Dynamics of Fictional Positionings in Paul Auster’s Travels in the Scriptorium

ABSTRACT

Paul Auster blends stories with stories, lives with lives, and reality with fiction, and, finally, presents a full sense of the self trapped in a net of uncertainties. In this article, we examine the fictional positioning of Auster’s protagonist in Travels in the Scriptorium (2006/2007) to identify the role of storytelling in authoring one’s self. Based on the newly developed conceptual framework of “virtual fictional and factual positioning,” we elaborate on the possible dialogical coalition of the author’s positions as “I-as-artist/novelist” and “I-as-the-hero-of-my-story,” among other positions. The findings of this research indicated that the art of storytelling for Mr Blank becomes a means of survival. In his creative absorption in the fictional and factual positionings and experiencing the life of his hero, Mr Blank as a motivated artist/novelist could develop a dialogical self and reconstitute a more porous sense of his self and identity.

KEYWORDS:

• Paul Auster
• Mikhail Bakhtin
• dialogical self
• identity formation
• storytelling

Notes

1. We note that VFP is not restricted to postmodern fiction and that application of this theory is available for the analysis of fictional self-narratives in general. VFP does not necessarily need a fictional author and is applicable to the dialogical relation between actual author figures and novelists and the heroes and heroines created in their literary narratives.

^2. The horizontal and vertical movements of the author inside his self-space facilitate a progressive dialogical bond with his own self, the external world, and his fictional world. In this way of perceiving the world, the author delineates it through the eyes of his hero and forms a “field of vision” as an arena for the rivalry of diverse and opposing points of view. As a result, “the “I” of the author as an internal position engages dialogically with the “I” of the hero as another internal one, and both are in active “dialogical coalition” (Barani et al. 763).

^3. Masculine pronouns are used following Bakhtin himself; the English translations of Chelovek intensify the masculine exclusivity of his writing. In principle, nothing in any of the ideas discussed here should be considered inapplicable to women writers or heroines. Moreover, since we are dealing with the hero theme and a male protagonist in Auster’s novel, we tend to draw on the masculine aspect of the author–protagonist relationship.

^4. The dialogical self, according to Hubert Hermans (1999, 2001), assumes no central or predominant core but considers the self to be a composite of various narrative voices narrating their own life story and trying to establish their own ideology in a continuous dialogue.

^5. Subsequent references are to the 2007 edition of Travels in the Scriptorium and will be cited parenthetically by page numbers in the text.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Forough Barani

Forough Barani is an assistant professor of English literature in the Department of English at Islamic Azad University, Mashhad Brach in Mashhad, Iran. Her research interests include Bakhtinian studies and psychological theories of the self. She is eager to try to further explore relations between psychology and literature and is currently undertaking research on the dialogical dimensions of the self in the relationship between author and hero in literary works.

Wan Roselezam Wan Yahya

Wan Roselezam Wan Yahya is an associate professor of English literature in the Department of English at the Universiti Putra Malaysia. Her current funded research includes readings on postcolonial literatures in English, an ecocritical study of Malaysian and Victorian literature, and a Bakhtinian study of world literature texts.