klc
another late auster that leaves me cold. the characters are repetitions from before that don't seem to add new dimensions and so now it gets grating when they all speak with that same introspective austerian voice in a hermetically sealed plot. especially as auster tries to write about the gfc here and shows limited understanding of what it meant to anyone who isn't a baby boomer who loves baseball and doesn't use a phone
Has all the chef's kiss elements of #1 - structurationist articulation of social dynamics, the interchanging roles of the brilliant friend, the beats of pure alienation that make you feel like you've been hit by a truck - but falters in 2 ways: seminal moments from #1 are reopened from their packaging unnecessarily in ways that diminish the source, the diary format is unconvincing and a tad too omniscient
powerful and persuasive polemic with a compelling thesis that sticks. the anecdotes are particularly horrifying and necessary. could explore the structurational reproduction and everyday transformation of ‘caste' as an institution more, or risk portraying it as a mysterious yet all-explaining monolith.
s-tier auster, one of his most successful skirmishes with ‘meta fiction'. here his protagonist author is openly struggling with what is essentially narrative (his memoir, his novel in his memoir, his novel in his novel in his memoir, his screenplay in his memoir, it goes on). these texts fluctuate in complexity, certitude, completion, and ultimately consequence. remarkably, they each bear their own logic and agency in a way that is surprisingly not annoying, and stimulate a collision course of events over nine days
Auster's use of duration makes you deeply and uncomfortably aware of the parallel lives you're not leading. In his 4 versions of 1 life story, anything that you think should stick is on shifting ground (sexuality, broad strokes of human relations, lifelong careers all provide to be results of banal contingencies) and anything arbitrary can have staying power (liking films lol). There are two endings. One is weak - to be vague, he briefly suggests that the 1,000 pages you've just read are a matter of ‘epistemology' rather than ‘ontology', and that spoils the meal. Auster has always been too cool (read: undisciplined) to care about the coherence of the random narrative devices he lobs over to his readers - they often do not fit in the novel, they are just novel. That is the sense in which he is a post modernist (the rest of his work reads very modernist). The other is strong - after 1,000 pages on the absurd twists and turns that violently stich together one already above average life, he shows us there are true men of agency and destiny who fuck shit up for the rest of us because they are simply too powerful.
there are essentially two projects at play here. one succeeds, the other is unconvincing.
project 1: demonstrate that the human past (and present) is a record of radical variability. people have in fact almost always organised themselves in ways that are unthinkable in our parochial and unreflective contemporary world. and it has nothing to do with progress. the authors spotlight the inappropriate use of other societies as shallow metaphors and superficial lessons for today's societies in influential popular and academic narratives. this is a very important project as it demonstrates how contingent and provisional our current social arrangements are. we are all trying so hard to control our lives and will be made into fools when social relations inevitably shift in unexpected ways in spite of every effort to reify them. by sifting through the archaeological and anthropological record in a both sufficiently thoughtful and aggressive way, this project succeeds.
project 2: demonstrate that an ‘anarchic' form of social organisation is possible and perhaps desirable. this project is more latent, less explicit, but it seems to be where each argument wants to go. here, the authors fall prey to many of the lapses they have identified in other works. there are too many problems to cover without looking uncharitable. the top few for me are: (a) an apparent disregard of how power manifests ‘structurationally' (imo) in interpersonal relations and everyday phenomenon, not just in broad strokes of social organisation. given that most people like being in a society i.e., they don't want everyone else to just fuck off and leave them alone as the book sometimes implies, this is an important mode of analysis. it is unfortunately glossed over in favour of the notion that societies as a collective can choose new paths together through a mystery box process that somehow generates equitable results beloved by all despite a smorgasbord of power dynamics. (b) the dismissal of material agency. i fully agree that environmental determinism is dumb af, but i also think we exercise our will on the world around us based on the materials we can access and the pathways they avail to us. e.g., the climate is doing very poorly but we can't just dream up electric vehicles, we actually need to obtain the damn nickel. and so, where nickel is and what properties it has will determine the options we can bring to the table. nickel's material reality doesn't automatically imply a form of social relations or power structure, but it does imply a constrained starting point for our negotiations with one another. (c) it's fair enough to reject the ontological turn - no one knows what it means and probably societies ‘reason' in more similar ways than we imagine. but we cannot flatten the myriad of knowledge, ethical and aesthetic configurations of different societies (ironically accepted as diverse in their political configurations) and assume they would all make a “common sense” choice to move towards a small ‘f' sort of freedom marked by citizen assemblies and just uprooting the family if the king is being annoying. this conception of the individual seems like a recent invention and despite my personal attraction to the idea of a life shooting the shit, ultimately my communitarian ass would probably not want to live in that society.
overall, because project 1 is so fundamental to social change and yet so hard to parse in the monolithic discursive climate of our world, this book on the whole is a wild success.
