The Fasnacht Fold Notes on Heide Fasnacht’s “New Frontier”

Paul Auster’s novel In the Country of Last Things is a diary of survival in a desperate postapocalyptic (putative) Manhattan1 . To survive in the city Anna Blume, the young narrator, becomes an Object Hunter, collecting and combining impossible and unidentifiable fragments to produce something else, new forms of being. She isn’t simply a rescuer or a recycler, but a re-inventor. Demiurge uses malleable clay; Anna has the harder task of working with the incoherence, inconsistency and heterogeneity of the debris of a vanishing society, to turn an ‘agglomeration of matter [that] cannot be identified [and] has no place’ into new ‘archipelagoes of matter’ in which ‘islands of intactness’ are ‘joined to other such islands’. In a way, Anna is memory: she preserves the intactness of the given fragment, she keeps things alive by changing them, she moves between times beyond her grim present, she produces continuity out of fragments by trans-forming them. Yet, time remains still here, in a hopelessly recursive afterlife. The only temporal event that shifts the temporality of the novel is Anna’s ultimate transgression in her demiurgic role: she becomes pregnant and gives birth, in a world where human reproduction has otherwise ceased.