Postmodernism, Paul Auster’s The New York Trilogy, and the Construction of the Black/Woman of Color as Primal Other

Abstract

Much has been made of the conjecture that postmodern fiction—along with the poststructural/postmodern theories of Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Jacques Lacan, Luce Irigaray, Jean Baudrillard, Hélène Cixous, and others—suggests a culture or social formation beyond instrumental reason and other Enlightenment ideas, existential humanism, the patriarchy, the nuclear family, the ego-centered subject, the Freudian psyche, and hierarchies of class, race, and gender—in short, beyond modernity and modernism. A close scrutiny of postmodern fiction in general and Paul Auster’s The New York Trilogy in particular shows that they play with instrumental reason and other Enlightenment ideas, opening up and validating all kinds of excluded/unacknowledged psychological, social, and nonrational human dimensions and experiences. They expand human possibilities and create new languages and new ways of thinking about existence—outside Freud, the patriarchy, and the ego-centered subject.