[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

wool tweed with a short bill jutting from the front  not very
different from the cap he had once worn himself, back when
he was new in America. Hector turned it over to make sure
there was nothing inside it, that it wasn t too dirty or too foul
for him to put it on. That was when he saw the owner s name
written out in ink along the back of the interior leather band:
14
Ibidem, p. 15.
Control in uncontrollable: the body of the artist&
195
Herman Loesser. It struck Hector as a good name, perhaps
even an excellent name, no worse than any other. He was Herr
Mann, was he not? If he took to calling himself Herman, he
could change his identity without altogether renouncing who
he was [& ] Herman Loesser. Some would pronounce it Lesser,
others would read it as Loser. Either way, Hector figured that
he would have the name he deserved.15
With a slight touch of accident, Mann is able to take on
the identity he finds suitable for himself. The question of
the body and that of identity seem closely interrelated, for
by putting on the worker s cap, Mann becomes a worker,
he begins performing manual labor, the more difficult and
harsh on the body, the better. The aim is clear, to inflict
pain and cause humiliation as a punishment for his role in
the killing of his ex-lover. It is worth noting, however, that
for Hector Mann, Hermann Loesser is more of a role than
a true identity, for it is just a temporal state. No matter what
he does, he cannot change his past, his memories that made
him want to suffer in the first place, therefore he is left with
his original identity, and no name written on a cap (which
actually means also on the forehead) is going to make any
difference. This point is further proved by the fact that Mann
does return to his original identity and goes back to making
films. Interestingly, it is love to a woman that causes this,
and as is being proven by scientists of the modern day, love is
also a physiochemical, biological reaction of the body, which
might lead some to claim that thus Auster argues that one s
identity is a function of the body.
15
Ibidem, pp. 143 144.
Jarosław Hetman
196
Apart from physical labor in the conventional meaning
of the term, Hector forces his body to engage in what can
be described as a pornographic theater. He earns money by
performing sexual intercourse with a woman in front of
a number of spectators. By making Mann do this, Auster
tries to examine the boundaries of art, and the body is a good
way to do it, mainly because there is nothing fictional about
the body, it belongs to the real, material world. Theater and
film are about acting, faking, pretending, but it is obvious
that it is not possible to fake intercourse.
Maria Turner is a character in Paul Auster s Leviathan,
whom the novel s narrator, Peter Aaron, encounters while
trying to discover the story behind the disappearing of
the novel s absent protagonist, Benjamin Sachs. Maria is
a photographer and a performance artist, and among her
various projects she assumes the role of a prostitute. Having
taken on a fictional character, she is confronted with the
brutal reality and thus learns that the body constitutes the
boundary of art, for exactly the same reasons as Mann. The
body is too real to be used for art.
Maria Turner emerged from the artistic cooperation
between Paul Auster and the well-known French Conceptual
Artist, Sophie Calle. The character of Maria Turner is used
by Auster to ekphratically depict some of the most critically
acclaimed works of the French artist.
In one work, she hired a private detective to follow her around
the city. For several days, this man took pictures of her as she
went about her rounds, recording her movements in a small
notebook, omitting nothing from the account, not even the
most banal and transitory events: crossing the street, buying
Control in uncontrollable: the body of the artist&
197
a newspaper, stopping for a cup of coffee. It was a completely
artificial exercise, and yet Maria found it thrilling that anyone
should take such an active interest in her.16
In the excerpt above Auster describes Calle s 1981
work entitled The Shadow. This piece exists in the form of
photographs taken by the private detective together with his
written report about the Subject s proceedings.
Apart from the obvious difference between Calle s The
Shadow and Auster s Leviathan, which is the mode of
existence, so different for the two works, there is also the
difference concerning the formal possibilities each of the
artists has at hand. While Calle, in her Autobiographies only
experiments with the idea of becoming a prostitute, Auster
can make Maria attempt to become one, and as a result
show that this is the boundary Maria is not able to cross,
just as Calle cannot push herself to become a prostitute.
In both cases the limit is the body  Calle cannot distance
herself from her body far enough to be able to prostitute
herself, Turner can, but the consequences of this are tragic.
It is the fact that it is not an actual body, but a fictional one,
which allows Auster to show the reader what is beyond the
limit. Beyond a limit Calle cannot cross. One may wonder
why Auster would describe a piece of performance art? Is
there any added value behind it? It seems that on the one
hand he emphasizes the immense conceptual possibilities
a writer of fiction has, on the other, by depicting what is
beyond the capabilities of a performance artist he shows
that there is always  a beyond , a sphere where the body
16
P. Auster, Leviathan, London 1992, p. 63.
Jarosław Hetman
198
cannot be taken to serve art; a sphere, where the loss of
control excludes the possibility of art, due to the lack of
intention. Intention is always directed towards something
external, and in a situation of trauma no such thing as the
external exists.
This is why whenever Auster speaks of the author as
a character presented in the context of the body, he always
does it by means of ekphrasis. For Auster the body is not
only the ultimate obstacle, an object resisting control, but
also the boundary between fiction and reality. This is not
to say that the body is completely out of control of the
artist, but by resisting control, it introduces accidentality
into a work of art. One may argue that an author like
Auster, one that so often experiments in his works with
this theme, by opposing its presence in other forms of art is
being hypocritical. However, Auster s accidentality is never
accidental. He describes accidentality, but does not allow
it to manifest itself in his novels. What this does to the
text is cause representative friction. This term, used by James
A.W. Heffernan, denotes  the difference between the medium
of visual representation and its referent .17 With reference
to Auster s works, reduced representational friction could be
used to describe the fact that he does place in his writing [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]