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POSTMODERNISM AS DYSTOPIA IN AUSTERS IN THE COUNTRY OF LAST THINGS

Cornelia MACSINIUC, Universitatea tefan cel Mare, Suceava


Rsum: Cet article offre une lecture du roman In the Country of Last Things par Paul Auster (1987) comme une dramatisation de ce que Fredric Jameson nomme le millnarisme inverti du postmodernisme, reprsent comme un espace culturel dystopique. La qute de lhrone est une descente dans lenfer du scepticisme postmoderne, et sa narration sarticule comme leffort dajourner la fin du monde (et des mots), la rsistance par lcriture lapocalyptisme de la pense postmoderne.

In spite of frequent associations of postmodern theory with apocalyptic as a mode of thought and a discourse (e.g. Berger, 2000; Fonda, 1994; Norris, 1999), the absence of the sense of a redemptive future from postmodern endisms justifies Fredric Jamesons talk of an inverted millenarianism (1991: 1). Krishan Kumar (1999: 247) sees the postmodern apocalypse coming not with a bang but with a whimper, and mentions Derrida describing it as an Apocalypse without vision, without truth, without revelation (ibid.). This is a natural consequence of the postmodern assent to the fundamental discontinuity and uncertainty of a world perceived as beyond any kind of repair (Alan Wilde, quoted in Connor, 1999: 159). True apocalyptic holds in its horizon the twin ideas of revelation and renovation, asserting an order of transcendence which is placed under erasure by postmodern thought. For all its pervasive rhetoric of the end, postmodernism places the world definitely in an order of immanence, and even if postmodern discourse has often a distinctive eschatological ring, it may in fact be described as anti-apocalyptic. The secular version of apocalyptic renovation is utopia, and the analogy between utopian thought and the millenarian spirit has been insistently pointed out. Postmodern anti-utopianism consists, as Jameson points out, in the rejection of the totalizing impulse of utopia, charged implicitly with the idea of a properly metaphysical survival, complete with illusions of truth, a baggage of first principles, a scholastic appetite for system in the conceptual sense, a yearning or closure and certainty, a belief in centredness, a commitment to representation, and any number of antiquated mindsets (Jameson, 1991: 334). Postmodernism opposes to the totality of utopia a vast will of unmaking (Hassan, 1993: 153), affecting the entire realm of discourse in the West and manifest in a negativising rhetoric, 99

replete with terms like decreation, disintegration, deconstruction, decentrement, displacement, difference, discontinuity, disjunction, disappearance, decomposition, de-definition, demystification, detotalisation, deligitimisation (ibid.). Paul Austers 1987 novel In the Country of Last Things figures narratively this disposition to un-making. As a novelist, Auster has been placed in an ambivalent position, simultaneously inside and outside the postmodern paradigm, speaking from within and looking ahead without (Neagu, 2002: 11). He is credited with the combined keen postmodern awareness of the bankruptcy of absolute universal values and with the will to transgress it without suspending any of its anti-dogmatic propositions (ibid.: 10). It may be argued that this indeterminacy of his stance has granted him the vision of postmodernism itself as dystopia. If postmodernism exists by virtue of its will to unmaking, then, by its own logic, it has the potential of its own unmaking. The very elusiveness and instability of the concept, the multitude and heterogeneity of ideas brought under this umbrella term, its resistance to attempts of making it manageable from a conceptual point of view (Bertens, 1995: 12) almost transform it into a supreme fiction. In Austers novel, the protagonist, 19 year-old Anna Blume, arrives in a nameless disintegrating city, in search of her brother, a journalist, who has gone missing. Very soon, her struggle to survive the general wreck absorbs all her efforts. Towards the end of her journey, she finds the means and power to provide a narrative coherence to an experience of dispersion and imminence of collapse, by writing a letter to an unnamed friend. Her story the novel itself is the record of a pilgrimage in an ironic key, in which the shrine is replaced by the ruins of a civilization which we are invited to see as our own. The City of Destruction in the epigraph from Hawthorne is not, as in Bunyan, the starting point of a redemptive adventure, but the destination itself, a mock-apocalyptic end in fact, which holds before her the terrifying prospect of eternal decay. Auster achieves his dystopian vision of the postmodern world by inverting some of its widely accepted descriptions and definitions and by turning abstract ideas into concrete representations, in an allegorical manner. The association of postmodernism with late capitalism and consumer society, for instance (cf. Jameson, 1991) is alluded to in the depiction of a literally postindustrial society, in which all production has stopped and oppressive scarcity has replaced abundance. Scavenging and object-hunting have become the dark parody of consumption, and the curtailing of needs is an essential strategy of survival. Work (one of the central issues in any utopia), as an activity enabling subsistence, has been replaced by the selling and buying of discarded things as the only productive occupations. The dilapidated city in which Anna Blume finds herself stranded is a huge ruinous shopping mall, in which the shopping cart, the only kind of surviving vehicle, is an absolute prosthetic necessity. Instead of the compulsion to happiness, the hedonism, the pursuit of comfort, the avoidance of pain, which define the inhabitant of a consumer culture (cf. Bruckner: 2000), Austers dystopian novel is, predictably, pervaded by everlasting struggle and weariness; death has become a commodity, sold in the Euthanasia Clinics, for instance and the longing for it is the equivalent of euphoria. 100

Austers country of last things is the age of the last man in his most distressing version, as his loss of all values and aspirations, of his understanding of the World and of self (cf. Fukuyama, 1992: 312) is not even compensated by the little pleasures and the warmth (cf. Nietzsche) that have become essential to him at the end of history: Austers last man cannot hope to leave the regions where it is hard to live (Nietzche). Auster himself removes the comfort that this may be just a grim projection of the future; he states: I feel its very much a book about our own moment, our own era, and many of the incidents are things that have actually happened. I feel that this is where we live. It could be that were accustomed to it that we no longer see it. (A Hunger Artist, 1992, quoted in Varvogli, 2001: 89). The whole narrative dramatizes the postmodern obsession with the end. The question of the end is brought in from the very first lines: These are the last things one by one they disappear and never come back. I can tell you of the ones I have seen, of the ones that are no more, but I doubt there will be time. It is all happening too fast now, and I cannot keep up. (Auster, 1987: 1) There is a sense of apocalyptic urgency, of impending catastrophe in her tone, but throughout the novel, it is counterpointed by the endless spectacle of de-realization, of a world in which the only progress is that of scarcity, as everything continually dwindles, decays, decomposes itself and disappears. It is the nightmare of an endless end, the dystopian counterpart of utopian stability and stagnation, lived by Anna as a constant, threatening sense of the provisionality and flimsiness of the familiar objects and surroundings. The material world seems to have lost its consistency, and human existence itself is precarious, as humans cannot, any more than objects, withstand the formidable absorbing power of the ravening null: Everything disappears, people just as surely as objects, the living along with the dead (ibid.: 114). The final depletion of the world seems imminent at every moment in her narrative. (You would think that sooner or later it would all come to an end. Things fall apart and vanish, and nothing new is made. People die and babies refuse to be born (ibid.: 7), but disintegration seems to be a self sustaining process (Slowly and steadily, the city seems to be consuming itself, even as it remains (ibid.: 21-22). The picture of the world heading implacably towards extinction, even as this finality is being perpetually suspended, is an allegorical representation of the postmodern deconstruction of the metaphysics of presence that underlies the concept of referentiality. According to Jameson, one of the constitutive features of postmodernism is its depthlessness, one of the repudiated depthmodels being the semiotic duality signifier-signified. Postmodern theory poststructuralism in particular, not only eliminates the referent from considerations of language, but concentrates exclusively on the signifier and on the movement of signifying, which absorbs the signified (as a promise of reference) into the order of the signifier. In a philosophy of the world as an effect of language i.e. of the signifier the presence which the sign is supposed to represent in its absence is deferred indefinitely, which is equivalent 101

with the demise of reality. The disappearance of the material world around Anna Blume corresponds to the radical debilitation of the referential function of the sign and the emancipation of the signifier in postmodern theory. Her descriptions of the ineluctable process of erasure of the world of objective things, with their apocalyptic overtones, are a fictional analogue of poststructuralist metaphors describing the precipitous, uncontrollable, unpredictable movement of signifying (cf. Derrida, 1967: 22). The independence of the signifier from the world of reference is evoked in Annas observations on the fate of words as compared to that of things: Words tend to last a bit longer than things, but eventually they fade too, along with the pictures they once evoked. [L]ittle by little, the words become only sounds, a random collection of glottals and fricatives, a storm of whirling phonemes, and finally the whole thing collapses into gibberish As more and more of these foreign-sounding words crop around you, conversations become rather strenuous. In effect, each person is speaking his own private language, and as the instances of shared understanding diminish, it becomes increasingly difficult to communicate with anyone. (Auster, 1987: 89) The essential instability of the concept of postmodernism has given rise to antithetical perceptions of it. Ihab Hassan, for instance, speaks of a celebratory postmodernism, associated with the sense of liberation from an order of values perceived as arbitrary, illusory and repressive, and a postmodernism in which the loss of reality and meaning, the terrifying disintegration of identity and the unsurmountable scepticism arising from the relativistic thrust of its philosophy confer a tragic dimension to the human condition. For Jean Baudrillard, who tends to emphasize the seductive, euphoric effect of a depthless vision of the world, without necessity or hazard, the end of the world would be equivalent to the entropic perfection of the correspondence between signifier and signified, that is, when all has become meaning and reality. What he celebrates as the overabundance of the signifier appears, in Anna Blumes account, as a gloomy dystopian order. The disappearance of what Lacan calls the anchoring points between things and words leaves the latter as literally floating signifiers (the maritime imagery is consistent in the novel), whose unanswerability to the signified precipitates meaning into indifference. This vertiginous collapse of language into the condition of delirium the pure, irreferential chain of language i.e. of signifiers (cf. Baudrillard,1996: 176) constitutes an alienating experience for the linguistically enisled individuals. Human communication, i.e. the sharing and exchange of meanings, depends on a shared perception and knowledge of the world, but the disconnection between world and word in the country of last things, entailing the loss of reality and meaning, generates solipsism and scepticism. Significantly, the currency employed in the buying and selling of things is the glot. Aliki Varvogli points out that the name of the currency a word which also designates a minimal unit of language indicates the blurring of the distinction between language and reality: money, like language, is meaningless in itself and only acquires 102

meaning through transaction; they both work as the principle of deferral, but in the process they become detached from the thing they are supposed to stand for. (Varvogli, 2001: 100) It may be contented, however, that the feverish quest for discarded objects, which are then taken to the Ressurection Agents and exchanged for glots, represents, on the contrary, the resistance to this blurring, the attempt to restore a causal link between reality and language, to recuperate a logocentric order, in which world and word correspond. In the city in which Anna Blume tries to survive, the scarcity of objects and the constant spectre of the shortage of glots figure postmodernisms denial of the power of signs to refer;1 and, together with the pervasive motif of hunger, they invert ironically the postmodern hedonism and the thrill produced by the overabundance of the signifier. The fragmentariness and chaotic indeterminacy of the world depicted by Anna suggests the postmordern hostility to the concept of totalization (Jameson, 1991: 333). It is felt, for instance, in the impossibility of characters to find their bearings in the city a decentred structure whose totality cannot be mastered. The elusiveness of the city is suggested by the almost supernatural way in which its space is continually reconfigured: A house is there one day, and the next day it is gone. A street you walked down yesterday is no longer there today (Auster, 1987: 1). An ambiguity insinuates itself in Annas ascribing Isabels confusion to her wandering mind, when the latter grows tired and begins to lose her touch at finding objects: Nearly every day she would discover herself walking down a street she did not recognize, turning a corner without knowing where she had just been, entering a neighborhood and thinking she was somewhere else (ibid.: 49). This may be read in a fantastic key, as a description of the abruptly shifting reality of the city, rationally unacceptable, just like Samuel Farrs remark: Nothing is definite in this place (ibid.:103). The fantastic-dystopian space of the city teaches her an unending lesson in scepticism: When you live in the city, you learn to take nothing for granted (ibid.: 1), or: Bit by bit, the city robs you of certainty. There can never be a fixed path, and you can survive only if nothing is necessary to you (ibid.: 6). The instability of the citys shape, the strange whimsicality of the weather, the improbably fast disappearance of things, the suspension of causality in several apparently marginal episodes (e.g. the unaccountable disappearance of Maggie Vine; the equally strange vanishing without a trace of Mr. Fricks horn; the fleeting sign of the former presence, in the city, of a character with a transworld identity Quinn, etc. ) are moments of hesitation and uncertainty in Annas narrative discourse, an evidence of its contamination by the ontological instability and inconsistency of the world and the experience she tries to describe. The discourse of the postmodern fantastic the most characteristic literary vehicle for postmodern epistemological reserve destabilises a narrative which otherwise aims at rational totality (Sooner or later, I will try to say everything ibid.: 39; I have kept at it (i.e. writing the letter) ever since, adding a few more pages every day, trying to get it all down for you. I sometimes wander how much I have left out, how much has been lost to me and will never be found again, ibid.: 182). Annas utopian attempt to 103

provide coherence to and to be exhaustive and accurate in, the description of her experience in the city, to understand and communicate this experience is premised on the logocentric assumption that the truth is the whole. Her emphasis on the effort to get it all down, to rescue as much as possible from her sometimes unreliable memory, proves her aspiration to be exhaustively realistic, but the only reality to which she can be faithful is her memory. Annas narrative, inaccurately described as a means of survival, as therapeutic (cf. Varvogli, 2001: 89), is not the report of an immediate experience reporting on an unstable reality is, epistemologically, a risky if not impossible undertaking, and the disappearance of her brother, the journalist, is symbolic of the inexistence, the inconceivability, in the postmodern paradigm of knowledge, of an objective, exterior vantage point from which the truth could be rendered undistortedly. Her story is a narrative reconstruction of a past experience it was written during the six or seven weeks before her planned escape from the city, and covered the several years before that limbo in which she lived every experience again in writing. Her narrative foregrounds repeatedly the laboriousness of the act of remembering, the effort to recuperate and to order memories in an intelligible sequence (cf. Auster, 1987: 82, 157, 159, 160). The narrative line is an essentially logocentric concept, from a postmodern deconstructive perspective, as it is taken to reproduce, to represent a chain of events that have already happened, and which function as its cause, or origin, a referent situated in the past which is being reappropriated. Narrative linearity is also associated with causality and teleology the sequence is conceived as sustained by consequence, moving toward closure and resolution. The end of a narrative is a version of the centre in deconstructive thought, the vantage point which allows the mastery of the line as the possibility of structure (cf. Macsiniuc, 2002: 59) i.e. as a totality. By such considerations, Annas narrative may be seen as a struggle to overcome the ruin and delirious dispersion of its world of reference by providing her experience with a sense of telos. It is in retrospect that she can realize, and point out, how closely everything is connected (Auster, 1987: 79), but this coherence arises from her attributing a causal link to events, from her effort to repair a world of fragments and pieces whose disconnectedness and unsteadiness a postmodern world in play creates the sense of the fantastic, in which causality is obscured. Her career as an object hunter parallels this narrative impulse to connect: It is an odd thing to be constantly looking down at the ground, always searching for broken and discarded things There are pieces of this and pieces of that, but none of it fits together. And yet, very strangely, at the limit of all this chaos, everything begins to fuse again (ibid.: 35); Everything falls apart, but not every part of every thing, at least not at the same time. The job is to zero in on these little islands of intactness, to imagined them joined to other such islands, and those islands to still others, and thus to create new archipelagoes of matter (ibid.: 36). Such creation is pure accident: Chance was my only approach, the purely gratuitous act of seeing a thing with my own two eyes and then bending to pick it up (ibid.: 35). Chance seems to govern the whole chain of her experiences, as she constantly emphasizes. Everything that happens to her is a matter of chance: her meeting Isabel, her finding shelter in the Library and finding the consolation of 104

human affection in her relation with Samuel Farr (chance had flung us together in an almost impersonal way, and that seemed to give the encounter a logic of its own ibid.:. 106), for whom she had been unsuccessfully looking, her almost miraculous survival after the sinister limit-experience in the slaughterhouse, her being found and rescued by Victoria Woburn, her reunion with Sam. Listening to the stories of those who sought admittance as residents at Woburn House, Anna concludes: Our lives are no more than the sum of manifold contingencies, and no matter how diverse they might be in their details, they all share an essential randomness in their design (ibid.: 144). Chance as the absence of evident cause, as pure chain of events on an unpredictable course, corresponds, in the realm of writing, to the uncontrollable dissemination of meaning (cf. Derrida, 1967: 22 elle ne sait pas o elle va) in a postmodern account. The only way for Anna as a narrator to transcend the postmodern metaphysics of accidence (cf. McHoul, 1997: 7) is to regard coincidence and accidents as little miracles and invest them with the power of shaping the geography of her existence in the city according to a logic of their own. Her narrative effort is therefore to turn chance and indeterminacy into the necessity of a plot, whose meaning is governed by the end. Her striving towards an end is the story of her survival as Author. The episode of her refuge in the National Library explores the same tension between a totalising, utopian logic, aiming at mastering reality by a centripetal pull, and the centrifugal tendency of postmodernism. The book that Samuel Farr plans to write is a comprehensive account of the city, in which the hundreds of smaller narratives of people whom he paid to talk to him are supposed to coagulate into an objective story of the citys past. The book advances slowly, as the enormous material accumulated seemed to resist the attempt of any single stance to organize it coherently. The story is so big, Sam would say, that its impossible for any one person to tell it (ibid.: 102). In the general collapse around them, the book is the only thing that keeps Sam going (cf. ibid.: 104), a desperate attempt at providing coherence to an atomistic, chaotic, elusive reality, the promise of a realm of self-transcendence, the possibility to situate oneself outside a world of pure immanence and accidence (It prevents me from thinking about myself and getting sucked up into my own life. If I ever stopped working at it, Id be lost. I dont think Id make it through another day (ibid.: 104). It is an effort doomed to failure as the library finally burns down, together with his manuscript, and, when, after a while, Anna encounters Sam again, he has completely lost his fixation of assembling knowledge about the city into a master narrative, experiencing instead the difficulty of re-assembling his personal past from the fragments of experience stored in his memory his stories were vague, filled with inconsistencies and blanks. It all seemed to run together and he had trouble distinguishing the outline of events, could not disentangle one day from another (ibid.: 161). The Book is one of the critical pillars of Western culture, whose end has been proclaimed by postmodern philosophy. The idea of a book, says Derrida, is the idea of a totality, finite or infinite, of the signifier (1976: 18), 105

dependent on the conception of a transcendental signified. As it is associated with an authorial consciousness which imposes an organising, unifying principle a centre , the book is a powerful reinforcement of logocentrism. In the country of last things, its demise is suggested first of all by the Orwellian interdiction to remove books from the library, and the strict regulations which made it quasi-inaccessible to a reading public. With its original function abolished, the library had become a closed universe, in which several factions of scholars co-habited, some of them engaged in esoteric pursuits like hunting for parallels between current events and events in classical literature, statistical analyses of population trends, the compiling of a new dictionary, and so on (ibid.: 111). The splendid edifice is now a dark labyrinth, whose irredeemable confusion irradiated from its central core, where the books were kept. The description of the chaos and decay in this place is an undisguised dystopian vision, giving the same impression of endless end: At one time, they say, there had been more than a million volumes in the National Library. Those numbers were vastly reduced but hundreds of thousands still remained, a bewildering avalanche of print. Some books were standing upright on their shelves, some were strewn chaotically across the floor, still others were heaped into erratic piles . The system of classification had been thoroughly disrupted, and with so many books out of order, it was virtually impossible to find any volume you might have wanted. When you consider that there were seven floors of stacks, to say that a book was in the wrong place was as much to say that it had ceased to exist. Even though it might have been physically present in the building, the fact was that no one would ever find it again. (Ibid.: 115) The paradox of the present but lost, absent books is also a play upon the idea of the books duality as both material and ideal object a duality analogous to that of the sign , and it evokes again the severance of the signifier from the signified in poststructuralist theory. What counts as irretrievable from the anarchy loosed upon the universe of the library is the transcendental signified, which guarantees the books unity of meaning. With its disappearance, the book remains an indifferent object, used by Anna and Sam as fuel during the Terrible Winter. The salvaged books that they burn so that Sam might continue his own book (a book consuming other books, perhaps a grimly parodic literalisation of the postmodern notion of intertextuality) are, however, books that Anna despises: sentimental novels, collections of political speeches, out of date textbooks, and she confesses: I enjoyed throwing those books into the flames (ibid.: 116). This is a symbolic auto-da-f, in which cultivated Anna condemns unpalatable literature. The end of the book in the country of last things recalls one of the widely acknowledged features of postmodernism: the effacement of the older frontier between high culture and the so-called mass or commercial culture (Jameson, 1991: 2): the elitist library at Woburn House, packed with world literature masterpieces, cannot escape the generalised dissolution, and Shakespeare, Dickens, Jane Austen, and Don Quixote dwindle into mere objects on shelves, finally sold for food. The elimination of books is almost a convention in dystopian fiction. They are banned as part of a larger campaign against the past, in the interest of 106

social control and political repression. Austers dystopian world is also repressive, in that the total disaster and the constant prospect of extinction limit human goals to immediate physical survival. It is significant, for instance, that the only efficient action that the government takes in the city concerns the removal of human waste and dead bodies removing health hazards (Auster, 1987: 30) so that the agony may go on indefinitely, in a perpetual present. The only situation in which people in the city orient themselves to the future is when this future is a promise of certain, quick and painless death: Death remains on the horizon, an absolute certainty, and yet inscrutable as to its specific form (ibid.:15). The past tends to become irretrievable, as the shifty, unstable environment seems to have an eroding effect on memory. Vestiges of the cultural and historical past are floating signifiers in a city whose cultural and historical memory has collapsed into fragmentariness and confusion. The names of places in the city, for instance (Ptolemy Boulevard, Nero Prospect, Diogenes Terminal, Pyramid Road), arbitrary markers on an impossible city map, are rather symptoms of what Jameson describes as historical deafness, the signs of spasmodic and intermittent, but desperate, attempts at recuperation (1991: x). They indicate the exasperating condition (ibid.) of a world in which, as in postmodernism, the past as referent finds itself gradually bracketed (Jameson, 1993 : 75). Postmodernism flattens time, in fact, by its combined evacuation of history and inverted millenarianism. Annas comment It takes a long time for the world to vanish (ibid.: 28) suggests that the dull, low-intensity postmodern apocalypse (cf. Kumar, 1999: 251), felt as a slow, perpetual decline, is already taking place, and that the end may be something indefinitely and hopelessly going on. This is perhaps the most dystopian aspect of the postmodern, and, in Austers novel, Anna tries, like the protagonist of any dystopia, to resist and to escape that order of existence. She attempts to salvage some of the basic humanistic values during her infernal pilgrimage her experiences of love, loyalty, dedication, idealism and hope are steps backwards taken from the dehumanising effect of an anti-society (cf. Jameson, 1991: 343), in her longing for the reinvention of solidarity in a fundamentally atomistic world. As a narrator, she tries to reassemble, from the postmodern, fragmentary and discontinuous text which is her memory, a coherent report on the human condition in post-history. Her last words are a promise to write again. A promise as a performative act is, however, caught in an ordeal of undecidability (Derrida, quoted in Buchanan, 1998: 22). Her planned journey of escape may be only another descent into the Inferno, as the City of Destruction may be coextensive with America itself (this country is enormous and theres no telling where he might have gone. Beyond the agricultural zone to the west, there are supposedly several hundred miles of desert. Beyond that, however, one hears talk of more cities, of mountain ranges, of mines and factories, of vast territories stretching all the way to a second ocean ibid.: 40). Her awareness of this possibility displays already a postmodern structure of sceptical, not hopeful, hesitation (Anything is possible, and that is almost the same thing as nothing ibid.: 188). The resistance to a dystopian system is generally futile, and the 107

protagonist will eventually be engulfed by it. The end of Annas narrative is motivated not only realistically (she has to end before they embark on the escape trip), but also metafictionally (she has to end because the pages of her notebook have been filled). Her ponderings on the nature and representability of the end in narrative are in the spirit of the paradoxical postmodern narrative self-consciousness. Endeavouring to provide a meaning to her experience by narrating it, she comes to suspect that the end is something you imagine, a destination you invent as you go along (ibid.: 184) that is, a realistic fiction in the arsenal of narrative discourse. As it cannot really be experienced, being the object of an indefinite deferral (the closer you get to it, the more there is to say), all we can hope for is for narrative to offer a vicarious experience of it. Annas sceptical consciousness is that of a postmodern writer, and the novel ultimately debates on the possibility of being both inside and outside postmodernism. Is post-postmodernism (cf. Neagu, 2002) the end of postmodernism? Can postmodernism be transcended? There is no transcendence of the system in dystopia, and Annas final assent, her reconciliation with the idea of the uncertainty of her fortunes, leave room for the speculation that perhaps the postmodern may be described with the words of one incidental character in the novel: Its the end of the goddam world. Nobody gets out of there (Auster, 1987: 41).

NOTE:

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REFERENCES Auster, Paul, 1987. In the Country of Last Things, London: Faber and Faber Baudrillard, Jean, 1996. Strategiile fatale, trad. Felicia Sicoe, Iai: Editura Polirom Berger, James, 2000. Twentieth Century Apocalypse. Forecasts and Aftermaths, Twentieth Century Literature, 12/22/2000, available at http://www.highbeam.com Bertens, Hans, 1995. The Idea of the Postmodern. A History, London and New York: Routledge Bruckner, Pascal, 2000. Euforia perpetu. Eseu despre datoria de a fi fericit, trad. Cristina and Costin Popescu, Bucureti: Editura Trei Buchanan, Ian, 1998. Metacommentary on Utopia, or Jamesons dialectic of hope, Utopian Studies, Vol. 9, Issue 2 (pp.18-31) Bull, Malcolm (ed.), 1999. Teoria apocalipsei i sfriturile lumii, trad. Alina Crc, Bucureti: Editura Meridiane Connor, Steven, 1999. Cultura postmodern. O introducere n teoriile contemporane, trad. Mihaela Oniga, Bucureti: Editura Meridiane Derrida, Jacques 1976 (1967). Of Grammatology, transl. Gayatry Chakravorty Spivak, Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press Derrida, Jacques, 1967. Lcriture et la diffrence, Paris: ditions du Seuil Docherty, Thomas (ed.), 1993. Postmodernism. A Reader, Harvester Wheatsheaf Fonda, Marc, 1994. Postmodernity and the Imagination of the Apocalypse: A Study of Genre, available at http://www.clas.ufl.edu (22 April 1996) Fukuyama, Francis, 1992. The End of History and the Last Man, New York: Avon Books, Inc; The Free Press Hassan, Ihab, 1993. Toward a Concept of Postmodernism, in Docherty (146-156) Jameson, Fredric, 1991. Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, Duke Uiversity Press Jameson, Fredric, 1993. Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, in Docherty (62-92) Kumar, Krishan, 1999. Apocalipsa, mileniul i utopia astzi, in Bull (pp. 239-266) Macsiniuc Cornelia, 2002. Towards a Poetics of Reading. Poststructuralist Perspectives, Iai: Institutul European McHoul, Alec 1997. The philosophical grounds of pragmatics (and vice versa?), Journal of Pragmatics, Vol. 27, No. 1, January (pp. 1-15) Neagu, Adriana-Cecilia, 2002. Sublimating the Postmodern Discourse: Toward a PostPostmodern Fiction in the Writings of Paul Auster and Peter Ackroyd, Sibiu: Editura Universitii Lucian Blaga Norris, Christopher, 1999, Versiuni ale apocalipsei: Kant, Derrida, Foucault, in Bull (pp. 269-295) Varvogli, Aliki, 2001. The World That is the Book: Paul Austers Fiction, Liverpool: Liverpool University Press

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The waning of the referential power of the signs is consistent with the submergence of Nature by Culture, one constitutive feature of postmodernism.

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