[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
.Tantalisingly, hedoes remark that this was the book he had always imagined Sachs couldwrite, but he goes on to add that as it stands now, the book is no more thanthe promise of a book, a potential book buried in a box of messy manuscriptpages and a smattering of notes (Lev 142).Aaron s own novel, thoughcoherently narrated and complete, is equally fragmented to the extent thatthe writer confesses the limitations of his own perception and acknowledgesthe impossibility of turning another man s life into a story that couldcorrespond to that man s real life.Leviathan tells the story of Benjamin Sachs and his transformation fromwriter to terrorist, but it is also the story of Peter Aaron.At the beginning ofhis narrative, Aaron promises to confine himself to verifiable facts, but hispromise is as questionable as that of the narrator in City of Glass who claimsto have refrained from any interpretation.Peter Aaron is aware of hislimitations as observer and writer: I can only speak of the things I know, thethings I have seen with my own eyes and heard with my own ears.I havenothing to rely on but my own memories.I don t want to present this bookas something it s not.There is nothing definitive about it.It s not a biographyor an exhaustive psychological portrait (Lev 22).However, he often presentshis own theories concerning his friend, and he also records facts he has notbeen able to verify.Above all, what emerges from his narrative is therealisation that writing about someone else s life is a process of fiction-making.Lives do not unfold in a linear sequence and effects cannot alwaysbe traced to a single cause.Inevitably, then, the novel is the portrait of twoartists, Sachs and Aaron, whom Auster himself thinks of as two sides of thesame coin.40 At the same time, both characters are given biographical detailswhich belong to the real, extratextual Paul Auster.In this complicatedrelationship, the boundaries between self and other are constantly blurred,and it is no accident that impersonation and representation play a big part inthe novel.The recurring Austerian theme of imagining the self as other isreflected here in the character of Maria Turner, who is herself based on a realartist, Sophie Calle, whom Auster thanks for permission to mingle fact withfiction.41 Maria Turner is an artist whose work defies traditional204Aliki Varvoglicategorisation. Her subject was the eye, writes Aaron, the drama ofwatching and being watched, and her pieces exhibited the same qualities onefound in Maria herself: meticulous attention to detail, a reliance on arbitrarystructures, patience bordering on the unendurable (Lev 63).Among otherprojects, Maria hires a detective to watch her and write reports of hermovements.When she studies these reports, she feels as if she had becomea stranger, as if she had been turned into an imaginary being (Lev 63).Later,she takes a job as a stripper and invites a friend to take pictures of her to satisfy her own curiosity about what she looked like (Lev 65).Conversely,she herself takes pictures of strangers and composes imaginary biographies.Although Peter Aaron has a limited understanding of what happened thenight Sachs fell from the fire escape, he knows that Maria Turner wassomehow involved in it.Sachs s version of the story is that he was temptedby her, and chose to fall rather than give in to that temptation.But if she wasthe cause of his accident, she was also the agent of his partial recovery.Although at the time it was assumed that the two were no longer in touch,Aaron later found out that they met regularly, spending every Thursdaytogether as part of a loosely defined project of Maria s.During thosemeetings they would sometimes talk, and Maria would tape theirconversations, while at other times she would take pictures of him,occasionally dressing him up in costume, or she would follow him in thestreets.Aaron thinks that these projects saved Sachs from himself:When Sachs came to visit her in October, he had withdrawn sofar into his pain that he was no longer able to see himself.I meanthat in a phenomenological sense, in the same way that one talksabout self-awareness or the way one forms an image of oneself.Sachs had lost the power to step out from his thoughts and takestock of where he was, to measure the precise dimensions of thespace around him.What Maria achieved over the course of thosemonths was to lure him out of his own skin.They say that acamera can rob a person of his soul.In this case, I believe it wasjust the opposite.With this camera, I believe that Sachs s soul wasgradually given back to him
[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]