A Place Both Imaginary and Realistic- Paul Auster's

8/7/2019 A Place Both Imaginary and Realistic- Paul Auster's

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A Place Both Imaginary and Realistic: Paul Auster's "The Music of Chance"Author(s): Ilana Shiloh and Paul AusterSource: Contemporary Literature, Vol. 43, No. 3 (Autumn, 2002), pp. 488-517Published by: University of Wisconsin PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1209110Accessed: 31/07/2009 11:11

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I LANA S H I L O HA Place BothImaginaryand Realistic:Paul Auster's TheMusic of Chance

hanceis an inherentlyambiguousconcept.It conflatesdiametrically opposed notions: hazard and destiny,good fortune and bad luck. Yet as noted by JacquesDerrida,among the multiple and contradictoryassocia-tions of chance-unpredictability, haphazardness, adventure-there is one privileged sense: the fall. We tend intuitively to associ-

ate chance with a downward movement, an intuition encoded inlanguage: "chance"descends from the Latincadere,"tofall"; ts der-ivations can be found in "case" or "occasion,"in "accident"or "co-incidence." Chance has the implication of that which we fall into,or which befalls us by surprise-the incident, the accident, the finalthrow of the dice. It embraces the interplaybetween indeterminacyand inevitability, between fortuity and fate. To believe in chance,suggests Derrida, "canjust as well indicate that one believes in theexistence of chance as that one does not, above all, believe inchance, since one looks for and finds a hidden meaning at allcosts" (4).None of Paul Auster's novels displays this ambiguity morestarkly and more tragically than TheMusic of Chance(1990). Thedual nature of chance is already incipient in the first paragraph,which introduces the protagonist of the novel and announces itscentral themes, as well as its narrative structure:

For one whole year he did nothing but drive, traveling back and forthacross America as he waited for the money to run out.... Three daysinto the thirteenth month, he met up with the kid who called himselfJackpot. It was one of those random, accidental encounters that seem to

ContemporaryiteratureXLIII,3 0010-7484 02/ 0003-0488? 2002 by the Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System


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S H I L 0 H 489materialize out of thin air-a twig that breaks off in the wind and sud-denly lands at your feet. Had it occurred at any other moment, it is doubt-ful that Nashe would have opened his mouth. But because he had alreadygiven up, because he figured there was nothing to lose anymore, he sawthe stranger as a reprieve, as a last chance to do something for himselfbefore it was too late. And just like that, he went ahead and did it. Withoutthe slightest tremor of fear, Nashe closed his eyes and jumped.The opening sequence foregrounds the motif of chance; thechoice of imagery suggests the inherent ambiguity of chance and

foreshadows the sense in which chance will govern the protago-nist's life. We learn that Nashe, the novel's main character, hastaken to the road and thereby opened himself up to the uncontrol-lable, unpredictable aspects of life. Traveling in the countryside,he notices a young hitchhiker,beaten half to death. His encounterwith the kid is accidental;he will soon find out that the kid callshimself Jackpot. His nickname refers to the pot that accumulatesuntil one poker player opens the betting with a pair of jacks orbetter;it evokes poker, risk, and chance but also signifies good for-tune, great wealth, sensational success. Yet the ensuing images un-dermine both the notion of accident and of good luck.Nashe's deci-sion to pick up the stranger is metaphorically described as a blindjump, which he should have feared. Lady Luck is blind, but inNashe's case, accident leads in one direction only-the downwardmovement of the fall. This suggestion is further corroboratedbyNashe's perception of the kid as a reprieve. The image ironicallyadumbrates the novel's end: the entire sequence of events triggeredby the two protagonists' accidental encounter is just a reprieve, atemporary suspension of punishment. The end is already con-tained in the beginning. Pozzi, who first appears beaten half todeath, will eventually be beaten to death. And Nashe, who firstappears driving on the road, will eventually die on the road.The road, suggests Mikhail Bakhtin in TheDialogic Imagination,is the chronotope best suited for portraying events governed bychance: it is the place where the paths of the most various peopleintersect, a point of new departures and the locus where eventsfind their denouements (98). Accordingly, the road is the tradi-tional setting of picaresque fiction, which flourished in sixteenth-and seventeenth-century Spain and was characterized by an epi-


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490 - C O N T E M P O R A R Y L I T E R A T U R Esodic narrative,in which a lower-class protagonist sustains himselfby means of his roguery during a journey through predominantlycorrupt social milieus. The picaresque story relies on a triad of in-terconnected elements: the figure of the picaro,the temporal andspatial framework of the road, and the capricious unpredictabilityof chance. The picaro s a dialectic figure, alternatelyaffiliated withthe stock charactersof the jester, the adventurer, the explorer, orthe noble savage; but from whatever perspective he may be seen,he invariably remains an outsider. With no home and no familyties, starting his life's adventure from point zero, he hits the openroad, pursuing the favor of Lady Luck.1The American version of the picaresque story is the road story,whose prominence in American culture may be accounted for bythe affinity of American myth with the classical elements of thepicaresque. The typical American protagonist, like the typical pi-caro, s an orphan and an outsider who has rejectedthe obligationsof family and the authorityof society. Butwhile the road story pre-serves the essential picaresque situation, which involves a confron-tation between an isolated individual and a hostile society, its focusis not altogether the same as that of its European counterpart.TheAmerican protagonist who takes to the road-whether it be MarkTwain's Huck Finn, JackKerouac's Dean Moriarty,or Robert Pir-sig's "Phaeadrus"-is not primarilymotivated by the wish to takematerialadvantage of a corruptsociety. He wants to get away fromthat society. He does not look for money, but for freedom and au-tonomy. The American orphan wishes to become his own fatherand seeks to create himself through the freedom of the open road.The first part of TheMusic of Chanceconspicuously foregroundsthe principal features of picaresque fiction: the action is set mainlyon the road, the sequence of events is governed by accident, andthe protagonist exhibits the most salient characteristicsof the picaro.In effect, the two main characters,Jim Nashe and JackPozzi, maybe seen as representing, respectively, the American wanderer and

1. For general discussions of the picaresque, see Bjornson, Blackburn, and Whitboum;for a discussion of the neo-picaresque in the twentieth century, see Gurevitz. Bemd Her-zogenrath surveys the American tradition of the road novel and relates it to The Musicof Chance(160-66).


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SHILOH ? 491the European picaro.Nashe, the novel's main protagonist, is athirty-two-year-oldfirefighterfrom Boston.At the outset of the nar-rative he is at point zero, having lost, or forfeited, all family ties.His wife has left him, and he entrusts his two-year-old daughterto the care of his sister; when he sees that his role as a father hasbeen "usurped"by his brother-in-law (4), he leaves his child withhis sister's family. While reneging on his fatherhood, Nashe is alsodeprived of his father, who dies and leaves him an inheritance ofclose to two hundred thousand dollars. Equipped with this "colos-sal sum" and treating the past as if it were "so much junk to becarted away" (10), Nashe quits his job, buys a new, red Saab, andhits the road in a quest foremptiness, irresponsibility,and freedom.Freedom, for Nashe, is associated with anonymity, lack of com-mitment, and absence of human contact.It is also closely associatedwith chance. Driving home to Boston after a visit to his sister'sfamily, he misses the ramp to the freeway and impulsively decidesto follow the new road, having realized that "both ramps were fi-nally the same" (6).This decision marksNashe's willingness to em-brace chance as the underlying principle of human life; it evokesthe dilemma of Quinn, the putative detective in City of Glasswho,at the very outset of his investigation, is faced with two Stillmans,two identical-looking suspects, and realizes that "whatever choicehe made . . . would be arbitrary, a submission to chance" (56).Nashe's realization that all his potential choices are of equalvalue further echoes Meursault's feeling in The Outsider that he"could either shoot (the Arab) or not shoot" (57). In TheMyth ofSisyphus,Camus writes, "Ican refute everything in this world sur-rounding me,... except this chaos, this sovereign chance and thisdivine equivalence which springs from anarchy" (51). When onerealizes that the world is devoid of meaning and purpose, that itis morally indifferent, all decisions become equivalent. Teleologymay satisfy the human craving for unity, but it is also restrictive;transcendence may satisfy the human craving for meaning, but itis also prescriptive. A consciousness of the absurd, the acceptanceof life's contingency, liberates one from the tyranny of religions orideologies.In this respect, absurd freedom is closely related to picaresquefreedom. As noted by David Gurevitz, the twentieth century has


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492 . C O N T E M P O R A R Y L I T E R A T U R Eknown the bankruptcy of three master ideologies-fascism, Marx-ism, and psychoanalysis-each of which posited a closed, deter-ministic model of reality (26-32). Picaresquefiction, with its rogu-ish protagonists and episodic plots, offers an alternative myth,projecting a vision of a world balanced between total chaos andcarnivalesque situations. The carnival, suggests Bakhtin, entails"temporary iberation from the prevailing truth and from the estab-lished order" (Rabelais10). Auster's depiction of Nashe's experi-ence of freedom conspicuously echoes Bakhtin'svocabulary:whenNashe meets Fiona, during one of the intervals in his aimless driv-ing, he feels "as if their fluke encounter called for ... a spirit ofanarchy and celebration"(15).Nashe thus casts himself in the role of the traditional Americanpicaro,who forsakeshis family ties, breaks from the past, and seeksto re-createhimself through the freedom of the open road. His newlife is an assertion of autonomy and a private declaration of inde-pendence: not only is Nashe a firefighter,a man powerful enoughto tame the elements, he is a firefighterfrom Boston, the arena ofthe historical "teaparty" and the birthplace of American indepen-dence. His autonomy has social and metaphysical implications: itis the freedom of the wanderer, who repudiates external authority,traditional conventions, and ideological dogma; it is the freedomof the absurd man, who refuses to posit the existence of a transcen-dent realm of meaning and value. It is the freedom of a man whohas embraced chance.

If Nashe has some of the characteristicsof the picaresque protag-onist-no family ties, infatuation with the freedom of the openroad, an erratic existence that follows the promptings of chance-Pozzi has them all. His background is poor and disreputable: theson of a swindler who served time in jail and whose existence heignored for most of his childhood, Pozzi grew up in "[a] sad,crummy little town" (40),raised by a hard-working mother. A pro-fessional poker player since the age of eighteen, he lives off luckand his wits, despising his rivals at the poker table, whom he re-gards as typical representatives of a corrupt society: "The old boyswith the five-dollar cigars. True-blue American assholes" (25).Yet Pozzi is not just the stock figure of the rogue, disdainful ofmaterialbenefits which he would nevertheless like to acquire.The


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S H I L 0 H 493picaro s a fundamentally ambiguous character,and this ambiguityis one of Pozzi's principal traits. Nashe first perceives his younghitchhiker as "fullof elements that did not add up" (22),a foreshad-owing of Pozzi's tragic end, in which his head seems almost sev-ered from his battered body (171). The physical fragmentationmetaphorically conveys the inner contradictions of Pozzi's charac-ter and existence. The kid makes his living off a game based onluck, but his success is due to his talent: he is a masterful player,as Nashe realizes during their test game at the Plaza. Scrawny andfrail,looking like a twelve-year-old, Pozzi is nonetheless admirablycourageous, "improvising his life as he went along, trusting in purewit to keep his head above water" (37). If the corporate hotshotsthat he swindles out of their money represent the materialisticAmericanethos, Pozzi representsanother (and complementary) as-pect of that ethos-self-reliance.Nashe and Pozzi hitting the road together, on theirway to a pairof millionaires whom they intend to relieve of their money in adazzling poker game, thus seem like a traditional American pairof male buddies, fleeing adult society in pursuit of adventure, orlike a picaresque version of Laurel and Hardy.2Yet the picaresqueperspective, conspicuously foregrounded in the firstthree chaptersof the novel, is essentially ironic, in line with Gurevitz's argumentthat the picaresque text is a parodic metatext. This self-reflexiveirony is the underlying mode of the first section of The Music ofChance,n which the picaresque framework is simultaneously con-structed and deconstructed. One of the ways in which it is decon-structed is through the evocation of works that question traditionalAmericanvalues, such as JeanBaudrillard's America.Thus Nashe'sfascinationwith life on the road is described in the following terms:

He wanted that solitude again, that nightlong rush through the empti-ness, that rumbling of the road against his skin.

(7)

2. This initial depiction of Nashe and Pozzi is in line with Leslie Fiedler's theory thatAmerican fiction traditionally presents two juvenile male protagonists escaping adultsociety in an island or woods where mothers do not come. Laurel and Hardy are broughtup by Pozzi, who initially perceives Flower and Stone as a pair of inoffensive buffoons(30). But in Auster's 1976 play "Laurel and Hardy Go to Heaven," which consists entirely


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494 . C O N T E M P O R A R Y L I T E R A T U R ESpeed was of the essence, the joy of sitting in a car and hurtling himselfforward through space.

(11)Both descriptions seem to echo Baudrillard'sobservation, "Speedis simply the rite that initiates us into emptiness: a nostalgic desirefor forms to revert to immobility, concealed beneath the very inten-sification of their mobility" (7).3Baudrillard's work offers the Other'sperception of America andof the American myth of the road, a perception that ironically sub-verts the picaresque perspective. This perspective, which is mainlyprojected from Nashe's center of consciousness, is also subvertedwithin the novel's fictional world. Thus when he promises Fionathat he will come back to her, as he is a free man now and can dowhat he wants, she retorts sarcastically:"This is America, Nashe.The home of the goddamn free, remember? We can all do what wewant" (16). But Nashe cannot actually do what he wants, not evenwhen he believes himself to be aimlessly zigzagging acrossAmerica. His drifting turns into an obsession and he becomes theslave of his pursuit of freedom, "careening blindly from one no-where to the next" (7).The picaresque framework of the first three chapters is thus sub-verted through extratextual suggestions, the comments of othercharacters, and the depiction of an inner contradiction in Nashehimself. Another element that destabilizes the underlying assump-tions of the picaresque genre is a gradual shift in the nature ofchance. This shift, already adumbrated in the opening sequence, isdramatized in the narrative reversal resulting from Nashe's loss inthe poker game with the pair of millionaires, and metaphoricallyconveyed through the change of setting from the road to the castle.It has thematic and generic implications, suggesting that fate,rather than accident, is the force governing human life, and trans-forming the specific tale of human life entitled TheMusicof Chancefrom a road story into a tragedy.of the inexplicable construction of a wall by a pair of tragicomic characters, Laurel andHardy are the precursors of Nashe and Pozzi (see Hand to Mouth 133-71).3. The similarity between the first part of The Music of Chance and Baudrillard'sAmerica is also pointed out by Bray (84) and Herzogenrath (180), although the latterdiscusses it from the Freudian and Lacanian perspective of the drive.


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496 . C O N T E M P O R A R Y L I T E R A T U R Eand an acceptanceof life's absurdity; tragedy evokes pity, fear,anda sense of elation at the spectacle of human dignity.The shift from the picaresque to the tragic perspective is fore-grounded in TheMusic of Chanceby the shift of the setting fromthe road to the castle. The agent of that shift is Pozzi, who tellsNashe that he has a prearranged game of poker with a pair of ec-centric millionaires. Pozzi has no doubt about beating the coupleand hitting the jackpot;unfortunately,he has no money left to gam-ble with. Nashe decides to put up his last ten thousand dollars forthe young hitchhiker, in return for an even share in the profits ofthe game. Thus he believes he will recover, through the kid, someof his money:

At that point, Pozzi was simply a means to an end, the hole in the wallthat would get him from one side to the other. He was an opportunityin the shape of a human being, a card-playing specter whose one purposein the world was to help Nashe win back his freedom.(36-37)

Nashe's decision to use Pozzi as an instrument to get back hisfortune is his tragic deed. It grows out of his fatal error-his equa-tion of freedom with money. Freedom is a quality of the spirit; itsperception in terms of money produces a reductive view of humanlife and an idealized view of material values. In the novel's fictionalworld, money does not set people free: it corrupts and enslaves.Nashe realizes this briefly when he notices the paradox implicit inhis mental equation: each time he uses money to buy another por-tion of his freedom, he is denying himself an equal portion of it aswell (17). But the impact of that realization does not last, since hedecides to become a partnerin Pozzi's gambling profits, to retrievehis money and his freedom.Nashe's blindness becomes progressively more pronounced ashe enters the castle. He feels sorry for its owners, Flower and Stone,whom he perceives as harmless buffoons (83, 87). He continues tomisinterpretthe situation throughout the poker game; even thoughPozzi begins to lose heavily, Nashe still harbors the illusion thathe is in control (95, 107). He thus adds twenty-three hundred dol-lars,his last money, to the original sum he put up and finally offershis car as collateral. Pozzi loses everything. Nashe proposes one


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S H I L 0 H * 497final cut, which will either give them back the car or double theirlosses. Pozzi loses again. At this point, Stone proposes a schemethat will enable him and Flower to collect the money they won inthe game: Nashe and Pozzi will manually erect a wall, from tenthousand stones of an Irish wall that the millionaires dismantledand imported to their castle. Nashe and Pozzi will be paid fortheir labor;once they cover their gambling debt, they will be freeto go.Pozzi is appalled at Stone's solution and vehemently protests.But Nashe accepts it. His acceptance follows logically from hisidentification of money with freedom: if money signifies freedom,then lack of money signifies slavery. Poker may be seen as an aptmetaphor for fictitious capital, which has characterized the econ-omy of the late twentieth century-capital dissociated from laboror production, existing only nominally, in the sphere of specula-tion.4Nashe's loss in poker is a symbolic loss in the capitalist game,whose rules he fully accepts. He thus associates money not onlywith freedom but also with justice. It is all part of fair play, heexplains to the inconsolable Pozzi: in fifty days, they will pay outtheir debt in work and will be free. When the skeptical youngsterinsists, "How do you know it will be only fifty days?" Nashe reas-sures him, "Because that's the agreement" (111).Nashe's metaphorical blindness is underscored by the fact thatStone, his host in the castle, is an optometrist by profession. Anoptometrist is a man who correctspeople's vision; Stone's City ofthe World could have corrected Nashe's vision, were he perceptiveenough to decipher it properly. But he is not. His tragic error,the"naked self-deception" that he attributes to Rousseau (54)but thatcharacterizeshim as well, consists in his blind acceptance of thecapitalistAmericanethos, which conflates ethical values-freedomand justice-with a material value that has nothing to do with eth-ics: money. This inner contradiction is built into the Declaration ofIndependence, as the creator of Nashe realized at a very young age:

The wholesomeness and dreary rectitude of American life were no morethan a sham, a halfhearted publicity stunt. The moment you began to4. Theperceptionof pokeras a metaphor or fictitiouscapital s suggested by Dotan(167).


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498 * C O N T E M P O R A R Y L I T E R A T U R Estudy the facts, contradictions bubbled to the surface.... We had beentaught to believe in "liberty and justice for all," but the fact was that lib-erty and justice were often at odds with one another. The pursuit ofmoney had nothing to do with fairness; its driving engine was the socialprinciple of "every man for himself."

(Hand12)5This observation finds a powerful and poignant fictional realiza-tion in the plot of TheMusic of Chance. Nashe's fatal error inevitablyleads to his tragic deed, which in Greek tragedy was usually a sin-gle act; in modern tragedy, suggests Krook, the tragic deed tendsto be diffused. That is precisely the case in The Music of Chance, inwhich there are three tragic deeds, mirroring each other in amounting succession of horror. All three have to do with the fa-ther's betrayal of his child, real or symbolic; and all three have todo with money.6Nashe's first tragic deed, his "original sin," as it were, is his aban-donment of his daughter. He initially entrusts her to his sister'scare because he cannot afford paid help: "If there had been somemoney, he would have hired a woman to live with them and lookafter Juliette" (2). In spite of his rationalizations-Juliette has al-ready forgotten him; wrenching her away from her new familywould do her more harm than good-Nashe feels profoundlyguilty for having given her up. This sense of guilt is the subtext ofthe opening paragraph: Nashe regards his encounter with Pozzi asa reprieve, a respite from impending punishment, because he feelsthat he deserves to be punished. "[I]n Greek tragedy," observesKrook, "every tragic hero approximates the Adam figure-the ar-chetypal, representative sinner, perpetually re-enacting the funda-mental sin of mankind" (75). In Auster's poetic world, the originalsin is neither spiritual pride, as in the Christian narrative of theFall, nor hybris, as in Greek tragedy; it is the father's betrayal ofhis child.

5. In this passagefromthe title essay of his memoir,Austerclaimsthathe becameaware of that innercontradictionn the Americanethos at a very young age, when hestumbledacrossan issue of Madmagazine.6. The triadof betrayalssuggests a Crucifixionparallel,a suggestionreinforcedbythesceneinwhich NashecarriesPozzi'sbatteredbodyinhisarms, n a gestureevocativeof the pieta 171).


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S H I L OH 499Nashe's second tragic deed is his decision to use Pozzi as "an

opportunity in the shape of a human being." His decision-whichhe carriesout, and in that sense it is a deed-entails a double tragicirony. Itwill boomerang on him, for the millionaires will dehuman-ize him in precisely the same way in which he has dehumanizedPozzi: they will use their two visitors as instruments for retrievingtheir money. Second, in his attempt to redeem himself through theerection of the wall, Nashe will inadvertently repeat the very sinfor which he is trying to atone-the father's betrayal of his child.

Throughout the narrative,Pozzi gradually becomes a son figurefor Nashe, a substitute for the daughter whom he has forsaken. Bypicking Pozzi up from the side of the road, Nashe literally saveshim; he then offers the kid his own shirt, an exchange of clothessymbolically establishing their new kinship. This sense of kinshipdeepens when Nashe finds out that he and Pozzi share a similarlife story: both of them grew up with an absent father who madehimself manifest only through the gift of money. The nature of thebudding relationship between Nashe and Pozzi is metaphoricallyunderscored by the setting of the Plaza Hotel, where Nashe takesthe kid to test the truth of his claims about his superb skills asa poker player: the Plaza was also the location of Pozzi's secondencounter with his absentee father.

Nashe thus symbolically reenacts the pattern of behavior ofPozzi's father:he initially overwhelms the boy with his lavishnessbut will ultimately betray him. His firstbetrayal consists in his de-humanization of Pozzi, his resolve to use him as an instrument toretrieve his money. His second betrayal consists in his acceptanceof Stone's offer, which will ultimately lead to Pozzi's death. Forthe millionaires eventually change the terms of their agreement,and Nashe, realizing the enormity of his error,suggests that Pozziescape through a hole that they dig in the fence surrounding themeadow. Pozzi takes up Nashe's suggestion, is apprehended, andthen is beaten almost to death.Nashe's tragicdeed furtherreverberatesin the narrativethroughhis grotesque relationship with the retarded grandson of the over-seer, Calvin Murks. Nashe suspects that it was little Floyd whoalerted Murks to Pozzi's attempted escape, and he begins fantasiz-ing about killing the boy. Paradoxically,the more he hates the boy,


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500 . C O N T E M P O R A R Y L I T E R A T U R Ethe more the boy dotes on him: little Floyd seems to adopt Nasheas his father in the same way that Nashe adopted Pozzi as his son.Nashe's murderous fantasy thus becomes the last one in a seriesof paternal betrayals, real or imaginary, which thicken the web ofwarped fatherhood interconnecting the various characters.

Ironically, the warmest paternal and filial feelings seem to existin Murks's family-three male generations who apparently adoreeach other. But their mutual devotion has no redeeming value. Inthe novel's fictional world, fatherhood is stripped of compassionand childhood is stripped of innocence. Calvin Murks and his son-in-law are dumb, brutal, almost subhuman. Little, retarded Floydis not much more than an animal, "cavortinglike some strange andsilent monkey" (183).Mindless and grotesque, though innocent, heis already implicated in crime, as his discovery of the escape proba-bly triggered Pozzi's deadly beating.At this point in the narrative,Nashe has not yet made the connec-tion between his fatalerror-his confusion of money with freedomand justice-and his tragic deed-selling out his son to retrievehis money. Consequently, he seeks vengeance, not atonement, con-tinuing to work on the erection of the wall so that when he getsfree he can alert the police and have Murks arrested. The killingof the foreman's grandson, mirroring the killing of Nashe's ownson, would highlight the symmetry of his revenge. It would rectifythe balance of injustice: "the boy was telling him that it was allright, that as long as Nashe was the one who killed him, everythingwas going to be all right" (186).Nashe's need for revenge implies that he has not yet gained theknowledge that follows from the tragicreversal.Irony,orperipeteia,states Aristotle, "is a reversal in the course of events ... in accor-dance with probability or necessity" (31):it is thus both surprisingand inevitable. Peripeteia efers not only to the external course ofevents, but also to the consciousness and intentionality of the tragichero. Before the reversal, all his actions are directed toward theachievement of a certain goal, from whose tragic consequences hetries to escape after it is subverted by the ironic turn of events. Inthe narrative structure of The Music of Chance, he tragic reversalis Pozzi's death. While it marks a turning point in the unfoldingof the narrative, a turning point both surprising (for Nashe) and


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S H I L OH 501inevitable (for the reader), it equally marks a shift in Nashe's con-sciousness. Only at the sight of the kid's battered body does Nasherealize the tragic error of his equation of money with justice. Andhe is plunged into a terrible, agonizing suffering.Nashe's most profound grief is due neither to the physical hard-ship nor to the deprivation of freedom or the indignation of injus-tice. It is the pain of loss. Whereas in his earlier days on the roadhe welcomed the "salutary emptiness," after Pozzi's death he findsit unbearable,so that "hisdomestic routines became dry and mean-ingless, a mechanical drudgery of... making things dirty andcleaning them up, the clockwork of animal functions"(179).7Nashehas already lost a wife and forsaken a daughter, yet it is his lossof Pozzi that produces a sense of bereavement so profound that heexperiences it as the divestment of his humanity, the reduction ofhis life to animal existence. The curious metaphor of "the clock-work of animal functions" simultaneously evokes Lear's vision ofman as a bare, forked animal and Macbeth's vision of time as aseries of tomorrows, creeping in their petty pace from day to day.The oblique reference to Macbethis reinforcedby Nashe's readingof The Sound and theFury,whose title refers precisely to that samesoliloquy in Shakespeare'splay. Macbeth was a murderer and Leara father who betrayed his beloved child; Nashe is both.The hero's suffering, according to Krook,is properly tragicwhenit generates knowledge, even if only subliminal. That is the casewith Nashe, as may be seen in the novel's final section. He eventu-ally finishes the erection of the wall and accepts Murks's offer to goout with his son-in-law, Floyd, and celebratehis upcoming release.Pozzi's memory haunts their stay in the bar, where Nashe andFloyd play a pool game on whose result they gamble fifty dollars.Floyd isn't bad, but Nashe is better, and he winds up playing hisheart out, zeroing in on his shots with a skill and precision thatsurpass anything he has done before. "Ifigured you might be good,but this is ridiculous," comments Floyd, to which Nashe smilinglyreplies, "Justluck" (213).The scene is the wish-fulfillment version of Pozzi's poker game

7. A "salutary emptiness" is the inner condition to which Quinn aspires in City ofGlass (4) and is the objective of Nashe's quest in the first part of the novel.


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502 * C O N T E M P O R A R Y L I T E R A T U R Ewith the millionaires, the way things should have been but weren't.Theanalogy is foregroundedby the players' gambling on the resultsof the game andby Nashe's sense of skill and mastery,which mirrorsthe way Pozzi felt about himself. The implied analogy only deepensthe sense of loss, offeringvistas of possibilitiesforeverforfeited. "Thediscovery or anagnorisiswhich comes at the end of the tragicplot,"writes Frye, "is not simply the knowledge by the hero of what hashappened to him ... but the recognitionof the determined shape ofthe life he has created for himself, with an implicit comparisonwiththe uncreatedpotential life he has forsaken"(212).Thatrecognitionbecomes unbearably poignant as Nashe once again gets behind thewheel of theredSaabwhich used to be his butnow belongs to Murks."This was the only chance he would have," he thinks, trying "tosavor what had been given to him, to push the memory of who hehad once been as far as it would go" (215).The only chance left to Nashe at the end of the novel is to recallthe past with an unbearable sense of loss, to remember, to borrowFrye's terms, the potential life he has forsaken. Chance frames thenarrative,but it remains as ambiguous at the end as it was at thebeginning. Forin the course of Nashe's story, the element of unpre-dictability associated with the picaresque is gradually transformedinto the determinism of Greek tragedy. That determinism is par-tially due to a flaw in Nashe's character,the fatal errorthat blindshim to the distinction between the material order and the ethicalorder. But the underlying determinism of the narrative develop-ment, the inevitability that dictates the sequence of events, is alsodue to a force external to Nashe-the force of fate. In the fictionalworld of TheMusic of Chance, he role of fate as the principle gov-erning human life is taken over by money. Money, like fate, be-comes an impersonal power, amoral, ruthless, and inexorable. Itdetermines the lives of those who have it and, even more so, thelives of those who do not.In Greektragedy, fate does not operate to punish the wicked andreward the just:at the end of the tragicaction, suffering and calam-ity befall the guilty and the innocent alike.8 Fate is stronger than

8. This is the original, Aristotlean view of tragedy, which Krook endows with a Chris-tian overlay by introducing the notion of a universally binding and objective moral order.Aristotle does not associate fate with morality; Krook does.


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S H I L 0 H 503the gods and stronger than humans, whose struggle against it isinevitably futile. This notion is most eloquently epitomized by thechorus in Seneca's Oedipus:

a man's life is a pattern on the floor like a mazeit's all fixed he wanders in the patternno prayer can alter itor help him to escape it nothingthen fear can be the end of hima man's fear of his fate is often his fateleaping to avoid it he meets it. (52-53)

The lament over Oedipus's destiny reverberatesin the initial de-scription of Nashe: because he has already given up, without theslightest tremor of fear, he closes his eyes and jumps. Leaping toavoid it, he meets it. For at the end of the novel, Nashe is in exactlythe same place where he was at the beginning: on the road, behindthe wheel of the red Saab, closing his eyes. Closing his eyes, thistime, to the glare of the headlights of an oncoming car. The circular-ity of the narrative, whose calamitous end is already contained inits beginning, the sequence of events that follows the structuralstages of a tragicfable, and the characterof the main protagonist-all these elements cast TheMusic of Chance n the mold of a Greektragedy. This structuraland thematic context is highlighted by theconspicuously allegorical depiction of the two millionaires, whoare presented as omnipotent, malevolent, and unpredictable dei-ties.

The gods in Greek tragedy, suggests Frye, exist primarily to rat-ify fate's abstractpower (208). In the fictional world of The Musicof Chance, he millionaires are metaphorically presented as gods,and the power they ratify is the power of money. The associationof Flower and Stone with forces of a ruthless destiny is alreadyannounced as Nashe and Pozzi are making their way to the mil-lionaires' mansion. In spite of the specific landmarks Pozzi wasgiven, they get lost, and "[a]ftera while, it began to feel as if theywere traveling through a maze" (64). The evocation of the laby-rinth, the Greek trope for fate, is followed by an almost parodicallusion to Beethoven's Fifth Symphony, known as the "Destiny"Symphony, with whose opening notes chimes the doorbell of the


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504 - C O N T E M P O R A R Y L I T E R A T U R Emillionaires' abode. The nature of the specific destiny representedby Flower and Stone is suggested by the pieces of broken statuarydecorating the entrance hall: "a naked wood nymph missing herright arm,a headless hunter, a horse with no legs that floated abovea stone plinth with an iron shaft connected to its belly" (68). Themutilated objects, whose sequence suggests the direction ofNashe's gaze, appear in a mounting gamut of senseless cruelty,metaphorically foreshadowing the direction Nashe's and Pozzi'slives will take on these premises.

Flower and Stone act as gods and see themselves as gods. "Billhas the Midas touch," explains Stone to his guests, and Flowermodestly admits, "attimes I feel thatwe've become immortal"(75).Stone's divinity is even more forcefully suggested, on both the mi-metic and allegorical planes. He is the one who acts out the million-aires'omnipotence and lawlessness by suggesting the manual erec-tion of the wall, which condemns Nashe and Pozzi to slavery. Heis also the one who has created a world-the City of the World, aminiature rendering of a city. When Nashe sees the model for thefirst time, he feels that its overriding mood is one of terror, as ifthis were a city "struggling to mend its ways before ... the arrivalof a murderous, avenging God" (96).The millionaires' divinity is further suggested through obliquereference to Samuel Beckett's WaitingforGodotand Franz Kafka'sTheCastle.9Pozzi's name blends the names of the two secondaryfigures in Beckett's play, Lucky and Pozzo, and indeed Pozzievokes both these characters:his living off luck is associated withLucky's name; like Lucky leading his master to an unknown desti-nation, Pozzi leads Nashe to the castle; like Lucky, he will also bevictimized by the man in power. The novel's narrativeframeworkand its metaphysical implications likewise evoke Beckett's work.Both TheMusic of Chance in its first section) and Waitingor Godotare set on the road and offer contemporaryvariations on the para-digm of the road story. In Beckett's play, the passage of time iscyclical and brings no progress; the entire action consists of wait-ing. Nashe and Pozzi do make progress while they are on the road,but once they start slaving on the erection of the wall, their exis-

9. For a comparison with Beckett, see Saltzman (71-72).


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S H I L 0 H 505tence is also reduced to waiting. Whereas Beckett's duo seems tobe waiting for the arrivalof some spiritual power, Nashe and Pozzitoil in the service of Midas. Their lot is harsher and more devasta-ting than that of Beckett's protagonists, who are allowed to clingto their illusion and their hope. But at the end of The Music ofChance,no hope is left. And this is the most significant implicationof the reference to Beckett-the evocation of a world stripped ofa transcendental dimension, in which God is absent, nonexistent,or deposed by the power of money.

Kafka's The Castle,a novel often regarded as a parable of theinaccessibility of divine grace, constitutes another intertextual ref-erence suggesting thatFlower and Stone areallegorically cast in therole of fate. The millionaires' mansion conjures up Kafka'scastle inits combined air of evil and of childish banality: while the brokenstatuary at the entrance suggests senseless cruelty, the meal towhich Nashe and Pozzi are invited "turn[s]out to be no more thana kiddie banquet, a dinner fit for six-year-olds"(88).This unsettlingcombination of madness and childishness also marks K's initialperception of the Castle, glittering in the sun with "a somewhatmaniacal glitter . . . with battlements that were irregular,broken,fumbling, as if designed by the trembling or careless hand of achild" (19-20).More significantly, Flower and Stone evoke the inhabitants of theCastle in their remoteness and their unpredictability.As in Kafka'sworld, on the millionaires' premises, the rules keep changing. OnceNashe and Pozzi startworking on the wall, the millionaires disap-pear from sight; contactwith them can only be established throughtheir emissary, Murks, the sinister double of Kafka's Barnabas.They also alter the terms of the agreement, which underminesNashe's faith in the moral justification of his ordeal. Within theframework of the tragic fable, Nashe's loss of faith triggershis sug-gestion that Pozzi escape, a suggestion that brings about the ulti-mate catastrophe. In terms of the symbolic frame of reference,Flower's and Stone's inaccessibility, their unlimited power, and theconstantly shifting nature of the rules they have set up evoke aworld governed by an absent God, malevolent, cruel, and unpre-dictable.

The source of Flower's and Stone's divinity is money. They used


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506 - C O N T E M P O R A R Y L I T E R A T U R Eto be family men, in Pozzi's words, "[r]ealordinary middle-classguys" (32),until they won twenty million dollars in the lotterywitha ticket they'd jointly purchased. They retiredfrom their respectiveoccupations-Flower as an accountant and Stone as an optome-trist-bought a mansion to which they moved together,and startedto use their sudden windfall to make even more money. They wereextraordinarilysuccessful at that, as Flower proudly explains:

No matter what we do, everything seems to turn out right.... It's asthough God has singled us out from men. He's showered us with goodfortune and lifted us to the heights of happiness. I know this might soundpresumptuous to you, but at times I feel that we've become immortal.

(75)

Money does not have an intrinsic value. It is a signifier, acquiringits value from the commodities to which it refers-gold, labor,other currencies-and from the commodities it can buy. But forFlower, the signifier has usurped the status of the signified. Hisperspective is not fundamentally different from Nashe's; in effect,it takes Nashe's conviction to its radicalconclusion. Nashe believesthat money can buy freedom and that the protection of one's for-tune is morally justified. In other words, he does not think that thematerial order is identical to the ethical order, only that the firstrepresents the latter, that the two are linked in a relationship ofsignification. Money, for Nashe, is a signifier whose signifieds arefreedom and merit. Flower has taken Nashe's reasoning one stepfurther. In his world-view, the material order has superseded theethical order;money has been elevated from the status of signifierto that of a signified. Money is not only fortune but goodfortune;it does not just buy happiness but is happiness; it is not the signof God's grace but its manifest operation.The transformation of money from signifier to signified is oneof the hallmarksof the capitalistethos. Themost radicalrepresenta-tives of that ethos in TheMusicof Chanceare Flower and Stone, butit is professed as well by the other main characters-Murks, Floyd,Pozzi, and Nashe. Its most distinctive features are metaphoricallyconveyed through the hobbies of the two millionaires-Stone'sminiature model of a city and Flower's collection of historical mem-orabilia. Flower's collection exhibits the talent he is most proud


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S H I L 0 H 507of-his ability to make money out of money, that is, to create aclosed system of proliferating signifiers, which have acquired thestatus of signifieds. The trivia he ebulliently displays to hisguests-Wilson's telephone, Fermi'spencil, Churchill'scigar-area small-scale manifestation of such a system, "agraveyard of shad-ows, a demented shrine to the spirit of nothingness" (84).Flower used to be an accountant;his museum reflects his procliv-ity to quantify reality and to reduce everything to matter. The col-lection is an accuraterepresentation of his mental world, in whichmoney is deified, numbers are personified, and human beings arereified. He perceives the possession of money and the talent formaking money as signs of a divine stature;he personifies figuresbut dehumanizes human beings. As an accountant, Flower ex-plains to Nashe and Pozzi, he has dealt with numbers all his life,and after a while he began to think that each number has a person-ality of its own. "Numbers have souls," he elaborates, "and youcan't help but get involved with them in a personal way" (73). Inan ironical symmetry, the moment Pozzi and Nashe start owinghim money, Flower can't help but get involved with them in animpersonal way. They become for him (as Pozzi was for Nashe),mere ciphers, opportunities in the shape of human beings.Stone's hobby is an even more awesome symbolic representationof the American ethos. He has constructed a miniature-scale modelof a city, which Flower displays to their guests with the pride ofan overbearing father (weaving another thread into the motif ofwarped fatherhood):

"Willie's city is more than just a toy," Flower said, "it's an artistic visionof mankind. In one way, it's an autobiography, but in another way, it'swhat you might call a utopia-a place where the past and future cometogether, where good finally triumphs over evil.... Look at the Hall ofJustice, the Library, the Bank, and the Prison. Willie calls them the FourRealms of Togetherness, and each one plays a vital role in maintainingthe harmony of the city. If you look at the Prison, you'll see that all theprisoners are working happily at various tasks, that they all have smileson their faces. That's because they are glad they've been punished fortheir crimes, and now they are learning how to recover the goodnesswithin them through hard work.

(79-80)


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508 ? C O N T E M P O R A R Y L I T E R A T U R EFlower'spresentation of Stone's model parodically conflatescap-italist and Puritan rhetoric with George Orwell's "new-speak." Ifhis own collection of historical trivia mainly evokes commodifica-tion, a central feature of capitalism, Stone's City of the World in-

corporates Puritan and totalitarianmotifs as well. As Tim Woodscorrectly observes, the ideological rationalization of venture capi-talism is rooted in the Puritanethos, which preaches freedom, self-determination,and independence. This is the ideology that informsNashe's life on the road in the first section of the novel. The sameideology motivates the toy prisoners in Stone's utopian model,who are working happily, with smiles on their faces, apparentlysharing the belief harbored by Nashe when he comes to erect thewall, namely, that work sets one free.?1n Stone's model, "TheFourRealms of Togetherness," evocative of the four Ministries of Or-well's Oceania, inculcate in the prisoners the Protestant ethic,which regards work as evidence of being saved. The City of theWorld eventually evokes an Orwellian dystopia, in which hard la-bor is promulgated as morally beneficial, exploitation is masked asliberation,and the state controls and regulates all aspects of humanlife.1

As mentioned earlier,Nashe perceives the City of the World asa place awaiting the punishment of "amurderous, avenging God."This vengeful deity conflates the notions of a rigid, ProtestantGod,of Midas, and of the two millionaires who have been consistentlylikened to gods. The allegorical import of this composite imageevokes big money (Midas, Flower, and Stone) exercising the ruth-less and inexorable power of fate. But if this symbolic representa-tion of venture capital apparently substantiates the tragic frame-work, suggesting that money is a larger-than-lifeforce regulating

10. In the second month of their hard toil, Nashe feels that "[a]s long as they kepton working, the work was going to make them free" (147). The wording here ironicallyevokes the slogan "Arbeit macht frei," inscribed on the entrance gate to Auschwitz, andprovides an instance of the way in which the ideologies conceptualized in the modelare reproduced in the meadow.11. Another possible intertextual reference is to Edward Albee's Tiny Alice (1966),which features a miniature-scale model of the play's fictional space, a model functioningas an instance of infinite regression. Albee's play is thematically relevant in that it dealswith the motifs of big money and of the relationship between representation and reality.


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SHILOH ? 509human existence, money is also associated with another elementthat subverts the tragic mode-chance.In the novel's fictionalworld, money is never earned. It is alwayswon, acquired either by accident or by manipulation and swin-dling. Nashe's inheritance,which generates the entireplot, is a sud-den windfall. That fortune did not result from his father's work athis hardware store, but from his speculation on the stock market.Pozzi's father also showered him with occasional gifts of money,although of a more modest size; their source was not hard work,either,but a petty financialscam. Nashe quits his job once he comesinto money, as do Flower and Stone; Pozzi has (almost) neverworked, relying on luck and his gambling skills. Flower and Stonewon their fortune in the lottery, and they came into Nashe's tenthousand dollars through a poker game. The only time in the novelwhen money is earned through work-when Nashe and Pozzierect the wall-this labor turns into a cruel and senseless slavery.Money is thus associated both with chance and with fate;it is theleitmotif that links the novel's picaresque and tragicperspectives. Itis associated with chance in that its acquisition is accidental and itspossession reflects neither merit nor justice.All the main characterscome into money by luck and lose it through misfortune (exceptfor Nashe, who deliberately rids himself of his possessions); itcirculates blindly and is bestowed randomly. But money is alsoassociated with fate, evoking the world-view that informs classictragedy. The notion of fate implies direction, necessity, andpredictability: "it's all fixed," chants the chorus in the final act ofOedipus.In The Music of Chance,money is fate to the extent that itdetermines Nashe's life, so that, like Oedipus, leaping to avoid it,Nashe meets it. It is the power that drives him to seek his freedomon the road and the power that will deprive him of his freedom.The representatives of this power are the two millionaires, petty,eccentric,and ruthless, exerting absolute control over theirvictims'lives.It is Pozzi, the typical picaro iving off gambling and luck, whovoices a belief consistent with the perspective of classic tragedy.When he discovers that in the middle of the poker game Nashewent off and stole the figures of Flower and Stone from the citymodel, he bitterly remonstrates:


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510 * C O N T E M P O R A R Y L I T E R A T U R EI can't believe what a mistake that was. No class, Jim,an amateurish stunt.It's like committing a sin to do a thing like that, it's like violating a funda-mental law. We had everything in harmony. We'd come to the pointwhere everything was turning into music for us, and then you have togo upstairs and smash all the instruments. You tampered with the uni-verse, my friend, and once a man does that, he's got to pay the price. I'mjust sorry I have to pay it with you.

(138)Pozzi's indignant protest against Nashe's theft of the toy figuresevokes the image of the music of chance, the novel's title and itsthematic and structural core. Music is associated with harmony,which implies symmetry, balance, an underlying order; chance im-plies the opposite notions. The belief in harmony is the underpin-ning of classical tragedy, which reaffirms cosmic balance and reas-serts an objective moral order, simultaneously incorporating thehuman realm and transcending it. The celebration of chance is theunderpinning of the picaresque mode, which contests the existenceof a transcendent order and revels in the freedom implied by thecontingency governing human order.12The Music of Chance is a roadstory which gradually acquires the dimensions and depth of aGreek tragedy. It is also a Greek tragedy which becomes frag-mented and divested of its grandeur through the inclusion of ele-ments belonging to the road story and to the philosophy of theabsurd.13

The novel's tragic substructure is subverted in several ways. Forone, the pattern of the tragic action is not completed. The two prin-cipal tragic events, Pozzi's and Nashe's deaths, are only presumedto have happened. Pozzi is severely beaten and is taken away by

12. For discussions of the notions of music and of chance, see Grandjeat (153-54),Herzogenrath (207), Little (4), and Saltzman (70).13. Auster's conflation of two seemingly incompatible genres, picaresque and tragedy,is in line with the tendency of postmoderist writing to blur generic categories, a ten-dency that may be accounted for by the wish to unfix boundaries that conceal dominationor authority (see, among others, Cohen; Derrida, "Law";and Todorov). I believe, how-ever, that Auster borrows postmoder practices in the same way that he uses the conven-tions of detective fiction, "as a way to get somewhere else entirely" ("Interview" 303).In other words, the blurring of generic conventions and postmodern ontology in TheMusic of Chanceare the means Auster found most effective for enhancing the novel'sthemes.


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S H I L OH 511Murksand Floyd, who promise to hospitalize him. Nashe assumesthey haven't done so; he believes Pozzi is dead. Nashe's own deathis not certain either. At the end of the novel, Nashe drives the redSaab again, listening to music, with Murks and Floyd in the car.He accelerates;Murks protests and turns the radio down; Nashetakes his eyes off the road and tells the foreman to mind his ownbusiness. When he looks at the road again, he is facing an oncomingcar. There is no time to stop, and he presses down on the gas, shut-ting his eyes seconds before the inevitable collision.

The end, like the entire novel, is conveyed from Nashe's centerof consciousness. The reader understands that he welcomes deathand that he feels these are the last moments of his life. That is alsothe logic of events: the entire narrativesequence, which follows thestages of the tragicfable,builds up to the final catastrophe: he deathof the tragic hero. Still, the end remains open: even though Nasheis convinced that the accident is unavoidable, this need not be so.14If the novel does not have a tragic closure, neither does it pro-duce the tragic effect, the catharsis of pity and fear. The final re-sponse to tragedy, according to Aristotle, is a sense of liberation.We acknowledge the hero's suffering as necessary and expiatory;rather than being crushed by the hopelessness of the human condi-tion, we are liberatedfrompain and fear and feel elated by a specta-cle reaffirming human dignity. But at the end of The Music ofChance,we seem to be left only with pity and fear. There is nocatharsis. This is because the picaresque and absurd world-viewsevoked through the intertextual references undermine the tacit as-sumptions of classical tragedy. In a world devoid of a transcendentdimension, the hero's suffering is neither necessary nor expiatory.It serves only to reaffirmthe brutal, dehumanizing, and ultimatelybanal order of money.

Banality is another element that undermines the novel's tragicperspective-the banality of evil, to borrow Hannah Arendt'sphrase. Tragedy evokes a sense of grandeur-the greatness of the

14. This possibility is explored in the cinematic version of The Music of Chance,whereat the end of the film Nashe, who survived the accident, hitchhikes by the side of theroad, mirroring Pozzi in the opening sequence. The final scene thus foregrounds thecircularity of the story but subverts its tragic aspect.


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512 * C O N T E M P O R A R Y L I T E R A T U R Etragichero, the awesome statureof the fate that he is pitted against.But in TheMusicofChance,he sinister is intermixed with the banal.Flower and Stone are both malevolent gods and ordinary, middle-class guys, omnipotent and cunning yet petty and infantile. Theirinfantilism may be seen in their ridiculous dinner, "a kiddie ban-quet fit for six-year-olds";in Flower's senseless collection of trivia;and in the wall, its stones strewn on the meadow "like a set ofchildren'sblocks,"which Nashe and Pozzi have to cartin the samekind of children'swagon thatNashe bought forJulietteon her thirdbirthday.The combination of mythologized evil with childishness andtriviality functions on several levels. It subverts the tragic perspec-tive, suggesting thatthe power that set Nashe on the road, seducinghim with the pledge of freedom, the power for which he forsookhis daughter and betrayed his symbolic son, is not only malevolentbut also inane. If we experience the lot of the tragic hero as theessence of the human condition, then this condition, conveyed byNashe's ordeal, is an entrapmentbetween brutality and stupidity.An additional effect is a sense of disorientation, which the readercomes to share with Nashe: are the millionaires infantile, or is theirdullness a deliberate facade, calculated to lull their victims? Bothreadings aresupported equally by the text, especially since banalityand evil are not mutually exclusive. Banality does not cancel outevil; it only makes it more depressing.This is another reason why the novel's final effect is not a cathar-sis of pity and fear. But the tragic framework is invalidated notonly by the lack of dramatic closure, by the triviality of the forcesassociated with fate, and by the absence of the properly tragic ef-fect. It is ultimately subverted by a sense of progressive disorienta-tion, reverberating from the fictional to the extratextual space. Inthe fictional space, the disorientation mainly results from the fluid-ity and proliferation of signifiers, and from the obliteration of thedistinctions between representation and reality. Some signifiers,such as chance, imperceptibly slide from one meaning to its oppo-site; others, such as money, change their status from signifiers tosignifieds.15The novel also abounds with empty signifiers, appar-

15. For a detailed discussion of the relationship between money and language as sys-tems of signification, see Birat.


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S H I L 0 H 513

ently laden with meaning but ultimately pointing to nothing at all.An example of this is the conspicuous recurrence of the "magic"number seven, which mysteriously invades all the characters' ives,creating an intricate web of signifiers without signifieds.16Another such floating signifier is the image of the hole in thewall, whose status in the ontology of the fictional world is ex-tremely fluid. "The Hole in the Wall" was the name of ButchCassi-dy's gang; the allusion is another one of Auster's ironical stabs atthe American ethos. At the beginning of the novel, Pozzi tellsNashe he doesn't know him from a hole in the wall, and Nasheperceives Pozzi as a hole in the wall, an instrument for getting hismoney back; Pozzi's father presumably escaped from a prisoncamp through a hole in the wall, just as his son attempts to escapefrom the millionaires' premises, with tragic effects. The hole in thewall is thus a figure of speech and a metaphor literalized, a histori-cal allusion and an element of the fictional space.The same indeterminacy and multiplicity characterizes the cen-tral image of the wall. In Auster's play "Laurel and Hardy Go toHeaven," Hardy, one of the two wall-builders, reflects:

When I think of the wall, it's as if I were going beyond what I can think.It's so big, so much bigger than anything else. (Pause). And yet, in itself... in itself ... it's just a wall. A wall can be many things, can't it? It cankeep in or keep out. It can protect or destroy. It can help things ... ormake them worse. It can be part of something greater ... or only whatit is. Do you see what I mean? It all depends on how you look at it.

(Hand 149)17Hardy's observation offers a metafictional comment on the func-tion and possible meanings of the wall in the later novel, and onthe interpretive process which gives access to those meanings. Awall can be a solid object, opaque and inscrutable;but it may also

16. Nashe becamea firefighter even yearsbeforethe poker game;the playerswhobeat Pozzi had been winning steadilyfor seven yearsuntil he camealong;Nashe andPozzi stay on the seventhfloor of the Plaza;Flowerand Stone used to have a friendlypoker game at seven o'clockevery fortnight; hey won the lotteryseven years ago; inthefinalpokergame,Flowerdraws a seven cardand beats Pozzi. Forfurtherdiscussionof the significance and insignificance) f the numberseven, see Barone(7) and Dotan(164).17. The wall also figuresprominently n MauriceBlanchot's tory "TheIdyll,"in-cluded in the collectionViciousCircles1985),which was translatedby Auster.


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514 ? C O N T E M P O R A R Y L I T E R A T U R Ebecome a signifier, with multiple and contradictory signifieds.When Pozzi expounds to Nashe his gambling philosophy, he em-phasizes, "Theimportant thing [is] to remain inscrutable, to builda wall around yourself and not let anyone in" (63). His remarkreverberates backward and forward in the novel's chronology-backward to Nashe's earlierattempt to follow Pink Floyd's preceptin their album TheWalland become "comfortablynumb";forwardto the millionaires' gambling technique, which will successfullymirror Pozzi's strategy and bring about his downfall.18Later on,Nashe's reflection upon realizing that the meadow is surroundedby a barbed-wire fence (a variation on the notion of the wall) con-spicuously echoes Hardy's observation: "The barrier had beenerected to keep things out, but now that it was there, what was toprevent it from keeping things in as well?" (126). And when helistens to his favorite musical piece, Couperin's "The MysteriousBarricades,"he thinks, "As far as he was concerned, the barricadesstood for the wall he was building in the meadow, but that wasquite another thing from knowing what they meant" (181).Like the "magic"number seven and like the hole in the wall, thewall itself is a signifier whose signifieds cannot be circumscribedor finally determined. It is an extraordinarilyfecund symbol, butalso a dramaticelement of the fictional world; "sobig," in Hardy'swords, "and yet, . . . in itself, it's just a wall." The proliferation ofshifting signifiers, of figures of speech that occasionally literalize,and of endlessly reverberating correspondences makes up a fic-tional world whose ontology is structured like "a Chinese box, aninfinite series of containers within containers,"to use Auster's fa-vorite metaphor (Invention117).19This ontology is symbolicallyportrayed in the City of the World, in which Stone plans to recon-

18. Pink Floyd's The Wall was released in 1979, became a cult event, and was madeinto a movie. Its twenty-six songs make up a complex musical and poetic whole, in whichthe wall signifies the hero's attempt to achieve emotional impenetrability. Whether ornot Auster was familiar with the album-and he probably was-Pink Floyd's wall isthe same metaphorical barrier that Nashe and later Pozzi and the millionaires try to erectaround themselves.19. The Chinese box is one of Auster's favorite metaphors for the nature of reality,

recurring in many of his novels. Interestingly, in the film Lulu on theBridge,which Austerscripted and directed, he literalizes the metaphor as the protagonist unwraps the miracu-lous stone, concealed inside a series of wrappers within wrappers.


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S H I L 0 H *515struct the mansion with its premises and with the room housingthe model, thereby transforming the miniature-scale city into aspecter of infinite regress. The City of the World thus representsthe structure of the (fictional) world in which it is embedded; butit is not just a representation. Nashe's and Pozzi's erection of thewall reenacts the principles of totalitariancapitalism which informthe miniature construction, so that, as Woods accurately observes,the ideologies that are theorized and conceptualized in the modelare reproduced practically in the meadow (153).

This spilling over of representation (in the fictional world) intothe reality of that world is furtheraccentuatedby Nashe's dizzyingvision of himself as a pawn in Stone's model, and by his hallucina-tion that by carrying the stones of the wall he is carrying Stonehimself (178). The novel's ontological horizon is further destabi-lized by the illusory aspect of the fictional reality:the millionaires'mansion looks like a movie set, and their dinner is a parody ofchildren's commercials. This is the realization of Baudrillard's no-tion of simulacrum-a simulation which does not referback to re-ality but which generates its own models, a simulation which hasbecome a hyperreality.20The (doubly) fictional world inhabited bythe millionaires-fictional in the sense that it forms a partof a workof fiction, and that in this work it is also exposed as fictional-is such a hyperreality, in that it generates models by which theprotagonists, as well as the reader, interpret reality.TheMusic of Chancebegins as a classic American road story andimperceptibly shifts into the mold of a Greek tragedy. These twoincompatible modes are thematically interlaced by the motifs ofchance and determinism, fatherhood, freedom, and money, whichare constructed and deconstructed in the context of individual lifeand that of the national American ethos. The tragic substructuredivests the road story of its carnivalesque elements; the picaresqueframework strips the tragedy of its grandeur.The two perspectivesimplode, destabilizing the ontology of the fictional world, whichis further undermined by the proliferationof signifiers, the literali-zation of metaphors, and the interpenetrationof representationandreality. Representation embedded in the fictional world topples

20. See Baudrillard, Simulacres(10) and America (28).


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516 ? C O N T E M P O R A R Y L I T E R A T U R Eonto that world and furtherreverberates to the extratextualworld,turning TheMusic of Chance nto Auster's most incisive and mostpoignant criticism of the American ethos. For, as Nashe realizeslooking at the City of the World, "It's an imaginary place, but it'salso realistic."

Tel-AvivUniversity

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Beckett, Samuel. Waitingfor Godot.1955. London: Faber, 1977.Birat,Kathie. "Lelangage de l'argent: la metaphore comme monnaie d'echangedans la Musique du hasard."L'oeuvre de Paul Auster: Approcheset lecturesplurielles. Ed. Annick Duperray. Marseilles: Actes Sud/U de Provence/Irma, 1995. 199-213.

Bjornson, Richard. ThePicaresqueHero in EuropeanFiction.Madison: U of Wis-consin P, 1977.Blackburn, Alexander. TheMyth of the Picaro:Continuity and Transformation fthe PicaresqueNovel, 1554-1954. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1979.Blanchot, Maurice. "The Idyll." ViciousCircles:Two Fictions and "After heFact."Trans. Paul Auster. Barrytown, NY: Station Hill, 1985. 1-37.


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A Place Both Imaginary and Realistic- Paul Auster's