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(Luận án tiến sĩ Ngữ văn) PHẢN TRINH THÁM TRONG BỘ BA NEW YORK CỦA PAUL AUSTER(Luận án tiến sĩ Ngữ văn) PHẢN TRINH THÁM TRONG BỘ BA NEW YORK CỦA PAUL AUSTER(Luận án tiến sĩ Ngữ văn) PHẢN TRINH THÁM TRONG BỘ BA NEW YORK CỦA PAUL AUSTER(Luận án tiến sĩ Ngữ văn) PHẢN TRINH THÁM TRONG BỘ BA NEW YORK CỦA PAUL AUSTER
MINISTRY OF EDUCATION AND TRAINING HANOI NATIONAL UNIVERSITY OF EDUCATION DANG THI BICH HONG ANTI-DETECTIVE IN PAUL AUSTER’S THE NEW YORK TRILOGY Speciality: Literary Theory Code: 62.22.01.20 THE SUMMARY OF PHD THESIS IN PHILOLOGY Hanoi - 2016 Thesis was completed at: Hanoi National University of Education Supervisor: Prof.Dr LE HUY BAC Reviewer 1: Assoc.Prof.Dr Nguyen Duc Hanh Thai Nguyen University Reviewer 2: Assoc.Prof.Dr Hoang Minh Luong Academy of Journalism & Communication Reviewer 3: Assoc.Prof.Dr Le Nguyen Can Hanoi National University of Education The thesis will be presented to the Council at Hanoi National University of Education at…………………… , 2016 The thesis can be found at: - National Library of Vietnam - Hanoi National University of Education’s Library INTRODUTION Rationale i In Barry Lewis’s opinion, the detective genre is one of the candidates as a real partner of the postmodernity “The laws” of detective fiction may be used as the material for creating the antidetective works Both anti-detective fiction and postmodern literature are not sufficient grounds to justify the things in a causal relationship ii Paul Auster is one of the typical contemporary writers in European literature and Americian literature During his writing career, Paul Auster has written across many genres However, in the field of fiction, he seemed more successful Paul Auster's works have been translated into over 30 different languages; thus, he was honored in the world with many prestigious awards, including Prince of Asturias Awards Two years after being presented to the readers, The New York Trilogy won France Culture Award in the field of foreign literature iii Paul Auster's The New York Trilogy is considered as one of the most popular works of postmodern detective fiction After the works’ publication, this trilogy has attracted the attention of many readers as well as critics iv In Vietnam, Paul Auster's works are getting more and more popular with the readers However, the researches of Paul Auster are still sketchy and there is not any one about him as a postmodern detective author Therefore, "Anti-Detective in Paul Auster’s The New York Trilogy" has been our choice v Carrying out this research, we aimed at establishing the theoretic basis to analyze the originality of narrative in Paul Auster’s anti-detective novels, and then confirming a trend of literary creation during the postmodern period Besides, we hope that the research will help to bring Paul Auster's works as well as the trend of creating anti-detective novels closer to Vietnamese literature 2 Subjects and scope of the study The thesis studied the aspects, expressions of anti-detective in The New York Trilogy by Paul Auster A survey was conducted on The New York Trilogy (Penguin Books, 2006) and a translation of The New York Trilogy by Trinh Lu (Women's Publishing House, 2007) was another source of reference In addition, the research also looked into other works when necessary Objectives and tasks of the study Performing this thesis, we confirm that anti-detective fiction is the serial, development of literary detective genre Questioning "Anti-Detective in The New York Trilogy", we aim at analyzing and clarifying Paul Auster's originality in the creating of his anti-detective novels By comparing with the later novels, the thesis also confirms the role of The New York Trilogy in shaping the creative style of Paul Auster To achieve this objective, three basic tasks are done Firstly, the thesis systematized the development of the detective literature genre Due to the fact that most of anti- detective novels have not been translated into Vietnamese, we tried to generalize the appearance of the detective genre, emphasize the difference between detective fictions and anti-detective ones through the typical authors and works Secondly, the thesis confirmed that the way to build a detective in The New York Trilogy is a clear demonstration of anti-detective Paul Auster's detectives in turn break the illusion about an invincible hero in readers' thoughts Detectives' searching process shifts from the crime to their own identity in a world full of chance and uncertainty This theme will be repeated again and again in Paul Auster's novels later Thirdly, we also showed the art of building the anti-detective plot in The New York Trilogy as a strategy to negate the immutable principles in a detective plot Metafiction and intertextuality are effective methods which help Paul Auster make the dramatic plots unclear and put many stories into his novel over a detective story These stories also formed the author's style in his following compositions Research Methodology Typology, narrative, comparative and cultural-historical studies are the main research methods used in the thesis New contributions of the thesis The thesis introduced, systematized the studies of detective literary genre in the transition from detective to anti-detective fiction In particular, before this thesis, anti-detective literary was almost unheard of translation or research in Vietnam Our showing of achievements of detective literary can become a reference On the basis of theory, the thesis researched a phenomenon of typical and multi-values contemporary literature: anti-detective novels by Paul Auster We made a new approach to the anti-detective characteristics in The New York Trilogy from the basic aspects of narrative method combined with postmodern fictional styles in order to show the particular characteristics in anti-detective novels by Paul Auster By combining theoretical generalization and practical research, the thesis also indicated the shift of anti-detective literature gerne from popular literature into scholarly literature and the possibility of development of it in the postmodern context Structure of thesis Apart from introduction, conclusion, references, the thesis is divided into four chapters: Chapter 1: Overview of Research Issues Chapter The anti-detective fiction in the procedure of the genre Chapter The multifaceted detective in The New York Trilogy Chapter Anti-detective plot in The New York Trilogy Chapter OVERVIEW OF RESEARCH ISSUES 1.1 The studies of anti-detective fiction The term "anti-detective" was first proposed in 1972 by William Spanos Since then, the study of anti-detective fictions has attracted a good deal of scholars Here, we based our research of detective literature on the two sources of Vietnamese and English materials with two major contents: the opinion of the anti-detective fiction and the basic characteristics of this literature typology 1.1.1 Materials in Vietnamese An investigation into the anti-detective fiction in discourse of Vietnamese literary criticism review showed us its significance Many researches on classic detective fiction of the world- renowned scholars have been translated into Vietnamese In addition, a number of Vietnamese authors have made their deep discussions about the literary detective However, there are almost not any researches on anti-detective literature Le Huy Bac is the only person that mentioned a branch of the detective fiction genre in the postmodern context with term “pseudo detective” 1.1.2 Materials in English It can be seen from the studies in English that new viewpoints on this literature gerne has always been supplemented following the transformations of innovative practice We paid closer attention to the researches by William Spanos, Malcah Effron, Hans Bertens, Larry McCaffery Obviously, the Western literary criticism on detective fiction are still continuous, even they opposed each other on the movement of creative activities Beside the studies of the detective literature, many works directed their attention to the changes of the genre associated with the change of historical context and social context However, there is no work to show the full process of this literary genre 1.2 The studies of Paul Auster’s novels Like the general overview of the detective fiction genre, we overviewed the situation of the research on Paul Auster from two sources including Vietnamese and English documents 1.2.1 Materials in Vietnamese Vietnamese readers are gradually closer to Paul Auster’s works However, up to this moment, the studies of Paul Auster in Vietnam, in general, have not matched with his talents and contributions Based on the overview of the researches on Paul Auster in Vietnam, we paid our attention to the evaluations by Le Huy Bac and Nguyen Thi Thanh Hieu in their article and thesis 1.2.2 Materials in English In the world liturature, Paul Auster has confirmed his position from the 1980s and the studies of his works have also formed a fairly rich system Paul Auster's works have become the subject of monograph books, thesis, dissertations, essays, scientific articles Accessing to research materials on Paul Auster, our method is not based on themes but on the documentary groups since each of them sets up a different aspect of reading Paul Auster’s works Accordingly, we devided the collected materials into groups: monographs and published articles, thesis, dissertations We also gave our full attention to the three books by Bernd Herzogenzath, Aliki Varvogli , Brendan Martin and some researches on Paul Auster by Dragana, Stephen E.Alford… 1.3 The studies of The New York Trilogy The interpretations of The New York Trilogy came from many different angles, but generally they agreed at the metaphysical and postmodern nature under the guide of the detective fiction of the trilogy 1.3.1 Materials in Vietnamese Overview of the studies on The New York Trilogy in Vietnam, the introduction of Trinh Lu and scientific article by Le Huy Bac were focused Their reviews somewhat mentioned the anti-detective nature of the fiction trilogy 1.3.2 Materials in English From English material sources, we approached to the novel in two ranges: the study of the uniqueness of The New York Trilogy in general, and research on its anti-detective nature in particular We also gave close attention to the researches on The New York Trilogy of Anne M Holzapfel, John Zilcosky, William Lavender, Alison Russell, Stephen E.Alford, Mark Brown, Norma Rowen, Madeleine Soprapure, Jeffrey Nealon, Paul Jahshan, Dan Homes Matthias Kugler, Toni Rudat 1.4 The arising issues From the general overview of the anti-detective fiction genre including Paul Auster’s novel and The New York Trilogy, it can be seen that: There is a quite remarkable difference between the researches on the anti-detective fiction in Vietnam and those around the world There are not any scientific works retracing the entire process of the detective genre The researches of Paul Auster in Vietnam are still limited and not proportional to those abroad and the writer’s own stature as well This thesis approached Paul Auster's works in our own way: emphasising on the art mechanism of the postmodern fiction used by the writer to creat his anti-detective novels Chapter THE ANTI-DETECTIVE FICTION IN THE PROCEDURE OF THE GENRE Detective elements appeared very early in the Western culture and literature, beginning by the story of Cain and Albert in the Bibles, then the legend of Oedipus in Greek tragedy and the story of three apples narrated by Scheherazade in One Thousand and One Nights However, until 1841, with Edgar Poe’s works, the detective fiction really became a literary genre Since then, the literary detective has evolved through many forms 2.1 The forms of the detective fiction The detective fiction is a collection of literary works concerning a case or an investigation Stories are organized by linear narrative sequence, in which detectives, criminals, as well as all related characters are in the same orientation to reveal the mysteries 2.1.1 The Classic Detective Fiction Classic detective fiction was officially formed in April 1841 with the publication of The Murders in the Rue Morgue by Edgar Poe Although created in America, examples of this form mainly came from Great Britain The most flourishing period of the classic detective fiction was from the second half of the nineteenth century to 1945, even, the time between the two world wars was known as "the golden age of the detective story" Following Poe’s standards, the classic detective fiction was put into its top position by the writers such as: Van Dine, Elery Queen (USA), Emile Graboriau, Gaston Leroux (France), Conan Doyle, Agatha Christie, Cecil Day Lewis (UK) In the context of interculture between France and Vietnam in the early years of the twentieth century, some Vietnamese writers as Pham Cao Cung and The Lu immitated the way of writing the detective novels from Western writers The success of the August Revolution fundamentally changed the country’s social and historic context and led to the disruption of the detective fiction in Vietnam In the 1980s, the classical form of this genre reappeared with the investigation novels by Phung Thien Tan, Tran Tu Van, Vo Duy Linh, Tran Thanh Ha, Di Li, etc 2.1.2 The Hard- Boiled Detective Fiction The emergence of the hard– boiled detective fiction with a number of representatives such as Chandler, Hammett and James Chase is the result of a direct reaction to some characteristics of the classic detective fiction A change in both of the form and content of the detective fiction corresponded to a new urban American culture During the postwar time in the West, the hard–boiled detective fiction appeared popularly in France and other European countries Although the number of the hard–boiled detective novels published in Europe was not as much as that in the US, there were many prominent names such as Leo Malet, Auguste Le Breton, Jose Giovanni, etc The last decades of the twentieth century, a great deal of works reflecting the reality of crime and the fight against crime appeared in Vietnam These crime novels in Vietnam are close to the hard–boiled detective ones in the West However, unlike the hard–boiled detective novels showing a denial of the role of the rotten Western society, the Vietnamese crime novels by Xuan Duc, Nguyen Quang Thieu, Nguyen Nhu Phong… acknowledged the struggle of the police and society as well against unjust forces 2.1.3 The Political Detective Fiction The political detective fiction originated in England in the early twentieth century Closely associated with the major political events of the world, this form mainly reflected the real life The works by Ian Fleming, John Le Carre, Graham Greene (UK), Xemionov, Bogomolov (Russia), Charles McCarry, Tom Clancy (USA) attracted a lot of Western readers Today, with the appearance of terrorism, the detective writers like Forsythe, Tom Clancy diverted to exploiting detective activities in this fierce battle In Vietnam, "intelligence – spy novel" is a popularly used term, equivalent to the term of the political detective novel in the West This literature form appeared in the 1960s of the twentieth century It revealed the silent struggle of intelligence soldiers and spies as well as the entire nation in the fight against imperialism After the Independence Day, the intelligence – spy novels flourished in Vietnam with the works by Dang Thanh, Nguyen Truong Thien Ly, Huu Mai, etc 2.1.4 The Psychological Detective Fiction Modern detective fiction bases on the psychological factors for tracing the root of human behaviors Detective novels, therefore, stress the role of doctors, psychologists and scientists, etc The works can be considered as the art of research on crime psychology The current 11 for the Nobel Prize for Literature by the Swedish Academy His first novel - The Name of the Rose - borrowed the "detective tools" to arouse a lot of philosophical problems of human 2.3 From detective fiction to anti-detective fiction: the change in narration 2.3.1 The change in character In the detective fiction, the detective is identified by means of his superiority intellectual, his analytical skills and his respectable courteous… The appearance of detective’s friends, the members of the official police and the collection of false suspect also aims to stress on the competence of the detective The situation in which the detective faces a crime is the symbol of a disruption of the normal order of society The final ‘trap-scene’ is only alluded to briefly as the reader may very well imagine its outcome Although the criminal’s actions may be interesting and his motives complex, they must primarily be evil and their deeds therefore always have to be kept subordinated to the detective Thus, the story’s primary emphasis is placed on those who investigate the crime The detective to get actively involved in the case and give up his detached life for a limited time until order and harmony have been restored In the hard-boild detective fiction, the detectives uses the power of fists, guns and becomes a new type of anti- heroes in the society degraded in all respects They deny the role of human reason and believe in the absolute power of mysteries The anti-detective fiction inherited from the hard-boild detective the characteristics of denying the role of human reason In postmodern detective works, the detective may even be not a real detective but is a writer, a journalist, a monk, an archaeologist, a map-maker His investigation is nothing more than a signifier code Readers are not interested in whether the detective will succeed or fail, but in his journey to find out the different signified 12 2.3.2 The change in plot The structure of the detective fiction is emphasized on rationality, logic of the events under clear-cut rules About situation, the work begins with a mysterious crime that most of the facts happened in the past About pattern of action, the detective fiction advocacy through six main stages involving pattern of action of the detective fiction by Edgar Poe, they are: introdution of the detective; crime and clues; investigation; announcement of the solution; explanation of the solution; denouement Anti-detective novels parodied and subverted the linear movement rule of the plot The ending of tracing the truth in anti-detective novels is not concerned to have a neat ending in which all the questions are answered After all, the difference in movement between the plot of detective fiction and that of anti-detective is the writer’s way to design the solutions Unlike requirements of two stories summed by Todorov, antidetective novels are not divided into two coherent story parts The boundary between truth and false, reality and image, present and past is gradually blurred Spanos, who first proposed the term anti-detective, found a clear relationship between this literary genre with postmodernism Both postmodernism and anti-detective fiction are not sufficient grounds to justify the things in a causal relationship * Regarding to the detective fiction, we think that, the works are not ejected from their own genre because of the content changes Over more than 200 years of development, the detective fiction has gone through a variety of forms, from the classic detective, hard-boild detective, political detective, psychological detective to anti-detective The anti-detective fiction applies the form of the detective one to convey the writer’s concepts of art, human life Some fundamental changes in the plot and the character have been made on the movement from the detective fiction to anti-detective fiction And the movement of the genre is the cause which 13 makes the detective fiction become an example for blur the boundary between scholarly and popular literature Chapter THE MULTIFACETED DETECTIVE IN THE NEW YORK TRILOGY As "the mirrors of life", the character became an integral part of literary creativity Characters in detective fiction were said to be in double characters This model originated from Poe's works The story of the detective fiction is a process in which the detective chases the criminal to find out the mystery From this relationship, a lot of other double relationships will appear in the investigation such as the detective - the victim, the detective - the detective’s companion, the detective investigating authorities In anti-detective novels, the detective is no longer a symbol of the truth’s power He plays at the same time a variety of roles and even fails to notice his own role By generalizing the differences in the detective between detective fiction and anti-detective ones, we will clarify the multifaceted nature of the detective in The New York Trilogy through the transformation from solving the mystery to seeking the identity 3.1 The detective on the process of solving the mystery 3.1.1 The detective and his specific relationships In the detective world, the writers always put the detective in a mysterious situation to test his talent A classic detective fiction even became a tense battle of wits between the detective and the criminal - two counterparts in talent Using detective tools, The New York Trilogy made the readers at once think about a detective, a criminal or at least, a mystery at the beginning of the story However, the specific relationships of the main character known as the detective was broken on the process of the story As a detective novel, City of Glass put the readers in a typical context - the possibilities of crime Quinn played the role of a detective but 14 Quinn was not a real detective himself He's just a writer who create detective fiction Unlike Quinn, who has nothing relevant to a detective job, Blue in Ghosts was characterized by White as a detective at the beginning of the novel The more he investigated, the more he realizied that there was not a pure relationship between White - Blue - Black as the client - the detective - the object The narrator who addressed "I" in The Locked Room was neither a detective writer nor a private detective, but the disappearance of Fanshawe pushed him into an investigation After all, the process of writing a book, investigating a person's identity and fate became a detective investigation A common characteristic in The New York Trilogy by Paul Auster is that most of the characters had nothing to guarantee their jobs as a detective, moreover, there is an extremely interesting role reversal in three novels The characters escaped from the confines of the world created by the author in order to write the story of their life 3.1.2 Intellectual labyrinth - characteristics of detective games According to Van Dine’s definition, detective fiction is a kind of "intellectual game" It requires a high degree of rational thinking of detectives during their tracing process to decipher mystery The antidetective novels of Paul Auster broke the rational and logical nature of the events under clear rules of causal relation The author designed "intellectual game" as a maze, focused on impromptu temporary ones not for explaining the mystery but for adapting to it The detective took part in this game, so he also lost in a labyrinth Breaking all the rules of the classic detective fiction, Paul Auster reconstructed the tracing process of the detective so as to express the tragic intellectual labyrinth of people In his own way, the writer will give the final answer at the end of a traditional detective work However, The New York Trilogy did not offer a complete end Closing the chain of the characters journey, the events in Paul Auster’s novel completely broke all the rules of setting every thing in the context of a final truth 15 3.2 Detective in the process of finding the identity 3.2.1 Identity in a chance world The chance is events beyond human control This is one of the haunting problems in Paul Auster’s novel The chance appeared in the anti-detective novels thoroughly denied both the power of reasoning and the causal relation The detective situations in all the three works were opened with the chance events whose characters were not aware of the complexity of them Under the impact of the chance events, the unity in the character’s personality development was broken In different ways, Paul Auster's detectives casually entered the same space: space of a closed room This space was used as a common motif in Edgar Poe’s detective works opening with The Murders in the Rue Morgue In the detective tradition, this motif associated with the mysterious evil, however, in The New York Trilogy, it became a space for character’s adventure in his own inner world In that room, the character had a chance to experience the human loneliness The room was the place where they saw themselves, as well as where they were reborn on the lonely journey The closed room was also a metaphor of writing In the private and privacy space, the detectives wrote up the stories and found their identity in the writing The detective in Paul Auster's novel became a metaphor of chance choice which led the characters’ destiny into different directions That also was a symbol of fragile identity The writer made readers accept it as an inevitability That's the way for us to adjust ourselves to the vicissitudinous and uncertain life 3.2.2 Identity in the mirror of an other person In the world of change, Paul Auster's characters could only experience their existence through an other person In The New York Trilogy, meeting situations appeared in a chance way The process of discovering the detective’s identity was not separated from the mirror of the double characters 16 The nature of the mirror of an other person in Paul Auster’s novels is the reflection of the human loneliness The relationship between a person and another person can not be identified through the direct contact but by loneliness In spite of being among many people, each person can only live his real life with the things inside his deep inner realm The inner realm itself is a labyrinth from which people in his whole life can not escape In retrospect, the most complicated labyrinth traps a man is oneself * In detective fiction, the detective always related to a mysterious story about the crime and the investigation process to seek the answer In The New York Trilogy, the investigation was no longer merely the search for the culprit but it was transformed into the endless discovery of identity On the journey tracing the mysteries, we paid attention to the character on their specific relations However, the special of his quest was nothing that was built on the certain basis to help the detective promote his logical thinking ability The author used the detective's quest to express the impossibility of searching for the truth That process was lost in the intellectual labyrinth where chance elements mercilessly denied reasonable ability of people The detectives in The New York Trilogy were continuously put on the movement of forming and denying their identity though it may be beyond their consciousness The calm demeanour which adopted the change as an inevitable element of the life has brought postmodern spirit to the trilogy: the spirit of playing to nonsense instead of trying to create meaning for a nonsensical world 17 Chapter ANTI-DETECTIVE PLOT IN THE NEW YORK TRILOGY The plot defined by the Oxford Dictionary as a plan or an outline of the events in a play or a novel Discussing detective fiction, many researchers said that this genre was outside the plot innovation trend of contemporary literature It maintained the rigorous demands of plot for a sequential order of beginning, middle, ending In our opinion, this opinion is not suitable to anti-detective fiction Like the detectives, the readers have to learn to read the ‘postmodern signs’ on a different level Therefore, the structure of the novel cannot be circular and coherent since the solution is missing and the readers are not returned to the secure state of order that existed before the crime had been committed To base on the opinion, we focused on two unique highlights of the anti-detective plot by Paul Auster: metafiction and intertextuality In the thesis Characteristics of postmodern writing in Paul Auster’s novels by Nguyen Thi Thanh Hieu, metafiction and intertextually are the two most important art strategies in Paul Auster's works Metafiction and intertextuality can be said to be a beginning for different studies Unlike Nguyen Thi Thanh Hieu who considered metafiction and intertextuality as the modes of showing postmodern sense of the writers, we approached these modes in The New York Trilogy to clarify Paul Auster’s antidetective art in the plot In his novels, metafiction broke the traditional structure of the detective plot and intertextuality created a new plot style: complex plot 4.1 Metafiction as the way to blur the detective plot As the term of postmodern literature, metafiction was used to name a literature kind: novel about novel, fiction in fiction, in which work was written as a language game with presenting its own playing rule The writer was both its author and reader who left the open endings for the multi-direction receptions 18 Paul Auster’s anti- detective novels are a refined collection of the works which blured the boundary between reality and fiction It is also the factor to break the unity of the plot, and not the writer but the readers themselves can decode the stories’s mystery To create the metafiction, the writer used the multistory narrator model, open structure, questioned about the relationship between the author and his work for the purpose of blurring the authorship 4.1.1 Multistory narrator model The narrator is one of the basic categories of narratology This is a fictional image of the writer to organize the text, control the situations, lead the story In The New York Trilogy, Paul Auster deliberately blurred the narrative’s spokesperson Image of the author disappeared, the readers are attracted by their reading to fill the questionable gaps and look for the relationship between the different facts With frame fiction - the narrator retold the story of another person, City of Glass has two narrators, first, it was Quinn - who himself told his story in the red notebook, the second, who is "I" telling the story of Quinn from the red book Like City of Glass, there were two narrators in Ghosts Almost throughout the work, the narrator was in third person of an observer who told the story of Blue The Locked Room is narrated by the first person pronoun "I" at the beginning fiction Work was interlocked by two main stories, the first was a story about life of "I", and the second was about Fanshawe Fanshawe did not directly appear until the end of the work, however, his life and stories were the cause of the fictionline’s maintenance and development The frame fiction style created a multistory fiction This genre was fairly common in detective literature It derived from Poe's stories and then was inherited and developed in the works of Conan Doyle, Christie The frame fiction aimed at affirming the reality of the stories’events Turning to The New York Trilogy, the purposes of authenticity were emphasized by the writing mode of the frame fiction, so it made an 19 impression that life itself likes a text Life became literature with all its bare, roughness; without neither sorting nor editing The stop of the characters’ note led to the stop of the narrator’s story at once; there was no author's intervention to reach the completion of the events 4.1.2 Open structure in the narrative Open structure created a system of signs which can be interpreted to infinity The plot of The New York Trilogy led the reader into vague answers for the problem, the events became more and more obscure, the characters appeared without any explanation, and fiction has nothing story in it Anti-detective fiction of Paul Auster left "many things to say" on the target journey of the characters Instead of supplying the readers a work with a plot, a beginning, a conflict, a solution and an end, the writer created a new possibility neither for him nor for his characters but for the readers to decode the mystery when he made the end for his novels 4.1.3 Author – novels relationship and the authorship According to Van Dine’s summation on detective fiction , there is a homology: author : reader = criminal : detective The investigators (and the readers) traced the clues of the criminals (as well as indications made by the author in his fiction) to find the answer to the mystery In the Paul Auster’s trilogy, the relationship between the writer and the character and the narrator separated the connections between the different facts to form the labyrinth of the boundaries The author of The New York Trilogy was "dead" as Roland Barthes’s wording of the role of the author in postmodern narrative The writer himself denied his creative role In the novels, the boundary between text and text was disappeared The character admitted to being the author of the fiction that was telling about himself Paul Auster created a multistory metafiction style with replacement of the narrator, changing point of view, the constant reconstruction and denial of authorship When the different roles of the narrator could not give the final ending, the reading process became the mutual creativeness 20 4.2 Intertextuality as the way to create the complex plot Intertextuality is the term proposed by Julia Kristeva to name the relationship of a text with other texts According to the spirit of intertextuality, each text was influenced by numerous other texts Accordingly, a plot is never single because it will be read in many different ways by intertextuality experience of its readers In Paul Auster’s trilogy, he linked the many kinds of texts in a variety of different forms: text quoting, event citing , anecdote citing, and using non-verbal signs With such an intertextuality structure, the stories of Paul Auster referenced to a lot of the postmodern society problems In this thesis, the aim of reading the intertextuality structure in The New York Trilogy is at the meanings which are believed to be the most characteristic and haunting ones They are stories of the language and of American culture 4.2.1 "The New York Trilogy" and the story of language Language is one of the themes throughout The New York Trilogy Through Babel Tower, Paul Auster presented a concept of language doubt Because of the difference in language, each person can be closed in its own language People have been excluded from their own language The view on language is closely related to Paul Auster’s concept of art creative activities Writing a novel is like creating a world by language The basis of this world is not fixed, so the world can not have its invariant shape Reality is the images that are made through language Memories are merely a game of language signs 4.2.2 "The New York Trilogy" and the story of American culture Gathering under the name of The New York Trilogy, Paul Auster’s anti-detective novels mainly described the space around New York This city was not only a context of the character’s thoughts and actions but also a space to remind of the cultural events which helped form America with its unique achievements in spite of its short period Every street, building, monument and bridge… of the city was described in The New York Trilogy in connection with the unique events, 21 anecdotes Whith that, anecdotes about American writers appeared spontaneous in Paul Auster's novels for referring to the author's concept of the world, people and art * Basing on the characteristics of the detective plot with dramatic structure, we demonstrated that the innovation with artistic craft in plot in Paul Auster’s The New York Trilogy was used to break the classical structure Metafiction, intertextuality were the highlights of form and technique by which the writer expressed the concern about the problems of contemporary life With the aim of blurring the boundaries between literature and life, metafiction in Paul Auster’s The New York Trilogy denied consistency knowledge Paul Auster opened other possibilities up for a detective plot not following the structure of opening, developing, and ending by his creation such as: creating the fiction in fiction form, making open detective events and blurring the authorship The readers were drawn in the fictional details to experience the stories’ incompletion status as the life itself Focusing on the haunting theme in The New York Trilogy with intertextually mode, we affirmed again: detective plot is never the purpose of Paul Auster’s anti-detective novels Putting the events, anecdotes, texts in the stories, Paul Auster showed his readers things as the break state of language, the unique cultural values of America The fiction dismantled altogether what is presented as a macrocosm, a unification, a grand narrative Fiction is pieced together from the fragments of reality CONCLUSION Discussing on detective fiction, Todorov put it in relation with the genre problem He asserted that a masterpiece should create a new genre, and break the previous rules of the genre; it should also determine two its own standards: the standard of the broken genre and the one of the created 22 genre Todorov separated detective fiction from the general rules, he supposed that a masterpiece of the popular literature should be the most suitable book with its genre The best detective novel must not break the rules of the genre but follow them In our opinion, Todorov’s concept of detective fiction was no longer fit for anti-detective fiction Not being bound by the available rules of the genre, each anti-detective writer selected his own way to create his works Paul Auster's The New York Trilogy was a vivid example of unsuitability between the fixed concepts and the writing practice In order to demonstrate the "dislocation" between the fixed rules of the detective fiction and the breaking of the rules in Paul Auster’s novels, we defined the theory basic of detective literature, thence we focus on unique highlights in Paul Auster’s narration Beginning with Edgar Allan Poe, the detective fiction reached the level of literary works and since then, after nearly 200 years of its existence and development, it has made the history of the genre through many generations of the writers During the period of 200 years, detective fiction is evaluated in different or even contrary ways In developing process with the appearance of many forms such as classic detective, hard-boild detective, political detective, psychological detective, all of them have remained a general characteristic which we considered as a criterion to identify of the detective literature, it’s the orientation for the readers Decoding the mystery is always the destination of this genre It governs the way that the writers build the plot and character With our opinion, anti-detective fiction is one form in the procedure of the detective genre Like the appearance of the concept "anti-drama" proceeded from "drama" as well as "anti-character" from "character", the concept "antidetective fiction" was originated in "detective fiction" That is the evidence of innovation in creative activities In the postmodern context, when some novelists have developed their narration, breaking the "rules" of the detective novels, forming a new writing style, anti-detective fiction is no longer a stimulation merely for the crowd’s psychology with the thrilling 23 crime happenings and thorny investigation process The traditional closed structure of the plot with beginning, developing, ending was broken, the character was out of the orbit to recode the mystery with his reasoning and action possibilities The aesthetic experience of the readers was strictly demanded for decoding the art and human messages that writers took in their fictions Thus, anti-detective novels have left the field of popular literature for scholarly one In Vietnam, the detective literature is still not seen as an independent genre Instead of focusing on the intellectual questions, the writers often associated the crime story with psychological and social analyses It partly reflects the concepts, thoughts of Vietnamese Mentioning the character in detective literature means mentioning the detective He is the basis for determining the existence of a detective narrative, and thereby, the writer built the other characters through the double relationship: detective - victim, detective - criminal, detective accompanied person In The New York Trilogy, we emphasized the parody of form of the detective fiction by building the multifaceted detective Putting the character in the specific relationships, the discovery process of detectives in Paul Auster’s novels did not follow the rules of logical deduction The detectives were set on a journey to decipher the mystery, however, that was not the destination that the works wished to get The detection of the outside world transformed continuously into the discovery of the identity The identity and its uncertainty in a world of chance, in the incessant insight from the other identity became the highlight in Paul Auster’s anti-detective novels Discussing the plot, many opinions agreed that the detective literature did not belong the innovation trend It maintains a traditional plot style with the strict causal relationships between the events towards the completion point We affirmed that, anti-detective fiction is a part of the plot innovation trend of contemporary literature Metafiction and intertextuality are two important choices for the writer to break the monopoly of the journey to decipher the mysteries of the plot organization 24 By metafiction mode, the author has exchanged the real and fiction in his work The narrator confirmed that the story followed the main truth in the notebook, the different roles directed the readers into the only conclusion: nothing is true except the writer’s fiction Along with the replace of the roles, the creation of the open structure as well as the blur of the authorship, detective fiction structures were broken, reading activity became the mutual creativeness The intertextuality mode which appeared continuously and publicly in The New York Trilogy created the complex plot style towards many different topics Like the metafiction, the intertextuality is not a purely mechanism They became means to convey postmodern aesthetics concepts of the writer In Vietnam, researches on Paul Auster and detective fiction is mainly still a potential direction During the study period, we saw numerous potentials for various other researches on those subjects The New York Trilogy was a creative succession of the achievements of not only American literature authors in the previous century as Thoreau, Hawthorne, Melville but also the writers of other nations in the world as Kafka, Beckett Besides, the postmodern spirit in Paul Auster's novels had the encounter with the works of many writers of his generation as the inevitable result of the era when it was born Research on Paul Auster from the theory of comparative literature, certainly promises a lot of interesting From the genre, we found a new expectant direction to expand the study scope and objects It is to study the innovation of detective literature in the postmodern condition Comparing with the development of linguistics, the mystery of postmodern detective fiction became an code of which decoding process would give an open answer Putting it in the histoty of the genre, the researchers will provide a comprehensive view of the detective literature We believe that if this study direction is implemented effectively, it can fill the gap in the current literature criticism of our country 25 PUBLISHEDSCIENTIFIC WORKS Dang Thi Bich Hong (2011), “Metafiction in Paul Auster’s City of Glass”, Researching and Teaching Philology from Tradition to Modern, Ha Noi National University of Education Press, p 211 – 217 Dang Thi Bich Hong (2013), “Paul Auster’s City of Glass: Myth of Labyrinth in the Postmodern Period”, Postmodernism Literature Theory and Practice, Ha Noi National University of Education Press, p 195 – 204 Dang Thi Bich Hong (2013), “Paul Auster’s The New York Trilogy and Anti-detective Novel in Postmodernism Literature”, Postmodern Literary Criticism in Viet Nam, Knowledge Press, p 347 – 366 Dang Thi Bich Hong (2015), “Anti-Detective Fiction”, Literature Studies (12), p 106 – 114 Dang Thi Bich Hong (2015), “The Authorship of The New York Trilogy: Labyrinth of the Intellectual Game in Paul Auster’s Novel”, Journal of Science, Ha Noi National University of Education (10), p 131 – 138 Dang Thi Bich Hong (2016), The Characteristics of the Plot of Detective Fiction, Journal of Science and Technology, Hung Vuong University (1), p 49 – 52