The Intertextual Poetics of Paul Auster’s 4321: A Dialogue Between Writers and Filmmakers

The intertextual poetics of the novel “4321” (2017) by P. Auster (1947—2024) is considered. “4321” is the last great novel of the American classicist, which consistently reveals the writer’s interest in dialogue with literary predecessors, but to no lesser extent with filmmakers: classics and contemporaries. The article shows that this dialogue between literature and cinema is built around the metaphor of “forking paths” proposed by J.L. Borges and then actively adopted in the culture of the second half of the 20th and early 21st centuries. Forking paths are always variations. On the one hand, this is the principle according to which the novel’s narrative is organized: in it, alternative versions of the development of events are presented one after another. This narrative form brings P. Auster closer to the Polish Director K. Kieslowski (1941—1996), whose films he was inspired by. At the same time, the forking paths manifest themselves in the way the author varies the characters, in the use of genre conventions, in the correlation of different events with each other. Such variations allow us to reflect on what just might have happened to the protagonist, but what did not actually happen to him. Thus, they allow us to shift the emphasis from the “realized” to the “unrealized” and “unfulfilled”. It is noted that in his refraction of the idea of forking paths, Auster inevitably enters into a dialogue with other writers and directors — his predecessors and contemporaries who reflected on similar themes (R. Frost, H. Cortázar, J.-L. Godard, M. Antonioni). He borrows narrative principles, techniques and the effects they create, but he invents much himself, turning his novel into a dense intertextual network within which the reader will have to find his way, and this reader’s movement will also resemble a journey through “The Garden of Forking Paths”. The present study expands our understanding of the problem of the intertext of the contemporary novel in the context of the dialogicality of literature and cinema.

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