The Poetics and Politics of Metafiction: Reading Paul Auster'sTravels in the Scriptorium

The pragmatic study of metafiction in Preeti Shenoy’s ‘The Secret Wish List’ and ‘It Happens for A Reason’

“…The study by Butler and Gurr (2008) also utilizes Currie's (1995) metafiction theory to explain metafiction in Auster's (2007) 'Travels in the Scriptorium'. In this work, Mr. Blank is the protagonist, who leads his life in an anonymous cell-like room.…”

Paul Auster's Travels in the Scriptorium

“…As an imitation of the process of writing, each object in the room is labeled with a strip of white tape on which Mr. Blank reads their names. Indeed, Butler and Martin state, “the poetic potential of the act of writing is emphasized by the narrative, which, from the very beginning, successively introduces objects and physical details of the room” (Butler & Martin, , 197). At first glance, as the character is supposed to have lost his memory, it seems that the labels are there in order to help his treatment to recover it.…”

“…Accordingly, Auster through his texts evokes the relationship between the written word and the representation, which is the same as considering this example, using the signifier of the word and its signified. Indeed, Butler and Martin affirm that this passage “immediately evokes de Saussure's structuralist notion of the binary opposition between signifier and signified” (Butler & Martin, , 196). All of this combines with an oral dimension of the process that makes the transition from ordinary speech to the fictional realm possible and which Auster depicts in Mr. Blank's act of pronouncing the word “wall.” In this sense, the protagonist of the novel illustrates the exact moment in which the space he inhabits starts to metamorphose into a space of fiction.…”

“…However, critics like Aliki Varvogli state that the novel asks “important questions about what it means to be an American writer at the beginning of the twenty‐first century, and what it means to be a New York writer after 9/11” (Varvogli, , 95). In the same line of thought, Martin Butler and Jens Martin argue that there is a use of the poetics and politics of metafiction in order to express not only a reflection of the literary devices used in a very complex way, but also to express the poetic potential of literature as a “room of its own, as a site of both poetological reflection and ideological intervention in extratextual discourses” (Butler & Martin, , 196). In this context, there are two lines of thought proposed for the analysis of the novel.…”

The Career and Critical Reception of Paul Auster

“…Conversely, something of a turning point has been marked by academic readings‐against‐the‐grain of Travels in the Scriptorium , at first glance a slim compendium of Austeriana, and therefore generally panned by the critics for its navel‐gazing. With two pieces published almost simultaneously, Butler and Gurr (2008) and Varvogli (2008) have successfully demonstrated that, far from being ‘meaningless pretentious crap that is passing itself off as cutting‐edge post‐modern metaphysicality’ (Crace), Scriptorium is a topical narrative, alert to the suspicious objectivity of reports (a genre notorious for having provided the justification for the military intervention in Iraq in 2003) and riddled with subtle allusions to the thin line between surveillance, rehabilitation and coercion, and to the burden of responsibility of the contemporary American intellectual, in the face of his/her growing (self‐inflicted?) irrelevance in the country’s political debate.…”