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Anne Frank Rescues the Writer in Paul Auster's The Invention of Solitude
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 17 February 2012
Abstract
This article takes as its starting point Stephen Fredman's claim that women are “effaced” from Paul Auster's The Invention of Solitude, and notes that this claim is contradictory, given the centrality of Anne Frank to the text. This article attempts to account for that contradiction by arguing that Anne Frank is enlisted in Auster's text as a means of providing consolation for the loss of Auster's father; indeed, Frank is enlisted as a figure for Auster's father. It is argued that Frank can be read, if problematically, and not entirely successfully, as a Levinasian “other” within Auster's text, something which influences the act of self-representation in The Invention of Solitude and necessitates consideration of the text as autobiography.
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References
1 Stephen Fredman, “ ‘How to Get out of the Room that Is the Book?’ Paul Auster and the Consequences of Confinement,” in Harold Bloom, ed., Paul Auster (Philadelphia: Chelsea House, 2004) 7–41, 7.
2 Ibid., 27.
3 Ibid., 31.
4 Dennis Barone, “Paul Auster and the Postmodern American Novel,” introduction, in idem, ed., Beyond the Red Notebook: Essays on Paul Auster (Philadelphia: Philadelphia University Press, 1995) 7.
5 Ibid., 31.
6 Auster, Paul, The Invention of Solitude (London: Faber, 1982) 87Google Scholar. Subsequent page references given in text.
7 Barbour, John D., “Solitude, Writing and Fathers in Paul Auster's The Invention of Solitude,” A/B: Autobiography Studies, 19 (2002), 19–32, 19–20CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
8 Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1961) 39.
9 See Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. John Cumming (Allen Lane: London, 1973; first published 1947).
10 Levinas, Preface, 29, original emphasis.
11 See, for example, Varvogli, Aliki, The World that Is the Book: Paul Auster's Fiction (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2001)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Springer, Carsten, Crises: The Works of Paul Auster (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 2001)Google Scholar; and Barone, Beyond the Red Notebook.
12 Sue Vice, Holocaust Fiction (London and New York: Routledge, 2000) 19. See also Bernstein, Michael André, Foregone Conclusions: Against Apocalyptic History (Berkeley and London: University of California Press, 1994)Google Scholar.
13 A vast number of critical texts in many disciplines address the ethics of representing the Holocaust. For only three important examples see Eaglestone, Robert, The Holocaust and Postmodernism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Lang, Berel, Holocaust Representation: Art within the Limits of History and Ethics (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003)Google Scholar; and Sicher, Efraim, ed., Breaking Crystal: Writing and Memory after Auschwitz (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1997)Google Scholar.
14 Fredman, “How to Get out of the Room,” 28.
15 Barbour, 31.
16 Fredman, 31.
17 Anne Frank functions as muse for Philip Roth's protagonist Nathan Zuckerman in Roth's novel The Ghost Writer (London: Vintage, 1979), and possibly for Roth himself. (In depicting Frank as surviving the Holocaust and forging a new life and identity in America, this novel also counters historical fact.) Frank performs a similar role in John Berryman's essay “The Development of Anne Frank,” in idem, The Freedom of the Poet (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1976)Google Scholar.
18 Luce Irigaray, “Questions to Emmanual Levinas: On the Divinity of Love,” in Robert Bernasconi and Simon Critchley, eds., Re-reading Levinas (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), 109–18, 120.
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22 The American Jewish writer and journalist Meyer Levin was integral to the publication of Frank's diary in America. Levin wished to acquire rights to adapt the diary for the stage. When denied this opportunity, he sued the play's producers. The subsequent law case became, among other things, a debate about who should represent Anne Frank, and how. Levin was vocal about the perceived erasure of Frank's Jewish identity. See Graver, Lawrence, An Obsession with Anne Frank: Meyer Levin and the Diary. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995)Google Scholar.
23 For an excellent discussion of the controversy involving de Man see Norman Ravvin's chapter “Warring with Shadows: The Holocaust and the Academy,” in idem, A House of Words: Jewish Writing, History, and Memory (McGill-Queen's University Press, 1997)Google Scholar.
24 See, for example, Eaglestone, Robert, Ethical Criticism: Reading after Levinas (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1997)Google Scholar.
25 de Man, Paul, “Autobiography as De-facement,” Modern Language Notes, 94 (1979), 919–30Google Scholar, 926.
26 Fredman, 31.
27 Auster, Paul, Hand to Mouth (London: Faber, 1997)Google Scholar 123.
28 Barbour, “Solitude, Writing and Fathers,” 31.
29 Jacques Derrida, Given Time, I: Counterfeit Money, trans. Peggy Kamuf (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 16.