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

In the very first lines of this section Auster writes, “He lays out a piece of blank paper on the table before him and writes these words with his pen. It was. It will never be again” (75). The shocks of the factual death of his father and the metaphorical death of his marriage are indisputable, and these deaths leave Auster absent from himself, estranged from the self that he had been. These opening lines foreground Auster as a writer of the text, and suggest a significant and dramatic change that he finds himself negotiating. His simple declaration, “It was. It will never be again,” is repeated only two paragraphs following its first utterance to emphasize the importance of his recognition of departure from the past. While the reference to “it” remains incredibly broad and enigmatically open, I would suggest that Auster’s use of third-person narrative in relation to himself, and the expansion of his memoir into reflections on the nature of memory that lead to personal correspondences and literary allusions, are themselves indicative of the departure to which he refers. The rejection of the event in his father’s childhood as cause and reason for his detachment from life is embodied in Auster’s leap into a third person narrative: he strives to objectify his life and see it in this broader and deeper historical context. “It was. It will never be again” explicitly suggests an intention to depart from a past version of himself, and from a mode of identification with the world that centered around a stabile, and hence impenetrable, conscious “I.” The recognition of departure and personal destabilization coincides with a movement that enters the contradictions and ambiguities of identity and explores the effects of the stories he has come into personal contact with, as well as literary stories and histories encountered via the written word as he tries to come to terms with, and reconstruct, his identity.

As Auster proceeds along his labyrinthine trip through memory, he also mines the depths of literary history. This is illustrated through his central reference to Pascal along with several other citations, including St. Augustine and the epigraph from Collodi’s The Adventures of Pinocchio. In addition to addressing the sobering subject of death, the epigraph highlights the contradictory aspect of his inquiry as it signifies the relevance of stories, particularly childhood tales, and their importance in shaping consciousness. Auster’s decision to use an epigraph from a children’s tale points to the fabulative nature of childhood and its imaginative coloring, and therefore points not only to the impossibility of accuracy in recovering one’s earliest memories, but also to the symbolic importance of the imagination and the fantastic that coalesce with experience and shape memory. It also directs attention to the essential unresolvability of death and the outer limits of human understanding, and recalls Bachelard’s primal evocations of the immemorial.

The journey inward may have been initiated as an attempt to recover himself in the face of his feeling of disorientation and absence, but the epigraph from Pinocchio signifies the contradiction and ambiguity of the venture into memory. “It was” can be declared by Auster as past, but the vagueness of ‘it’ is significant because there is no ontological certainty possible regarding ‘it,’ whatever it may have been. The elusiveness and clearly subjective nature of memory does not, however, imply that the work of excavation is not poignant and crucial. Rather, the recognition of its unresolvability and somewhat fantastic nature serves as a commentary on the construction involved in human consciousness, and highlights the openness and endless interpolation that is possible in the face of traumatically tinged events that may be unearthed. And because the quest opens with an epigraph which validates contradictory viewpoints, the question of reality is foregrounded as the stability of his personal identity is annihilated through the circumstances of loss. Auster’s non-linear and circuitous inquiry, which is full of ambiguities and contradictions, is presented as being quintessential to stories and to writing.

Auster’s personal story is embedded within a larger context of narrative histories and storytelling. For him, the written word, to put experience into language, always implies a refashioning or reconstruction of experience. To phrase it differently, the act of writing entails the supplementation of a critical perspective and imaginative coloring of experience, and therefore recreates it. Auster reconstructs his personal life within a history that recontextualizes his experience, but the text he leaves behind under his name, does have a deeply personal signature and style. In this sense, in tune with important themes within “The Book of Memory,” Auster’s personal memoir might also be said to run parallel with this larger contextual narrative. The memoir becomes a text that doubles as the narrative is a reflection upon the larger themes of memory, solitude, and stories as detailed through an array of literary and personal references. The personal crises involving loss and separation catalyze Auster’s feeling of absence and separation from himself, and these facts in his life propel him toward an internal excavation into the spatio-temporal disorder of the unconscious and the space of writing that emerges as a poetic and labyrinthine meditation, “The Book of Memory.”

The effect of this excavation, this archeological dig into himself, creates a sense of disorientation as he retreats from the flow of time of the external world, away from social interaction and everyday concerns, and into darkness, solitude, and the disordered time of the unconscious where consciousness becomes labyrinthine and hellish. And yet, his descent moves him into a space from which he can create. Memory then has a redemptive quality as a place of sanctuary because it moves Auster well beyond the confines of his immediate condition through the coupling of personal correspondences with individuals from his past, and with literary allusions which propel the work more deeply into literary history and tradition. Barone notes, “the Auster of Solitude centers himself through a historical search. The center revealed by that search is not solid or uniform but is ever changing” (32). The perpetual motion of his inward journey enables him to understand and affirm that his solitude is shared with others. For if he cannot do this, he implies, how can he feel connected to others if he is not connected to himself, even if this self remains an unstable entity subject to continuous interrogation?

As Fredman commented on the ‘midrashic nature’ of the text, this solitude is not overcome or resolved, but is a condition of reading and writing that is ongoing, which suggests that the previous conception of stability and a coherent self that Auster felt absent from, and which initially plunged him into the work, is instead continually reshaped in the caverns of solitude such that Auster’s effort to recover and locate himself is fleeting and paradoxical. Fredman encapsulates Auster’s work; “you could say that his books are allegories about the impossibly difficult task of writing, in which he investigates the similarly impossible task of achieving identity– through characters plagued by a double who represents the unknowable self” (4). For Auster, this doubling and unknowability of the self might perhaps be described as the revelatory space of memory and writing where the self must perpetually be rewritten. Only questions and indeterminacy remain, and Auster suggests in his concluding words that it is this open terrain that must be continually charted: “It was. It will never be again. Remember” (172). The impossible task of writing to which Fredman refers is, of course, Auster’s imaginative landscape, and this returns me to Pascal and the importance of sitting quietly in the room. But in this instance, the citation changes and suggests a vital reason for inhabiting the creative space of solitude when Auster quotes Pascal, “it is not possible to have reasonable grounds for not believing in miracles” (120). Auster knows that his life will never be the same, but perhaps the miracle is that it will go on changing by writing the text in a solitary space so he can continually author his existence through the perpetually shifting book of memory.

Chapter Two

City of Glass: Lost in the Labyrinth
In an interview with Sinda Gregory and Larry McCaffery regarding the autobiographical aspects of The New York Trilogy, specifically City of Glass, Auster acknowledged a strong personal motivation behind his exploration of identity in the novel in response to their questions. He stated, “I think of City of Glass as an homage to Siri, . . . . 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” (AH 306). Working from this statement, and in consideration of Auster’s interrogation of his past and the subject of memory in the previous chapter on “The Book of Memory,” I want to look at City of Glass through a lens that frames Quinn as a figure of Auster’s alternate self who fails to dwell with himself and investigate his past through the process of writing following the losses of his wife and son. While The Invention of Solitude is a meditation upon, and philosophical exploration into, the nature of memory and its importance in maintaining both a coherent identity and enabling a creative reshaping of identity through textual representation, City of Glass presents the polar opposite of such an engagement and details the dissolution of Quinn’s identity due to a repression of memory that leads him to take on the identity of a detective, Paul Auster, on the basis of a mistaken phone call. In the novel, Auster imagines what might have happened to himself had he failed to work through his and cornered himself into an isolated existence to the extent that he would be unable to engage in social reality and initiate meaningful action in the present because of his alienation from himself and others.

As I discussed in the first chapter, “The Book of Memory” engages and wrestles with a multiplicity of A.’s connections, and the poetic and labyrinthine structure of the text leaves the work very open for the reader to enter his philosophical speculations that carry the text beyond an individually centered memoir. The relevance of the openness and expansion of the self that Auster presents in The Invention of Solitude relates to his recognition of feeling a wealth of connections while in solitude, and, most significantly, his acknowledgment that these connections expand beyond the self and link A. with a literary and philosophical tradition. Ilana Shiloh describes “The Book of Memory” as “a torturous inquiry into his own self” which probes beyond the self and investigates “the role of memory in the construction of identity” (17). City of Glass also utilizes a multiplicity of literary connections, but these references serve as a metatext to illustrate Quinn’s forgetfulness and loss of connection with his past due to his inability to be in solitude and assimilate personal losses that would require him to dwell within the fluctuating, nebulous, and painful aspects of his emotional consciousness. Rather than engage his solitude and explore the correspondences and associations through the act of remembering as part of his acknowledgment of personal suffering, he remains divorced from his internal reality and fails to reflect and examine his possible motivations behind his decision to give up his life and become Paul Auster, the detective.

In a comparison of the two characters from each work, Dennis Barone remarks, “Quinn empties himself; literally, he thins away to disappearance. On the other hand, A., the narrator of ‘The Book of Memory,’ gradually remembers more and more, and this is how he comes to be where he is and no place else, and this is how he becomes alive and connected to the world though alone in a locked room on Varick Street” (34). Auster’s solitary existence following the loss of his father, separation from his wife and son, and the illness of his grandfather leads him to descend into the realm of memory and the seemingly endless associations that are engendered. He strives to represent this labyrinthine journey via the written word as a method of sustaining a connection with the past while retranslating it so that he can continue to live openly toward the future. Quinn, however, does not descend into his personal labyrinth of hell and experience feelings of loss and anguish. He fails to deal with his past trauma through the process of writing (despite being a writer) in order to reshape his understanding of the past and work toward creating a future that is not programmed. Instead, he denies himself such a recovery process and suppresses the past, and therefore, he remains lost and oblivious to his inner world. The result is that Quinn simply effaces himself and does not participate in life personally because he has no experience to draw upon due to his extensive repression. To highlight a metaphorical aspect of the novel’s title, City of Glass acts as an inverse mirror to the second half of Auster’s memoir, “The Book of Memory,” through his presentation of a character that fails to sustain a sense of coherence within himself: he suppresses his memories and fails to deal with significant losses in his life. The opening chapter of the novel, in which Quinn decides to be Paul Auster, marks his passage into a more extreme disconnection from his past and his interior world and propels him into an enclosed present that results in a palpable feeling of confusion. His repression of memories becomes inveterate and leads him to forego an internal narrative to the extent that his disappearance at the novel’s conclusion indicates a complete loss of internal coherence because of his drive for closure regarding his personal losses. This drive takes form through his obsessive quest for certainty and transparent meaning in his assumption of the identity of a hard-boiled detective.

My aim is twofold: to examine how the inverse mirror that Auster constructs in City of Glass in relationship to “The Book of Memory” is an exploration into what can happen to an individual who remains in perpetual forgetfulness of his past; and to explore the ramifications of this denial of the past in relation to present experience combined with the possibility of creating a future through authoring one’s existence. Quinn’s failure to deal with his sense of loss by repressing his past creates a distorted experience of the present which leaves him incapable of directing his consciousness and authoring his life into the future because he denies internal awareness. He therefore lacks a personal basis upon which he can make judgments in the present. The plot of the novel breaks down and narrative continuity is intruded upon by overtly metafictional elements which work to represent the dissolution of Quinn’s identity due to this failure to remain in contact with himself and struggle to sustain coherence and meaning in his life.

Quinn’s inability to dwell with himself as a means of accessing his emotions and sustaining an internal narrative is cause for his urgent desire to look for solutions outside of himself, and this is initially indicated by his appropriation of a passage from The Travels of Marco Polo as a means to support his belief that he can uncover definitive truth in the world: “to set things down seen as seen, things heard as heard, so that our book may be an accurate record, free from any sort of fabrication” (7). Auster presents a character that is so fixated on external reality and solving problems empirically that his thirst for definitive solutions, as indicated through his superficial reading of Polo, leads to his breakdown and eventual disappearance because of his failure to dwell within his memories and engage them as the writer that he was prior to his losses. His former life as a reader and writer of literary work is evidently buried along with his memories of his wife and son as he lounges in his room reading sports scores and clinging to this single passage as part of his need for certainty in the form of a crisp external reality. The evasion of his internal world and participation in society leads him to delude himself into believing that everything outside of himself in the physical world is truth for its sheer measurability, and so he clings to the phrase from Polo as part of a need for meaning that is clear and unchanging, and in this way he evades the instability of interpretation and participation with others. Joseph Daniel Burgard remarks,

in our constant effort to differentiate the ‘I’ from the ‘other,’ to attain

a mastery of ourselves and our environment, we retreat into delusional

moments of lucidity in which both the outer world and the inner self

become bifurcated into easily divisible and manipulated dichotomies.

In these moments, we possess a sense of certainty where there is, in

fact, only uncertainty. (11)

Quinn’s desire for certainty rests on a negation of his inner world and so social reality also remains foreign to him because he cannot negotiate its ambiguity and openness. He therefore cannot encounter the unknown with any spontaneity or flexibility. And his desire to unveil truth empirically in his quest for a transparent reality free from the influence of subjective interpretation indicates his negation of personal memory as well as subjective thought and imagination.

Quinn’s obsessive quest for transparency in the external world as well as in language marks another metaphorical aspect of the novel’s title. But the clear surface of glass also mirrors and can both reverse and distort the images perceived on or behind its surface. Therefore, while Quinn doggedly pursues sharply defined solutions through the distant act of observation, what he winds up encountering is nearer to what Norma Rowen proposes:

All the figures and situations in the case turn out inexorably to be

in various ways his own reflections, and his wide divagations

through the labyrinth of New York only bring him back to the inner

world that he has been so assiduously avoiding. (227)
This single-minded external pursuit occurs because he neglects his inner world, and this subsequently leads him into a hall of mirrors that reflect his intensifying delusional state due to his failure to come to terms with his personal past because he has sealed himself in his room and written detective novels in which an alter ego, Max Work, bravely solves every case he encounters:

He had, of course, long ago stopped thinking of himself as real. . .

If Quinn had allowed himself to vanish, to withdraw into the confines

of a strange and hermetic life, Work continued to live in the world of

others, and the more Quinn seemed to vanish, the more persistent Work’s

presence in that world became. (10)

His repression of memories has led him into an isolated life as a writer of formulaic detective novels in which Max Work has become “his interior brother, his comrade in solitude” (7) who decisively and forcefully solves crimes and restores justice to a piece of the world through his actions. And his adoption of the popular genre enables him to create a heroic character who serves as an alter ego capable of restoring order to a haphazard and complex world by solving crimes sheerly through his wits and hard work: “whereas Quinn tended to feel out of place in his own skin, Work was aggressive, quick-tongued, at home in whatever spot he happened to find himself in” (10). Through this model Quinn takes a step that further distances him from his previous life as he essentially attempts to step into the shoes of his alter ego by adopting the role of detective.

Quinn’s negation of his former literary life and his extreme shift to writing predictably-plotted detective novels is indicative of his intense desire for rationality and logic in the face of the irrationality of his personal tragedy that upended his previously comprehensible existence. Patricia Waugh states, “the detective story celebrates human reason: ‘mystery’ is reduced to flaws in logic; the world is made comprehensible. . . . Michael Holquist has suggested that the detective story developed out of a need to escape the obsession with the irrational and the unconscious” (82-3). Quinn’s adoption of the rationally based detective genre is so extraordinary, however, that he effectively attempts to obliterate irrationality and the unknown by severing himself drastically from his previous life. His desire to live anonymously is so marked that even his personal agent had never met him and only knew him under his pseudonym, William Wilson.

Quinn’s self-effacement suggests that he has a strictly negative interest in his past because he negates the process of memory as a result of not wanting to be reminded of the deaths of his wife and son. Similarly to Auster prior to his father’s death and the break up of his marriage, Quinn “had published several books of poetry, had written plays, critical essays, and had worked on a number of long translations” (4). His decision to give up his life in favor of writing formulaic detective novels serves as the groundwork for his eventual descent in his desire for a rigid stability that aborts the process of remembering and grieving by denying the years connected with his family. Rather than deal with his losses through writing as a means to investigate and recontextualize his past, Quinn encloses himself in a continuous present and only sustains his existence as a scribe by writing under the pseudonym of William Wilson:

. . . quite abruptly, he had given up all that. A part of him had died,

he told his friends, and he did not want it coming back to haunt him.

It was then that he had taken on the name of William Wilson. Quinn

was no longer that part of him that could write books, and although

in many ways Quinn continued to exist, he no longer existed for anyone

but himself.
He had continued to write because it was the only thing he felt he

could do. Mystery novels seemed a reasonable solution. (5)

It is this particular reference in the novel, his pseudonym which refers to the title character of Edgar Allan Poe’s short story, “William Wilson,” that signifies Quinn’s loss of connection with his interior.

While the connotations involved in the reference to William Wilson are layered, the pivotal reference is metafictional in regard to the self-annihilation of a character due to his repression of an essential part of himself. In Poe’s story about a double, Wilson leads a lascivious life and denies the double that represents his conscience. When he murders his double, the outward manifestation of his conscience that haunts and confronts him, he winds up murdering himself, and therefore, Wilson’s life of wholeheartedly indulging the pleasure of his sensations acts as a repression of the memory of his double and a denial of conscious thought. The death of conscience therefore represents a destruction of his affective experiences which could then be re-experienced through memory, and Wilson’s denial of affective experience and his conscience in favor of a life of pure sensation is cause for his inability to sublimate experience through thought and imagination.

Quinn’s choice to live behind the pseudonym of William Wilson acts as a substitution for his former identity as opposed to a sustainment of himself through a re-contextualization of his past experience of personal loss. The symbolism embedded in Poe’s Wilson is not a direct mirroring of Quinn’s state, however, because Quinn does not live like Wilson nor does he violently destroy his conscience. However, he does lose touch with his private self, an affective core, through the repression of his memories and denial of his life by suggesting that a part of him had died. Wilson symbolizes Quinn’s increasing rupture from himself, and the choice to shiled himself behind this pseudonym signifies a more gradual case of self-annihilation for Quinn as it indicates his severance from a part of himself that was connected with other human beings and writing that he cared about. While writing under a pseudonym, Quinn “did not consider himself to be the author of what he wrote, he did not feel responsible for it in his heart” (5). In Poe’s story, Wilson willfully attempts to bury the double who represents his conscience with his evasions until the violent moment of his suicidal act in which he decides to lash out and kill his conscience. Quinn, however, is unlike Wilson who distinguishes himself as the narrator of the story and sets himself apart by proposing that “Men usually grow base by degrees. From me, in an instant, all virtue dropped bodily as a mantle” (66). Quinn’s case is not as drastic as Wilson’s disappearance into a state of oblivious debauchery, but is rather a matter of gradual deterioration and dissolution of his identity which leads to his disappearance through personal neglect. His dilemma involves an inability to act as opposed to engaging in an act of willful oblivion. What is interesting to note here is that Wilson is in control of his own story as narrator while Quinn, in his anonymity, has absolutely no bearing and control of his story. He doesn’t actively destroy himself, but instead he passively slips into the identities of William Wilson and Max Work, and finally, Paul Auster, as a result of his advancing isolation. Additionally, both Poe’s story and Auster’s novel posit impossible narrators. Wilson tells the tale of his own bizarre murder-suicide, and City of Glass unveils an unreliable narrator at the novel’s conclusion which reveals the impossibility of his position as an omniscient narrator and opens the text up to new meanings and fresh interpretive possibilities.

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