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Paul Auster's novella Travels in the
Scriptorium (2006) methodically
uncovers some of the conventionally downplayed aspects of textuality
through an intense probe into the recesses of language, where a
deferral network of signifiers constantly mobilizes a sense of irreducible plurality. If
in medieval Europe `scriptorium' referred to a room where monastic
scribes habitually analyzed and lettered scripts, in Auster's novella the
scriptorium stands for a place of confinement where Mr. Blank, the protagonist,
obsessively composes some extraordinary narratives. Frequently, the `differential'
mini narratives in the novella serve not only to `defer' the possibility of creating
a stable narrative structure but also to contest the conventional belief that
a work of art reflects reality. In a characteristically postmodern manner,
Auster fashions a handful of peculiar events around the amnesiac Mr. Blank
who exemplifies inconsistency and unpredictability. Simultaneously a reader
and a writer, Mr. Blank's subjective position often remains consistent only in
terms of his `tool'—language. Much like Jacques Derrida's deconstruction,
Auster's Travels is preoccupied with the disparity between language (word) and
reality (the external non-linguistic referent). Mr. Blank seeks to script his
forgotten past by having recourse to both the frame narrative and the framed
narratives (including John Trause's historical account of the Confederation), and also
tries to discover meaning through paradigmatic substitutions and
syntagmatic combinations of such linguistic units. This essay argues that Auster's art,
in problematizing the differential narratives composed within an
insular scriptorium, fuels the conception of a world within a linguistic world, and
this concoction of texts generates meaning not in terms of an external referent
but through a mechanism intrinsic to the system of language, which is
represented as a zone of deferral signifiers.
Auster's Travels effectively deploys the act of naming to accentuate
the impasse in language—the unbridgeable gulf between language and things.
If seen as a symbolic manifestation of the characteristic operations of
language, the room of Mr. Blank, the scriptorium, becomes a stage for playing out
the arbitrary relationship between the word and the thing it represents. By way
of explaining the arbitrariness of language, the novella, of course, relies on
the Saussurean linguistic sign: "A linguistic sign is not a link between a thing
and a name, but between a concept and a sound pattern" (Saussure, 1972, p.
66). Accordingly, Travels foregrounds language as a system of signifiers
functioning not through inherent similarities or physical connections with objects but
in arbitrary or conventional ways. Suggestively, for instance, Mr. Blank's
room contains several white strips of labels with imprinted names of objects: "On
the bedside table, for example, the word is TABLE. On the lamp, the word is
LAMP. Even on the wall, which is not strictly speaking an object, there is a strip
of tape that reads WALL" (Auster, 2007, p. 1). Here, the word `lamp' does not
have any physical link with the object `LAMP,' yet the word signifies perfectly well
for Mr. Blank because meanings emanate from conventional codes.
Nevertheless, the novella posits naming as an abortive attempt to concretize things
using language. Auster is defining the indefinable in choosing the name |
