Corporeality and the Metropolis: Dissolving the Body in Paul Auster’s The New York Trilogy

摘要

This article deals with the theme of the shattering of the body in the contemporary urban environmentas it appears in Paul Auster’s The New York Trilogy. In the three novels of The Trilogy, the writerdeals with the complex interaction between the metropolitan cityscape and the human body: movingthrough a labyrinthine New York whose dimensions exceed by far the human scale, Auster’s heroesexperience conditions of depersonalization and assumed absorption by space, which finally lead themto the extreme state of the dissolution of their bodies. This transgression of the physical body, that“melting into the walls of the city” (139), is however celebrated by Auster as a form of transgressionof logical boundaries, which permits thought to reveal its poetic nature: the heroes may disappear inthe end, however they leave behind them a written story – product and witness of their existence oftheir existence in the postmodern city that escapes all anthropomorphic qualities in order to reveal amore archaic and inspiring imagery.