Word: selfe
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...classical style and enormous size all smacked of historical and religious importance; but Courbet’s choice to depict an everyday, contemporaneous funeral set in a rural area found modernity through an exultation of the commonplace. The painting itself was a radical upending of hierarchies. Courbet demonstrated the self-consciousness that sets modernism apart: a form of expression that, even as it acknowledges its tradition, eschews...
...Such self-consciousness is the mark of much modern writing as well—quite notably, that of Paul Auster. Auster is a master of metafiction, writing about stories and within stories, writing about writers and the act of writing. From his initial success with 1987’s “New York Trilogy” to more recent novels like 2004’s “Oracle Night” and now with “Invisible,” Auster continues to surround his novels’ protagonists in layers of text...
Auster’s concern is in the self-conscious depiction of the confusion of his characters; digging through books and words and letters to find truth, to find something—to find themselves. The protagonist of “Invisible,” Adam Walker, does just this; he looks for himself in Paris and looks at himself in letters. His quest is one of identity, but strangely, Auster’s almost simplistic prose leaves Walker as effervescent and fleeting as the novel itself...
...first person, I had smothered myself and made myself invisible, had made it impossible for me to find the thing I was looking for. I needed to separate myself from myself.” Walker’s literary distance—within the context of these self-conscious sections—helps him look for himself in darkly tinged sexuality and self-revelation...
...however, to the time and space Walker traverses—in such a multilayered, diligently designed novel, clichés seem strangely out of place. Perhaps, then, their presence is meant to highlight the futility of Walker’s quest for identity: can words and letters encompass the self? The soul? “Invisible” seems to suggest that they cannot, for at the novel’s end, Walker is flat and therefore fleeting, and a style that mirrors structure doesn’t excuse Auster’s seemingly lazy language...