The Ego, the Self and the Subject in Paul Auster’s Fictions Catherine Roger In Paul Auster’s fiction, the self can become the other very easily because it has no cohesion or continuity. Yet the subject speaks loud and clear, even though it cannot be grasped easily. Paul Auster’s fiction mostly deals with the unconscious. The conscious part of the self spies on the intimate, secret, unconscious self, so as to see through its workings. A split between conscious and unconscious selves occurs during writing and it is this process that Auster stages in his poetry and in his prose. Not only does the individual criss-cross his own inner world but he also explores the outside world. After coping with his inner conflicts, he attempts to adapt to society. Yet two possibilities for confusion crop up. The “I” in Auster’s works is both the subject of French Lacanian psychology and the self of American psychology. On the one hand, the subject is both present and impossible and the whole of Auster’s writing turns around “aphanisis,” the process by which a subject disappears as soon as it has appeared to consciousness. Dissociation, alienation and imperfection characterize the subject which is inaccessible by nature. On the other hand, the “I” is also the ego and the self of American psychology in Auster’s works. The American self has nothing to do with the Freudian self: it is a complex blend of conscious and unconscious. The self of Auster’s fiction is situated in between Hartmann, Kris and Loewenstein’s ego-psychology and Kohut’s self-psychology. It partakes both of the Lacanian subject and Kohut’s self. Writing enables Auster to stage the fundamental alienation of the subject and to find out how to prop up, back up a weak, fragmented self, how to give it cohesion and continuity. Finally, by questioning the subject, Auster makes it more present than ever in his fiction. In this essay, I intend to show that the “I” in Auster’s works partakes both of the subject of French Lacanian psychology and the self of American psychology and that, in his fiction, Auster gradually moves away from the former and comes to accept the latter while deriding it. In a way, Auster’s works can be considered as the successive steps of an existential quest which can be summed up thus: after coping with his inner conflicts, the individual tries to adapt to society - except that none of these tasks is ever over, it has to be performed again and again in each work. Such a terse definition of Auster’s writing deserves a little explanation. The unconscious is a repository of signifiers, both visual and auditory, that are repressed at the oedipal moment when incestuous desire for the mother is no longer perceived to be acceptable by the ego. What’s unconscious in mental life is also infantile, it is the initial, primitive part of psychical life. The unconscious is inaccessible to contradiction, location and time. It pays no attention to the demands of external reality and seeks to satisfy pleasure rather than be regulated by the reality principle to which the ego is subject. It is a system which is in direct and continual conflict with the ego, in a constant state of resistance due to the striving of the wishes to obtain immediate satisfaction. Thus Auster’s characters act despite their conscious will: when Quinn goes to Stillman’s appartment in City of Glass, when Jim Nashe criss-crosses America in The Music of Chance, they obey the demands of the unconscious. The ego combines common usage of the word: the image one has of oneself, the conscious data, the knowable information about oneself, and an accepted use in psychoanalytic theory: one agency among others functioning within the psyche (Freud’s ego, superego and id). The ego and the conscious do not coincide exactly in so far as the ego strives to maintain repression of the unconscious. In Auster’s fiction, characters are on the lookout for the unconscious. Quinn in City of Glass claims the writer is a detective spying on “the tiny life-bud of the body buried in the breathing self” (9). Lacan takes up the Freudian ego: the mirror stage becomes a decisive step in ego-identity in which the ego constructs an image of unity, permanence, and substantiality, but which is marked by the misrecognition and alienation inherent in the reflected specular image. Moreover, Lacan thinks that the center of the human being is not the ego, but the subject which sometimes corresponds to what Freud calls the id. The unconscious, according to Lacan is “that which vacillates in a split in the subject” (Four Fundamental 28). Unconscious discourse is other to conscious discourse and it speaks to the self through the symptom. Moreover, Lacan distinguishes between need, demand and desire. Whereas need belongs to the realm of the Real (it is short-lived and instinctual, it can be satisfied easily), demand belongs to the realm of the Imaginary (it is a call to the other, to the Imaginary mother, to the image in the mirror), desire belongs to the realm of the Symbolic. Desire is the hallmark of the subject, it is insatiable and unfulfillable, predicated on lack and absence. The desire of the subject is the desire of the Other. Lacan defines the subject as forever wanting and privileges the Other as the locus of want, lack and speech. Auster’s characters Roger, Catherine. “The Ego, the Self and the Subject in Paul Auster’s Fiction.” EREA 2.2 (automne 2004): 72-7. 72 <www.e-rea.org> are forever trying to grasp otherness in themselves. The desire of the other is called “hunger” in Paul Auster’s fiction. It is what motivates his characters, what makes them walk endlessly. They are subjects because they are forever wanting (The inhabitants of the City in In the Country of Last Things are insatiable “The stomach is a bottomless pit” - Marco Fogg in Moon Palace almost starves himself to death, hoping that someone will take pity on him and rescue him, which finally happens since Kitty Wu comes to his help - characters cultivate that hunger both as a rejection of society and a call to the other). Impossibility, alienation and imperfection characterize the subject in Paul Auster’s poetry. A voice can be heard but it corresponds to a subject which is divided, alienated in the Other. The poem White Nights (1972) starts with this line of verse: “No one here” and ends with “And each night, / from the silence of the trees, you know / that my voice / comes walking toward you.” The subject is alienated to itself: “The wall / is your only witness. Barred / from me, but squandering nothing, / you sprawl over each unwritten page...” (Unearth II). Its whereabouts cannot be mapped. While the poet keeps mentioning his wish to discover a true, personal language (the true seed - the seed of a single voice - the clandestine word - a flower), words come out corrupted, tainted, alien: language bespeaks the alienation of the subject (the babble - the rant - the mob - the work of sabotage - the skull’s rabble). Lacan teaches that language speaks the subject, that the speaker is subjected to language rather than master of it. The subject is hidden from view, it has to speak to give birth to itself, but the hoped-for clandestine word is forever replaced by “the hundred-faced lie that makes you visible” (Unearth XII). In Auster’s poems, the subject is this “you” which is forever barred from the “I.” Whereas Auster, before 1978, before White Spaces, dwells in his poetry on the voice of the impossible subject, on the inaccessibility, division and alienation of the subject, in White Spaces, he finds a way out of the dilemma: speech becomes as much a function of the body as an extension of the mind “no less a gesture than a hand outstretched […] and in this gesture can be read the entire alphabet of desire, the body’s need to be taken beyond itself, even as it dwells in the sphere of its own motion” (White Spaces 82). Auster has found a clever way of escaping from the impossible and alienated subject as defined by Lacan. “In other words, it says itself, and our mouths are merely the instruments of the saying of it” (White Spaces 84). The subject, the unconscious, says itself through language. Writing remains minimalist “to say the simplest thing possible” and still deals with reality “how much sweeter to remain in the realm of the naked eye,” but, thanks to that leap in the unknown, the “I” achieves full subjectivity at last “as if in an act of blind faith, I want to assume full responsibility.” While it is true that the subjective stance is an interaction of all three orders (symbolic, imaginary and real), it is only when the individual takes his rightful place in the sociocultural and signifying order that he attains full subjectivity, according to Lacan. Auster no longer refuses otherness and alienation, he embraces it. The poet has become a passive urn which welcomes otherness rather than refuses it. Language speaks the subject: whereas bodies are mere weak and vulnerable puppets, their voices are powerful and come from an alien world. This is the case for Stillman Junior in The City of Glass, but also for Effing in Moon Palace and Jack Pozzi in The Music of Chance. The “I” achieves full subjectivity through acceptance of the symbolic order. True enough, nostalgia for lost and impossible perfection and harmony still pervades Auster’s prose, but it is not hampered by the inability to speak which looms, weighs over his poetry.