Abstract
This paper analyzes the formation of identities in the simulacrum through an examination of Paul Auster’s novel Timbuktu. Drawing on Baudrillard’s theory of hyperreality and simulation, the essay explores how identity becomes a commodity purchased within postmodern consumer culture. The paper investigates the Americanization process of the protagonist Willy, his transmission into a self-constructed simulation, and the imposition of identity upon the powerless as embodied by his dog Mr. Bones.
Keywords: simulacrum, hyperreality, identity, postmodernism, Paul Auster, Baudrillard, Timbuktu
Introduction
As the present hyperreal condition of the conjectural postmodern world “threatens the difference between the ‘true’ and the ‘false’, the ‘real’ and the ‘imaginary’” (Baudrillard 1994: 3), the sense of senselessness shapes the society and the individual. In this postmodern world, images and signs proliferate to the point where previous distinctions between illusion and reality, signifier and signified, subject and object collapse, and there is no longer any social or real world of which to speak, only a semiotically self-referring ‘hyperreality’.
The term “identity,” which signifies “individuality,” loses its meaning in the hyperreal. Since a simulacrum of the world is formed through the personal preferences of people, each person will believe in something different and therefore nothing will be regarded as fact or real. Identity becomes an adornment which is chosen to be worn or taken off. In the postmodernist understanding, cultural consumption equals the means of constructing an identity. As Hugh Mackay paraphrases Baudrillard’s statement: “We become what we consume.”
Willy’s Americanization and Identity in the Simulacrum
In Timbuktu, Willy, being a child of a Polish immigrant family, had a hard time passing himself as an American with his thick curly hair. His mother used to try to make his curls straighten with “the O’Dell’s Hair Trainer” so that he would look like an American. Willy’s main concern for a long time “was to convince himself that his mother and father were not his real parents.” As Baudrillard states, “to simulate is to feign to have what one does not have.” Willy tried to simulate being an American, but his appearance and parents prevented him from establishing his wish.
After living in the simulacra for so long, when Willy understands the unreality of life, he has to find the “key to the puzzle, the secret formula” that would lead him to an understanding of his life. He knows that all the labels dancing in his mind can be regarded as “American know-how for you. It keeps coming at you, and every minute there’s new junk to push out the old junk.”
Simulacrum is indefeasible for Willy. In his youth, he had tried to escape from everything through drugs, then one day a vision on TV enabled his transmission into his own simulacrum. In his vision where he saw Santa Clause talking to him through the TV set, he understood that Christmas was real and that from then on his mission would be “to embody the message of Christmas every day of the year, to ask nothing from the world and give it only love in return.” Willy creates the meaning and aim in his life through his TV vision, thereby creating his own simulacra within the simulacrum of TV and shaping his identity similar to the simulated hero figure, Santa Clause, he watches on the screen.
Having decided to turn himself into a saint, Willy rushes off to get his last name changed to Willy Christmas and to have himself tattooed with a picture of Santa Clause. However, the identity of Santa Clause Willy chooses turns out to destroy him since the hard times on the street wear off his health and he grows very sick.
Mr. Bones and the Imposition of Identity
Similarly, Willy’s dog, Mr. Bones, changes identity as a result of a dream vision. Mr. Bones is incapable of either creating any alternative worlds or choosing any identities, since he is devoid of the power to speak, to write and to purchase. The children who have the power to feed Mr. Bones force him into a different identity and into different simulacrums.
First, Mr. Bones meets a small Chinese boy Henry who names him Cal, after a baseball player Henry watches on TV. “It was hardly strange that the dog wasn’t always certain about who he was anymore or what he was supposed to be.” Mr. Bones, himself, is starting to lose his own identity and reality—not because he is choosing a simulacra to exist within, but because he is being pulled into a simulacra of the little boy Henry who has the power/money to manage him.
Mr. Bones’ leaving Henry and the city does not enable his escape from the danger of identities being imposed on him, because very soon he willingly surrenders into the suburban conformance of the Joneses. He is immediately appointed another identity when the little kids of the family call him Sparky. His complacency and illusion of security in the Joneses household robs him first of his identity and then of his sex when the family gets him castrated.
Conclusion
Paul Auster constructs an imaginary world where the imaginary characters Willy and Mr. Bones are nothing but the creations of the simulacra. In the novel, Auster questions the illusion of being an individual and having a unique identity in a world controlled by the producers. Only one thing enables a person to achieve a high class identity created by the producers: it is power and money. Even though those who have the power to purchase are limited within the range of products created by the producers, they consider themselves to be free and independent beings, in control of their lives. However, the only difference they have from those who lack the power to purchase is that they can pick an identity from the ones presented to them, instead of being imposed to wear one. Auster presents to his reader his own simulacrum, of what could happen to a person when s/he does not possess this power to consume.