real people

[Jeffrey L. Meikle]

        To be honest I don't quite understand all the philosophical ins and
outs of this thread--Mickey Rooney and Willie Gaddis and all.  But what of
the real Paul Auster appearing as a shadowy figure at a back table of a
deli near the end of the film "Smoke," eavesdropping while Auggie Wren
(Harvey Keitel), manager of the Brooklyn Cigar Co., tells writer Paul
Benjamin (William Hurt), a true story of Christmas in the projects so that
Benjamin, who's hard up facing a deadline, will have a story to write.  The
eavesdropping Paul Auster takes the story he's overheard, writes it up and
publishes it in the NY Times as "Auggie Wren's Christmas Story," and
eventually winds up turning it into a film script in which he will appear
as an eavesdropper at a back table of a deli, etc.  There's a bit of a
reversal of time's arrow hidden here, but as fans of GR we've all
experienced that.
        Auster has a history of this sort of trickery with his own identity
and the inclusion of himself in his own fictions, as in "City of Glass," in
which Daniel Quinn, a writer of detective novels published under the name
William Wilson (cf. Poe's story of the double), gets a phone call from a
femme fatale who insists she has reached the Paul Auster Detective Agency.
Quinn finally assumes the name Paul Auster and takes the case, leading to
his complete mental and physical dissolution as a wraith inhabiting a
dumpster, but not before he tracks down the real Paul Auster, the author,
who knows nothing of all this detective business, and who becomes obsessed
with Quinn, later tracking him to the site of his eventual disappearance
and winding up with his notebook...  (Oddly enough, it was Daniel Quinn who
won the megabuck Ted Turner fiction award for "Ishmael," about a
philosophical talking ape, in 1992, several years after publication of
"City of Glass." Perhaps Auster succeeded too well in "projecting a
world.")
        I'm not sure where all this is going.  It's just a couple examples
of a writer putting himself into his own works (in another sense don't all
writers do that?--you've gotta "put yourself into it" if you wanna "make
anything of it," if you want it to have the "ring of authenticity"?--isn't
that what they say?).

Just playing around while putting off the inevitable getting down to work,
Jeff Meikle