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

The narrator’s remark about the pseudonym of Wilson being Quinn’s invention (5) is also an essential marker of Quinn’s severance from his past, for as someone who had been a literary writer he would be aware of the famous Poe story. In fact, later in the novel, his knowledge of Poe is revealed when he follows Stillman Sr. to Riverside Park and recalls that “Poe had spent many long hours gazing out at the Hudson” (100) from the same location, and he additionally has a superficial recollection of The Narrative of A. Gordon Pym in his desperate attempt to find a distinct pattern and explicit signs in Stillman’s walking routes (85). These instances emerge to highlight the fragments of Quinn’s memory that surface briefly to the level of consciousness which he is unable to place in context with his past, and this early reference to Wilson is also very important as an indicator of what will be revealed as the unreliable narrator of the novel at its conclusion. The narrator’s claim that William Wilson had been Quinn’s invention, born within himself and with no association to Poe’s story, betrays the more explicit references to Poe that Quinn fleetingly recalls later in the narrative. The unreliable narrator serves as yet another mirror, a further reflection, of Quinn’s psychological state. His severance from the past and from all literary references as well as connections with others, leaves him without internal reference points upon which to make judgments, and therefore, he will eventually realize that his single-minded search for empirical solutions and a rational and explainable world outside of himself will be fruitless. The unreliable narrator represents Quinn’s personal unreliability in making judgments and reaching decisions because he has cut himself off from an interactive process with the world that would require an ongoing dialogue with others as well as with himself and his past.

Unlike Wilson, Quinn’s conscience is not annihilated as he continues living within the boundaries of the law, but by living an isolated existence only for himself while disconnected from his past, he foregoes the continued construction of himself by negating participation with others. If anything, Quinn strives for an impossible ego ideal in his adoption of the identity of Auster in the effort to protect Stillman Jr. from his father, or as the narrator suggests, “he knew he could not bring his own son back to life, but at least he could prevent another from dying” (41). It appears that the repression of the past has perhaps included a repression of feelings of guilt as though Quinn felt responsible for his son’s death. By convincing himself that his assumption of the case is a noble and heroic act he slips into an identity even further removed from himself based upon these subterranean motivations. His decision to be Auster, to play a role he knows nothing about, is part of his drive for certainty and transparency, to find a rational solution for this absurd case in order to save the son from an abusive father because he could not save his own. What emerges as his motivation, which could speak to an unconscious intentionality behind his actions, is the desire to solve, and therefore close, the case of his dead son whom he rarely remembers and no longer wishes to remember. He has been assuming alternate identities and has progressively distanced himself from his past in this desire for its closure. Michael Yarmark remarks, “the single crime Quinn uncovers is the one he committed against himself: the denial and avoidance of his past, his present, his dreams and ambitions, as well as of the experiential” (40).

The morning after his decision to play the part of Auster on the phone, Quinn assumes the identity of the unknown Auster by dressing in a coat and tie, clothing which he had not worn “since the funerals of his wife and son. He put them on in a kind of trance,” and he is barely cognizant of his actions as he remarks to himself, “I seem to be going out,” (14) when he leaves his flat for Stillman’s apartment. Quinn is so removed from his personal past that he has little or no regard for the present or his future and therefore feels no trepidation or concern about what he is actually embarking upon, and so he brings no attention, let alone meaning, to his actions. His failure to think about what he is doing and his complete lack of self-awareness regarding the extreme aspect of his decision details his unconscious mode of living and lack of personal concern for his actions. Quinn’s entrance into Stillman’s apartment in the role of Paul Auster marks his deepening immersion into a trance state: “As he crossed the threshold and entered the apartment, he could feel himself going blank, as if his brain had suddenly shut off” (16). His entrance into the domicile of Stillman, or ‘still-man’, who has experienced a traumatic rupture from his past and moves and speaks mechanically due to the violence he suffered at the hands of his father, suggests that Quinn’s narrowing realm of experience is akin to a state of regression. The encounter serves as a mirror image of himself in the form of a traumatized man who is paralyzed to the degree that he resembles an automaton, or “the puppet boy” (26), as Peter mechanically refers to himself. Stillman Jr. mirrors the state of paralysis and personal entrapment that Quinn is heading toward, and the encounter with Stillman Jr. marks the onset of Quinn’s descent into a timeless realm as he completely loses track of time while listening to the cacophony of repetitive utterances:

The speech was over. How long it lasted Quinn could not say.

For it was only now, after the words had stopped, that he realized

they were sitting in the dark. Apparently, a whole day had gone by.

At some point during Stillman’s monologue the sun had set in the

room, but Quinn had not been aware of it. (27)
Quinn’s severance from himself and immersion into a trance state exhibits the unconscious status of his life. Arnold Modell notes that “the timeless of the unconscious is the absence of experience” (OTOR 82). I will have more to say about timelessness, though for now it is worth stating that his immersion into timelessness is connected with his repression of affects connected with memory.

The fact that he elects to go on with the case while neglecting to ask fundamental questions during the meeting indicates the commencement of his disappearance for being unable to awaken to an internal awareness of how drastic his psychic condition has become in his decision to adopt the identity of Auster. When he questions Virginia Stillman about her knowledge of the arrival of Peter’s father at Grand Central Station she gives the impression of being meticulously thorough: “I’ve made it my business to know, Mr. Auster. There’s too much at stake here for me to leave it to chance” (35). However, when she retrieves a twenty year old photograph of Peter’s father moments later and says, “I’m afraid it’s the best I can do” (37), Quinn doesn’t register the discrepancy between her boast and the uselessness of the evidence she provides him with. He has given up any sense of authority or even responsibility for his choices, and he commences his journey toward disappearance as he loses his sense of self and seems to merge with the traumatized mind of Stillman Jr. by entering into his enclosed world devoid of thought and feeling, and hence any continuity of experience. Enrico Garzilli’s study of the self opens with a consideration of Miguel de Unamuno’s ideas regarding the relationship of memory to identity:

Unamuno sees the changing self as involving a continuity which

results from the persistence of memory… Unity results from the person’s

position in space, his action and intentionality. Continuity in time results

from memory. ‘Memory is the basis of individual personality, just as

tradition is the basis of the collective personality of the people.’ Every

change which takes place in the person, then, can only come from the

security that an alteration in thinking or feeling is consistent with the

self’s experience of unity of spirit and of continuity. Otherwise, change,

according to Unamuno, means the pathological obliteration of

personality. (3)

In her consideration of the younger Peter Stillman, Ilana Shiloh states, “he is a synthetic creature, with no memory and no self” (47), and she continues, “he has a warped sense of reality, because he has no language, and a warped sense of identity, because he has no memory” (48). Quinn’s coalescence with Stillman’s state illustrates his deteriorating psychic condition and a movement toward automation because of his lack of an internal register of the present based on experiences and memories of the past. Arnold Modell proposes that “The memories of affective experiences are organized into categories as an attempt to find a perceptual unity between past and present” (OTOR 66). Quinn’s eventual disappearance is the result of the complete dissolution of his identity due to his deepening self-alienation because he remains cut off from internal affects and therefore severs this unity between past and present and is unable to sustain internal coherence. Modell also states that “Feelings assign value to what is meaningful” (IMB 151), and that “memories can have experiential immediacy only if they are memories of affective experiences” (OTOR 84). Therefore, Quinn’s judgments in the present are severely distorted because his repression of the past renders him unable to draw on experience and a personal language of emotions through memory that could question the strange nature of his meeting with Stillman and comprehend the severity of traumatic experience that weaves through his mechanical monologue. While Quinn does still retain a basic linguistic capacity, his lack of interaction with others and his increasingly automatic writing of stock detective fiction have reduced this capacity to the extent that he appears to be limited to this representational form of speech and simply mirrors what others say rather than speak from a personal standpoint.

Following his extended meeting with Stillman, Quinn ventured to a diner where he had eaten for years and would always talk about the New York Mets with the counterman. This scene details Quinn’s habitual life of anonymity for the fact that he had spoken with the man for years and yet never learned his name and always conversed solely about the topic of baseball. The exchange calls attention to his level of personal interaction and also illustrates Quinn’s shrinking linguistic world as the counterman’s description of Kingman’s home runs, “Boom, boom” (45), exactly mirrors the words he has just heard during Stillman Jr.’s mechanical speech. These are the words which emanate from a person completely incapable of expressing himself due to the violent trauma he suffered at the hands of his father. And a moment later Quinn himself responds to the counterman with the exact same cliché, “you bet your bottom dollar” (45), that Peter uttered to him earlier in the day. Rowen states, “the speeches of Peter Jr., victim and puppet as he is, reflect Quinn’s own estrangement from language” (228). Quinn’s anonymity and isolation and penning of popular novels that cohere strictly to conventional codes divorced from life in the present have begot self-forgetfulness and a deteriorating psychological condition. Arnold Modell states, “the alienation, or decentering, of the self is the psychic catastrophe” (PS 82), whereas “it is the centering of affects within the self that leads to a sense of psychic aliveness” (PS 84). And part of this psychic aliveness connects with a centering of affects through an ongoing internal dialogue. The simple fact of Quinn’s inability to sustain an internal narrative in the process of giving up his identity as a literary writer and supplanting his career by writing formulaic mystery novels leads him to float into the role of a detective, an identity of which he has no conceptual understanding outside of fiction, movies, and magazines: “like most people, Quinn knew almost nothing about crime” (8). Because he foregoes his self-conception as a writer and does not work through the losses of his wife and son through writing, or by talking with others, he has given up the process of an ongoing construction of his identity. Quinn’s lack of an internal narrative and failure to sustain a concept of who he is and has been propels him toward the dissolution of his identity.

Following his meal and cliché-laden conversation with the counterman, Quinn advanced another step in the direction of playing detective by ignoring these internal tensions through the repression of his thoughts and feelings. When he succumbs to an urge to purchase a particular red notebook for the purpose of recording his thoughts and observations about the case he was “almost embarrassed at the intensity of his feelings” (46). Following this moment, Quinn

picked up his pen and wrote his initials, D.Q. (for Daniel Quinn),

on the first page. It was the first time in more than five years that he

had put his own name in one of his notebooks. He stopped to consider

this fact for a moment but then dismissed it as irrelevant. He turned the

page. For several moments he studied its blankness, wondering if he

was not a bloody fool. (47)

Quinn’s act of trying to bring his alter ego to life highlights a further movement from himself and any affective experiences of his past. His rationalistic and intellectual notion of the nature of memory illustrates his disconnect from personal affects and his confused perspective on memory:

Every once in a while, he would suddenly feel what it had been like

to hold the three-year-old boy in his arms—but that was not exactly

thinking, nor was it even remembering. It was a physical sensation, an

imprint of the past that had been left in his body, and he had no control

over it. (6)

The suggestion in this passage is that memory has no connection with physical sensation, or the body, and hence, emotion, and also that the experience of memory should actually be under Quinn’s control. His confused conception of memory exemplifies his repression of affective experiences of the past, and this can be viewed as a source of his impulsive decision to become Paul Auster and for his subsequent descent into a state of confusion and despair. And again, this exhibits the importance of the unreliable narrator as a reflection of the inherent unreliability of Quinn’s personal judgment due to his denial of his interior world. Through this denial he represses his inner contradictions and any possible recognition of paradox in favor of insisting upon a solution that will neatly tie everything together.

It appears that Quinn’s decision to write detective novels emerged out of this denial and flight from himself through a heavily invested attachment to words that were able to induce a reassuring effect like those from Marco Polo: “the detective is one who looks, who listens, who moves through this morass of objects and events in search of the thought, the idea that will pull all these things together and make sense of them. In effect, the writer and the detective are interchangeable” (9). We learn that Quinn’s quintessential detective-writer “demands that the world reveal itself to him,” and that “for five years now, Quinn had been living in the grip of this pun” (10). Through his isolated routine of writing stock detective fiction half of the year and aimlessly wandering the New York streets and attending events by himself over the other half of the year, Quinn becomes automated to the extent that he doesn’t observe and take in objects in order to contemplate them, but rather, he passes by them in search of an idea that will magically unify everything. Therefore, what is implicitly suggested in the pun of the detective and the writer is that objects themselves contain meaning free of a subjective imagination that creates meaning by making connections between objects. Yarmark states, “one moves closer toward the objects of the world in order to take them in and reflect upon them, in order to overcome to some degree an automatic and unconscious response to existence” (36). Quinn’s essentially romantic vision in which the detective and writer observe and experience revelations simply through observation free of self-conscious reflection removes the trouble of conscious labor and thought and leaves him strictly in a realm of exactly this type of unconscious response. Therefore, with the ongoing repression and subsequent destruction of memory there is a concurrent destruction to his imagination and his entire thinking process. Modell states, “thinking is not possible without imagination” (IMB 108), and as a way to consider Quinn’s lack of imagination and deteriorating psychic condition, he notes, “imagination can be constricted by trauma or expanded through empathy and aesthetic experience” (IMB 111).

I have noted continuously that Quinn’s severance from affect is due to his disconnection from the past and this connects with a lack of capacity for empathy which keeps him locked inside the role of detective. In regard to aesthetic experience, the automatism of his writing leaves him devoid of such experience in relation to his work, and this is doubly emphasized in his insistence upon a purely factual and objective vision of reality through which his subjective experience is denied. Again, Modell notes, “although one’s imagination is autonomous, it can also be directed to a degree that excludes the agency of the self, as in cases of trauma, where feelings and thoughts are stereotypic and constricted in ways analogous to a fixed-action pattern” (IMB 111). The repression of the trauma of his losses over an extended period of time has led Quinn down an increasingly narrow path in which his shriveling personal agency is mirrored by the mechanistic movements and language of Stillman.

When Quinn does have moments of recall he either forgets them immediately or dismisses them offhand as unimportant because he wishes to attain closure from the losses of his wife and son and from the person he was before they died. When he first meets Stillman Jr. we discover that “uncannily, in that first moment, Quinn thought of his own dead son. Then, just as suddenly as the thought had appeared, it vanished” (17). He has reached a state of nearly automatic repression of his memories and by doing so he corners himself into a sterile lifestyle wherein he becomes a caricature of a human being by adopting the character role of a detective whose explicit purpose, in his mind, is to solve cases empirically through detached observation. Since Quinn does not want to be reminded of his past, he is unable to construct anything for himself because he empties himself so thoroughly that he lacks an internal register from which to act and construct a future, and this leaves him vulnerable to following both Stillmans respectively into stasis. Gaston Bachelard states, “any weakness in the function of unreality, will hamper the productive psyche. If we cannot imagine, we cannot foresee” (xxxiv). While Quinn’s entire life has become muddled and unreal, he has no awareness of this, and his insistence upon finding transparency and certainty on the surface of the world indicates his desire for a simplistic outlook that is closed to his inner world and an acknowledgment of his subjective coloring of reality. His sense that his life was no longer real and that he existed purely through the figure of his detective hero, Max Work, places Quinn’s obsession with empiricism and rational inquiry in an absurd position because it is purely a romanticized empirical outlook. George Grella notes that “the private detective, born as a plausible substitute for the conventional sleuths of the whodunit. . . evolved into a literary hero, nearer to his archetype’s imaginative reality than to an actual detective” (118). Quinn’s fascination with detective fiction and his interest in Polo’s travels are part of a naïve and romantic outlook designed to avoid the painful and rigorous process of dealing with his past and accepting the power of the irrational, the tragic losses of his wife and son.

Quinn cannot propel himself into a future and construct a new narrative because he does not grieve for his losses, and his flight acts as a diversion and defense to prevent him from feeling the pain of his past. Modell offers that “the manic defense creates the illusion of the everlasting present in that the experience of present time is not recontextualized with the past” (OTOR 80-1). And his further elaboration upon this subject describes Quinn’s condition perfectly; “painful memories, especially the memory of loss, are denied; it is as if the individual is effectively cut off from memories of the past and concerns about the future. He is in a world of the everlasting present” (OTOR 80). Quinn’s escape into external reality as part of his insistence upon discovering a rational solution while under the sway of the pun of the detective ironically renders him stuck in timelessness as he is unable to construct a personal narrative or any sort of autobiographical self that connects his present phase of life to his past. This automatism, which results from Quinn’s continued repression of his interior world, additionally signifies that he has lost the capacity to generate meaning from within himself. And Modell connects this with the sense of alienation of the self: “the inability to generate meaning is a psychic catastrophe” (PS 144). Therefore the ability to generate meaning is intimately tied to one’s relationship with memory as vital to the ongoing construction of an autobiographical self in order to strive to sustain personal continuity and create a concept of oneself through time. Modell also emphasizes that “the construction of meaning requires the use of emotions and feelings as markers of value” (IMB xiii). Or, as Miguel de Unamuno states plainly, “Man is said to be a reasoning animal. I do not know why he has not been defined as an affective or feeling animal” (3). Quinn’s suppression of his feelings, and therefore his negation of translating affective experiences as a means to conceive of and shape his identity, causes him to live suspended in a timeless realm, a continuous present, because he lacks such markers of value. His rigid determination to tie everything together with a rational solution blocks him from a process of reconstructing and understanding his place in the present or how his present perceptions have been influenced by experience.