Eden of Exiles: The Ethnicities of Paul Auster’s Aesthetics

Although Paul Auster regularly insists on his identity as an American writer, the abstract, French-influenced intellectualism of his early works has been difficult to situate within an American studies that reflects the nation itself in its abiding interest in questions of race and ethnicity. While the US is the setting for almost all Auster’s novels, and while US literature and folk narratives underpin many of his stories, Auster’s writing can seem curiously devoid of racial and ethnic difference, even when his novels are set in such famously diverse cities as New York. Similarly, while he identifies as a Jewish-American writer, his novels—in striking contrast to authors such as Philip Roth or Jonathan Safran Foer—seldom address ethnicity or Jewish identity substantively. For these reasons, Auster’s fiction has sometimes disappointed critics.¹ Perhaps more commonly, his work has simply been ignored, pushed aside as American studies’ interest in postmodernism and linguistic play has waned in favor of more concrete engagements with the material conditions of the contemporary US.

Manuscript drafts of Auster’s earliest writing—which is perversely resistant to realist representations of ethnic diversity—are, however, surprisingly replete with accounts of ethnicity. In the early drafts of his novels, essays, and poetry (most dating from the 1970s), Auster appears preoccupied with both Jewish identity and, more unexpectedly, contact narratives of lost Native American tribes. Although these references are largely erased or minimized in the published versions of the text, the situations and narratives rooted in these ethnic references are foundational to the development of Auster’s thinking about aesthetics at this crucial early point in his career. By reading the effaced traces of his early interest in ethnicity in the context of his more widely acknowledged national myth-making, the abstract, language-driven aesthetics of Auster’s writing emerges as an attempt to engage ethnic diversity on an aesthetic level, ultimately offering a countermyth of US nationhood that Auster provides with its own distinctive aesthetic theory.

Such an aesthetic engagement with ethnicity may constitute its own problematic retreat from the lived reality of ethnic diversity and, indeed, this strategy says little concerning the ongoing struggles and marginalization of many ethnic communities. Nonetheless, it resonates with changes in notions of ethnicity emerging at precisely the time Auster wrote these drafts. In 1979, around the middle of the period under consideration in this essay, Herbert J. Gans influentially coined the term “symbolic ethnicity” to describe the changes in ethnic identification that he saw characterizing third- and fourth-generation immigrants during the 1960s and 1970s. Designed to account for the peculiarities of ethnic identification among precisely the generation to which Auster belongs—he was a third-generation Jewish American of Eastern European extraction, who entered adulthood in the late 1960s—“symbolic ethnicity” describes the historical moment when ethnicity shifts from an enforced everyday experience determined by participation in a shared cultural life and instead becomes a voluntary and symbolic form of identification, shaped out of cultural practices which “are ‘abstracted’ from that culture,” identity “pulled out of its original moorings, so to speak, to become stand-ins for it” (Gans 9).² The trajectory of late-twentieth-century Jewish-American literature follows this shift in notions of ethnicity. Roth, particularly in his early novels, typifies the more group-oriented self-definition of second-generation ethnicity, with his emphasis on the lived, often fraught material reality of Jewish identity within specific New Jersey communities. In these narratives, material necessity and social exclusion make ethnicity the primary form of social arrangement for the characters of novels and collections such as Portnoy’s Complaint (1969) and Goodbye, Columbus (1959). On the other hand, the more recent spate of Holocaust narratives by writers such as Foer and Art Spiegelman may be understood as reflecting a form of symbolic ethnicity, following Gans’s suggestion that the Holocaust came to function as a “new symbol for the threat of group destruction” among Jewish Americans, several decades after the immediate crisis of World War II and the Shoah (11).

In this context, Auster’s writing of the 1970s...