ABSTRACT

In The Book of Illusions, Auster juxtaposes three ways of understandings the word-world relation. The postmodernist belief in the self-sufficiency of language finds its spokesperson in the narrator-protagonist David Zimmer. Alma Grund, by contrast, is a stanch realist. She strives after a strict correspondence between words and their referents in the physical world. Different from both Zimmer and Grund, Hector Mann is a “middleman” that straddles two realms – art and life. He shuttles between art and reality at ease and is able to transform either one into the other. In this essay, I first demonstrate how the three main characters of the novel represent the three understandings. Based on the analysis, I proceed to examine David Zimmer’s (failed) attempt to get over the trauma caused by the death of his family in light of the Lacanian trinity of imaginary-symbolic-real. Mann’s late film The Inner Life of Martin Frost and its thematic relation to the novel will also be discussed to further shed light on Auster’s view on the word-world, or art-reality relation.

摘要

在幻象之书中，奥斯特并列了三种理解世界关系的方式。后现代主义对语言自给自足的信念在叙述者兼主人公大卫·齐默身上找到了它的代言人。相比之下，阿尔玛·格伦德（Alma Grund）是一个坚定的现实主义者。她力求在物理世界中的词语与其所指对象之间建立严格的对应关系。不同于 Zimmer 和 Grund，Hector Mann 是一个跨越艺术和生活两个领域的“中间人”。他轻松自如地穿梭于艺术与现实之间，并能将其中的任何一种转化为另一种。在这篇文章中，我首先展示了小说的三个主要人物是如何代表三种理解的。在分析的基础上，我根据拉康的想象-象征-实在的三位一体，继续研究大卫·齐默（David Zimmer）（失败的）试图克服因他的家人去世而造成的创伤的尝试。还将讨论马丁弗罗斯特的内心生活及其与小说的主题关系，以进一步阐明奥斯特对世界或艺术现实关系的看法。