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Artists in Isolation: The Paradox of Recognition in Paul Auster’s the Book of Illusions

ABSTRACT Paul Auster’s novel The Book of Illusions presents a series of isolated, decentered artists whose identities, not merely their stories, are nested inside one another. Through a handful of textual clues, the narrator Zimmer assembles, within himself, the identity of the silent movie actor Hector Mann, and that construction, in turn, reflects back on Zimmer and secures his identity. The creative act can become a debilitating retreat or a productive form of intersubjectivity. In his quest for a stable identity, Zimmer explores what it means to be either an artist like Mann who shuts out the audience, depriving himself of the other’s gaze, or one who narrates himself into existence through a communion with absent and imaginary people. Auster complicates a simple notion of recognition and the possibility of intersubjectivity, by rejecting humanist presuppositions about the subject and by qualifying – through his depiction of desire and the quest narrative – a postmodern view of the decentered, intertextual subject. A postmodern dialectics of recognition appear not only in Zimmer’s textual relation to Mann and his flesh-and-blood relation to Alma, but also in Mann’s secret film The Inner Life of Martin Frost.