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.The inference of identity andtotality that is constitutive of metaphor is lacking in the purelyrelational metonymic contact: an element of truth is involved intaking Achilles for a lion but none in taking Mr.Ford for a motorcar.(14; quotation from Proust 13)The music of chance, title of another Auster novel, runs through all of thewriter s works and Auster s predilection for metonymy over metaphor isincontrovertible.And yet, I would argue, it is not irreversible.For in Austerthere is chance and there is chance.One evinces the radical contingency ofthe Ford motorcar; the other is rooted in a quest for an element of truth and is akin to what the Surrealists termed le hasard objectif, objective ornecessary chance.When the it happened this way is transformed into the ithad to happen this way, when the contingent is turned into the necessary,we have moved from the world of metonymy to that of metaphor, with its inference of identity and totality. When, one might ask, does that occur? Lacan says that it happens inlove or that love makes it happen:All love, existing on but ceases not to be written [Lacan s formula forthe contingent], tends to shift the negation to does not cease to bewritten [his definition of the necessary], does not cease, will notcease.(Séminaire XX 132)In a necessary, necessarily metonymic move, love displaces the not ofcontingency, makes it be not.Negating the iron law of contingency, it opensup the realm of metaphor and meaning; it takes two arbitrary points on a lineand makes them into a circle, makes them make a circle.When, one might ask, does that occur in Auster, in Leviathan? As inLacan, it happens in and because of love.For the story of Sachs is not theonly one in the novel.There is also the narrative of the narrator, PeterAaron, drawn from the life story of Paul Auster.Sachs s life ends in tragedy;Aaron s reads like a fairy tale.After a number of trials and tribulations, hemeets the woman of his dreams and lives happily ever after.The encounterwith Iris Auster s wife s name spelled backwards leads to love, which, inturn, transforms the contingent into the necessary, the tragic into thecomedic.Aaron s fairy tale follows the appropriate paradigm, the U-shaped 210Linda L.Fleckpattern that recurs in literature as the standard shape of comedy (Frye,Great Code 169).Sachs s, on the other hand, does not.Sachs s emergencefrom the dark wood ends in murder rather than marriage, and his entire talecorresponds to the inverted-U structure of tragedy, including the fall of thetragic hero from the top of the wheel of fortune (Frye, Anatomy 206),which, in Leviathan, takes the form of a literal fall on July 4, 1986, thecentennial of the Statue of Liberty.The sudden plummet from a fire escape, the moment of dizziness,when the wheel of fortune begins its inevitable cyclical movementdownward (Anatomy 213), occurs in the third and central chapter of thenovel.The first had portrayed Sachs at the height of his powers, happilymarried to Fanny, writing easily and quickly as if he had found a secretpassageway that ran straight from his head to the tips of his fingers (54).The second related the ascension narrative of Aaron and its intersection withthe story of Sachs.For it is thanks to an affair with Sachs s wife Fanny thatAaron learns that he is capable of love: If not for her, I never would havebeen in a position to meet Iris, and from then on my life would havedeveloped in an altogether different way (98).As for their actual encounter,it takes place at an exhibition, hence, in Aaron s view, under [the] influence of the artist Maria Turner, of Maria as the reigning spirit of chance (113).The two adjuvants in Aaron s tale will become agents of catastrophe inSachs s.Maria will be present on the fire escape when Sachs plunges fourstories to the ground, saved from almost certain death by a clothesline thatbreaks his fall.Subsequent to the murder of Dimaggio, Fanny too willassume the role of unwitting agent of catastrophe.Realizing that he neededto talk to someone about the disaster on the Vermont dirt road, Sachs knewthat person had to be Fanny (174).Though he and his wife had beenseparated for a time, Sachs did not expect to find Fanny in bed with anotherman.Stunned, he beats a hasty retreat and turns instead to Maria who, unlikeFanny, happens to know Dimaggio, the one fact powerful enough to turn anugly misfortune into a full-scale tragedy (179).The division of the text into five parts or acts certainly conforms tothe structure of a full-scale tragedy
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