A Place Both Imaginary and Realistic: Paul Auster's "The Music of Chance"

Author(s): Ilana Shiloh and Paul Auster

Source: Contemporary Literature, Vol. 43, No. 3 (Autumn, 2002), pp. 488-517
Published by: University of Wisconsin Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1209110
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 I LANA S H I LO H
A Place Both Imaginaryand Realistic:
Paul Auster's TheMusic of Chance

hance is an inherentlyambiguousconcept.It conflates

diametrically opposed notions: hazard and destiny,
good fortune and bad luck. Yet as noted by Jacques
Derrida, among the multiple and contradictory associa-
tions of chance-unpredictability, haphazardness, adventure-
there is one privileged sense: the fall. We tend intuitively to associ-
ate chance with a downward movement, an intuition encoded in
language: "chance"descends from the Latin cadere,"to fall";its der-
ivations can be found in "case"or "occasion,"in "accident"or "co-
incidence." Chance has the implication of that which we fall into,
or which befalls us by surprise-the incident, the accident, the final
throw of the dice. It embraces the interplay between indeterminacy
and inevitability, between fortuity and fate. To believe in chance,
suggests Derrida, "can just as well indicate that one believes in the
existence of chance as that one does not, above all, believe in
chance, since one looks for and finds a hidden meaning at all
costs" (4).
None of Paul Auster's novels displays this ambiguity more
starkly and more tragically than The Music of Chance(1990). The
dual nature of chance is already incipient in the first paragraph,
which introduces the protagonist of the novel and announces its
central themes, as well as its narrative structure:
For one whole year he did nothing but drive, traveling back and forth
across America as he waited for the money to run out.... Three days
into the thirteenth month, he met up with the kid who called himself
Jackpot. It was one of those random, accidental encounters that seem to

Contemporary LiteratureXLIII,3 0010-7484/02/ 0003-0488

? 2002 by the Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System
 S H I L0 H 489

materialize out of thin air-a twig that breaks off in the wind and sud-
denly lands at your feet. Had it occurred at any other moment, it is doubt-
ful that Nashe would have opened his mouth. But because he had already
given up, because he figured there was nothing to lose anymore, he saw
the stranger as a reprieve, as a last chance to do something for himself
before it was too late. And just like that, he went ahead and did it. Without
the slightest tremor of fear, Nashe closed his eyes and jumped.

The opening sequence foregrounds the motif of chance; the

choice of imagery suggests the inherent ambiguity of chance and
foreshadows the sense in which chance will govern the protago-
nist's life. We learn that Nashe, the novel's main character, has
taken to the road and thereby opened himself up to the uncontrol-
lable, unpredictable aspects of life. Traveling in the countryside,
he notices a young hitchhiker, beaten half to death. His encounter
with the kid is accidental; he will soon find out that the kid calls
himself Jackpot. His nickname refers to the pot that accumulates
until one poker player opens the betting with a pair of jacks or
better; it evokes poker, risk, and chance but also signifies good for-
tune, great wealth, sensational success. Yet the ensuing images un-
dermine both the notion of accident and of good luck. Nashe's deci-
sion to pick up the stranger is metaphorically described as a blind
jump, which he should have feared. Lady Luck is blind, but in
Nashe's case, accident leads in one direction only-the downward
movement of the fall. This suggestion is further corroborated by
Nashe's perception of the kid as a reprieve. The image ironically
adumbrates the novel's end: the entire sequence of events triggered
by the two protagonists' accidental encounter is just a reprieve, a
temporary suspension of punishment. The end is already con-
tained in the beginning. Pozzi, who first appears beaten half to
death, will eventually be beaten to death. And Nashe, who first
appears driving on the road, will eventually die on the road.
The road, suggests Mikhail Bakhtin in The Dialogic Imagination,
is the chronotope best suited for portraying events governed by
chance: it is the place where the paths of the most various people
intersect, a point of new departures and the locus where events
find their denouements (98). Accordingly, the road is the tradi-
tional setting of picaresque fiction, which flourished in sixteenth-
and seventeenth-century Spain and was characterized by an epi-
 490 - C O N T EM P O RA RY LI T E RA T U R E

sodic narrative, in which a lower-class protagonist sustains himself

by means of his roguery during a journey through predominantly
corrupt social milieus. The picaresque story relies on a triad of in-
terconnected elements: the figure of the picaro, the temporal and
spatial framework of the road, and the capricious unpredictability
of chance. The picarois a dialectic figure, alternately affiliated with
the stock characters of the jester, the adventurer, the explorer, or
the noble savage; but from whatever perspective he may be seen,
he invariably remains an outsider. With no home and no family
ties, starting his life's adventure from point zero, he hits the open
road, pursuing the favor of Lady Luck.1
The American version of the picaresque story is the road story,
whose prominence in American culture may be accounted for by
the affinity of American myth with the classical elements of the
picaresque. The typical American protagonist, like the typical pi-
caro,is an orphan and an outsider who has rejected the obligations
of family and the authority of society. But while the road story pre-
serves the essential picaresque situation, which involves a confron-
tation between an isolated individual and a hostile society, its focus
is not altogether the same as that of its European counterpart. The
American protagonist who takes to the road-whether it be Mark
Twain's Huck Finn, Jack Kerouac's Dean Moriarty, or Robert Pir-
sig's "Phaeadrus"-is not primarily motivated by the wish to take
material advantage of a corrupt society. He wants to get away from
that society. He does not look for money, but for freedom and au-
tonomy. The American orphan wishes to become his own father
and seeks to create himself through the freedom of the open road.
The first part of TheMusic of Chanceconspicuously foregrounds
the principal features of picaresque fiction: the action is set mainly
on the road, the sequence of events is governed by accident, and
the protagonist exhibits the most salient characteristicsof the picaro.
In effect, the two main characters,Jim Nashe and Jack Pozzi, may
be seen as representing, respectively, the American wanderer and

1. For general discussions of the picaresque, see Bjornson, Blackburn, and Whitboum;
for a discussion of the neo-picaresque in the twentieth century, see Gurevitz. Bemd Her-
zogenrath surveys the American tradition of the road novel and relates it to The Music
of Chance (160-66).
 SHILOH ? 491

the European picaro. Nashe, the novel's main protagonist, is a

thirty-two-year-old firefighterfrom Boston. At the outset of the nar-
rative he is at point zero, having lost, or forfeited, all family ties.
His wife has left him, and he entrusts his two-year-old daughter
to the care of his sister; when he sees that his role as a father has
been "usurped" by his brother-in-law (4), he leaves his child with
his sister's family. While reneging on his fatherhood, Nashe is also
deprived of his father, who dies and leaves him an inheritance of
close to two hundred thousand dollars. Equipped with this "colos-
sal sum" and treating the past as if it were "so much junk to be
carted away" (10), Nashe quits his job, buys a new, red Saab, and
hits the road in a quest for emptiness, irresponsibility, and freedom.
Freedom, for Nashe, is associated with anonymity, lack of com-
mitment, and absence of human contact. It is also closely associated
with chance. Driving home to Boston after a visit to his sister's
family, he misses the ramp to the freeway and impulsively decides
to follow the new road, having realized that "both ramps were fi-
nally the same" (6). This decision marks Nashe's willingness to em-
brace chance as the underlying principle of human life; it evokes
the dilemma of Quinn, the putative detective in City of Glasswho,
at the very outset of his investigation, is faced with two Stillmans,
two identical-looking suspects, and realizes that "whatever choice
he made . . . would be arbitrary, a submission to chance" (56).
Nashe's realization that all his potential choices are of equal
value further echoes Meursault's feeling in The Outsider that he
"could either shoot (the Arab) or not shoot" (57). In The Myth of
Sisyphus,Camus writes, "I can refute everything in this world sur-
rounding me,... except this chaos, this sovereign chance and this
divine equivalence which springs from anarchy" (51). When one
realizes that the world is devoid of meaning and purpose, that it
is morally indifferent, all decisions become equivalent. Teleology
may satisfy the human craving for unity, but it is also restrictive;
transcendence may satisfy the human craving for meaning, but it
is also prescriptive. A consciousness of the absurd, the acceptance
of life's contingency, liberates one from the tyranny of religions or
ideologies.
In this respect, absurd freedom is closely related to picaresque
freedom. As noted by David Gurevitz, the twentieth century has
 492 . C O N T EM P O RA RY LIT E RA T U R E

known the bankruptcy of three master ideologies-fascism, Marx-

ism, and psychoanalysis-each of which posited a closed, deter-
ministic model of reality (26-32). Picaresque fiction, with its rogu-
ish protagonists and episodic plots, offers an alternative myth,
projecting a vision of a world balanced between total chaos and
carnivalesque situations. The carnival, suggests Bakhtin, entails
"temporaryliberation from the prevailing truth and from the estab-
lished order" (Rabelais10). Auster's depiction of Nashe's experi-
ence of freedom conspicuously echoes Bakhtin's vocabulary: when
Nashe meets Fiona, during one of the intervals in his aimless driv-
ing, he feels "as if their fluke encounter called for ... a spirit of
anarchy and celebration" (15).
Nashe thus casts himself in the role of the traditional American
picaro,who forsakes his family ties, breaks from the past, and seeks
to re-create himself through the freedom of the open road. His new
life is an assertion of autonomy and a private declaration of inde-
pendence: not only is Nashe a firefighter, a man powerful enough
to tame the elements, he is a firefighter from Boston, the arena of
the historical "tea party" and the birthplace of American indepen-
dence. His autonomy has social and metaphysical implications: it
is the freedom of the wanderer, who repudiates external authority,
traditional conventions, and ideological dogma; it is the freedom
of the absurd man, who refuses to posit the existence of a transcen-
dent realm of meaning and value. It is the freedom of a man who
has embraced chance.
If Nashe has some of the characteristicsof the picaresque protag-
onist-no family ties, infatuation with the freedom of the open
road, an erratic existence that follows the promptings of chance-
Pozzi has them all. His background is poor and disreputable: the
son of a swindler who served time in jail and whose existence he
ignored for most of his childhood, Pozzi grew up in "[a] sad,
crummy little town" (40), raised by a hard-working mother. A pro-
fessional poker player since the age of eighteen, he lives off luck
and his wits, despising his rivals at the poker table, whom he re-
gards as typical representatives of a corrupt society: "The old boys
with the five-dollar cigars. True-blue American assholes" (25).
Yet Pozzi is not just the stock figure of the rogue, disdainful of
material benefits which he would nevertheless like to acquire. The
 S H I L0 H 493

picarois a fundamentally ambiguous character,and this ambiguity

is one of Pozzi's principal traits. Nashe first perceives his young
hitchhiker as "full of elements that did not add up" (22), a foreshad-
owing of Pozzi's tragic end, in which his head seems almost sev-
ered from his battered body (171). The physical fragmentation
metaphorically conveys the inner contradictions of Pozzi's charac-
ter and existence. The kid makes his living off a game based on
luck, but his success is due to his talent: he is a masterful player,
as Nashe realizes during their test game at the Plaza. Scrawny and
frail, looking like a twelve-year-old, Pozzi is nonetheless admirably
courageous, "improvising his life as he went along, trusting in pure
wit to keep his head above water" (37). If the corporate hotshots
that he swindles out of their money represent the materialistic
American ethos, Pozzi represents another (and complementary) as-
pect of that ethos-self-reliance.
Nashe and Pozzi hitting the road together, on their way to a pair
of millionaires whom they intend to relieve of their money in a
dazzling poker game, thus seem like a traditional American pair
of male buddies, fleeing adult society in pursuit of adventure, or
like a picaresque version of Laurel and Hardy.2Yet the picaresque
perspective, conspicuously foregrounded in the first three chapters
of the novel, is essentially ironic, in line with Gurevitz's argument
that the picaresque text is a parodic metatext. This self-reflexive
irony is the underlying mode of the first section of The Music of
Chance,in which the picaresque framework is simultaneously con-
structed and deconstructed. One of the ways in which it is decon-
structed is through the evocation of works that question traditional
American values, such as Jean Baudrillard'sAmerica.Thus Nashe's
fascination with life on the road is described in the following terms:
He wanted that solitude again, that nightlong rush through the empti-
ness, that rumbling of the road against his skin.
(7)

2. This initial depiction of Nashe and Pozzi is in line with Leslie Fiedler's theory that
American fiction traditionally presents two juvenile male protagonists escaping adult
society in an island or woods where mothers do not come. Laurel and Hardy are brought
up by Pozzi, who initially perceives Flower and Stone as a pair of inoffensive buffoons
(30). But in Auster's 1976 play "Laurel and Hardy Go to Heaven," which consists entirely
 494 . C O N T EM P O RA RY LI T E RA T U R E

Speed was of the essence, the joy of sitting in a car and hurtling himself
forward through space.
(11)

Both descriptions seem to echo Baudrillard's observation, "Speed

is simply the rite that initiates us into emptiness: a nostalgic desire
for forms to revert to immobility, concealed beneath the very inten-
sification of their mobility" (7).3
Baudrillard'swork offers the Other's perception of America and
of the American myth of the road, a perception that ironically sub-
verts the picaresque perspective. This perspective, which is mainly
projected from Nashe's center of consciousness, is also subverted
within the novel's fictional world. Thus when he promises Fiona
that he will come back to her, as he is a free man now and can do
what he wants, she retorts sarcastically: "This is America, Nashe.
The home of the goddamn free, remember? We can all do what we
want" (16). But Nashe cannot actually do what he wants, not even
when he believes himself to be aimlessly zigzagging across
America. His drifting turns into an obsession and he becomes the
slave of his pursuit of freedom, "careening blindly from one no-
where to the next" (7).
The picaresque framework of the first three chapters is thus sub-
verted through extratextual suggestions, the comments of other
characters, and the depiction of an inner contradiction in Nashe
himself. Another element that destabilizes the underlying assump-
tions of the picaresque genre is a gradual shift in the nature of
chance. This shift, already adumbrated in the opening sequence, is
dramatized in the narrative reversal resulting from Nashe's loss in
the poker game with the pair of millionaires, and metaphorically
conveyed through the change of setting from the road to the castle.
It has thematic and generic implications, suggesting that fate,
rather than accident, is the force governing human life, and trans-
forming the specific tale of human life entitled TheMusic of Chance
from a road story into a tragedy.

of the inexplicable construction of a wall by a pair of tragicomic characters, Laurel and

Hardy are the precursors of Nashe and Pozzi (see Hand to Mouth 133-71).
3. The similarity between the first part of The Music of Chance and Baudrillard's
America is also pointed out by Bray (84) and Herzogenrath (180), although the latter
discusses it from the Freudian and Lacanian perspective of the drive.
 S H I L0 H 495

Tragedy is a genre diametrically opposed to the picaresque, both

in form and in content. Its principles were laid down by Aristotle,
whose theory of tragedy still provides the terms of reference for
any contemporary discussion of the genre. In ThePoetics,Aristotle
maintains that tragedy is essentially an imitation of an action: an
action complete, unified, and of some amplitude (24, 28). The unity
of action reflects the logical principles of causality and probability:
each element of the fable (plot) must follow from the preceding
element and lead logically to the following element. Tragedy thus
precludes chance. The direction of the tragic action should be from
good fortune to misfortune, and its structure involves five basic
stages: fatal error (or tragic flaw), the tragic deed, reversal (or
irony), disclosure, and suffering.
The fatal error (hamartia)is a kind of blindness, making the tragic
hero commit misguided deeds that bring about his downfall. The
terrible deed is the actualization of the tragic error,its embodiment
in action. It evokes a reaction of shame and horror because it often
involves a betrayal of the closest family members, to whom one
should be naturally bound in love. The hero's terrible deed brings
about the reversal, or peripeteia-a drastic change in the course of
action, which, however, is not arbitrary. Reversal leads to disclo-
sure, or knowledge, which becomes the source of the hero's suffer-
ing; but the spectacle of his ordeal does not produce depression,
bitterness, or anger. Paradoxically, it liberates the audience from
pain and fear, because, in the words of Dorothea Krook, tragedy
entails "some kind of reaffirmation ... of the dignity of the human
spirit and the worthwhileness of human life" (8).
As can be seen from this sketchy overview of Aristotle's theory,
tragedy is opposed in all aspects to the picaresque. It assumes the
existence of a structured universe, whose underlying order is re-
flected in the tight structure of the tragic fable, in contradistinction
to the chaotic and carnivalesque world-view projected by the pica-
resque story and reflected in its cumulative and fragmented plot.
The hero of classic tragedy is "a man of great reputation and pros-
perity"; the picarois a nobody, an individual of no social status or
personal importance. His life is governed by chance; that of the
tragic hero is governed by inevitability, a determinism of fate or
character. The picaresque tale evokes laughter at human foibles
 496 . C O N T EM P O RA RY LIT E RA T U R E

and an acceptance of life's absurdity; tragedy evokes pity, fear, and

a sense of elation at the spectacle of human dignity.
The shift from the picaresque to the tragic perspective is fore-
grounded in The Music of Chanceby the shift of the setting from
the road to the castle. The agent of that shift is Pozzi, who tells
Nashe that he has a prearranged game of poker with a pair of ec-
centric millionaires. Pozzi has no doubt about beating the couple
and hitting the jackpot;unfortunately, he has no money left to gam-
ble with. Nashe decides to put up his last ten thousand dollars for
the young hitchhiker, in return for an even share in the profits of
the game. Thus he believes he will recover, through the kid, some
of his money:

At that point, Pozzi was simply a means to an end, the hole in the wall
that would get him from one side to the other. He was an opportunity
in the shape of a human being, a card-playing specter whose one purpose
in the world was to help Nashe win back his freedom.
(36-37)

Nashe's decision to use Pozzi as an instrument to get back his

fortune is his tragic deed. It grows out of his fatal error-his equa-
tion of freedom with money. Freedom is a quality of the spirit; its
perception in terms of money produces a reductive view of human
life and an idealized view of material values. In the novel's fictional
world, money does not set people free: it corrupts and enslaves.
Nashe realizes this briefly when he notices the paradox implicit in
his mental equation: each time he uses money to buy another por-
tion of his freedom, he is denying himself an equal portion of it as
well (17). But the impact of that realization does not last, since he
decides to become a partner in Pozzi's gambling profits, to retrieve
his money and his freedom.
Nashe's blindness becomes progressively more pronounced as
he enters the castle. He feels sorry for its owners, Flower and Stone,
whom he perceives as harmless buffoons (83, 87). He continues to
misinterpret the situation throughout the poker game; even though
Pozzi begins to lose heavily, Nashe still harbors the illusion that
he is in control (95, 107). He thus adds twenty-three hundred dol-
lars, his last money, to the original sum he put up and finally offers
his car as collateral. Pozzi loses everything. Nashe proposes one
 S H I L0 H * 497

final cut, which will either give them back the car or double their
losses. Pozzi loses again. At this point, Stone proposes a scheme
that will enable him and Flower to collect the money they won in
the game: Nashe and Pozzi will manually erect a wall, from ten
thousand stones of an Irish wall that the millionaires dismantled
and imported to their castle. Nashe and Pozzi will be paid for
their labor; once they cover their gambling debt, they will be free
to go.
Pozzi is appalled at Stone's solution and vehemently protests.
But Nashe accepts it. His acceptance follows logically from his
identification of money with freedom: if money signifies freedom,
then lack of money signifies slavery. Poker may be seen as an apt
metaphor for fictitious capital, which has characterized the econ-
omy of the late twentieth century-capital dissociated from labor
or production, existing only nominally, in the sphere of specula-
tion.4Nashe's loss in poker is a symbolic loss in the capitalist game,
whose rules he fully accepts. He thus associates money not only
with freedom but also with justice. It is all part of fair play, he
explains to the inconsolable Pozzi: in fifty days, they will pay out
their debt in work and will be free. When the skeptical youngster
insists, "How do you know it will be only fifty days?" Nashe reas-
sures him, "Because that's the agreement" (111).
Nashe's metaphorical blindness is underscored by the fact that
Stone, his host in the castle, is an optometrist by profession. An
optometrist is a man who corrects people's vision; Stone's City of
the World could have corrected Nashe's vision, were he perceptive
enough to decipher it properly. But he is not. His tragic error, the
"naked self-deception" that he attributes to Rousseau (54) but that
characterizes him as well, consists in his blind acceptance of the
capitalist American ethos, which conflates ethical values-freedom
and justice-with a material value that has nothing to do with eth-
ics: money. This inner contradiction is built into the Declaration of
Independence, as the creator of Nashe realized at a very young age:
The wholesomeness and dreary rectitude of American life were no more
than a sham, a halfhearted publicity stunt. The moment you began to

4. The perceptionof poker as a metaphorfor fictitiouscapitalis suggested by Dotan

(167).
 498 * C O N T EM P O RA RY LIT E RA T U RE

study the facts, contradictions bubbled to the surface.... We had been

taught to believe in "liberty and justice for all," but the fact was that lib-
erty and justice were often at odds with one another. The pursuit of
money had nothing to do with fairness; its driving engine was the social
principle of "every man for himself."
(Hand 12)5

This observation finds a powerful and poignant fictional realiza-

tion in the plot of The Music of Chance. Nashe's fatal error inevitably
leads to his tragic deed, which in Greek tragedy was usually a sin-
gle act; in modern tragedy, suggests Krook, the tragic deed tends
to be diffused. That is precisely the case in The Music of Chance, in
which there are three tragic deeds, mirroring each other in a
mounting succession of horror. All three have to do with the fa-
ther's betrayal of his child, real or symbolic; and all three have to
do with money.6
Nashe's first tragic deed, his "original sin," as it were, is his aban-
donment of his daughter. He initially entrusts her to his sister's
care because he cannot afford paid help: "If there had been some
money, he would have hired a woman to live with them and look
after Juliette" (2). In spite of his rationalizations-Juliette has al-
ready forgotten him; wrenching her away from her new family
would do her more harm than good-Nashe feels profoundly
guilty for having given her up. This sense of guilt is the subtext of
the opening paragraph: Nashe regards his encounter with Pozzi as
a reprieve, a respite from impending punishment, because he feels
that he deserves to be punished. "[I]n Greek tragedy," observes
Krook, "every tragic hero approximates the Adam figure-the ar-
chetypal, representative sinner, perpetually re-enacting the funda-
mental sin of mankind" (75). In Auster's poetic world, the original
sin is neither spiritual pride, as in the Christian narrative of the
Fall, nor hybris, as in Greek tragedy; it is the father's betrayal of
his child.

5. In this passage from the title essay of his memoir,Auster claims that he became
aware of that inner contradictionin the Americanethos at a very young age, when he
stumbledacross an issue of Madmagazine.
6. The triad of betrayalssuggests a Crucifixionparallel,a suggestion reinforcedby
the scenein which Nashe carriesPozzi'sbatteredbody in his arms,in a gestureevocative
of the pieta(171).
 S H I L OH 499

Nashe's second tragic deed is his decision to use Pozzi as "an

opportunity in the shape of a human being." His decision-which
he carries out, and in that sense it is a deed-entails a double tragic
irony. It will boomerang on him, for the millionaires will dehuman-
ize him in precisely the same way in which he has dehumanized
Pozzi: they will use their two visitors as instruments for retrieving
their money. Second, in his attempt to redeem himself through the
erection of the wall, Nashe will inadvertently repeat the very sin
for which he is trying to atone-the father's betrayal of his child.
Throughout the narrative, Pozzi gradually becomes a son figure
for Nashe, a substitute for the daughter whom he has forsaken. By
picking Pozzi up from the side of the road, Nashe literally saves
him; he then offers the kid his own shirt, an exchange of clothes
symbolically establishing their new kinship. This sense of kinship
deepens when Nashe finds out that he and Pozzi share a similar
life story: both of them grew up with an absent father who made
himself manifest only through the gift of money. The nature of the
budding relationship between Nashe and Pozzi is metaphorically
underscored by the setting of the Plaza Hotel, where Nashe takes
the kid to test the truth of his claims about his superb skills as
a poker player: the Plaza was also the location of Pozzi's second
encounter with his absentee father.
Nashe thus symbolically reenacts the pattern of behavior of
Pozzi's father: he initially overwhelms the boy with his lavishness
but will ultimately betray him. His first betrayal consists in his de-
humanization of Pozzi, his resolve to use him as an instrument to
retrieve his money. His second betrayal consists in his acceptance
of Stone's offer, which will ultimately lead to Pozzi's death. For
the millionaires eventually change the terms of their agreement,
and Nashe, realizing the enormity of his error, suggests that Pozzi
escape through a hole that they dig in the fence surrounding the
meadow. Pozzi takes up Nashe's suggestion, is apprehended, and
then is beaten almost to death.
Nashe's tragic deed further reverberates in the narrative through
his grotesque relationship with the retarded grandson of the over-
seer, Calvin Murks. Nashe suspects that it was little Floyd who
alerted Murks to Pozzi's attempted escape, and he begins fantasiz-
ing about killing the boy. Paradoxically, the more he hates the boy,
 500 . C O N T EM P O RA RY LI T E RA T U RE

the more the boy dotes on him: little Floyd seems to adopt Nashe
as his father in the same way that Nashe adopted Pozzi as his son.
Nashe's murderous fantasy thus becomes the last one in a series
of paternal betrayals, real or imaginary, which thicken the web of
warped fatherhood interconnecting the various characters.
Ironically, the warmest paternal and filial feelings seem to exist
in Murks's family-three male generations who apparently adore
each other. But their mutual devotion has no redeeming value. In
the novel's fictional world, fatherhood is stripped of compassion
and childhood is stripped of innocence. Calvin Murks and his son-
in-law are dumb, brutal, almost subhuman. Little, retarded Floyd
is not much more than an animal, "cavorting like some strange and
silent monkey" (183). Mindless and grotesque, though innocent, he
is already implicated in crime, as his discovery of the escape proba-
bly triggered Pozzi's deadly beating.
At this point in the narrative, Nashe has not yet made the connec-
tion between his fatal error-his confusion of money with freedom
and justice-and his tragic deed-selling out his son to retrieve
his money. Consequently, he seeks vengeance, not atonement, con-
tinuing to work on the erection of the wall so that when he gets
free he can alert the police and have Murks arrested. The killing
of the foreman's grandson, mirroring the killing of Nashe's own
son, would highlight the symmetry of his revenge. It would rectify
the balance of injustice: "the boy was telling him that it was all
right, that as long as Nashe was the one who killed him, everything
was going to be all right" (186).
Nashe's need for revenge implies that he has not yet gained the
knowledge that follows from the tragic reversal. Irony, or peripeteia,
states Aristotle, "is a reversal in the course of events ... in accor-
dance with probability or necessity" (31): it is thus both surprising
and inevitable. Peripeteiarefers not only to the external course of
events, but also to the consciousness and intentionality of the tragic
hero. Before the reversal, all his actions are directed toward the
achievement of a certain goal, from whose tragic consequences he
tries to escape after it is subverted by the ironic turn of events. In
the narrative structure of The Music of Chance,the tragic reversal
is Pozzi's death. While it marks a turning point in the unfolding
of the narrative, a turning point both surprising (for Nashe) and
 S H I L OH 501

inevitable (for the reader), it equally marks a shift in Nashe's con-

sciousness. Only at the sight of the kid's battered body does Nashe
realize the tragic error of his equation of money with justice. And
he is plunged into a terrible, agonizing suffering.
Nashe's most profound grief is due neither to the physical hard-
ship nor to the deprivation of freedom or the indignation of injus-
tice. It is the pain of loss. Whereas in his earlier days on the road
he welcomed the "salutary emptiness," after Pozzi's death he finds
it unbearable, so that "his domestic routines became dry and mean-
ingless, a mechanical drudgery of... making things dirty and
cleaning them up, the clockwork of animal functions" (179).7Nashe
has already lost a wife and forsaken a daughter, yet it is his loss
of Pozzi that produces a sense of bereavement so profound that he
experiences it as the divestment of his humanity, the reduction of
his life to animal existence. The curious metaphor of "the clock-
work of animal functions" simultaneously evokes Lear's vision of
man as a bare, forked animal and Macbeth's vision of time as a
series of tomorrows, creeping in their petty pace from day to day.
The oblique reference to Macbeth is reinforced by Nashe's reading
of The Soundand the Fury, whose title refers precisely to that same
soliloquy in Shakespeare's play. Macbeth was a murderer and Lear
a father who betrayed his beloved child; Nashe is both.
The hero's suffering, according to Krook, is properly tragic when
it generates knowledge, even if only subliminal. That is the case
with Nashe, as may be seen in the novel's final section. He eventu-
ally finishes the erection of the wall and accepts Murks's offer to go
out with his son-in-law, Floyd, and celebrate his upcoming release.
Pozzi's memory haunts their stay in the bar, where Nashe and
Floyd play a pool game on whose result they gamble fifty dollars.
Floyd isn't bad, but Nashe is better, and he winds up playing his
heart out, zeroing in on his shots with a skill and precision that
surpass anything he has done before. "Ifigured you might be good,
but this is ridiculous," comments Floyd, to which Nashe smilingly
replies, "Just luck" (213).
The scene is the wish-fulfillment version of Pozzi's poker game

7. A "salutary emptiness" is the inner condition to which Quinn aspires in City of

Glass (4) and is the objective of Nashe's quest in the first part of the novel.
 502 * C O N T EM P O RA RY LI T E RA T U RE

with the millionaires, the way things should have been but weren't.
The analogy is foregrounded by the players' gambling on the results
of the game and by Nashe's sense of skill and mastery, which mirrors
the way Pozzi felt about himself. The implied analogy only deepens
the sense of loss, offeringvistas of possibilities forever forfeited. "The
discovery or anagnorisiswhich comes at the end of the tragic plot,"
writes Frye, "is not simply the knowledge by the hero of what has
happened to him ... but the recognition of the determined shape of
the life he has created for himself, with an implicit comparison with
the uncreated potential life he has forsaken" (212). That recognition
becomes unbearably poignant as Nashe once again gets behind the
wheel of the red Saabwhich used to be his but now belongs to Murks.
"This was the only chance he would have," he thinks, trying "to
savor what had been given to him, to push the memory of who he
had once been as far as it would go" (215).
The only chance left to Nashe at the end of the novel is to recall
the past with an unbearable sense of loss, to remember, to borrow
Frye's terms, the potential life he has forsaken. Chance frames the
narrative, but it remains as ambiguous at the end as it was at the
beginning. For in the course of Nashe's story, the element of unpre-
dictability associated with the picaresque is gradually transformed
into the determinism of Greek tragedy. That determinism is par-
tially due to a flaw in Nashe's character,the fatal error that blinds
him to the distinction between the material order and the ethical
order. But the underlying determinism of the narrative develop-
ment, the inevitability that dictates the sequence of events, is also
due to a force external to Nashe-the force of fate. In the fictional
world of TheMusic of Chance,the role of fate as the principle gov-
erning human life is taken over by money. Money, like fate, be-
comes an impersonal power, amoral, ruthless, and inexorable. It
determines the lives of those who have it and, even more so, the
lives of those who do not.
In Greek tragedy, fate does not operate to punish the wicked and
reward the just: at the end of the tragic action, suffering and calam-
ity befall the guilty and the innocent alike.8 Fate is stronger than

8. This is the original, Aristotlean view of tragedy, which Krook endows with a Chris-
tian overlay by introducing the notion of a universally binding and objective moral order.
Aristotle does not associate fate with morality; Krook does.
 S H I L0 H 503

the gods and stronger than humans, whose struggle against it is

inevitably futile. This notion is most eloquently epitomized by the
chorus in Seneca's Oedipus:
a man's life is a pattern on the floor like a maze
it's all fixed he wanders in the pattern
no prayer can alter it
or help him to escape it nothing

then fear can be the end of him

a man's fear of his fate is often his fate
leaping to avoid it he meets it.
(52-53)

The lament over Oedipus's destiny reverberates in the initial de-

scription of Nashe: because he has already given up, without the
slightest tremor of fear, he closes his eyes and jumps. Leaping to
avoid it, he meets it. For at the end of the novel, Nashe is in exactly
the same place where he was at the beginning: on the road, behind
the wheel of the red Saab, closing his eyes. Closing his eyes, this
time, to the glare of the headlights of an oncoming car. The circular-
ity of the narrative, whose calamitous end is already contained in
its beginning, the sequence of events that follows the structural
stages of a tragic fable, and the characterof the main protagonist-
all these elements cast TheMusic of Chancein the mold of a Greek
tragedy. This structural and thematic context is highlighted by the
conspicuously allegorical depiction of the two millionaires, who
are presented as omnipotent, malevolent, and unpredictable dei-
ties.
The gods in Greek tragedy, suggests Frye, exist primarily to rat-
ify fate's abstract power (208). In the fictional world of TheMusic
of Chance,the millionaires are metaphorically presented as gods,
and the power they ratify is the power of money. The association
of Flower and Stone with forces of a ruthless destiny is already
announced as Nashe and Pozzi are making their way to the mil-
lionaires' mansion. In spite of the specific landmarks Pozzi was
given, they get lost, and "[a]fter a while, it began to feel as if they
were traveling through a maze" (64). The evocation of the laby-
rinth, the Greek trope for fate, is followed by an almost parodic
allusion to Beethoven's Fifth Symphony, known as the "Destiny"
Symphony, with whose opening notes chimes the doorbell of the
 504 - C O N T EM P O RA RY LI T E RA T U R E

millionaires' abode. The nature of the specific destiny represented

by Flower and Stone is suggested by the pieces of broken statuary
decorating the entrance hall: "a naked wood nymph missing her
right arm, a headless hunter, a horse with no legs that floated above
a stone plinth with an iron shaft connected to its belly" (68). The
mutilated objects, whose sequence suggests the direction of
Nashe's gaze, appear in a mounting gamut of senseless cruelty,
metaphorically foreshadowing the direction Nashe's and Pozzi's
lives will take on these premises.
Flower and Stone act as gods and see themselves as gods. "Bill
has the Midas touch," explains Stone to his guests, and Flower
modestly admits, "at times I feel that we've become immortal" (75).
Stone's divinity is even more forcefully suggested, on both the mi-
metic and allegorical planes. He is the one who acts out the million-
aires' omnipotence and lawlessness by suggesting the manual erec-
tion of the wall, which condemns Nashe and Pozzi to slavery. He
is also the one who has created a world-the City of the World, a
miniature rendering of a city. When Nashe sees the model for the
first time, he feels that its overriding mood is one of terror, as if
this were a city "struggling to mend its ways before ... the arrival
of a murderous, avenging God" (96).
The millionaires' divinity is further suggested through oblique
reference to Samuel Beckett's Waitingfor Godotand Franz Kafka's
The Castle.9Pozzi's name blends the names of the two secondary
figures in Beckett's play, Lucky and Pozzo, and indeed Pozzi
evokes both these characters:his living off luck is associated with
Lucky's name; like Lucky leading his master to an unknown desti-
nation, Pozzi leads Nashe to the castle; like Lucky, he will also be
victimized by the man in power. The novel's narrative framework
and its metaphysical implications likewise evoke Beckett's work.
Both TheMusic of Chance(in its first section) and Waitingfor Godot
are set on the road and offer contemporary variations on the para-
digm of the road story. In Beckett's play, the passage of time is
cyclical and brings no progress; the entire action consists of wait-
ing. Nashe and Pozzi do make progress while they are on the road,
but once they start slaving on the erection of the wall, their exis-

9. For a comparison with Beckett, see Saltzman (71-72).

 S H I L0 H 505

tence is also reduced to waiting. Whereas Beckett's duo seems to

be waiting for the arrival of some spiritual power, Nashe and Pozzi
toil in the service of Midas. Their lot is harsher and more devasta-
ting than that of Beckett's protagonists, who are allowed to cling
to their illusion and their hope. But at the end of The Music of
Chance,no hope is left. And this is the most significant implication
of the reference to Beckett-the evocation of a world stripped of
a transcendental dimension, in which God is absent, nonexistent,
or deposed by the power of money.
Kafka's The Castle, a novel often regarded as a parable of the
inaccessibility of divine grace, constitutes another intertextual ref-
erence suggesting that Flower and Stone are allegorically cast in the
role of fate. The millionaires' mansion conjures up Kafka's castle in
its combined air of evil and of childish banality: while the broken
statuary at the entrance suggests senseless cruelty, the meal to
which Nashe and Pozzi are invited "turn[s] out to be no more than
a kiddie banquet, a dinner fit for six-year-olds" (88). This unsettling
combination of madness and childishness also marks K's initial
perception of the Castle, glittering in the sun with "a somewhat
maniacal glitter . . . with battlements that were irregular, broken,
fumbling, as if designed by the trembling or careless hand of a
child" (19-20).
More significantly, Flower and Stone evoke the inhabitants of the
Castle in their remoteness and their unpredictability. As in Kafka's
world, on the millionaires' premises, the rules keep changing. Once
Nashe and Pozzi start working on the wall, the millionaires disap-
pear from sight; contact with them can only be established through
their emissary, Murks, the sinister double of Kafka's Barnabas.
They also alter the terms of the agreement, which undermines
Nashe's faith in the moral justification of his ordeal. Within the
framework of the tragic fable, Nashe's loss of faith triggers his sug-
gestion that Pozzi escape, a suggestion that brings about the ulti-
mate catastrophe. In terms of the symbolic frame of reference,
Flower's and Stone's inaccessibility, their unlimited power, and the
constantly shifting nature of the rules they have set up evoke a
world governed by an absent God, malevolent, cruel, and unpre-
dictable.
The source of Flower's and Stone's divinity is money. They used
 506 - C O N T EM P O RA RY LI T E RA T U R E

to be family men, in Pozzi's words, "[r]eal ordinary middle-class

guys" (32), until they won twenty million dollars in the lottery with
a ticket they'd jointly purchased. They retired from their respective
occupations-Flower as an accountant and Stone as an optome-
trist-bought a mansion to which they moved together, and started
to use their sudden windfall to make even more money. They were
extraordinarily successful at that, as Flower proudly explains:
No matter what we do, everything seems to turn out right.... It's as
though God has singled us out from men. He's showered us with good
fortune and lifted us to the heights of happiness. I know this might sound
presumptuous to you, but at times I feel that we've become immortal.
(75)

Money does not have an intrinsic value. It is a signifier, acquiring

its value from the commodities to which it refers-gold, labor,
other currencies-and from the commodities it can buy. But for
Flower, the signifier has usurped the status of the signified. His
perspective is not fundamentally different from Nashe's; in effect,
it takes Nashe's conviction to its radical conclusion. Nashe believes
that money can buy freedom and that the protection of one's for-
tune is morally justified. In other words, he does not think that the
material order is identical to the ethical order, only that the first
represents the latter, that the two are linked in a relationship of
signification. Money, for Nashe, is a signifier whose signifieds are
freedom and merit. Flower has taken Nashe's reasoning one step
further. In his world-view, the material order has superseded the
ethical order; money has been elevated from the status of signifier
to that of a signified. Money is not only fortune but goodfortune;
it does not just buy happiness but is happiness; it is not the sign
of God's grace but its manifest operation.
The transformation of money from signifier to signified is one
of the hallmarks of the capitalist ethos. The most radical representa-
tives of that ethos in TheMusic of Chanceare Flower and Stone, but
it is professed as well by the other main characters-Murks, Floyd,
Pozzi, and Nashe. Its most distinctive features are metaphorically
conveyed through the hobbies of the two millionaires-Stone's
miniature model of a city and Flower's collection of historical mem-
orabilia. Flower's collection exhibits the talent he is most proud
 S H I L0 H 507

of-his ability to make money out of money, that is, to create a

closed system of proliferating signifiers, which have acquired the
status of signifieds. The trivia he ebulliently displays to his
guests-Wilson's telephone, Fermi's pencil, Churchill's cigar-are
a small-scale manifestation of such a system, "a graveyard of shad-
ows, a demented shrine to the spirit of nothingness" (84).
Flower used to be an accountant;his museum reflects his procliv-
ity to quantify reality and to reduce everything to matter. The col-
lection is an accurate representation of his mental world, in which
money is deified, numbers are personified, and human beings are
reified. He perceives the possession of money and the talent for
making money as signs of a divine stature; he personifies figures
but dehumanizes human beings. As an accountant, Flower ex-
plains to Nashe and Pozzi, he has dealt with numbers all his life,
and after a while he began to think that each number has a person-
ality of its own. "Numbers have souls," he elaborates, "and you
can't help but get involved with them in a personal way" (73). In
an ironical symmetry, the moment Pozzi and Nashe start owing
him money, Flower can't help but get involved with them in an
impersonal way. They become for him (as Pozzi was for Nashe),
mere ciphers, opportunities in the shape of human beings.
Stone's hobby is an even more awesome symbolic representation
of the American ethos. He has constructed a miniature-scale model
of a city, which Flower displays to their guests with the pride of
an overbearing father (weaving another thread into the motif of
warped fatherhood):
"Willie's city is more than just a toy," Flower said, "it's an artistic vision
of mankind. In one way, it's an autobiography, but in another way, it's
what you might call a utopia-a place where the past and future come
together, where good finally triumphs over evil.... Look at the Hall of
Justice, the Library, the Bank, and the Prison. Willie calls them the Four
Realms of Togetherness, and each one plays a vital role in maintaining
the harmony of the city. If you look at the Prison, you'll see that all the
prisoners are working happily at various tasks, that they all have smiles
on their faces. That's because they are glad they've been punished for
their crimes, and now they are learning how to recover the goodness
within them through hard work.
(79-80)
 508 ? C O N T EM P O RA RY LI T E RA T U R E

Flower's presentation of Stone's model parodically conflates cap-

italist and Puritan rhetoric with George Orwell's "new-speak." If
his own collection of historical trivia mainly evokes commodifica-
tion, a central feature of capitalism, Stone's City of the World in-
corporates Puritan and totalitarian motifs as well. As Tim Woods
correctly observes, the ideological rationalization of venture capi-
talism is rooted in the Puritan ethos, which preaches freedom, self-
determination, and independence. This is the ideology that informs
Nashe's life on the road in the first section of the novel. The same
ideology motivates the toy prisoners in Stone's utopian model,
who are working happily, with smiles on their faces, apparently
sharing the belief harbored by Nashe when he comes to erect the
wall, namely, that work sets one free.?1In Stone's model, "The Four
Realms of Togetherness," evocative of the four Ministries of Or-
well's Oceania, inculcate in the prisoners the Protestant ethic,
which regards work as evidence of being saved. The City of the
World eventually evokes an Orwellian dystopia, in which hard la-
bor is promulgated as morally beneficial, exploitation is masked as
liberation, and the state controls and regulates all aspects of human
life.1
As mentioned earlier, Nashe perceives the City of the World as
a place awaiting the punishment of "a murderous, avenging God."
This vengeful deity conflates the notions of a rigid, Protestant God,
of Midas, and of the two millionaires who have been consistently
likened to gods. The allegorical import of this composite image
evokes big money (Midas, Flower, and Stone) exercising the ruth-
less and inexorable power of fate. But if this symbolic representa-
tion of venture capital apparently substantiates the tragic frame-
work, suggesting that money is a larger-than-life force regulating

10. In the second month of their hard toil, Nashe feels that "[a]s long as they kept
on working, the work was going to make them free" (147). The wording here ironically
evokes the slogan "Arbeit macht frei," inscribed on the entrance gate to Auschwitz, and
provides an instance of the way in which the ideologies conceptualized in the model
are reproduced in the meadow.
11. Another possible intertextual reference is to Edward Albee's Tiny Alice (1966),
which features a miniature-scale model of the play's fictional space, a model functioning
as an instance of infinite regression. Albee's play is thematically relevant in that it deals
with the motifs of big money and of the relationship between representation and reality.
 SHILOH ? 509

human existence, money is also associated with another element

that subverts the tragic mode-chance.
In the novel's fictional world, money is never earned. It is always
won, acquired either by accident or by manipulation and swin-
dling. Nashe's inheritance, which generates the entire plot, is a sud-
den windfall. That fortune did not result from his father's work at
his hardware store, but from his speculation on the stock market.
Pozzi's father also showered him with occasional gifts of money,
although of a more modest size; their source was not hard work,
either, but a petty financial scam. Nashe quits his job once he comes
into money, as do Flower and Stone; Pozzi has (almost) never
worked, relying on luck and his gambling skills. Flower and Stone
won their fortune in the lottery, and they came into Nashe's ten
thousand dollars through a poker game. The only time in the novel
when money is earned through work-when Nashe and Pozzi
erect the wall-this labor turns into a cruel and senseless slavery.
Money is thus associated both with chance and with fate; it is the
leitmotif that links the novel's picaresque and tragic perspectives. It
is associated with chance in that its acquisition is accidental and its
possession reflects neither merit nor justice. All the main characters
come into money by luck and lose it through misfortune (except
for Nashe, who deliberately rids himself of his possessions); it
circulates blindly and is bestowed randomly. But money is also
associated with fate, evoking the world-view that informs classic
tragedy. The notion of fate implies direction, necessity, and
predictability: "it's all fixed," chants the chorus in the final act of
Oedipus.In TheMusic of Chance,money is fate to the extent that it
determines Nashe's life, so that, like Oedipus, leaping to avoid it,
Nashe meets it. It is the power that drives him to seek his freedom
on the road and the power that will deprive him of his freedom.
The representatives of this power are the two millionaires, petty,
eccentric, and ruthless, exerting absolute control over their victims'
lives.
It is Pozzi, the typical picaroliving off gambling and luck, who
voices a belief consistent with the perspective of classic tragedy.
When he discovers that in the middle of the poker game Nashe
went off and stole the figures of Flower and Stone from the city
model, he bitterly remonstrates:
 510 * C O N T E M P O RA RY LI T E RA T U R E

I can't believe what a mistake that was. No class, Jim, an amateurish stunt.
It's like committing a sin to do a thing like that, it's like violating a funda-
mental law. We had everything in harmony. We'd come to the point
where everything was turning into music for us, and then you have to
go upstairs and smash all the instruments. You tampered with the uni-
verse, my friend, and once a man does that, he's got to pay the price. I'm
just sorry I have to pay it with you.
(138)

Pozzi's indignant protest against Nashe's theft of the toy figures

evokes the image of the music of chance, the novel's title and its
thematic and structural core. Music is associated with harmony,
which implies symmetry, balance, an underlying order; chance im-
plies the opposite notions. The belief in harmony is the underpin-
ning of classical tragedy, which reaffirms cosmic balance and reas-
serts an objective moral order, simultaneously incorporating the
human realm and transcending it. The celebration of chance is the
underpinning of the picaresque mode, which contests the existence
of a transcendent order and revels in the freedom implied by the
contingency governing human order.12The Music of Chance is a road
story which gradually acquires the dimensions and depth of a
Greek tragedy. It is also a Greek tragedy which becomes frag-
mented and divested of its grandeur through the inclusion of ele-
ments belonging to the road story and to the philosophy of the
absurd.13
The novel's tragic substructure is subverted in several ways. For
one, the pattern of the tragic action is not completed. The two prin-
cipal tragic events, Pozzi's and Nashe's deaths, are only presumed
to have happened. Pozzi is severely beaten and is taken away by

12. For discussions of the notions of music and of chance, see Grandjeat (153-54),
Herzogenrath (207), Little (4), and Saltzman (70).
13. Auster's conflation of two seemingly incompatible genres, picaresque and tragedy,
is in line with the tendency of postmoderist writing to blur generic categories, a ten-
dency that may be accounted for by the wish to unfix boundaries that conceal domination
or authority (see, among others, Cohen; Derrida, "Law"; and Todorov). I believe, how-
ever, that Auster borrows postmoder practices in the same way that he uses the conven-
tions of detective fiction, "as a way to get somewhere else entirely" ("Interview" 303).
In other words, the blurring of generic conventions and postmodern ontology in The
Music of Chance are the means Auster found most effective for enhancing the novel's
themes.
 S H I L OH 511

Murks and Floyd, who promise to hospitalize him. Nashe assumes

they haven't done so; he believes Pozzi is dead. Nashe's own death
is not certain either. At the end of the novel, Nashe drives the red
Saab again, listening to music, with Murks and Floyd in the car.
He accelerates; Murks protests and turns the radio down; Nashe
takes his eyes off the road and tells the foreman to mind his own
business. When he looks at the road again, he is facing an oncoming
car. There is no time to stop, and he presses down on the gas, shut-
ting his eyes seconds before the inevitable collision.
The end, like the entire novel, is conveyed from Nashe's center
of consciousness. The reader understands that he welcomes death
and that he feels these are the last moments of his life. That is also
the logic of events: the entire narrative sequence, which follows the
stages of the tragic fable, builds up to the final catastrophe:the death
of the tragic hero. Still, the end remains open: even though Nashe
is convinced that the accident is unavoidable, this need not be so.14
If the novel does not have a tragic closure, neither does it pro-
duce the tragic effect, the catharsis of pity and fear. The final re-
sponse to tragedy, according to Aristotle, is a sense of liberation.
We acknowledge the hero's suffering as necessary and expiatory;
rather than being crushed by the hopelessness of the human condi-
tion, we are liberated from pain and fear and feel elated by a specta-
cle reaffirming human dignity. But at the end of The Music of
Chance,we seem to be left only with pity and fear. There is no
catharsis. This is because the picaresque and absurd world-views
evoked through the intertextual references undermine the tacit as-
sumptions of classical tragedy. In a world devoid of a transcendent
dimension, the hero's suffering is neither necessary nor expiatory.
It serves only to reaffirm the brutal, dehumanizing, and ultimately
banal order of money.
Banality is another element that undermines the novel's tragic
perspective-the banality of evil, to borrow Hannah Arendt's
phrase. Tragedy evokes a sense of grandeur-the greatness of the

14. This possibility is explored in the cinematic version of The Music of Chance,where
at the end of the film Nashe, who survived the accident, hitchhikes by the side of the
road, mirroring Pozzi in the opening sequence. The final scene thus foregrounds the
circularity of the story but subverts its tragic aspect.
 512 * C O N T EM P O RA RY LI T E RA T U R E

tragic hero, the awesome stature of the fate that he is pitted against.
But in TheMusic of Chance,the sinister is intermixed with the banal.
Flower and Stone are both malevolent gods and ordinary, middle-
class guys, omnipotent and cunning yet petty and infantile. Their
infantilism may be seen in their ridiculous dinner, "a kiddie ban-
quet fit for six-year-olds"; in Flower's senseless collection of trivia;
and in the wall, its stones strewn on the meadow "like a set of
children's blocks," which Nashe and Pozzi have to cart in the same
kind of children's wagon that Nashe bought for Juliette on her third
birthday.
The combination of mythologized evil with childishness and
triviality functions on several levels. It subverts the tragic perspec-
tive, suggesting that the power that set Nashe on the road, seducing
him with the pledge of freedom, the power for which he forsook
his daughter and betrayed his symbolic son, is not only malevolent
but also inane. If we experience the lot of the tragic hero as the
essence of the human condition, then this condition, conveyed by
Nashe's ordeal, is an entrapment between brutality and stupidity.
An additional effect is a sense of disorientation, which the reader
comes to share with Nashe: are the millionaires infantile, or is their
dullness a deliberate facade, calculated to lull their victims? Both
readings are supported equally by the text, especially since banality
and evil are not mutually exclusive. Banality does not cancel out
evil; it only makes it more depressing.
This is another reason why the novel's final effect is not a cathar-
sis of pity and fear. But the tragic framework is invalidated not
only by the lack of dramatic closure, by the triviality of the forces
associated with fate, and by the absence of the properly tragic ef-
fect. It is ultimately subverted by a sense of progressive disorienta-
tion, reverberating from the fictional to the extratextual space. In
the fictional space, the disorientation mainly results from the fluid-
ity and proliferation of signifiers, and from the obliteration of the
distinctions between representation and reality. Some signifiers,
such as chance, imperceptibly slide from one meaning to its oppo-
site; others, such as money, change their status from signifiers to
signifieds.15The novel also abounds with empty signifiers, appar-

15. For a detailed discussion of the relationship between money and language as sys-
tems of signification, see Birat.
 S H I L0 H 513

ently laden with meaning but ultimately pointing to nothing at all.

An example of this is the conspicuous recurrence of the "magic"
number seven, which mysteriously invades all the characters'lives,
creating an intricate web of signifiers without signifieds.16
Another such floating signifier is the image of the hole in the
wall, whose status in the ontology of the fictional world is ex-
tremely fluid. "The Hole in the Wall" was the name of Butch Cassi-
dy's gang; the allusion is another one of Auster's ironical stabs at
the American ethos. At the beginning of the novel, Pozzi tells
Nashe he doesn't know him from a hole in the wall, and Nashe
perceives Pozzi as a hole in the wall, an instrument for getting his
money back; Pozzi's father presumably escaped from a prison
camp through a hole in the wall, just as his son attempts to escape
from the millionaires' premises, with tragic effects. The hole in the
wall is thus a figure of speech and a metaphor literalized, a histori-
cal allusion and an element of the fictional space.
The same indeterminacy and multiplicity characterizes the cen-
tral image of the wall. In Auster's play "Laurel and Hardy Go to
Heaven," Hardy, one of the two wall-builders, reflects:
When I think of the wall, it's as if I were going beyond what I can think.
It's so big, so much bigger than anything else. (Pause). And yet, in itself
... in itself ... it's just a wall. A wall can be many things, can't it? It can
keep in or keep out. It can protect or destroy. It can help things ... or
make them worse. It can be part of something greater ... or only what
it is. Do you see what I mean? It all depends on how you look at it.
(Hand 149)17

Hardy's observation offers a metafictional comment on the func-

tion and possible meanings of the wall in the later novel, and on
the interpretive process which gives access to those meanings. A
wall can be a solid object, opaque and inscrutable; but it may also

16. Nashe became a firefighterseven years before the poker game; the players who
beat Pozzi had been winning steadily for seven years until he came along; Nashe and
Pozzi stay on the seventh floor of the Plaza;Flower and Stone used to have a friendly
poker game at seven o'clock every fortnight;they won the lottery seven years ago; in
the finalpokergame, Flowerdraws a seven cardand beats Pozzi. Forfurtherdiscussion
of the significance(and insignificance)of the numberseven, see Barone(7) and Dotan
(164).
17. The wall also figures prominentlyin MauriceBlanchot'sstory "The Idyll," in-
cluded in the collection ViciousCircles(1985),which was translatedby Auster.
 514 ? C O N T EM P O RA RY LI T E RA T U R E

become a signifier, with multiple and contradictory signifieds.

When Pozzi expounds to Nashe his gambling philosophy, he em-
phasizes, "The important thing [is] to remain inscrutable, to build
a wall around yourself and not let anyone in" (63). His remark
reverberates backward and forward in the novel's chronology-
backward to Nashe's earlier attempt to follow Pink Floyd's precept
in their album TheWalland become "comfortablynumb"; forward
to the millionaires' gambling technique, which will successfully
mirror Pozzi's strategy and bring about his downfall.18Later on,
Nashe's reflection upon realizing that the meadow is surrounded
by a barbed-wire fence (a variation on the notion of the wall) con-
spicuously echoes Hardy's observation: "The barrier had been
erected to keep things out, but now that it was there, what was to
prevent it from keeping things in as well?" (126). And when he
listens to his favorite musical piece, Couperin's "The Mysterious
Barricades,"he thinks, "As far as he was concerned, the barricades
stood for the wall he was building in the meadow, but that was
quite another thing from knowing what they meant" (181).
Like the "magic" number seven and like the hole in the wall, the
wall itself is a signifier whose signifieds cannot be circumscribed
or finally determined. It is an extraordinarily fecund symbol, but
also a dramatic element of the fictional world; "so big," in Hardy's
words, "and yet, . . . in itself, it's just a wall." The proliferation of
shifting signifiers, of figures of speech that occasionally literalize,
and of endlessly reverberating correspondences makes up a fic-
tional world whose ontology is structured like "a Chinese box, an
infinite series of containers within containers," to use Auster's fa-
vorite metaphor (Invention 117).19This ontology is symbolically
portrayed in the City of the World, in which Stone plans to recon-

18. Pink Floyd's The Wall was released in 1979, became a cult event, and was made
into a movie. Its twenty-six songs make up a complex musical and poetic whole, in which
the wall signifies the hero's attempt to achieve emotional impenetrability. Whether or
not Auster was familiar with the album-and he probably was-Pink Floyd's wall is
the same metaphorical barrier that Nashe and later Pozzi and the millionaires try to erect
around themselves.
19. The Chinese box is one of Auster's favorite metaphors for the nature of reality,
recurring in many of his novels. Interestingly, in the film Lulu on the Bridge,which Auster
scripted and directed, he literalizes the metaphor as the protagonist unwraps the miracu-
lous stone, concealed inside a series of wrappers within wrappers.
 S H I L0 H *515

struct the mansion with its premises and with the room housing
the model, thereby transforming the miniature-scale city into a
specter of infinite regress. The City of the World thus represents
the structure of the (fictional) world in which it is embedded; but
it is not just a representation. Nashe's and Pozzi's erection of the
wall reenacts the principles of totalitarian capitalism which inform
the miniature construction, so that, as Woods accurately observes,
the ideologies that are theorized and conceptualized in the model
are reproduced practically in the meadow (153).
This spilling over of representation (in the fictional world) into
the reality of that world is further accentuated by Nashe's dizzying
vision of himself as a pawn in Stone's model, and by his hallucina-
tion that by carrying the stones of the wall he is carrying Stone
himself (178). The novel's ontological horizon is further destabi-
lized by the illusory aspect of the fictional reality: the millionaires'
mansion looks like a movie set, and their dinner is a parody of
children's commercials. This is the realization of Baudrillard's no-
tion of simulacrum-a simulation which does not refer back to re-
ality but which generates its own models, a simulation which has
become a hyperreality.20The (doubly) fictional world inhabited by
the millionaires-fictional in the sense that it forms a part of a work
of fiction, and that in this work it is also exposed as fictional-
is such a hyperreality, in that it generates models by which the
protagonists, as well as the reader, interpret reality.
TheMusic of Chancebegins as a classic American road story and
imperceptibly shifts into the mold of a Greek tragedy. These two
incompatible modes are thematically interlaced by the motifs of
chance and determinism, fatherhood, freedom, and money, which
are constructed and deconstructed in the context of individual life
and that of the national American ethos. The tragic substructure
divests the road story of its carnivalesque elements; the picaresque
framework strips the tragedy of its grandeur. The two perspectives
implode, destabilizing the ontology of the fictional world, which
is further undermined by the proliferation of signifiers, the literali-
zation of metaphors, and the interpenetration of representation and
reality. Representation embedded in the fictional world topples

20. See Baudrillard, Simulacres (10) and America (28).

 516 ? C O N T EM P O RA RY LI T E RA T U RE

onto that world and further reverberates to the extratextual world,

turning TheMusic of Chanceinto Auster's most incisive and most
poignant criticism of the American ethos. For, as Nashe realizes
looking at the City of the World, "It's an imaginary place, but it's
also realistic."
Tel-Aviv University

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