ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to show that Paul Auster exposes, or catches out, the culture’s fast break mentality by tailing a fugitive so singularly elusive that it neither totally vanishes nor fully shows up. The narrative that wrestles with such ontological, theological, and linguistic rupturing is bound to be a bit of a shambles, like Jacob with his ruptured hip. Taking up Jabes’ impossible investigation of nothing, Auster turns to a literary genre whose form and content have been marked by a determination to silence nothing. Auster’s investigators are neither unique nor self-possessed. Never sure of themselves, they are double-crossed from the beginning. The music of chance scored in(to) Auster’s sheets of glass answers Norman O. Brown’s plea to “get the nothingness back into words. Auster’s political conviction that the minimalist aesthetic constitutes an inverted application of the imperialist economy of domination is most clearly spelled out in his novel The Music of Chance.
