Against the Ontology of the Present: Paul Auster’s Cinematographic Fictions

Abstract

f we agree with Fredric Jameson that historicizing works of literature is always necessary (Political Unconscious 9), recent fiction poses particular challenge, not so much because of difficulty of gaining critical dis tance on our own times but because very idea of contemporaneity, of has recently become implicated as never before in way we read literature. The first task in historicizing contemporary fiction, I will suggest, should be to historicize concept of contemporaneity. This means beginning to dissolve ideological and historical congela tion that is implied in phrase such as the cultural logic of late capital ism' My argument in this essay will be that postmodernity, most influential recent theorization of present, has for most part constituted an obstacle to this historicization of contemporaneity; that it has, moreover, privileged present as principle that, in effect, stands outside its own historicity. Jameson's powerful diagnosis of a certain spatial turn in postmodern (Postmodernism 154) has, under sign of historicization, functioned to crystallize sense of contemporary as such-as something that may be subjected to scrutiny and analysis. Jameson's diagnosis, furthermore, is itself premised on an already spatial ized concept of time: If experience and expression still seem largely apt in cultural sphere of modern, he writes, they are altogether out of place and anachronistic in postmodern age, where, if temporality still

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