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

The sense of immersion into a state of timelessness is nothing new to Quinn, but it has reached a pronounced state in his accelerated flight from himself as Paul Auster. In his state of oblivion to the life he once led, the passage that characterizes Quinn’s self-forgetfulness and his isolation through extended periods of timeless drift relates to his pleasure of wandering the city streets:

More than anything else, however, what he liked to do was walk. . .

being lost. Lost, not only in the city, but within himself as well.

His inability to confront himself in solitude and his preference to remain on the surface of life is mirrored by his failure to confront other human beings in any public forum outside of his routines. Instead, he sustains a life of extreme isolation and is content to remain in comfortable anonymity and seclusion. Barone’s commentary on Auster’s depiction of his father in The Invention of Solitude is appropriate for Quinn:

The point is: his life was not centered around the place where he lived.

His house was just one of many stopping places in a restless, unmoored

existence, and this lack of center had the effect of turning him into a

perpetual outsider, a tourist of his own life. You never had the feeling

he could be located. (9)

By divorcing himself from his past and denying his memories, his repression is so entrenched that he is unable to experience the present in relation to past experience and be open to the uncertainty and ambiguity of human interaction where he must rely on personal judgment to make distinctions. And to reiterate, his lack of personal experience with crime in any fashion emphasizes that he experiences the present solely through the distorted lens of fictional representations of detectives and crime. But this basic fact is readily suppressed by Quinn so that he can live in a fantasy in which he becomes his alter ego, Max Work, out of his desperate need for decisive resolution. Madeleine Sorapure emphasizes the link of his activity to lose himself as marking an identity crisis in his perpetual desire “to imagine and assume alternative identities” (76), and she takes note of Quinn’s contradiction with the literary genre in which he is so absorbed: “this is, of course, highly incongruous with the behavior of the traditional detective, whose persona is a generally consistent one” (76). Quinn’s denial of his internal world is the source of his inability to comprehend contradiction and paradox, and it is the reason that he plunges ahead into a state of dissolution. Sorapure continues, “the mystery is, in this sense, in Quinn himself, in his ‘lost’ self, or rather, in his efforts not to find himself, to keep his thoughts only on the surface of himself and his world” (76). Because Quinn does not attend to his inner world, he does not read his surroundings. He therefore remains stuck because he cannot admit to his uncertainty nor acknowledge his contradictions and move from that awareness to spontaneously interact with others and engage in a process of exploration in an effort to bring meaning to his life.

Quinn’s continual misreading is concomitant with his inability to allow for ambiguity and reach decisions through a process of interpretation because of his urgent desire for a singular reading, for definitive clues which he expects to provide him with answers and closure. His activity of walking the streets in New York marks his desire to give up the process of interaction and the need to encounter others, and therefore himself, so that he can evade reflection and thought:

He was able to escape the obligation to think and this, more than

longer mattered where he was. On his best walks, he was able to feel

that he was nowhere. And this, finally, was all he ever asked of things:
to be nowhere. New York was the nowhere he had built around
himself, and he realized that he had no intention of ever leaving
it again. (4)
His escape from the obligation to think thus serves as a complete eschewing of judgment and a desire to live in a world without distinction. This expresses his fear of difference and failure to engage with the subtleties of interaction as his desire for clarity renders him unable to break free of his habits and participate with any sort of intimacy or with commitment outside of himself because he “no longer existed for anyone but himself” (10). Instead, Quinn loses himself in the stream of consciousness and develops a sense of separation from his environment purely through physical activity free of an ongoing internal narrative in relation to what he sees or encounters. Yarmark suggests, “Quinn’s ‘nowhere’ insulates him from the world, from self-reflection, and precludes an awareness of nothingness, of non-being” (50). Whereas ‘A.’ was lost in the labyrinth of himself and his memories, he did not inhibit the process, but strove to detail, interpret, and represent his internal circumlocutions and his relationship with nothingness literally and metaphorically by facing the blank page of writing and creating a text that emerged from a sense of personal urgency.

I will momentarily return to the metaphor of the blank page, but I first want to expand upon Quinn’s loss of linguistic capacity in connection with his ‘case’ and his excursions through the streets of New York. Rowen comments on his connection with the Stillmans: “their reliance on cliché and their contrived and mechanical delivery express in extreme form Quinn’s sense, underlying all his fluency, that the language he is using is not his own” (228). Quinn moves outside of himself and wanders in order to be free of an experience of the present that connects with the past so that he doesn’t have to engage and ‘read’ either his past or present experiences, let alone consider an interrogation of his past through writing. To recall Auster’s words from The Invention of Solitude, he states, “If a man is to be truly present among his surroundings, he must be thinking not of himself but of what he sees. He must forget himself in order to be there. And from that forgetfulness arises the power of memory. It is a way of living one’s life so that nothing is ever lost” (138). Unlike A., Quinn does not engage with and interrogate his past through writing as a means to come to terms with his history, but instead he gives up his life as a poet and essayist and moves toward disappearance as a consequence of divesting himself of any self-examination through an inquiry into his past. And as I’ve indicated previously, Quinn fails to pause and contemplate what he sees or experiences because he expects objects to reveal themselves directly to him free from conscious thought and subjective coloring. He does not forget himself temporarily and then reflect upon events because he has lost all sense of continuity in his identity due to his extensive repression of memory and their affects, and as a result he has become incapable of measured thought and judgment based upon an engagement with his own experiences.

Quinn’s anonymity and seclusion goes hand-in-hand with his desire for closure and is cause for his extreme isolation and his failure to engage with others inter-subjectively. His severance from relations with others, both in the present and the past, leaves him unable to encounter and engage with others openly and closes him off from the possibility of creating a future. Modell cites Mikhail Bakhtin to emphasize that inter-subjectivity is the only possibility of existence in the world:

(in mutual reflection and perception). (PS 87…)

The importance of the other and inter-subjective experience in no way negates the importance of reflection and dwelling with the self in solitude, but rather points to Auster’s statement in “The Book of Memory” of being alone and not alone at the same time; of coming to feel one’s connections in solitude so that when one is most intensely alone he feels his connections to others. Modell comments that “we are confronted with the paradox that although the coherence of the self can be sustained from within through the generation of passionate interests and moral commitments, the private self requires the presence of another” (PS 121). He proposes that this paradox is based on the fact that the initial experiences of solitude require the presence of the mother, but that “later, as adults, we are sustained in states of solitude by subjectively created (maternal) presences” (PS 121-22), and he goes on to suggest that “loneliness can be defined as a failed state of solitude” (PS 123).

Quinn’s inability to be with his thoughts and memories in solitude, and his need for continuous motion through the streets of New York free of any interpersonal exchanges all point to a state of loneliness which he cannot acknowledge because of his severance from affective experience that leads to a distortion of his perception so that he has completely lost his sense of identity. He has been unable to allow for his personal solitude and create such a presence by feeling connections with others, and his venture into the ‘Stillman case’ illustrates the deleterious effects of his prolonged self-enclosure because of the absurdity of his decision, and especially because of his stubborn persistence to remain on a path which eventually results in homelessness. He finally upsets his routine of writing and wandering, but he clings to a simplistic objective outlook through which he perceives a world modeled on the representations of detective fiction, and he therefore remains isolated from himself and the world at large.

In examining the subject of this enclosure through the trope of the locked room, an important symbol throughout The New York Trilogy, Ilana Shiloh states, “the locked room is not just one of the conventions of detective fiction. It is a metaphor for the genre itself, for its closed world, in which the chaotic, mysterious aspects of existence can always be explained away by reason” (37). When Quinn adopts the identity of Auster he is abruptly removed from this safe enclosure and cast forth into the uncertain and ambiguous terrain of social reality which requires an awareness of, and interaction with, others that depends upon a continuous process of interpretation. His safely sealed existence, which had turned him into an automaton due to its structured regularity free of interaction with others, is upset and exposed when he takes on the identity of Auster to venture out of his room and play the part of detective. Patricia Waugh proclaims that, “in the post-modern period, the detective plot is being used to express not order but the irrationality of both the surface of the world and its deep structures” (82-3). This is precisely what Auster proceeds to unveil through the absurdity of Quinn’s adoption of the case and his manic drive for certainty and definitive solutions. His decision to pretend to be Auster could be viewed as a desire for adventure to escape his dreary habitual existence, but within the novel’s hall of mirrors, the abruptness of his act can be interpreted as the surfacing of his unconscious as his venture from his strict routine leads him into reflections of himself and continual encounters with flashes from his past. These memory flashes arise with greater frequency as the novel proceeds, but Quinn quickly represses these moments or he fits them into his imaginary case rather than allow them to give him pause and interrupt his pursuit of Stillman. The important aspect of these encounters and their effects resides in Quinn’s complete lack of awareness of what is happening to him, though he does finally acknowledge his personal confusion when he decides to seek out Auster. It is through his encounter with Auster, the character, who metafictionally looms as the authorial figure ultimately responsible for his confused descent, that he is forced to confront his losses and the denial of his former life. When Auster’s family enters the scene and Quinn is introduced to Auster’s wife, he is finally confronted with feelings of loss that he had been suppressing for years:

In that one brief moment he knew that he was in trouble. She was a

tall, thin blonde, radiantly beautiful, with an energy and happiness that

seemed to make everything around her invisible. 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, with a self-lacerating 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. (121)

Though Quinn was really nowhere from the outset of the novel (a reality that he adamantly avoided) due to his suppression of his past and the unreliability of his judgment, as reflected through the sympathetic narrator, he becomes aware of his emptiness when Auster (the writer) surreptitiously confronts him with his evasions. The novel’s metafictional elements reach their peak as Quinn’s status as a parodic character is unveiled after Auster divulges his wild theories on Don Quixote: “Auster leaned back on the sofa, smiled with a certain pleasure, and lit a cigarette. The man was obviously enjoying himself, but the precise nature of that pleasure eluded Quinn” (120). Through this encounter with Auster, metafictionality is explicitly foregrounded and the reader is humorously brought to a heightened awareness that Quinn is a character at the mercy of the writer of a fictional text. But he is illustrative of a character, as Auster’s alternate self, that travels into an abyss because of his lack of engagement with life through an extensive repression of his past that negates the intensity of his feelings and an acknowledgement of the emptiness he must accept in lieu of his losses.

His flight from himself and any feelings of emptiness by automatically churning out predictably plotted novels and ceaselessly walking the streets without direction or plan is akin to William Wilson’s denial of conscience as an annihilation of the need to think and make judgments based in affective experience. And his automatic routines have the effect of leveling the world into an indistinct plane and act as a reinforcement to repress the past so that he can avoid thinking about the person he was in comparison with his present state. By virtue of this prolonged activity, year after year, Quinn’s adoption of the role of detective, of which he has no personal experience, is an understandable act based upon the self-alienating course of his life. Quinn has gone without meaningful contact with others for such an extended period of time that even though his fantastic foray into the detective world forces him into new situations and encounters, he is unprepared for these encounters and reads everything poorly because he only reacts through a naïve and distorted understanding of detective work based solely on representative fictions. His inner self has withered and his adoption of the identity of Auster to save Stillman can be seen as a heroically desperate act in an effort to revive this self, an affective core, which had once lived for and through others. However, it is a foolishly misplaced attempt at personal recovery because his severance from a personal past and his isolation lead him to embark upon an imaginary case which will eventually strip him of his personal delusions.

It is clear that Quinn is hardly processing or narrating what is happening within himself once he decides to take on the identity of Auster. Quinn’s automatism in writing and lack of interest in his work has caught up with him by virtue of the fact that he has worked solely to earn a living for himself in order to continue his isolated existence. As opposed to working toward internal coherence by remaining in contact with his personal life and acknowledging the importance of his past, his losses, and his connections with people and work as a means of sustaining coherence in the present, he proceeds on a path of self deception by remaining lost in his quest for an empirical resolution. His choice to live by the pun of the detective, of “reducing himself to a seeing eye” (4), who attempts to experience life through an objective lens indicates his inability to engage with the instability of interpretation and therefore make judgments on his own and shape his reality through a process of interaction with others. His continual misreadings result from his inability to gauge life based on a constancy of feeling which would enable him to think about his predicament as a man working under a pseudonym and adopting the identity of Paul Auster simply because he receives an urgent phone call making such a request.

His sudden urgency to lose himself at a further remove by attempting to act the part of detective is a consequence of his self-deception by remaining cut off from an interior world of thought and feeling, and this complete severance from his personal interior leaves him with what Anthony Storr refers to as a ‘false self.’ He characterizes the false self as “a self which is based upon compliance with the wishes of others, rather than being based upon the individual’s own true feelings and instinctive needs. . . . he is merely adapting to the world rather than experiencing it as a place in which his subjective needs can find fulfillment” (20-1). The path upon which Quinn journeys through his assumption of the identity of Paul Auster leads him to unknowingly encounter projections of his deteriorating psychic state in the form of the younger and elder Stillmans, and this is illustrated through his literal adaption to both men. As I mentioned earlier, he enters a trance state and completely loses track of time while taking in Peter Jr.’s incoherent speech, and he also adapts to Peter Sr.’s slow movements when he not only tails him through the streets, but falls into his exact gait: