MASARYK UNIVERSITY
FACULTY OF EDUCATION Department of English Language and Literature The Role of Solitude in Paul Auster’s Prose
Bachelor Thesis
Brno 2008 Author: Supervisor: Richard Tetek Mgr. Lucie Podroužková, Ph.D.
I herby declare that I am the sole author of this thesis. To the best of my knowledge and belief, the thesis contains no material previously published or written by another person except where due reference is made in the thesis itself. I used only the primary and secondary sources listed in the bibliography.
Brno, 15 April 2008 Richard Tetek
2 Acknowledgements I would like to thank Mgr. Lucie Podroužková, Ph.D., for her patience, kind guidance and worthy advice.
3 Contents
Introduction 5 0.1 Paul Auster’s Biography 6 1. The Invention of Solitude 8 1.1 Portrait of an Invisible Man 9 1.2 The Book of Memory 15 2. The New York Trilogy 22 2.1 City of Glass 23 2.2 Ghosts 30 2.3 The Locked Room 34 Conclusion 39 Resume 41 Bibliography 42 Appendix 46
4 Introduction The aim of this thesis is to analyse Paul Auster’s prose in connection with the theme of solitude. I have chosen two of his books, namely The Invention of Solitude and The New York Trilogy , because they provide a wide range of views on the topic. The two books deal with similar questions and they both reflect Auster’s opinions on the role of solitude in our lives. For most people the word solitude often carries mostly negative connotations. It is connected with other expressions such as loneliness, friendlessness or isolation. It is generally seen as something undesirable and unwanted. Nevertheless, there inevitably are moments when we are alone. Moreover, it is possible to find many examples of important figures throughout history who relished aloneness. I have decided to choose Paul Auster’s books because they focus on contemporary problems of our lives in an original way. The theme of solitude, which is often connected with the quest for one’s identity, is paramount in Auster’s work, and it is one of the key issues he tries to explore. The purpose of this paper will be to examine Auster’s views on the role of solitude in postmodern world and to identify what the term means for him. I will analyse each book separately because they both approach the topic from a different perspective. I will also try to decide whether they have something in common. Finally, I would like to find out whether Auster’s understanding of solitude is more negative or positive. I will describe possible advantages and disadvantages of aloneness in accordance with the both books. Because Paul Auster’s prose often draws on autobiographical material, I will include a brief biography and also a short introduction to each book in order to provide useful background for understanding Auster’s work.
5 0.1 Paul Auster’s biography Paul Auster was born on February 3, 1947 in Newark, New Jersey. His parents Samuel and Queenie Auster were middle class Jews of Polish decent. However, their marriage was unhappy and they later divorced. In 1960 Auster’s uncle, who worked as a translator, left several boxes full of books in Auster’s house in storage. Young Auster started to read them and it developed his interest in literature and writing. When his parents separated, Auster lived with his mothers and younger sister, who suffered from mental breakdowns. After finishing high school, Auster went on to study literature at Columbia University, where he began his relationship with Lydia Davis. Auster graduated in 1970 and started to work as a utility man on an oil tanker. Between 1970 and 1974, Auster lived in France, where he tried to support himself with various translations and other occasional jobs (Kreutzer). After his return to the USA, he married Lydia and the couple settled in New York, where their son Daniel was born in 1977. Auster was translating French poetry and some of his poems and essays were published. However, the family had serious financial difficulties and the marriage was gradually disintegrating. Auster also tried to write several plays but they were unsuccessful. Desperate to earn money, Auster even wrote a private eye thriller under the pseudonym Paul Benjamin or invented a card game. In spite of all those attempts, his financial situation did not change for the better. In 1979, Auster’s father died and Auster inherited enough money to pursue his literary career. Meanwhile, his marriage with Lydia collapsed. They decided to live separately and later divorced. It was at that time, when Auster started to work on The Invention of Solitude (Kreutzer). In 1981, Auster met Siri Hustvedt, also a writer, and the two got married in the same year. Soon, their daughter Sophie was born. Things started to improve considerably for Auster. Moreover, after publishing his next work, The New York Trilogy , he became popular worldwide. Nowadays, Auster is considered to be “one of the foremost American novelists now writing” (Sim 186).
6 Paul Auster has published eleven novels, several books of poetry, many essays and translations. He has also written a number of screenplays, for example for films like Smoke, Lulu on the Bridge or The Inner Life of Martin Frost . He is usually classified as a postmodern author (Sim 123). Auster often uses features of various genres like, for instance, detective or picaresque novels to explore themes which are typical of his writing. Most of his books contain aspects of the author’s own life or references to other literature and they can be described as metafictional, where many of his characters are involved in a certain kind of writing or are writers themselves (Barone 5). Intertextuality, fragmentation or vicious circles where the author himself enters the book, are some other techniques present in his work. Search for identity, coincides, contingency of language, solitude or ambiguity of reality are the key topics of his prose. (Wikipedia The Free Encyclopedia). Paul Auster still lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.
7 1. The Invention of Solitude The Invention of Solitude is Auster’s first published prose book. Although it has many autobiographical features, it is not a typical autobiography. Its aim is not just to describe Auster’s life but, more importantly, to put forward some universal questions. Auster himself refuses to consider it as his autobiography and describes it as “a meditation about certain questions, using myself as the central character” (Auster, The Red Notebook 106). It is divided into two sections. The first one is called Portrait of an Invisible Man and the second one The Book of Memory . The two parts were originally written as two separate books, with a gap of about a year between them. Nevertheless, they were published together under the name The Invention of Solitude in 1982. Auster started to write Portrait of an Invisible Man as a spontaneous reaction to his father’s sudden death. It is written in the first person and it explores, among other things, the question of solipsism; whether, and to what extent, it is possible to understand other people’s feelings and emotions, whether we can penetrate someone else’s solitude. The Book of Memory was a direct response to the first part. It is a confessional collage of thoughts, memories, quotations and meditation upon topics like fatherhood, identity and the sense of life, written in the third person. It also tries to define what our solitude means for us and what our self consists of. The Invention of Solitude was the first Auster’s book attracting wider public attention and it opened the gate for his later literary career. The reviews were mostly positive, although some were complaining that especially the second part is marred by “recurrent pointless mannerism” (Merwin). Others pointed out that the abundance of allusions and references is a sign of Auster’s immaturity as a writer, and that the high number of quotes may put off the reader who is not familiar with them. (Hamilton). The book, however, introduced the themes and topics that would later appear in most of his books and are crucial for his literary work: “The Invention of Solitude is both the ars poetica and the seminal work of Paul Auster. To understand him we must start here; all his books lead us back to this one” (Bruckner 27). It also implies that mixing the real, autobiographical features with the fictional will become one of the trademarks of his prose. The book is also important for understanding Auster’s views on solitude.
8 1.1 Portrait of an Invisible Man The death of his father comes as a big surprise for Auster. Even though their mutual relationship could be described as cold and distant, Auster feels the need to explore it deeper after his father dies. He decides to achieve it through writing a memoir: “I thought: my father is gone. If I do not act quickly, his entire life will vanish along with him” (Auster, The Invention of Solitude 6). This implies that Auster sees their relationship as unresolved. Putting ideas on paper is a way of solving the problem. He failed to do so while his father was alive and he feels he must do it now. From Auster’s point of view, his father was an unapproachable, withdrawn kind of person. On the surface, he had led a normal, sociable life but inside he stayed cold, without a real passion for anything around him. This must have had a negative impact on his family because he was unable to express any passionate emotions of love for them: “He did not seem to be a man occupying space, but rather a block of impenetrable space in the form of a man” (Auster, The Invention of Solitude 7). He had lived in his own solitary world, absent and closed even for the people closest to him. In this sense, his existence seemed empty and invisible. After receiving a phone call informing him about his father’s death, Auster comes to the old, solidly built house where his father had lived alone for fifteen years. He finds going through his father’s things both terrible and fascinating. The objects he comes across give him the illusion that his father is still there. Only after he throws away his father’s ties, does he accept the fact that his father is dead. What Auster tries to do is to give his feelings some form, to organize them through writing them down. He attempts to rediscover and reassess his relationship with his father. Auster sees his father’s restrained behaviour as something negative and harmful. He understands it as an attempt to hide from both himself and the world around him (Barbour 186). His father solitude and remoteness has no positive aspect for Auster: Solitary. But not in the sense being alone. Not solitary in the way Thoreau was, for example, exiling himself in order to find out where he was; not solitary in the way Jonah was, praying for deliverance in the belly of the whale. Solitary in the sense of retreat. In the
9 sense of not having to see himself, of not having to see himself being seen by anyone else. (Auster, The Invention of Solitude 17) There is no doubt that Auster suffered because his father was not able to show any emotions or passion towards his son. According to Auster, the marriage of his parents was not the happy one from the very beginning. His mother was already on the verge of leaving his father during their honeymoon. Auster imagines his own conception as a result of “a passionless embrace, blind, dutiful groping between chilly hotel sheets”. He even goes that far to call himself “a random homunculus” (Auster, The Invention of Solitude 19). Eight months later when the baby was coming, his father refused to go to hospital with his wife and went to work. She had to be taken to hospital and cared for by her sister. He came only for a short visit to see his newborn son and went to work again. Auster’s early memories of his father are those of his absence. Even when he did not work and stayed with his family, his father still seemed somehow distracted and absent minded. Auster explains that it was impossible for him to understand his father. He could not get close to him; he was not able to penetrate through the emotional vacuum surrounding him. As he puts it: “Impossible, I realize, to enter another’s solitude. If it is true that we can ever come to know another human being, even to a small degree, it is only to the extent that he is willing to make himself known” (Auster, The Invention of Solitude 20). Unfortunately for his son, the father seemed not able or willing to reveal what his real feelings were. He never spoke about his emotions and refused to look into himself, as if his inner life was something elusive even for him. Instead, he hid himself behind clichés and fixed routines. Auster compares the state of his father’s inner world to the state of the house where his father had lived. Since his wife had divorced him, his father occupied the enormous house all by himself for fifteen years until his sudden death. He changed almost nothing since the rest of the family had left. Auster noticed that: “Although he kept the house tidy and preserved it more or less as it had been, it underwent a gradual and ineluctable process of disintegration. He was neat, he always put things back in their proper place, but nothing was cared for, nothing was ever cleaned” (Auster, The Invention of Solitude 9). The house reminded of a place occupied by a stranger who stays there for some
10 time and then leaves it without being anyhow connected with it. Auster sees it as a metaphor for his father’s role in the family; he just existed within it, but always stayed on the surface, there was nothing warm or passionate and it disintegrated in the end. After the death of Sam Auster, Paul, his only son, had to take care of his father’s property. He went through the things left behind in the house. Old clothes, razors, empty tubes of hair colouring, monogrammed toothbrushes: all those things haunted Auster when he had to deal with them. He notes that “there is nothing more terrible, I learned, than having to face the objects of a dead man” (Auster, The Invention of Solitude 10). Once those things lost their purpose they have become only symbols of solitude, ghosts and remnants of the deceased. Among other things, however, Auster finds something very precious for him. In the bedroom closet, there are dozens of photographs of his father and the family. Auster hopes that the photographs can reveal something about his father, something that can help him find the way into Sam Auster’s inner world. It is rather symbolic when he discovers a photo album entitled “This is Our Life: The Austers” but finds out that it is empty inside. Another photograph found there could well serve as a symbol for the first part of the book. It is an old trick photograph of his father (see the appendix). It depicts five men sitting round a table in a still position, gazing at each other. When we look closer (the photograph is also on the book’s cover), we can see that all of them are identical, but taken from a different angle and put together to make it look as if five men were “conducting a séance” (Auster, The Invention of Solitude 33). Throughout the whole Portrait of an Invisible Man, elusiveness and remoteness of his father becomes a recurring theme for Auster. The stillness, coldness and artificiality of the picture seem to reflect Sam Auster’s personality as described in the book. Everything looks perfect and neat on the surface, but underneath there is a gloomy emptiness and anxiety. Auster also ascertains another side of his father’s character he had not been aware before. Some snapshots from his father’s youth and the time when he was a bachelor show him as a sociable man, always smiling and surrounded by women. Therefore, for some people, Sam Auster could have been a witty, cheerful man with an intense social life. Yet Auster’s view of his father is a bit more critical: “What people saw when he appeared before them, then, was not really him, but a person he invented, an artificial creature he
11 could manipulate in order to manipulate others. He himself remained invisible, a puppeteer working the strings of his alter ego from a dark, solitary place behind the curtain” (Auster, The Invention of Solitude 16). Even his ex girlfriends did not know Samuel Auster properly, as it is revealed when they surprisingly get know about each other’s existence. They also knew only a part of him: “He managed to elude them all” (Auster, The Invention of Solitude 17). What Auster acknowledges many times in the book is that it is almost impossible to understand other people’s mind. Our means of understanding are limited. With this in mind, Auster ponders whether it is even possible to write about another person (Auster, The Red Notebook 106). We live solitary lives inside our minds and it is up to each individual if, and to what extent, we let anyone in. In this sense, we should not consider Portrait of an Invisible Man a typical biography. Rather than that, it is a kind of meditation on a relationship, an attempt to put together memories and feelings and to cope with them via writing them down. During his search for his father’s past Auster finds a snapshot of his grandparents and their family. There is his grandmother with his father, who was then a one year old baby, and other four children. Auster spots that his grandfather is missing and that he had been cut out of the photograph. Upset by the discovery, Auster reveals and old family secret, which can explain a lot about his father’s withdrawn and solitary character. It is a secret of an old murder that had happened in his grandparent’s family in 1919. Auster's grandmother shot her husband because he had been cruel and unfaithful to her. She had to face a charge of murder but was later discharged and released. Nevertheless, the family had move to a different part of the USA and the bonds to the other family members were broken. Since then, the family moved constantly. This contributed to their isolation: “In a family that had already closed in on itself, this nomadism walled them off entirely. There were no enduring points of reference: no home, no town, no friends that could be counted on” (Auster, The Invention of Solitude 51). The concept of nomadism and uprooting is often present throughout Auster's works. It is as if something from his father’s past was passed on to his son and through him into his writing. This feature can be also seen, together with the metaphorical sense of “hunger and yearning”, as one of the reflections of his Jewish origin and background (Rubin 66 68).
12 This experience must have had some impact on Auster's father. Sam Auster was seven at the time of the murder and he remembered what had happened, although he was reluctant to speak about it. It may be the key to his personality and it can explain his detached behaviour to some extent. Thinking about those unhappy events Auster's remarks: “I do not think they explain everything, but there is no question they explain a great deal. A boy cannot live through this kind of thing without being affected by it as a man” (Auster, The Invention of Solitude 38). Later on, when Sam Auster started his own business, he concentrated on earning money. Art did not mean much to him because he could not see any direct link between an aesthetic experience and profit. The fact that his son wanted to become a writer and struggled to earn his living by occasional translating, must have been a disappointment for him. Paul Auster, however, sees writing as one of the most important things in his life. Auster affirms that “writing is no longer an act of free will for me; it’s a matter of survival” (Auster, The Red Notebook 123). Pascal Bruckner writes in an essay about Auster that “his father had denied him the usual outlet of youth: rebellion, because you can’t rebel against a phantom” (Bruckner 27). Nevertheless, writing can be seen as an act of rebellion against his father’s values, as well as an attempt of the writer to define who he is. It is a strange paradox that Auster was able to become a writer due to the money he inherited after his father had died. Until then, he had struggled hard to earn his living and could not fully concentrate on his writing. In this sense, the death of his father saved his future as a writer (Auster, The Red Notebook 132). The Invention of Solitude is a way, apart from other things, how to reconcile with his father: “The son would never stop repaying this debt, would never finish reimbursing the deceased, in prose, for his fearsome gift. As payment Auster seeks to revive the image of this man he barely knew” (Bruckner 27). The theme of a sudden inheritance appeared in Auster’s other books too. It saves Nash in The Music of Chance (2006) as well as Fogg in Moon Palace (1992). Blending the autobiographic with the fictional is typical of Auster. The boundary between the two is often blurred in his works. Another paradox is that although Auster finds out that the writing about his father is much more demanding and painful than he had thought, he is afraid to finish it: “I want
13 to postpone the moment of ending….when I step into this silence, it will mean that my father has vanished forever” (Auster, The Invention of Solitude 69). This will not happen, however. Paul Auster’s relationship with his father will stay partly unresolved and the theme will keep haunting Auster, as his apparent from his later novels. In an interview, Auster confessed that he still thinks a lot about his father (Contat). Although their relationship was painful and complicated, there is no doubt that Paul Auster loved him deeply.
14 1.2 The Book of Memory Although the second part of the book also deals with the father–son relationship, it differs from the first section in many aspects. Firstly, Auster decided to write it in the third person, referring to himself as A. In many ways, The Book of Memory is even more personal and that is why it was more difficult for him to put it together. He explains that “in order to write about myself, I had to treat myself as though I were someone else” (Auster, The Red Notebook 106). It enables him to distance himself from the text and to be more honest and open. Secondly, it explores new topics and offers different points of views on the role of solitude. The crucial theme, however, is a search for identity. Auster tries to find out who he really is; he wants to go through the pieces that his self is made of. He examines the role of our memories and the past in our lives, as well as the nature of chance a coincidences in our lives. For him, “the book wasn’t written as a form of therapy; it was an attempt to turn myself inside out and examine what I was made of” (Auster, The Red Notebook 136). The theme of solitude links the second part of the book with the first one, but now, Auster concentrates more on his own solitude and its creative potential (Barbour 186). Auster sees writing as a solitary activity: “Every book is an image of solitude….its words represent many months, if not years, of one men’s solitude.” (Auster, The Invention of Solitude 145). Every writer uses his own methods and ways of writing. In Auster’s case, writing takes place in his room, alone, just with a pen and a notebook or a piece of paper. Aloneness can stimulate one’s imagination and creativity (Buchholz 222). Artist’s room is a dream place, which encourages the mind to roam in time and space and to explore distant worlds (Barbour 190). The author becomes someone else; he becomes a part of his story. The bonds with the outer world must be cut for a while so that some new ideas can emerge. From the reader’s point of view, reading someone’s book means sharing the author’s solitude for a moment. Both the reader and the writer live within the same story but each of them can perceive it from a different perspective. The worlds they live in are different, yet there definitely is some kind of bond present: “Reading literature creates a
15 kind of companionship that preserves the solitariness of writing and reading” (Barbour 193). Auster feel that connection most strongly when he translates poetry. He projects his own feelings and thoughts onto someone else’s work: Even though there is only one man in the room, there are two. A. images himself as a kind of ghost of that other man, who is both there and not there, and whose book is both the same and not the same as the one he is translating. Therefore, he tells himself, it is possible to be alone and not to be alone at the same moment. (Auster, The Invention of Solitude 145 - 146). Writing the The Book of Memory is similar for Auster. It is a collage of voices, of his “ghosts”, that have their say in his writing. He is and he is not alone. It is him and it is not him who writes the book: “That book has dozens of authors, and I wanted them all to speak through me. In the final analysis, The Book of Memory is a collective work” (Auster, The Red Notebook 144). Moreover, this postmodern form of a textual fragmentation can give the reader more freedom in the way the text is perceived at the expense of author’s control. It is the reader who can decide “which paths to follow, assembling the text according to her own desires” (Geyh XXIV). Sharing stories also plays an important role for his relationship with his own son Daniel. Auster’s marriage with his first wife, Lydia Davis, was gradually collapsing at the time when he was writing The Invention of Solitude . The couple lived separately and Auster could see his three years old son only occasionally (Kreutzer). Although they do not see each other very often, Auster wants to make sure that he will not repeat the mistake of his father. He does everything possible to assure his son of his love. Auster wants to redefine and reinvent the meaning of solitude and tries to use it more creatively. He hopes that his solitude will not have the destructive effect on Daniel. By sharing some of his experiences of aloneness with his son, he wants to provide the conditions for Daniel to develop his capacity to be alone (Barbour 189). Children need some time alone as well as the assurance of their parent’s love. Being together but having chance to fulfil one’s need for privacy, can maintain our relationships healthy. Our capacity to be alone in adult life has its origin in our childhood when the infant has an experience of being alone in the presence of the mother or the father. Parents
16 should spend some time with their children without playing or focusing their attention on them all the time. The child will then learn how to cope with his own solitude later on. The ability to be alone without being anxious is also an aspect of emotional maturity (Storr 18 20). Children should be given an opportunity to be alone in order to get in touch with their inner feelings. They often have their special hiding place, for example a spot in their bedroom or in a garden, where they can retreat if they feel such a need. Nevertheless, all children need to feel secure and be aware of their parent’s love. They should also have a chance to spend some time alone to use their imagination. (Buchholz 155 156). Storytelling is one of the natural ways how to achieve it. Throughout the book, Auster often mentions reading stories to his son. One of these stories is the story of Pinocchio. Pinocchio’s separation and the reunion with his father Geppetto is symbolical for Auster. Pinocchio saves Geppetto from the belly of a shark and becomes a real boy. It can be seen as a metaphor applicable to Auster and Daniel, but also to Auster’s relationship with his own father. Daniel, too, relishes his time alone. It gives him chance to retreat into a world of fantasy and it helps to trigger his imagination: “I have to be alone to think,” he says to his father (Auster, The Invention of Solitude 139). Accordingly, his father needs some time alone to arrange his ideas and write them down. Daniel shares his father’s interest in stories. Through reading stories, they create a bond between them. The link between the author and the reader is very important for Auster on a more universal level. Both the author and the reader live in their separate worlds, but they still share what they have in common for that moment; the story. He experiences the same while reading to Daniel: Auster interprets the act of reading as a form of companionship based on the shared solitude of author and reader. The oxymoron `shared solitude´ represents an idealized fusion of aloneness and communion. It is a union of opposites that may be logically absurd, but expresses a spiritual yearning for synthesis or reconciliation of the tensions of human existence. Auster’s way of describing the writing and reading of literature strives to reconcile solitude and relationship to others. He tries to reconceive solitude as not solipsistic isolation but the necessary condition for a more meaningful form of connection with others than possible in normal social interaction. (Barbour 194)
17 Auster sees his writing as a connector with the world. He also imagines that, in the future, his son would read his book and he hopes that it would help him to express his emotions and feelings that his son cannot understand so far. Through the process of writing The Book of Memory , Auster’s son Daniel got seriously ill. His diagnosis was a severe pneumonia with asthmatic complications, and he could have died if he was not moved to a hospital quickly. Daniel had to stay in the hospital for some time, and his parents visited him regularly. The horror of the possible death of his son causes a change in Auster’s perceptions of his own life: ”…it was only at that moment, he later come to realize, that he finally grasped the full scope of his own fatherhood: the boy’s life meant more to him than his own; if dying were necessary to save his son, he would be willing to die (Auster, The Invention of Solitude 116). Moreover, it reminds him of his own mortality and responsibility. At the time of writing the second part, Auster lived alone in a little room in 6 Varick Street. His marriage had collapsed and his prospects were rather bleak (Kreutzer). The room becomes a central point of his life. Here, he decides to use his solitude creatively and employ writing as a tool of introspection and self examination. According the tone of the book, we can feel that it was not a happy period of his life for Auster. It is as if the reality of the outside world ceased to exist for him: “It is a hermetic season, a long moment of inwardness. The outer world, the tangible world of materials and bodies, has come to seem no more than an emanation of his mind” (Auster, The Invention of Solitude 82). His quest is of a spiritual nature. He feels it has to be done in order to get further with his life: The world has shrunk to the size of this room for him, and for as long as it takes him to understand it, he must stay where he is. Only one thing is certain: he cannot be anywhere until he is here. And if he does not manage to find this place, it would be absurd for him to think of looking for another. (Auster, The Invention of Solitude 83) The room serves as a microcosm, as a place of imagination. It is a place of resurrection and of a new start. It is “a kind of mental uterus, site of a second birth” (Bruckner 28). But before that, Auster must undergo a painful process of self exploration, he must dig deep into himself. In this respect, his enclosure is not a nihilistic escape from the world leading to oblivion, because its purpose is positive: to reconstruct the self through
18 exploring all the thoughts and inner voices that immerse in his mind. He must focus upon his inner world to find out what it consists of (Rubin 64). The notion of enclosed spaces is a paramount theme in Auster’s works. It later reappears in The New York Trilogy and Moon Palace (1992), but the theme can be traced in almost all of his novels. They are places of a profound significance. For Auster, enclosed spaces are the places of a change, or, at least, places where the characters try to get answers for the questions that haunt them. Nevertheless, the goal is not always achieved because there simply are not any definite answers. In a metaphorical sense, the room serves both as “a tomb” and as “a womb” (Ting). The walls do not have to be seen as a barrier; they can function as a protective shell that enables the mind to roam freely. Auster gives his friend S., whom he met while living in Paris, as an example: “He lived in the tiniest, most minimal space I’ve ever been in. And yet, he probably had the biggest mind of any person I’ve ever known, and he managed to inhibit that space as if he were utterly free” (Irwin). In The Book of Memory Auster often refers to other writes like for example Thoreau, Hölderlin, Emily Dickinson and Anne Frank. All those writers mentioned in the book, have one thing in common. Although for various reasons, they all spent some time in confined spaces. It was a cabin for Thoreau, a tower for Hölderlin and rooms or apartments for Dickinson and Frank. They all had some, though very different, experience of solitude. Their writing, too, often draws on their seclusion. That is why Auster feels affiliated with them. Visiting Anne Frank’s room in Amsterdam was a direct impulse for writing The Book of Memory . When he entered the room, he found himself overflowed with emotions: “…not sobbing, as might happen in response to a deep inner pain, but crying without sound, the tears streaming down his cheeks, as if purely in response to the world. It was at that moment, he later realized, that The Book of Memory began” (Auster, The Invention of Solitude 87). There is no doubt that the book has its origin in a sense of dissatisfaction and a deep anguish. Auster wants to fulfil his yearning for finding his place in the world by writing a literary work (Rubin 62). Auster’s penchant for confined spaces is not limited to rooms. Many times, he refers to the story of Jonah in a belly of a whale, as well as to the story of Pinocchio and his
19 father, imprisoned in a belly of a shark. He describes these stories as metaphors, as reflections of situations similar to his own life. Auster understands the Book of Jonah as the most dramatic story of solitude in the Bible. It is interesting, that it is also the only one written in the third person. The parallel with The Book of Memory is obvious. Jonah refuses God’s command to speak to the Ninevites and decides to escape on a ship. But God sends a tempest on the ship which does not stop until Jonah is thrown into the sea. There, he is devoured by a great fish. Jonah stays in its belly for three days until he reconciles with God. In the belly of the fish, solitude equals silence, as his refusal to speak leads to his disaster. As Auster puts it:”Who seeks solitude seeks silence; who does not speak is alone; is alone, even unto death Jonah encounters the darkness of death” (Auster, The Invention of Solitude 134). Jonah, however, does not die, but finds his way back to life through introspection and praying to God, and is finally released back onto dry land. The fish was sent not to punish Jonah and kill him, but to give him another chance. Jonah has to go through that experience of dying and vanishing in order to prepare for new life. Then, he is ready to speak and start again. It is interesting, how Auster reflects on that moment: “In the darkness of solitude that is death, the tongue is finally loosened, and at that moment it begins to speak, there is an answer. And even if there is no answer, the man has begun to speak” (Auster, The Invention of Solitude 134). Similarly, Auster hopes to find his way back to life, but in his case, he uses writing instead of praying as a means of introspection (Barbour 192). His writing is supposed to provide the answers. For him, the crucial question is Who am I, and what is my place in the world? He also acknowledges that he may not get the answer but the important thing is to look for it. In the same way as Jonah spent some time in the belly of a whale, Auster’s spends his time in the room in Varick Street. That is where his seclusion takes place. Exploring his thoughts, he discovers a strange paradox. Being physically separated from others does not mean being alone completely. He finds out that the more he is alone in a physical sense, the bigger and more understandable is his mental connection with others. All our thoughts, memories and feeling have their origin in a connection with something, objects or people. From this point of view, it means that we are never alone mentally: “The more intensely you are alone, the more deeply you plunge into a state of solitude, the more deeply you feel
20 that connection. It isn’t possible for a person to isolate himself from other people” (Auster, The Red Notebook 144). By “other people”, he means more than his family and people around him. He applies the term to people from the past as well, to all the voices that speak inside him and have some influence on his live. No matter how apart you might find yourself in a physical sense whether you’ve been marooned on a desert island or locked up in a solitary confinement you discover that you are inhibited by others. Your language, your memories, even your sense of isolation every thought in your head has been born from your connection with others…….That is why that book is filled with so many references and quotations, in order to pay homage to all the others inside me. (Auster, The Red Notebook 144) The question is, though, whether we can find our genuine self in that myriad of voices. Some argue that it is not possible to attain because the self “resists categorization” (Bruckner 31). The search for it “is an eternal quest, without guaranteed results, which can never achieve closure” (Bruckner 32). The quote would well correspond with Auster’s findings about the nature of the self. He does not find all the answers but writing the book helps him to overcome a difficult period of his life.
21 2. The New York Trilogy The New York Trilogy is Paul Auster’s first book of fiction. It was written soon after The Invention of Solitude and it explores and evolves similar themes. It consists of three parts: City of Glass, Ghosts and The Locked Room . The three novellas of the trilogy were originally released separately in 1985 and 1986, but they were later published collectively as The New York Trilogy in 1987. Although it was at first difficult for Auster to find a publisher and he received seventeen rejections, it later earned him international acclaim. There is also a comics adaptation of City of Glass , done by David Mazzucchelli and Paul Karasik in 1994. It is not easy to define the genre of the novel. It has been described as “postmodernist detective fiction” (Sim 126), “a surreal detective novel” (Begley) or “a meta anti detective story” (Sorapure72). Although it uses some elements characteristic for detective genre, it cannot be considered as a typical detective prose. Auster explains: “I felt I was using those elements for such different ends, for things that had so little to do with detective stories, and I was somewhat disappointed by the emphasis that was put on them…I tried to use certain genre conventions to get to another place, another place altogether” (Auster, The Red Notebook 108 109). Using pastiche is one of the typical features of postmodern literature. In Paul Auster’s case, genres like detective fiction can provide “ready made forms, ideal for postmodern miscegenation” (Sim 126). Unlike detective fiction, The New York Trilogy does not provide a solution and explanation to the case at the end of the book. It leaves more space for the reader and, in this respect, it can be more demanding. Or, as Auster puts it: “If a true follower of a detective fiction ever tried to read one of these books, I’m sure he would be bitterly disappointed. Mystery novels always give answers; my work is about asking questions” (Auster, The Red Notebook 139). Therefore, it is interesting that City of Glass was nominated for an Edgar Award for best mystery novel (Geyh 443).
22 2.1 City of Glass The theme of solitude is closely linked with the question of identity in City of Glass. Quinn, the main character of the book, spends his time alone in a small New York apartment. His wife and son died a few years ago, and his life lost its sense. Quinn escapes into his solitude and lives in his own world, occupying the space between reality and fantasy. He seems to have no ambitions anymore; he does not consider himself an integrated personality. Presumably, he hopes to get rid of his pain and distress together with his old identity. His life takes place inside his head: “although in many ways Quinn continued to exist, he no longer existed for anyone but himself” (Auster, The New York Trilogy 4). Then, one night, there is a strange phone call, which will turn Quinn’s life upside down. This is the starting point of the novel. Again, there is a writer, this time called Quinn, alone in a room. Again, he tries to find his place in the world. The situation reminds that of The Invention of Solitude, but this time the reader gets more; he gets a story. City of Glass deals with similar questions as The Invention of Solitude , but Auster’s approach is different. He decides to write a story that still draws on his personal life, but this time he shifts it into a fictional world. For Auster, however, both the “normal” and the “fictional” world are ambiguous and pregnant with the unexpected and unpredictable. Our world can be as absurd and incomprehensible as the world of fiction. Therefore, there is no need to define the exact border between the two (Auster, The Red Notebook 117). At the time of writing City of Glass , Auster’s life has undergone many changes. He had met Siri Hustved, his future wife, and fell in love (Auster, The Red Notebook 141). The tone of City of Glass , however, is far from optimistic. The feelings of loss and deprivation are still visible, together with a sense of alienation to the outer world. Auster explains: “In many ways, I think of City of Glass as an homage to Siri, as a love letter in the form of a novel. I tried to imagine what would have happened to me if I hadn’t met her, and what I came up with was Quinn. Perhaps my life would have been something like his… “(Auster, The Red Notebook 142). Quinn thus represents Auster’s possible future if he had not met Siri.
23 Quinn writes mystery novels under the pen name William Wilson. The main character of his books is a private detective called Max Work. Max becomes Quinn’s alter ego; someone he would like to become as well. Unlike Quinn, Max has no doubts, he always knows what to do and there is not a case he could not solve. Quinn is the exact opposite; he is indecisive and numb, his life seems empty and lonely and he has no real friends. All he asks for is “to be nowhere” (Auster, The New York Trilogy 4). By assuming Work’s identity, Quinn can escape his own misery. When he becomes Max Work, he is no longer alone: “And little by little, Work had become a presence in Quinn’s life, his interior brother, his comrade in solitude” (Auster, The New York Trilogy 6). Looking at the world from Work’s point of view helps him survive. It gives meaning to his existence. Becoming Work enables him to get rid of confusion and disorder within his own mind: “Seeing the world through the eyes of his detective and writing about a universe with an established order makes up for Quinn’s loss, serves as a refuge from the chaos that surrounds him and as a centre within Quinn’s own decentred world” (Herzogenrath 28). Nevertheless, these escapes can be only occasional and Quinn still has to face the reality of his everyday life. Chance helps him to solve his problem and connect the reality with his imaginary world. One night Quinn receives a strange phone call. Someone who obviously has a wrong number asks for help of a private eye called Paul Auster from the Auster Detective Agency. Quinn does not know who Auster is but when the stranger calls again, he decides to pretend that he is Auster, the detective, and takes up the case. Paul Auster, the real writer, therefore becomes another Paul Auster, the private eye, a fictional character in his own book, and Quinn becomes a real detective working on a case. Even though this swap may confuse the reader at first, it opens the way for new possibilities for both Auster and Quinn. By being engaged in a real case, Quinn can live as his fictional character, and Auster can give his fictional character some real essence. Auster, as the character described in the book, is a middle aged writer, living happily with his wife Siri and son Daniel. Although the names are the same as in reality, Auster did not mean to create his exact copy. He used it as an opportunity to be ironical about himself. He explains: “I was mostly making fun of myself. Everything the Paul Auster character said in City of Glass, I don’t believe. I have the opposite opinion on
24 everything. His ideas are bullshit” (Billen). This kind of short circuit when the writer steps into the text often arises in postmodern fiction so that „text and world fuse“ (Sim 132). The stranger on the phone asking for Auster’s help is called Peter Stillman. He represents extreme solitude and all the negative consequences it entails. Peter’s father, also called Peter Stillman, worked as a reputable professor in the religion department at a university. When his wife died, he went mad and decided to use his son for a terrible experiment. He locked two years old Peter junior into a dark room for nine years. Stillman hopes that by isolating his son from the real world and by forcing him to forget human language he has acquired, Peter will start speaking the prelapsarian language of God. The need to invent a new language that would be pure and untainted by the muddied waters of communication, serves his as an excuse for mistreating his own son (Tysh). The result is disastrous. Peter junior goes insane and his personality disintegrates. Peter shows many symptoms typical of prolonged enforced solitude: restlessness, inability to concentrate, fear of resuming social relationship and partial failure of memory (Storr 44 45). When he is accidentally rescued after the nine years of total isolation, Peter’s sense of time and reality is disrupted: “I know nothing of time. I am new every day. I am born when I wake up in the morning, I grow old during the day, and I die at night when I go to sleep” (Auster, The New York Trilogy 18). Despite the fact that he gets married later on and his state improves, Peter will stay alone forever. No one can understand his world and penetrate his solitude. His aloneness is closely connected with language and the ability to express thoughts and ideas. Peter often fails to match the meaning of words with what they represent in reality; he was told to connect certain things with certain words, but he still sees language as something treacherous and arbitrary. However, he accepts the human language as a means of communication with the surrounding world. Nevertheless, he has a great difficulty to speak normally. When talking to Quinn he says: “This is what is called speaking. I believe that is the term. When words come out, fly in the air, live for a moment, and die. Strange, is it not? I myself have no opinion. No and no again. But still, there are words you will need to have” (Auster, The New York Trilogy 16).
25 Peter sometimes invents words only he can understand. His ability to communicate with others is limited. In his case, silence leads to solitude. Language is what can help to open one’s mind for the others. Therefore, Peter cannot understand other people and they cannot understand him: “Peter can talk like people now. But he still has the other words in his head. They are God’s language, and no one else can speak them. They cannot be translated. That is why Peter lives so close to God” (Auster, The New York Trilogy 20). Although Peter lives in his own world, he still feels the desire to live and survive. Therefore, when the time comes for his mad father to be released from jail, he fears for his life. That is why he calls Auster, allegedly the best private detective in the town, to shadow his father when he is released and to report on all his actions to Peter. Unconsciously, Quinn echoes Peter’s confusion with his true identity because he tries to be four people simultaneously the real Quinn, William Wilson his made up writer, Max Work the fictional character of his books and finally Auster the detective (Dawson). Quinn’s own identity seems to be caught somewhere among all of them. When Quinn starts shadowing Stillman senior, he finds out that the old man does not try to contact his son in any way. Instead, he lives alone in a shoddy hotel, wanders around New York and collects all kinds of objects he finds on streets. Quinn cannot understand the purpose of Stillman’s behaviour. Although Stillman cuts himself off from all human contact, it seems that he has a certain kind of plan or, that he is working on something, occupied entirely with his own thoughts and indifferent to the world around. Again, as in The Invention of Solitude , it is evident that it is impossible to penetrate someone else’s solitude. Quinn observes everything Stillman does, he follows him everywhere but he still does not understand him: “He had lived Stillman’s life, walked at his pace, seen what he had seen, and the only thing he felt now was the man’s impenetrability” (Auster, The New York Trilogy 67). Stillman resist any explanation; he remains a mystery for both Quinn and the reader. He is supposed to be a villain, an evil father who sacrificed his own son for his crazy experiment, but nothing indicates that he has any menacing intentions. Contrary to his expectations, Quinn feels that there is a link between himself and Stillman, although he does not understand the sense of Stillman’s actions. Moreover, they both have a red notebook where they make notes of their ideas. After buying his notebook,
26 Quinn goes home, draws the shades in the room and takes off his clothes. Then he starts writing into the notebook. The first thing he writes are his initials DQ (for Daniel Quinn): “It was the first time in more than five years that he had put his own name in one of his notebooks” (Auster, The New York Trilogy 39). It is no longer Max Work who is solving the case; it is Quinn himself, although under the name of Paul Auster. Quinn suspects that Stillman’s notebook contains all the answers for his questions but he will never have a chance to see what is inside. He spends most of his time watching Stillman. The course of his life becomes controlled by Stillman’s actions. After some time, Quinn starts to be dubious about the case. It does not lead anywhere and he begins to feel his solitude more keenly than ever before. When he goes through his notes from the red notebook, Quinn discovers that the route of Stillman’s walks seems to follow a certain pattern and that it resembles the shape of certain letters. He hopes to find some signs of logic in Stallman’s odd behaviour: “He was ransacking the chaos of Stillman’s movements for glimmer of cogency. This implied only one thing: that he continued to disbelieve the arbitrariness of Stillman’s actions. He wanted there to be a sense to them, no matter how obscure” (Auster, The New York Trilogy 69). If the case is meaningless, then Quinn’s new identity loses its sense too. There is no need for an existence of a detective if there is no crime or a potential criminal. Quinn decides to confront Stillman directly to find out more about his plans. He speaks to him three times, each time in disguise. Stillman reveals that he is creating a new language reflecting the true reality of things. He contends that “our words no longer correspond to the world” (Auster, The New York Trilogy 77). If objects lose their original function or quality, they become something else: “When you rip the cloth off the umbrella, is the umbrella still an umbrella” (Auster, The New York Trilogy 77)? Stillman claims that when the thing no longer performs its function, it is not the same thing and we need a new word to describe it. Quinn experiences a similar dilemma: is he the same person as the one who had lived within a happy family until they died? Is his solitary self identical with the old one? If not, who is he now? Is his existence justified if he lives just for himself? Quinn does not know the answers.
27 As the case proceeds, Quinn becomes more and more solitary, and loses the sense of reality. One day Stillman mysteriously disappears. Quinn is desperate: “Quinn was nowhere now. He had nothing, he knew nothing, he knew that he knew nothing” (Auster, The New York Trilogy 104). He even finds and visits real Auster hoping that he would help him. Auster, in reality a writer and not a detective, cannot help him and just adds to Quinn’s anguish when he shows him his happy family. It was too much for Quinn. He felt as though Auster were taunting him with the things he had lost, and he responded with envy and rage, a lacerating self pity. Yes, he too would have liked to have this wife and this child, to sit around all day spouting drivel about old books, to be surrounded by yoyos and ham omelettes and fountain pens. He prayed to himself for deliverance. (Auster, The New York Trilogy 103 104) Quinn knows that the case has ended as Stillman has disappeared and Peter junior has probably moved away with his wife. There is no one to protect anymore. Nevertheless, he decides to continue playing his role of a detective. He takes all his money and settles in a narrow alleyway opposite the place where Peter used to live. There he stays observing an empty house. Both the plot of the book and Quinn’s life turn even more absurd: “We cannot say for certain what happened to Quinn during that period, for it was at this point in the story that he began to lose his grip” (Auster, The New York Trilogy 113). The case is no longer important. There is just Quinn and his red notebook. He stays in the alley except for short periods when he has to go to buy some food. His ambition is to eat as little as possible and to sleep only for short periods, so he can keep watching the house. The stay in the alley also changes his view of solitude. Quinn accepts the fact that he is on his own: “Quinn had always thought of himself as a man of who liked to be alone. For the past five years, in fact, he had actively sought it. But it was only now, as his life continued in the alley, that he begun to understand the true nature of solitude. He had nothing to fall back on anymore but himself” (Auster, The New York Trilogy 117). Quinn starts balancing between madness and sanity. The outer reality is not important for him anymore. He hides himself from other people and spends periods of time in a large metal garbage bin. At this point, he begins to gradually vanish both physically
28 and from the story itself: “It was as though he had melted into the walls of the city” (Auster, The New York Trilogy 116). Quinn shifts his attention from the house to his surroundings. He applies his detective skills to watching the clouds and the sky, and slowly becomes “swamped by myriad, disparate, and unrelated details” (Sorapure 82). Even though his situation is getting worse, Quinn seems to be more content than before. His isolation enables him to get to the core of the self. Free from all bonds, he can feel the real essence of life. Typically of many Auster’s characters, he feels most free when he is most confined. (Irwin) After he spends all his money, Quinn has to leave the spot in the alley and calls Auster for financial help. Auster informs him that Stillman had committed suicide. Quinn finally understands that he will not be able to solve the case. He enters Peter Stillman’s house and when he finds out that it is empty, he settles in one of the rooms. He throws all his clothes away and keeps only the red notebook a pen to write with. In the dark closure of the room, Quinn finally confronts his real self. He does not need his clothes, the room serves as a protective shell, as a place where his soul can manifest itself. Solitude is a key to self discovery and the room is the place where the reassertion of Quinn’s identity takes place (Dawson). Quinn writes his thoughts into the red notebook. His past, the existence of Max Work and Paul Auster lost their relevance for Quinn: “In his heart, he realized that Max Work was dead” (Auster, The New York Trilogy 127). His writing becomes the only reflection of his life. When he gets to the end of the red notebook, he will vanish too. For that reason, each moment of his life and each word he writes deserves a special attention and needs to be fully experienced. The near end makes Quinn understand the significance of living because he does not know what happens after he disappears: “The last sentence of the red notebook reads: `What will happen when there are no more pages in the red notebook? ´” (Auster, The New York Trilogy 131). When Auster and the unknown narrator of City of Glass enter the room, it is empty. Quinn has vanished. When they find the red notebook on the floor, Auster refuses to read it because Quinn’s story is over for him. Quinn fate after his disappearance stays a mystery for everyone. The only evidence left is the red notebook.
29 2.2 Ghosts The second part of the trilogy, Ghosts , takes part in New York in 1947. Again, it starts as a detective story but it is obvious from the beginning that it will not be a typical whodunit book. The focus of the novel is the theme of solitude and identity, as in the other parts of the trilogy. A man called White hires Blue to follow another man, named Black. Blue’s task is to keep an eye on Black and write reports on all of his actions to White. Why White wants to have Black watched is a mystery for Blue. He gets a small room opposite Black’s apartment to watch him and money for his job. Blue gradually starts to be so engaged in the case that he severs himself from other people. He stops seeing his fiancé and spends all his time alone in the room watching Black or following him on his walks through New York. The case becomes an obsession for Blue, and Black starts to be the key figure of Blue’s life. Blue knows nothing about Black who spends most of his time writing or reading in his apartment: “All he can say for certain, therefore, is that Black is writing in a notebook with a red fountain pen” (Auster, The New York Trilogy 137). Blue, however, does not know what Black writes about. Blue tries hard to understand Black but in vain: “The only way for Blue to have a sense of what is happening is to be inside Black’s mind, to see what he is thinking, and that of course is impossible” (Auster, The New York Trilogy 139). Blue’s life becomes monotonous and solitary. On the other hand, his solitude gives him a chance to explore his own inner world: For the first time in his life, he finds that he has been thrown back on himself, with nothing to grab hold of, nothing to distinguish one moment from the next. He has never given much thought to the world inside him, and though he always knew it was there, it has remained an unknown quantity, unexplored and therefore dark, even to himself. (Auster, The New York Trilogy 143) Although unwillingly, watching Black forces Blue to look deep inside his own mind. Not only Black’s, but also his own inner world is a mysterious and unmapped territory for Blue. He has become an inseparable part of the case, which then serves only as
30 framework for something deeper and more personal: “Detection becomes a quest for identity, as the mystery outside releases the mystery inside the detective” (Sorapure 76). When Blue looks closer at his thoughts, he is scared of the void and chaos he finds. His normal life made it possible for Blue to elude himself and stay on the surface of things, but it has changed since he started to stalk Black. The consequence is, of course, a fear of the unknown. Therefore, Blue feels affection for Black, whose elusiveness reminds him of his own impenetrability. Without Black Blue feels frightened and obsolete: “Loneliness envelopes him, shuts him in, and with it comes a terror worse than anything he has ever known” (Auster, The New York Trilogy 156). It is apparent that even in the middle of one of the biggest cities in the world, one can be alone. Because people often do not understand themselves, they can fail to understand other people too. The connection between the self and other is possible only when we find out who we are (Nikolic). According to Auster, the process of self discovery takes place in solitude. It is no accident that Auster’s novels are usually situated in urban spaces. It enables him to show the contrast between the rush of city and the aloneness of an individual. The New York Trilogy is set in cold, forlorn New York. The packed environment of city can make people turn inward to guide their privacy. They can live their lives aside each other. New York can be a friendly town where one can have a conversation with complete strangers, but it can also be a place exacerbating one’s loneliness (Jacobs). Blue is convinced that Black relishes his solitude and that he uses the city as a hiding place. To find out why White hired him, Blue decides to speak with Black in disguise. He discovers what he had suspected before; he is a part of a game that Black and White has been playing with him. White and Black are identical. What surprises him is that it is not true that Black seeks solitude. He hired Blue to have a whiteness of his existence. Black needs Blue “to prove he’s alive” (Auster, The New York Trilogy 181). It becomes obvious that Blue needs Black as much as Black needs him. They both need each other to prove that they exist. Auster believes that although inside we live alone, we are shaped by others at the same time. Our perception of the self is determined by the existence of others:
31 The infant feeding at the mother’s breast looks up into the mother’s eyes and sees her looking at him, and from that experience of being seen, the baby begins to learn that he is separate from his mother, that he is a person in his own right. We literally acquire a self from this process. Lacan calls it the “mirror stage”, which strikes me as a beautiful way of putting it. Self consciousness in adulthood is merely an extension of those early experiments. It is no longer mother who’s looking at us then we’re looking at ourselves. But we can only see ourselves because someone else has seen us first. In other words, we learn our solitude from others. In the same way that we learn language from others. (Auster, The Red Notebook 143 144) Black serves as a “mirror” for Blue. Even though he leads a solitary life, Blue still needs Black in order to be aware of his own individuality: ”For in spying out at Black across the street, it is as though Blue were looking into a mirror, and instead of merely watching another, he finds out that he is also watching himself” (Auster, The New York Trilogy 144). Similarly, Black needs Blue’s presence to assure him that he exists. Blue is the eye watching him, and as long as Blue keeps stalking him, it is a proof that Black is there. It would be impossible for Blue to watch nothing. While being alone in his apartment, Black often reads Walden by Henry David Thoreau. Blue also buys the book because he hopes that it will help him understand Black better. However, when he starts reading it, he finds it boring and incomprehensible. Blue does not understand why anyone would go to live alone in the woods and compares reading Walden to “entering an alien world” (Auster, The New York Trilogy 162). The fact is, however, that Blue’s life is much lonelier than Thoreau’s. Blue’s solitude has both positive and negative aspects. The allusion to Walden is not accidental. It can be seen as parallel story to Ghosts. Walden also deals with the role of solitude in people’s lives, but from a different perspective. Thoreau went to the woods because he wanted “to live more deliberately, to front only the essential fact of life”, and his desire was “to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life” (Thoreau 63). His experiment in the woods was planned and deliberate, and Thoreau saw it, apart form other things, as a chance to feel the unity with nature. Due to his companionship with the natural world, he “is always alone but never feels lonely” (Barbour 110). Thoreau relished his solitude; it also gave him a sense of freedom and control over his life.
32 Auster compares Ghosts to “Walden Pond in the heart of the city” (Auster, The Red Notebook 110). Although there are some similarities, circumstances and the outcome of the experience of solitude differ in both books. Auster’s characters often reduce their needs to minimum. The material world around loses its importance for them. The process they undergo “is one of stripping away to some barer condition in which we have to face up to who we are. Or who we aren’t. It finally comes to the same thing” (Auster, The Red Notebook 109). Thoreau also wanted to “drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms” (Thoreau 63). In this respect, Auster gets close to Thoreau’s idea. On the other hand, urban space, as described in Auster’s books, does not provide the same comfort and companionship as nature in Walden . Moreover, all the main characters of the trilogy balance between madness and sanity to some extent. Their solitude is often connected with feelings of isolation and loneliness. Their solitude can help them to explore themselves, but what they find, raises even more questions. They do not discover a permanent, united self. Rather than that, they uncover a fragile and fragmented identity. The concept of fragmentation is something generally embraced by postmodern philosophy (Geyh 1). In case of Auster’s characters, however, fragmentation often leads to confusion and disorder. Blue, for example, seems to be unable to accept himself as a fragmented being. Moreover, Blue’s solitude depicted in Ghosts is more compulsive rather than deliberate. He is not able to give up the case, even though he knows that it is just a game. Neither Blue nor Black are in complete control of their lives. They both seem to be unsure about what they want to achieve. Their aloneness gives them some sense of freedom but it severs the links with the outer world at the same time. There is no way back for them. The anguish they both experience intensifies towards the end of the book. The attack each other and Blue leaves the beaten Black lying on the floor. What happens next is ambiguous. Blue has reached the point of no return and disappears from the story: “For now is the moment that Blue stands up from his chair, puts on his hat, and walks through the door. And from this moment on, we know nothing” (Auster, The New York Trilogy 196).
33 2.3 The Locked Room The final part of the trilogy is, unlike the previous two, the first person narrative. It is told by an anonymous narrator who is, as we will get to know, in fact the narrator of all three novellas of The New York Trilogy . The nameless narrator is again engaged in a search for another person, this time a writer called Fanshawe. The narrator is contacted by Fanshawe’s wife Sophie. She assumes that her husband is dead because he mysteriously disappeared a long time ago. Sophie asks the narrator to take care of Fanshawe’s literary work. Due to his effort, Fanshawe’s books are later published and they become famous. Meanwhile, the narrator and Sophie fall in love and start to live together. Up to this point, everything goes smoothly and leads to a happy ending. But, unsurprisingly, it is not about to happen. The narrator receives a letter from Fanshawe, saying that he is not dead but only hiding. Fanshawe warns the narrator that he must not look for him or tell anyone that he is alive. From this point on, the narrator’s life is changed completely. He becomes obsessed with trying to find out more about Fanshawe and he can no longer be honest with Sophie. This drives him apart not only from her but also from all people around. Fanshawe and the narrator were very close friends during their childhood and the bond between them stayed strong even though their lives went separate ways. Fanshawe is a part of the narrator. It is clear from the very beginning of the book, where the narrator confesses: “It seems to me that Fanshawe was always there. He is the place where everything begins for me, and without him I would hardly know who I am” (Auster, The New York Trilogy 199). The narrator was always fascinated by Fanshawe’s life and admired him for his charm. Now, he has all that used to belong to his idol: his wife, son and even the money for his books. Fanshawe’s death would bring him happiness. Nevertheless, it is impossible for the narrator to get rid of Fanshawe completely: “He was ghost I carried around inside me, a prehistoric figment, a thing that was no longer real” (Auster, The New York Trilogy 200). Fanshawe’s letter brings the “ghost” back again. The narrator must find out everything about Fanshawe so that his “ghost” stops haunting him. However, Fanshawe’s mind has always been a closed and impenetrable place for the narrator. Fanshawe is “a prolepsis for the string of locked rooms, real and metaphorical,
34 that will follow” (Bernstein 88). The inability to understand his connection with Fanshawe is a cause of a struggle inside the narrator. He can no longer lead a normal life. The narrator agrees to write Fanshawe’s biography, hoping to find out more him that way. He goes through Fanshawe’s past only to discover that he will never be able to unveil the true nature of Fanshawe’s solitary existence: “Every life is inexplicable, I kept telling myself. No matter how many facts are told, no matter how many details are given, the essential thing resist telling” (Auster, The New York Trilogy 247). Again, narrator’s quest opens the question of solipsism. As it was implied in the other parts of the trilogy as well as in The Invention of Solitude , Auster seem to conclude that it is impossible to penetrate someone else’s mind. It is because “our sense of self is formed by the pulse of consciousness within us the endless monologue, the endless conversation we have with ourselves. And this takes place in absolute solitude” (Auster, The Red Notebook 143). Another reason why we cannot understand others is that sometimes we are not able to understand ourselves either. It can also be one of the reasons why people like stories. They give us a chance for doubling, which is also a central theme of the trilogy (Bernstein 89). Stories give us a unique opportunity to place ourselves into a position of a character with whom we are seemingly familiar. When Auster describes it in The Locked Room he explains: We imagine the real story inside the words, and to do this we substitute ourselves for the person in the story, pretending that we can understand him because we understand ourselves. This is deception. We exist for ourselves, perhaps, and at the times we even have a glimmer of who we are, but in the end we can never be sure, and as our lives go on, we become more and more opaque to ourselves, more and more aware of our own incoherence. No one can cross the boundary into another for the simple reason that no one can gain access to himself. (Auster, The New York Trilogy 247). What Auster also seems to point out is that not all stories can be trusted completely. Some of them can also resist a definite interpretation. There can be as many stories as there are their readers. Auster’s prose is full of stories within stories and it is up to their readers
35 to try to find the meaning for themselves. It is the tension that emerges when the stories fade into one another that seems to fascinate Auster. Fanshawe life story, as described in The Locked Room , is full of allusions to Auster’s personal life. He can be seen as yet another Auster’s alter ego put in the novel. The only link that connects Fanshawe with the world around is his writing. Except from his literary work, he stays mysterious and solitary. As with other Auster’s characters, Fanshawe’s writing takes place in solitude. His writing is “an attempt to explore the nature of the world” (Varvogli 57). Creative work done in solitude can be also used as a way of self exploration. When the narrator goes through Fanshawe’s letters, he concludes that in Fanshawe’s case “solitude became a passageway into the self, an instrument of discovery” (Auster, The New York Trilogy 278). Nevertheless, he is not successful in that search. His writing does not seem to help him much. He sacrifices his real life and lives alone, somewhere beyond the reality. Fanshawe becomes a ghost for himself: “Writing is a solitary business. It takes over your life. In some sense, a writer has no life of his own. Even when he is there, he is not really there” (Auster, The New York Trilogy 175). The New York Trilogy is filled with references to American writers of the nineteenth century. Thoreau, Melville, Poe, Whitman, Emerson and Hawthorne are mentioned throughout the book. Auster often uses the themes they explored and puts them in the urban world of the twentieth century. He mentions one Hawthorne’s short story called Wakefield . It is about a man called Wakefield who leaves his wife one day and mysteriously disappears. His wife thinks he is dead but in fact, her husband lives just around the corner and observes what happens when he is not there. Wakefield does not know the reason why he is doing it, but he cannot help himself. Years go by; he lives alone and even witnesses his own funeral. Then suddenly, he decides to return one day. The story ends when he opens the door of his old house and steps in. What happens next is a mystery. This very much resembles the story of The Locked Room . But unlike Wakefield, Fanshawe will never come back. His solitude goes too far. He vanishes for forever from the real world. At the end of Wakefield Hawthorne says: “Amid the seeming confusion of our mysterious world, individuals are so nicely adjusted to a system, and systems to one another and to a whole, that, by stepping aside for a moment, a man exposes himself to a
36 fearful risk of losing his place forever. Like Wakefield, he may become, as it were, the Outcast of the Universe” (Hawthorne 298). This is exactly what happens to Fanshawe. When someone’s solitude takes over the real life, it can be difficult to find the way back. The narrator gradually starts to follow Fanshawe’s fate. His obsessive work on Fanshawe’s biography consumes him completely: “I turned to edgy, remote, shut myself up in my little work room, craved only solitude” (Auster, The New York Trilogy 268). He soon realizes that the biography is nothing more than a way of encountering Fanshawe. Later, the narrator leaves Sophie and goes alone to Paris, where he hopes to find some more clues leading to Fanshawe. As a detective, however, he fails completely. Not only is he unable to find anything but he also loses the control over himself: “I became inert, a thing that could not move, and little by little I lost track of myself” (Auster, The New York Trilogy 293). When he tries to imagine Fanshawe, he can see only one thing: “At best, there was an impoverished image: the door of a locked room. That was the extent of it: Fanshawe alone in that room, condemned to a mystical solitude living perhaps, breathing perhaps, dreaming God knows what. This room, I now discovered, was located inside my skull” (Auster, The New York Trilogy 293). Here, narrator’s solitude appears to be compulsive and obsessive. It closes more doors for him than it opens. Unlike Thoreau, for example, the narrator does not find much solace in it. After the miserable stay in Paris, the narrator decides to go back to New York. Then, suddenly, the situation changes dramatically. Fanshawe sends another letter to the narrator and summons him to Boston for their final confrontation. In the letter, Fanshawe writes: “This is where it ends, I promise” (Auster, The New York Trilogy 301). The roles change and “the culprit finds the detective” (Varvogli 55). Fanshawe cannot stand his aloneness anymore and decides to die. When he meets the narrator in a bleak house in Boston, he speaks with him only from behind a locked door. The narrator will never see him. Fanshawe gives the narrator the red notebook with his notes, which should explain everything. Then, the narrator goes away, leaving dying Fanshawe behind. Therefore, Fanshawe will never leave his locked room. During their talk, Fanshawe reveals that he is connected with the other characters of the trilogy. He claims to have been followed by Quinn and, at the same time, he says that
37 he, Fanshawe, has been observing the narrator and Sophie. According to what he says, it can be implied that all the main protagonists of the trilogy, Quinn, Stillman, Black, Blue, Fanshawe and the narrator, have much in common. They all try to come to terms with their fragmented self. All three parts of The New York Trilogy deal with the solitary quest for identity of a man, represented by the narrator of the trilogy: The entire story comes down to what happened at the end, and without that end inside me now, I could not have started this book. The same holds for the two books that come before it, City of Glass and Ghosts . These three stories are finally the same story, but each one represents a different stage in my awareness of what it is about. I don’t claim to have solved any problem. I am merely suggesting that a moment came when it no longer frightened me to look at what had happened. (Auster, The New York Trilogy 294) The narrator reads through Fanshawe’s notebook but does not see much meaning in what he finds. Everything remains unsolved and ambiguous: If I say nothing about what I found there, it is because I understood very little. All the words were familiar to me, and yet they seemed to have been put together strangely, as though their final purpose was to cancel each other…..He (Fanshawe) had answered the question by asking another question and therefore everything remained open, unfinished, to be started again. (Auster, The New York Trilogy 314) Therefore, the end of the trilogy does not provide any closure or a definite ending. Rather than that, it accepts the idea of ambiguity and fragmentation of the self. The narrator seems to come to terms with that fact in the end, when he tears out the pages of the red notebook and drops them into a trash bin. The narrator seems to be at the beginning of a new start. Or, as Auster puts it: “He finally comes to accept his own life, to understand that no matter how bewitched or haunted he is, he accepts the reality as it is, to tolerate the presence of ambiguity within himself...He hasn’t slain the dragon, he’s let the dragon move house with him” (Auster, The Red Notebook 111).
38 Conclusion According to my analysis of The Invention of Solitude and The New York Trilogy , it is evident that solitude is a complex term for Paul Auster. He explores and approaches it from various angles. The first book shows that when solitude is meant only as an escape from social interaction or as a hiding place, it can have a harmful impact on those close to us. This is clearly visible from how Auster describes his relationship with his father. Moreover, what Auster claims in both books is that it is impossible for a person to penetrate someone else’s mind. In this sense, we are all alone because no one else can fully understand our thoughts. Our inner life takes place inside our head and therefore always in solitude. On the other hand, Auster stresses the possible importance of solitude for creative work, focusing especially on the process of writing. An image of a writer sitting alone in a room is a recurrent theme in his books. Auster evidently sees writing as a solitary activity, which is not meant negatively. He interprets aloneness as a state with a great creative potential. At the same time, he tries to put forward some dangers that may entail when the author becomes too immersed in his work. Then, the author can lose control or the sense of reality, as it is described on characters of The New York Trilogy. What is also typical of Auster’s view of solitude is that although we essentially live our lives alone, there is always some kind of connection with others. In our thoughts and memories, we often turn to others. We are permanently inhibited by them. Therefore, if we accept this point of view, we can be never alone. This fact does not contradict the solipsistic attitude mentioned above. The can both go hand in hand. On the contrary, aloneness can be the time when we are most aware of the connections with others as well as a period of introspection and re evaluations of our relationships and values in general. Lastly, solitude, as depicted in Auster work, is necessary for self exploration and self formation. For all of the characters of the trilogy, their solitude is closely linked with their search for identity, which is another crucial theme of Auster’s prose. Quinn, Blue or the unnamed narrator and, after all, even Auster himself, struggle to find the meaning of their lives and their place in the world. Although they are not always successful, Auster seems to suggest that the fundamental question of one’s identity can be answered, if ever,
39 in solitude. However, in The New York Trilogy Auster shows that if one’s aloneness goes too far, it can be self destructive. He also mentions that in case of an extreme isolation the boundary between madness and sanity or fiction and reality can be very narrow and blurred. This is well reflected in the whole trilogy where the main protagonists often balance on that line. To sum up, Auster tries to describe both advantages and dangers of solitude. His work, and The New York Trilogy in particular, resist simple interpretation, which is probably one of the things that make his writing so attractive. Each reader can become the part of the story and understand it from a different point of view. As Auster concludes: “I finally believe that it’s the reader who writes the book and not the writer” (Auster, The Red Notebook 111).
40 Resume This work analyses two books written by Paul Auster, The Invention of Solitude and The New York Trilogy , in connection with the theme of solitude. The main aim of the thesis is to examine Auster’s opinions on the topic and to find out how it is described in the selected books. The thesis mentions both positive and negative aspects of solitude and shows how the term is complex for Auster. Both The Invention of Solitude and The New York Trilogy are analysed separately and thesis is divided into chapters according to the parts of the books. Resumé Tato práce analyzuje dvě knihy Paula Austera, Vynález samoty a Newyorskou trilogii , v souvislosti s tématem samoty. Hlavním cílem této práce je prozkoumat Austerovy názory na tuto problematiku a zjistit, jak je popsána ve vybraných knihách. Práce zmiňuje jak pozitivní, tak negativní aspekty samoty a ukazuje komplexnost tohoto termínu pro Austera. Jak Vynález samoty, tak Newyorská trilogie jsou analyzovány zvláštˇ a práce je rozdělena do kapitol podle jednotlivých částí obou knih.
41 Bibliography Works cited: Auster, Paul. The Invention of Solitude . London: Faber and Faber, 2005. . The New York Trilogy . London: Faber and Faber, 1992. . The Red Notebook . London: Faber and Faber, 1996. Barbour, John D. The Value of Solitude: The Ethics and Spirituality of Aloneness in Autobiography . Virginia: University of Virginia Press, 2004. Barone, Dennis. “Introduction: Paul Auster and the Postmodern American Novel.” Beyond the Red Notebook: Essays on Paul Auster. Ed. Dennis Barone. Pennsylvania: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996. 2 26. Begley, Adam. “Case of the Brooklyn Symbolist.” The New York Times . 30 Aug. 1992. 12 March 2008.
42 Bruckner, Pascal. “Paul Auster, or The Heir Intestate.” Beyond the Red Notebook: Essays on Paul Auster. Ed. Dennis Barone. Pennsylvania: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996. 27 33. Buchholz, Ester Schaler. The Call of Solitude: Alonetime in a World of Attachment . New York: Touchstone, 1997. Contat, Michael. “The Manuscript in the Book: A Conversation.” JSTOR-The Scholarly Journal Archive. 20 Feb. 2008.
Hamilton, Steffan. “The Invention of Solitude.” Paul Auster- The Definitive Website. 1 April 2008.
43 Jacobs, Andrew. “Lonesome Town.” The New York Times . 8 June 1997. 10 March 2008. < http://www.nytimes.com > Kreutzer, Kenneth. “Paul Auster: A Brief Biography.” Paul Auster- The Definitive Website.2 April 2008.
Thoreau, Henry David. Walden . Hertfordshire: Wordsworth Editions Limited, 1995.
44 Ting, Morten. “The Notion of `The Room´ in Paul Auster’s The Invention of Solitude
and City of Glass .” Paul Auster- The Definitive Website. 20 March 2008.
< http://www.paulauster.co.uk/theinventionofsolitude.htm>
Tysh, Chris. “From One Mirror to Another: The Rhetoric of Disaffiliation in City of
Glass .” Literature Online . 20 March 2008.
Varvogli, Aliki. The World That Is the Book: Paul Auster’s Fiction . Liverpool:
Liverpool University Press, 2001.
Works consulted:
Auster, Paul. Moon Palace . London: Faber and Faber, 1992. . The Music of Chance . London: Faber and Faber, 2006. Bible: Písmo svaté Starého a Nového zákona . Praha : Ekumenická rada církví v ČSR, 1979. Collodi, Carlo. Pinocchiova dobrodružství . Praha: Albatros, 2007.
45 Appendix 1: Paul Auster’s portrait.
Source: http://www.gonzalobarr.com/blog/?p=301 Appendix 2: Samuel Auster Paul Auster’s father.
Source: http://www.justbuffalo.org/media/pdf/Auster.pdf
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