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  • Montaigne in Brooklyn:Paul Auster’s Body Writing
  • Jack I. Abecassis (bio)
PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER.

… One of the inspirations struck me as being Montaigne. …

PAUL AUSTER.

Well, if there is any literary antecedent for Winter Journal, it would be Montaigne, for sure. You are the first one who has pointed this out, by the way.

PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER.

It’s not a bad genealogy.

PAUL AUSTER.

No, no, no. I’ve been reading him and rereading him all my life.1

Montaigne, the Purloined Father

Any practiced reader of Michel de Montaigne would immediately recognize Paul Auster’s Winter Journal, the autobiography of his body published in 2011, as a Montaigne-inspired exploration of the bodily, the immanent, and the contingent, written in propulsive, paratactic style—the essayistic style, animated by the mind-body union as it is experienced in the rhythmic movement of existence.2 But the obvious [End Page 1035] is not at all so obvious. After all, Auster writes by and large for an audience ignorant of Montaigne, and this holds true for even his most sophisticated readers, few of whom have ever seriously studied Montaigne. Notice in the epigram above Auster’s surprise and then his ironic compliment to Paul Holdengräber, his New York Public Library conversant, for being the first to recognize Montaigne in Winter Journal: “You are the first who has pointed this out, by the way.” That is, Paul Holdengräber is the first to have located clearly Montaigne’s Essays as the most obvious, relevant, and revealing genealogy of Winter Journal, despite the myriad of interviews granted by Auster with regard to Winter Journal. Auster cannot assume any familiarity with his literary pantheon, especially given the fact that Montaigne and Cervantes, and the Early Modern period in general, inspire Auster just as much as Hawthorne and Kafka do. And, were Paul Auster himself to aggressively assert this genealogy, he would alienate his readership in the United States and abroad. After all, connecting contemporary autobiography written by an experimental “New York” novelist to a Renaissance essayist seems like an esoteric non-starter to a literary conversation. And, at any rate, even if Auster emphatically tells the French Magazine Littéraire: “… For me Montaigne was a real revelation. He has taught me a lot. I continue to think about him. I can say about him as well that I carry him within me”—this emphatic statement finds no echo in the critical literature.3 Thus, in Winter Journal he contents himself with a parenthetical wink: “(The Montaigne seminar with Donald Frame and the Milton course with Edward Tayler are still vivid.)”4 Each time Auster mentions his early modern predecessors, no matter how much importance he attributes to them, his interviewers and critics hardly ever follow up with a detailed discussion, and in that sense Paul Holdengräber is very much the welcome exception.5 [End Page 1036]

Now, in his numerous fictional and even in his previous autobiographical works, the absence of the reference to Montaigne in the critical literature is of little consequence. What Auster takes from Montaigne—the physical body as a source of sense, the essayistic and writerly stylization of the body-in-movement as a dynamic and ever-changing principle, its “swerve” as it were, the rhythmic and oral writing style and the new dynamic subjectivity that results from this writing of the experience of the swerve, the immanent conception of the world, including its randomness and radical contingency, the thorough skepticism about reason and knowledge, the permanent sense of loss, from the loss of a beloved friend or the loss of old teeth, the physical pain of aging and disease, all bow-tied in corrosive, comic irony coursing along seemingly random anecdotes and aimless rhapsodies, etc.—all these disparate attributes of Montaigne’s Essays have been subsumed as the very staples of modern fiction, starting with Cervantes and Lawrence Stern.6 It was thus of little consequence for readers and critics that Auster “read and reread Montaigne all of his life,” since so many other derivative and more recognizable levers could be activated to make sense of his writing, each critic according to his or her own...

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