Lost in the Labyrinth: Authoring of Identity in the Works of Paul Auster by

While Auster’s feeling of absence from himself may certainly reflect the loss of his father and a heightened awareness of absence as an ironically central theme of that relationship, this is compounded by the fact that he first reveals his separation from his son in “The Book of Memory.” Auster is no longer a son to his father, and his presence as a father to his son has been significantly transformed to include an experience of absence in the midst of his separation from his wife. His father and son relationships have undergone swift and radical changes, and his efforts to come to terms with these changes must occur in solitude so that he can develop stability within himself even in his barren state and surroundings. The changes Auster experiences are numerous and extremely life-altering in their disruption of a sense of continuity and coherence in his identity, and therefore, The Invention of Solitude marks an entry into what Arnold Modell characterizes as the essential paradox of the self: “the self endures through time as a sense of identity, yet consciousness of self is always changing” (PS 3).

Amidst his experience of loss and separation, Auster does appear to find some resolution to the father-son relationships in a realization that carries a revelatory tone: “when the father dies, he writes, the son becomes his own father and his own son. He looks at his son and sees himself in the face of the boy” (81). But despite this recognition, Springer suggests that Auster’s realization is momentary, and so the search for the father proceeds and transforms into a search beyond, or for what was absent within, their relationship: “‘Portrait of An Invisible Man’ only represents another phase in the speaker’s search. The search is the text itself” (86). In his highly reflexive novella, “Ghosts,” the second novel in The New York Trilogy, Auster posits the question about this process by suggesting the ceaseless, and hence timeless, aspect of the textual search through a central character who faces the similar fate of an unfamiliar solitary condition: “How to get out of the room that is the book that will go on being written for as long as he stays in the room?” (202). In order for the search to continue Auster must go on writing and stay quietly in his room. Therefore, another integral aspect to Auster’s feeling of absence from himself, and his previously established roles as a father and a son, is the fact of his complete separation from a familiar domestic setting and the undeniability of its impact upon his rupture from specific identifications with the past. The themes of memory, the room, and writing circumscribe and transcend these personal relationships, and they coalesce as an imaginative space that potentially, and yet uncertainly, charts a way through his ruptures and losses.

This imaginative space is signified through the text’s circuitous form which incorporates both poetic and prosaic textual elements. The circuitous form of “The Book of Memory” is indicative of a poetic rather than a linear history. Passages are linked through aphorisms and are concerned with the nature of chance and discontinuity. This aphoristic presentation emphasizes the theme of a spatialization of time which is discontinuous and porous, and marked by gaps. This emphasizes the memoir’s poetic form as Auster develops associative links between historical connections and his personal recollections. This representation of memory, which could be ascertained as an effort to emphasize the timeless, or the unconscious, aspect of being is a move away from a strictly prosaic personal story that attempts to link and fill gaps in the form of a linear narrative. What Auster comes to illustrate is how personal memory and stories can only take on meaning, or resonate, in the associations that reconnect with the larger world of story and reality through which they take shape. Auster investigates and details how his personal experiences resonate with the stories of other individuals he has known in his life, and ultimately, for the writer, how they resonate with the stories he has read and the larger world of literature. And Auster’s interrogation of the past, it appears, can only occur in the midst of this displacement and rupture, alone in a bare room where he must venture into his emptiness and draw upon the resources of his memory to create and recover himself.

Amidst these crises, Auster lived in a state of flux, staying in both his grandfather’s empty apartment in Brooklyn and a bare room in an office building in Manhattan. The feeling of flux and instability in his personal life is therefore mirrored by his transient living conditions, and it is the bare room that acts as a metaphor for Auster’s spiritual condition that he suggests is the site from which he must regenerate himself. The location in which he must face himself is spartan and offers no solace or respite from his spiritual ordeal. He notes the draining toll of the effort which lies before him:

There is nothing here to welcome him, no promise of a soma holiday

to woo him into oblivion. These four walls hold only the signs of

his own disquiet, and in order to find some measure of peace in these

surroundings, he must dig more and more deeply into himself. But

the more he digs, the less there will be to go on digging into. This

seems undeniable to him. Sooner or later, he is bound to use himself

up. (78-9, emphasis added)

The struggle is tantamount to burrowing into himself to find strength in the realm of memory, perhaps in hopes of recovering submerged parts of himself that have been forgotten or untapped, and which he may suspect as a source for his feeling of self-absence. In regard to what he portrays as his immanent disappearance, he simultaneously fears the prospect of this looming unknown and the possibility that he will not have the strength to endure; hence, he may be unable to locate a self that can find a solution to this unfamiliar disquiet. Additionally, Auster’s use of third person narration throughout “The Book of Memory” is worth reiterating here as indicative of representing his sense of displacement.

The spartan conditions of the room in the office building are detailed early in “The Book of Memory.” He describes the room’s uninhabitability: “people were never supposed to live here. It is a room meant for machines, cuspidors, and sweat” (77). This uninhabitability suggests that his living situation is more akin to transience than a state of transition as he struggles to make his temporary residence livable. His effort is a Sisyphean task:

By staying in this room for long stretches at a time, he can usually

manage to fill it with his thoughts, and this in turn seems to dispel the

dreariness, or at least make him unaware of it. Each time he goes out,

he takes his thoughts with him, and during his absence the room gradually

empties of his efforts to inhabit it. When he returns, he has to begin the

process all over again, and that takes work, real spiritual work. (77)

The room’s barrenness and lack of association with the slightest hint of comfort evokes an extreme sense of alienation and dissociation. Additionally, the structure of this section of the memoir is fragmented and repetitive with an interspersing of particular themes throughout the text, and the circuitous and non-linear narration represents his disjuncture from the present and his movement into the space of memory. It is therefore difficult to determine if his inhabitance of these two locations achieve an overlap in time, or whether they were separate stays that Auster chose to overlap as a representation of this temporal disjuncture and the labyrinthine nature of his inward descent while writing the memoir. Auster conveys this confusion and a sense of vertigo that fills his bare room: “it is as if he were being forced to watch his own disappearance, as if, by crossing the threshold of this room, he were entering another dimension, taking up residence inside a black hole” (77).

His inwardness, and yet his paradoxical feeling of displacement from himself, highlight the importance of the excavation of memories that mark the beginning of his journey. In addition to the dreariness of his surroundings, the period is marked by the onset of winter, “the darkest time of year,” wherein the days are so short that “there is no light to sink his teeth into, no sense of time unfolding. . . . It is a hermetic season, a long moment of inwardness” (78). The effect of sinking into himself amidst such dreary conditions causes Auster to feel “himself sliding through events, hovering like a ghost around his own presence, as if he were living somewhere to the side of himself– not really here, but not anywhere else either” (78). In this instance he portrays a sense of spatial disorientation that reflects his feeling of temporal disjunction, and he ultimately determines that he is left with no alternative but to face and plunge into his personal disorder within this bare environment: “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” (79). Auster is on the verge of entering a dark and confusing period in which his experience of loss is accentuated by his bare environment and his lack of stable reference with the external world. His self-diagnosis is that he must accept this condition rather than resist it. This then becomes the project, or quest, of the “Book of Memory”: that Auster must dwell within himself no matter how harsh, estranging, or barren his condition becomes to sustain a hope of locating himself, of attempting to re-stabilize in the sense of being able to inhabit himself and assuage his feeling of absence. To state it differently, Stephen Fredman offers the following response to the narrator’s question in Ghosts, “the only way to get out of the room that is the book is by writing the book” (10).

Auster sets the tone of the memoir as an act of embarking on an inner quest by entering the realm of memory. As his external world fades away and loses its aura of stability and certainty in the unfolding of habitual reference, he resigns himself to being propelled internally and turns his predicament into a quest. And the insistence in his project, through the refrain from Pascal, is to be able to stay inside the room with himself and inhabit the space of memory. The characterization of the quest, however, as an entry into another dimension that acknowledges his crisis of identity and referentiality is one that will evoke questions rather than offer a discovery of definitive solutions. Fredman characterizes Auster’s work in relation to the poet, Edmond Jabes, who, he says, “favors a midrashic approach to the book over an idealist one, a text composed of questions rather than answers” (7). The goal that Auster posits is to remain in solitude and inhabit his memories in order to confront Pascal’s proclamation and face the indeterminate path of self-questioning as opposed to seeking quick solutions for his feeling of dis-ease.

Though Auster’s inward quest is propelled by personal catastrophes which remain central themes throughout the memoir, he moves into a deeper philosophical inquiry. The title suggests that this inquiry builds into an exploration upon the nature of memory itself and the endless source of connections and associations that can be mined and brought to light to represent its depths. His quest then is in the ‘true’ sense of the word in regard to looking into himself in order to seek and question and perhaps to unveil and flesh out his contradictions. It lies in opposition to the hero’s quest as there can be no end nor solution in the form of a conquest, because memory cannot be conquered but only experienced and reconstructed through language. And in writing through and about memory, there is no tangible object of pursuit to gain nor final discovery or revelation, but rather a perpetual process of unveiling and inscribing: “memory, then, not so much as the past contained within us, but as proof of our life in the present. . . He must forget himself in order to be there. And from that forgetfulness arises the power of memory” (138). If a quest into oneself involves discoveries and a recovery of memories, and so a recovery of oneself in the present, the losses that propel Auster into himself can never be overcome. Rather, they must be continually remembered and rearranged inside the book of memory which can perhaps be endlessly rewritten. Barone states, “Auster understands that coherence can never remain very long if we are to live” (34). It is as though the only solution is to discover his solitude in order to evoke memories and arrange them on the page without an intention to fill the gaps of memory, but rather, to let them resound as pauses and spaces of reflection. The gaps must always remain for the space of continuous interpretation to be possible.

The prominence of empty space in Auster’s aphoristic presentation, and the circuitous repetition of themes that characterize “The Book of Memory” represent and evoke his sense of disorientation within the realm of memory. Auster’s act of facing his solitude and his feeling of absence and emptiness turn into a full surrender to, and even an affirmation of, his state in his recollection of being lost in the streets of Amsterdam:

unable to discover even a single point of reference, he saw that his

steps, by taking him nowhere, were taking him nowhere but into

himself. He was wandering inside himself, and he was lost. Far from

troubling him, this state of being lost became a source of happiness,

of exhilaration. . . . he breathed it into his very bones and said to himself,

almost triumphantly: I am lost. (87)

This assessment of his condition acts as an affirmation that he must inhabit what feels like the uninhabitable. To put it a little less dramatically, he must familiarize with the unfamiliar, in the sense that, as Gaston Bachelard states, “the normal unconscious knows how to make itself at home everywhere” (10). To be at home everywhere, in familiar relationship with one’s more disturbing interior realms, is paramount to a creative participation with the everyday rather than remaining swept up in an unquestioning acceptance of daily life devoid of both sobriety and imagination. Auster’s ability to sit with himself and the unfamiliarity of his crisis-driven disorder bring him into contact with personal and literary associations that link his alien state with others through his imagination. Bachelard remarks on the power of solitude:

he knows instinctively that this place identified with his solitude

is creative. . . . We return to them in our night dreams. These retreats

have the value of a shell. And when we reach the very end of the

labyrinths of sleep, when we attain to the regions of deep slumber, we

may perhaps experience a type of repose that is pre-human; pre-human,

in this case, approaching the immemorial. (10)
His statement implies the primal, the deeply irrational, that presently in the modern labyrinth of New York where Auster lives. His comment also reinvokes Auster’s fear of using himself up by journeying beyond the realm of memory and into territory that must ultimately remain indefinable and mysterious. Bachelard’s words evoke the sense of boundlessness that human consciousness entails which can never be fully understood nor articulated.

Auster develops a connection to the boundless and immemorial that Bachelard refers to through a citation of St. Augustine: “the power of memory is prodigious. It is a vast, immeasurable sanctuary. Who can plumb its depths? And yet it is a faculty of my soul. Although it is part of my nature, I cannot understand all that I am” (88). Additionally, his citation of Pascal comes together with his reference to St. Augustine: “memory as a room, as a body, as a skull that encloses the room in which a body sits. As in the image: ‘a man sat alone in his room’” (88). In this instance, the man sitting alone can be viewed as a self-portrait of Auster engaged in the dual act of reading and writing. It is here that the vastness and incomprehensibility of memory extends through personal memory to literary and historical associations, as Auster, alone in his room, makes contact with writers from different ages writing from their spaces of solitude.

Early in the text Auster reflects, “memory: the space in which a thing happens for the second time” (83). This sense of doubling and paralleling of ideas evoked via the shared space of solitude is reflected as a central theme of the text via the title, “The Book of Memory,” through his use of an informal subtitle that is woven into the text’s aphoristic framework. In “Book One,” Auster depicts his aforementioned dreary living conditions and feeling of absence from himself. As I’ve referred to previously, I see this departure reflected in his use of a third person narrative which also signifies a sense of doubling. “Book Two” of “The Book of Memory” illustrates the expansion of Auster’s personal plight into the realm of history as it consists entirely of a lengthy citation from Israel Lichtenstein’s last testament during the holocaust in which Lichtenstein asks for remembrance for his daughter, his wife, and himself. The full citation very early in “The Book of Memory” signifies that the text is not a traditional memoir in regard to being a presentation of a personal testament, but opens into an other space ordinarily conceived beyond the personal which recontextualizes Auster’s meditations. The doubling in memory is therefore not a direct mirroring, but rather, indicates that “in the space of memory, everything is both itself and something else” (136). Therefore, his departure is simultaneously an entrance into a larger and richer sense of himself that connects with history by connecting to the solitude of others, and by honoring Lichtenstein’s wish for remembrance.

Even though Auster ruminates, “he remembered that various diagrams of hell had been used as memory systems,” (86) what he discovers inside his solitary space and private hell of memory is a connection with others in the shared space of solitude so that a recognition of otherness is evoked despite his apparent self-enclosure. While moving inside of himself and his suffering over his losses, he also moves beyond himself as part of an “establishment of resemblances with other people, other artists. . . .” (Springer 89). In Auster’s words,

what he experienced, perhaps, . . . as he sat alone in his room on Varick

Street, was this: the sudden knowledge that came over him that even

alone, in the deepest solitude of his room, he was not alone, or, more

precisely, that the moment he began to try to speak to that solitude, he had

become more than just himself. Memory, therefore, not simply as the

resurrection of one’s private past, but an immersion in the past of others,

which is to say: history– which one both participates in and is a witness to,

is a part of and apart from. (138)

Therefore, the initial segments in the writing of “The Book of Memory” detail Auster’s personal circumstances, and as the text develops he proceeds to frame his existential state within a broader literary context which resituates his personal narrative. The sense of being alone and not alone simultaneously addresses Auster’s early sense of absence from himself which he appears to come to terms with when he succinctly states , “therefore he tells himself, it is possible to be alone and not alone at the same moment” (136). This doubling also frames the subtitled sections as parallel texts because the sections are not ordered chronologically, but instead are connected thematically through the subtitle. In this way, the personal does not disappear, but rather changes shape within the larger frame of historical forces. It is recontextualized and can be seen to simultaneously expand as part of this larger framework, and shrink in terms of the self’s identification with the ego. For Auster, what will never be again is the singularity of the personal which fails to acknowledge its place within, and alongside, a broader and richer historical context.

In addition to the “Books” of “The Book of Memory,” another prominent subtitle in the text is “Installments on the Nature of Chance.” These subsections thematically support each other as part of the labyrinthine structure of the text and emphasize the lack of a penetrable logic that characterizes living, and especially the reliving of experiences that occur through the life of memory and the act of writing. The negation of a chronological representation serves to illustrate the nature of the mind at work in the present either drifting or jumping through associations without regard for narrative order or linear coherence. The subtitles symbolize an attempt to construct order, but it is an order which honors the illusive ‘logic’ of contemplation and memory in which the past is re-lived in the present, and in this way the passages double as moments of re-experiencing and examining the past, a process which effectively reshapes the present.

As I have mentioned previously, another significant way in which Auster conveys a feeling of unfamiliarity and plays with the theme of doubling is via his reference to himself in the third person to indicate how his personal crises have inflicted a feeling of rupture and fragmentation of his identity. His implementation of third person narration not only marks this sense of slippage from himself, but it also connotes an attempt to attain critical distance and exert control as an author of this experience of rupture, and in this way he is doubled by being both absent and present. In Auster’s account of his father in “Portrait of an Invisible Man,” he uses a first person narrative in his portrayal of a man who always remained distant and on the surface in both his relationships to others and to himself. Auster uncovers previously unknown personal history about his father’s family which perhaps offers insight into the man’s distance from life. He discovers that his father, as a child, was present during the murder of his father (Auster’s paternal grandfather) by his mother. While the unveiling of this dark secret appears to offer some explanation for his father’s remoteness, it is an explanation that is ultimately too simplistic for Auster. The traumatic event in the elder Auster’s childhood gives cause for a note of empathy from Auster toward his father, but the strictly personal tragedy does not let his father off the hook for being “a perpetual outsider, a tourist of his own life” (9). The rejection of a singular event as central to identity formation lies within Auster’s rejection of writing “The Book of Memory” as a more limited first person account. This authorial choice serves to create critical distance and separation from his past. Auster consciously deploys the technique when he states, “he decides to refer to himself as A.” (75), and thus steers his narrative away from a confining personal account of events in order to open his memoir to the broader and deeper notion of influences which help construct identity. It is a narrative choice that elicits the complex and highly contextual nature of identity. Unlike his father, he chooses to put his past under the microscope in the confines of his solitude as an attempt to be present in his past so that he can explore it and recontextualize it through writing.

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