In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Austers Sublime Closure: The Locked Room Stephen Bernstein In The Locked Room, as in the other novels ofPaul Auster's New York Trilogy, the path the reader follows diverges considerably from what might be expected in conventional detective fiction. This is due to what are, by this stage in the trilogy, predictable recourses to narratorial unreliability, epistemological uncertainty, and existential contingency. As these strategies come into play in the trilogy'S final volume, the trail leads neither toward nor away from a corpse, but instead into postmodern meditations on subjectivity, sexuality, sublimity, and silence. By engaging with the text's thematization of these concepts, we can begin to understand both The Locked Room's location within the trilogy and the possibilities of closure which that place might be expected to confer. It will be the purpose of this essay to discuss what Auster finally says "goodbye to" in the novel, why "[t]he entire story comes down to what happened at the end" (149). But since the figures for these ideas slip repeatedly into a realm of unspeakability, Auster's novels confer upon criticism some of the same limitations their protagonists realize for themselves . The Locked Room is finally Auster's powerful refusal to accede to the traditional category of closure, a refusal that makes repeated appeals to the sublime in order to frame its unimaginable task. In order to examine Auster's text, a synopsis is useful. The novel's narrator is contacted by Sophie Fanshawe, whose husband has mysteriously disappeared. A friend of the narrator's in youth, Fanshawe has long since been out of touch with him. On the assumption that Fanshawe is dead, the narrator agrees to become his literary executor, getting novels , plays, and poetry into print and creating Fanshawe's posthumous reputation as an important, serious writer. The narrator is at this point notified by letter that Fanshawe is still alive but wishes to remain missing. For various reasons the narrator attempts to write Fanshawe's biography; Auster'S Sublime Closure 89 as a result he begins to lose his grip on reality. He gives up the study, and is subsequently summoned to the threshold of the room in which, it turns out, Fanshawe, still alive, is hiding. A conversation (through "double" doors) ensues in which Fanshawe claims to have taken a fatal dose of slow poison hours earlier. The doors are never opened; the two men never see one another. On his way home the narrator reads a notebook Fanshawe has left for him that, not surprisingly, fails to clear up the fundamental mysteries ofFanshawe's existence. As nearly every critic ofAuster notes, doubling is central to his fiction. Just as routinely it is the pivotal problem of The Locked Room, operating in a number of ways. The novel's nameless narrator establishes the seminameless Fanshawe as his alter ego from the novel's first paragraph: It seems to me now that Fanshawe was always there. He is the place where everything begins for me, and without him I would hardly know who I am. We met before we could talk, babies crawling through the grass in diapers, and by the time we were seven we had pricked our fingers with pins and made ourselves blood brothers for life. Whenever I think of my childhood now, I see Fanshawe. He was the one who was with me, the one who shared my thoughts, the one I saw whenever I looked up from myself. (7) In its quiet way this opening is nothing less than a thematic tour de force: everything that will be ofimportance as the novel continues is already germinally present. The "seems" of the first sentence posits the tenuous nature ofcountless assertions in the novel; simultaneously Fanshawe's omnipresent relationship to consciousness is maintained. Fanshawe is further established as a "place," a prolepsis for the string of locked rooms, real and metaphorical, that will follow. The relationship of the two characters precedes language, a vital conception for the narrator's frequent questioning of linguistic presence, while the fingerpricking and mixing of blood signal not only the "brotherhood" of the doubles but also an incipient homoeroticism that will obtain in the novel's many sexual episodes . The irony ofsuch a passage should be clear, ofcourse: Auster offers up a textbook example of the opening paragraph's narrative plenitude, then goes on to call narrative structure into question through the archnarrative of the detective quest. Though this problem will eventually engage us, for...

Share