Paul Auster's writing machine: A thing to write with

Abstract

Borrowing from the French philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s concept of the rhizome, this thesis explores the intratextuality and self-referentiality of contemporary American author Paul Auster's work, with a focus on his films and collaborative projects, which so far have suffered critical neglect. In Auster's self- and cross-referential body of work (the so-called "intratext"), where each text is always "a part of" and yet "a multiplicity" of other related texts, and where, in Auster's own words, "everything is connected to everything else," looking for singular, fixed meanings would be a futile task. Instead, one can explore the plethora of shifting meanings by reading his texts rhizomatically and by following or "tracing" the associations, values and functions of the elements that work to assemble each text and its constituent parts (a story, a character, a plot situation, a diegetic space). This study does this by following, in terms of Bruno Latour’s actor-network theory, the meanings and work of several recurrent "things" in Auster's texts, such as cigarettes, typewriters and doppelgängers, which together assemble the emblematic writer-figure (the chain-smoking, typewriting New York writer), an image also associated with the empirical author himself. Functioning as prosthetic writing tools, they also construct what this study calls Auster’s "writing machine." Taking the work of Paul Auster as an illustrative case, this is, in a broader sense, a thesis about assembling texts and textual networks, the writing machines that produce them, and the ways that such machines invest them with meaning.