Letter Killers Club by Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky
Last week I was thinking that Paul Auster’s new novel, Invisible
Paul Auster’s latest book, “Invisible” (Holt; $25), though it has charm and vitality in places, conforms to the Auster model.
He also gets into the role of cliche in postmodern fiction (failing, I note, to name-check Gilbert Sorrentino, one of the greatest abusers of cliche in the American postmodern canon):
Clichés, borrowed language, bourgeois bêtises are intricately bound up with modern and postmodern literature. For Flaubert, the cliché and the received idea are beasts to be toyed with and then slain. “Madame Bovary” actually italicizes examples of foolish or sentimental phrasing. Charles Bovary’s conversation is likened to a pavement, over which many people have walked; twentieth-century literature, violently conscious of mass culture, extends this idea of the self as a kind of borrowed tissue, full of other people’s germs. Among modern and postmodern writers, Beckett, Nabokov, Richard Yates, Thomas Bernhard, Muriel Spark, Don DeLillo, Martin Amis, and David Foster Wallace have all employed and impaled cliché in their work. Paul Auster is probably America’s best-known postmodern novelist; his “New York Trilogy” must have been read by thousands who do not usually read avant-garde fiction. Auster clearly shares this engagement with mediation and borrowedness—hence, his cinematic plots and rather bogus dialogue—and yet he does nothing with cliché except use it.
This is bewildering, on its face, but then Auster is a peculiar kind of postmodernist. Or is he a postmodernist at all? . . .
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Wallace impaled cliche? What? More like insisted on their utmost importance, their wisdom beyond intellect, unavailable to the ironic eye.
Tim:
Not sure what you mean about Wallace. Do you remember “Mister Squishy” and “The Suffering Channel” from Oblivion? Or how about nearly all of the “hideous interviews?” Or vast stretches of Infinite Jest?
Wallace impaled the cliche in the sense that he turned the tables on it. He seized the cliches permeating pop culture – whether in the media or in our everyday dialogues – and exploited them (ruthlessly, brilliantly) to dramatize how people fail to connect…how we insulate ourselves in catchphrases, corporate jargon, doublespeak, etc. that now mean anything and nothing.
And he was often ironic about it to boot.