Objectivity Disguised: Ideas of Authenticity in the Novels of Thomas Pynchon and Paul Auster

• Thesis title in Czech: Utajená Objektivita: Autenticita v dílech Thomase Pynchona a Paula Austera
• Thesis title in English: Objectivity Disguised: Ideas of Authenticity in the Novels of Thomas Pynchon and Paul Auster
• Key words: thomas pynchon|paul auster|autenticita|objektivita
• English key words: thomas pynchon|paul auster|authenticity|objectivity
• Academic year of topic announcement: 2018/2019
• Thesis type: diploma thesis
• Thesis language: angličtina
• Department: Department of Anglophone Literatures and Cultures (21-UALK)
• Supervisor: doc. Erik Sherman Roraback, D.Phil.
• Author: hidden - assigned and confirmed by the Study Dept.
• Date of registration: 21.02.2019
• Date of assignment: 21.02.2019
• Administrator's approval: not processed yet
• Confirmed by Study dept. on: 26.02.2019
• Date and time of defence: 10.09.2020 00:00
• Date of electronic submission: 14.08.2020
• Date of proceeded defence: 10.09.2020
• Submitted/finalized: committed by student and finalized
• Opponents: David Lee Robbins, Ph.D.

Guidelines

My thesis will deal with texts by two well-known American authors, namely Paul Auster and Thomas Pynchon. I argue that these two writers, despite using different approaches to achieve the same goals, address the notion of authenticity as a leitmotif on both on the level of characters and the broader aesthetic organisation of their novels. The thesis will in a series of close readings and comparisons with historical and analytical texts argue that authenticity provides an aesthetic matrix for both writers, through which they comment on the human condition in contemporary society. History, both personal and public, as well as urban landscapes are used by both writers to validate the narrative in the minds of readers.
While Thomas Pynchon's historical (meta)fictions make use of at times overtly accurate descriptions of landscapes (both historical and contemporary) and at the same time they experiment with the textual side of the narrative. In her book Narratology Mieke Bal describes the realist narrative rhetoric and Emil Zola’s work: the “so called objectivity is, in fact, a form of subjectivity in disguise. [...] If ‘truth’ or even probability, is no longer a sufficient criterion to make narrative meaningful, only motivation can suggest probability.”^[1] A similar description to that of Bal ought to be applied to American postmodern fiction, which is represented by Pynchon's last three novels Against the Day, Inherent Vice and Bleeding Edge. Rather than subjectivity in disguise, these novels' constant need of self-validation functions, I argue, as the imagined “objectivity disguised.” The truth has to be marginalised and intertwined in the sujet as factual data or identity workings, thus creating aesthetic authenticity amidst the subjectivity of the postmodern novel. In an interesting historical parallel, it was Herman Melville, who in his novel The Confidence-Man: His Masquaradefirst created the interplay of objectivity and subjectivity and who
While Thomas Pynchon's historical (meta)fictions make use of at times overtly accurate descriptions of landscapes (both historical and contemporary) and at the same time they experiment with the textual side of the narrative. In her book Narratology Mieke Bal describes the realist narrative rhetoric and Emil Zola’s work: the “so called objectivity is, in fact, a form of subjectivity in disguise. [...] If ‘truth’ or even probability, is no longer a sufficient criterion to make narrative meaningful, only motivation can suggest probability.”^[1] A similar description to that of Bal ought to be applied to American postmodern fiction, which is represented by Pynchon's last three novels Against the Day, Inherent Vice and Bleeding Edge. Rather than subjectivity in disguise, these novels' constant need of self-validation functions, I argue, as the imagined “objectivity disguised.” The truth has to be marginalised and intertwined in the sujet as factual data or identity workings, thus creating aesthetic authenticity amidst the subjectivity of the postmodern novel. In an interesting historical parallel, it was Herman Melville, who in his novel The Confidence-Man: His Masquarade first created the interplay of objectivity and subjectivity and who used the notion of authenticity not only as the leitmotif of this work but also as an inner working mechanism of the sujet.
Paul Auster's exploration of fictional worlds, his frequent usage of absurdist plots and maze-like structures of the cities and the individual's life within them, connects to these notions too, however, Auster's is a world fundamentally different from Pynchon's, while the same motifs of the urban landscape, historical events on the background of the individual and his life are present. While Pynchon's novels are complex networks of connection and relations, Auster's approach to the character and their relationship to the world of things is fundamentally individualistic. His latest novels such as Sunset Park, Invisible and especially his 4 3 2 1 are all preoccupied with the idea of the individual subjected to the fluctuation in time. A link can be made between Auster's writing and the philosophy of Ralph Waldo Emerson, whose philosophy of self-reliance permeates all of Auster's work. However, the focal point for Auster's individuals is not nature, but rather the city as a landscape in which the individual faces the ultimate becoming. Deleuze and Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus describe such a paradox too when they say that it is crucial to "dismantle one's self" in order to become true to oneself. Authenticity for Auster is thus tied to the notion of decomposition of the self and the individual, mirrored in the glass surface of modern cities.
The precise mechanisms of how we think of fiction, how we read and translate the written word into our day to day experiences, make for a thought-provoking topic. Fiction interacts with notions of identity, reaches out of the textual world into readers' reality. In this sense, authenticity is an important notion to be considered when trying to understand the reading (and writing) processes.

^[1] pg. 37 in Bal, Mieke. Narratology: Introduction to the Theory of Narrative. Toronto: U of Toronto, 1997. Print. Omition mine.

References

Bibiliography
Auster, Paul. Sunset Park. Faber & Faber, 2017. Print.
Auster, Paul. Invisible. Picador, 2010. Print.
Auster, Paul. 4 3 2 1. Faber & Faber, 2017. Print.
Pynchon, Thomas. Against the Day.Vintage, 2007. Print.
Pynchon , Thomas. Bleeding Edge. Penguin Books, 2014. Print.
Pynchon, Thomas. Inherent Vice. Vintage, 2010. Print.

Adorno, Theodore W. Aesthetics: 1958/59. Polity Press 2018. Print.
Alphen, Ernst Van, et al. The Rhetoric of Sincerity. Stanford University Press, 2009. Print.
Amian, Katrin. Rethinking Postmodernism(s): Charles S. Peirce and the Pragmatist Negotiations of Thomas Pynchon, Toni Morrison, and Jonathan Safran Foer. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2008. Print.
Augé, Marc. An Anthropology of Contemporaneous Worlds. Stanford University Press, 1999. Print.
Bal, Mieke. Narratology: Introduction to the Theory of Narrative. Toronto: U of Toronto, 1997. Print.
Bourdieu, Pierre, and John B. Thompson. Language and Symbolic Power. Cambridge: Polity, 2011. Print.
Hutcheon, Linda. Poetics of Postmodernism. Routlege, 2003. Print.
Lefebvre, Henri. Metaphilosophy. Verso Books, 2016. Print
Luhmann, Niklas. Art as a Social System. Stanford University Press, 2000. Print.
Roraback, Erik S. The Philosophical Baroque: On Autopoietic Modernities. Leiden: Brill, 2017.
Sartre, Jean-Paul. What Is Subjectivity? Verso Books 2016. Epub.
Tabbi, Joseph. Cognitive Fictions. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota, 2002. Print.