Towards a Trope of Reciprocal Reading in the Post-Medium Condition: From Paul Auster’s Leviathan to Sophie Calle’s Double Game and Back Again

ABSTRACT

In the wake of Auster’s fictionalizing of the life and work of Sophie Calle in Leviathan (1992), Sophie Calle in Double Game (1999) brought together a body of work as if it was the outcome of her collaboration and dialogue with Paul Auster. Taking as a point of departure Rosalind Krauss’ “post-medium” condition as a notion that allows us to rethink how certain post-conceptual artistic practices unsettle postmodern self-referentiality, this article reassesses the self-reflexive tropes that were central in much postmodernist fiction and art. Auster in Leviathan and Calle in Double Game engage reflexivity as the catalyst that redirects us towards what lies beyond it and invests in the value of the document; their dialogue, thereby, points beyond the loop of self-reference and towards the malleable and changing textures of lived life.

Acknowledgments

Research for this article was enabled by a Library Research Grant from the John F. Kennedy Institute for North American Studies, Freie Universität Berlin.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Calle’s following practices on which Auster’s narrator glosses have a precedent in the projects of conceptual performance artists like Vito Acconci and Adrien Piper.

2. Yve-Alain Bois has read this mismatch otherwise, more in line with a reading of the postmodern as situated in the disjunction as such: Calle’s Chromatic Diet and the Birthday Ceremony, he argues, engage the “object as pathetic dross, tautological sign, lifeless remainder” (39).

3. In the day “under the sign of B,” Calle disguised herself in Cindy Sherman’s vein as Brigitte Bardot, and turns herself into an object of display in a still-life with stuffed animals and birds. In place of caption, below the photograph, we read an idiosyncratic list of animals and animal sounds starting with the letter B, leading up to the mockery of Bardot in “Beastly Birdbrain, for BB” (24–25).

4. Gratton and Sheringham note the affinity for Oulipo and the intertextual reference to George Perec: “among the items that she had with her during her train journey to Wallonia was Perec’s W ou le souvenir d’enfance (1975)” (20). Jean-Luc Joly also acknowledges the intertextual play and the Perequian influence in the Chromatic Diet and notes that Auster recuperates “existential constraints” from Calle (109).

5. On how explosiveness permeates the novel and on the political resonances of the explosion of the bomb see Hardy.

6. Shirley Jordan includes Calle in her mapping of the “fertile repositionings of the ‘I’” that “feminine” autofictions have generated: “Calle’s mixed-media life narratives probe connections between autobiography and fictional scripts” (82–83).

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Stamatina Dimakopoulou

Stamatina Dimakopoulou is Assistant Professor in American literature and culture at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens. Publications include edited volumes, chapters and articles on Surrealism, modernist magazines, U.S. literature and art. She is a founding member and co-editor of Synthesis: an Anglophone Journal of Comparative Literary Studies.