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

he became aware of the fact that he was no longer following Stillman.

It felt as though he had lost half of himself. For two weeks he had

been tied by an invisible thread to the old man. Whatever Stillman

had done, he had done; wherever Stillman had gone, he had gone.

His body was not accustomed to this new freedom, and for the first

few blocks he walked at the old shuffling pace. The spell was over,

and yet his body did not know it. (110)

The result of solely looking outside of himself leaves him open to all influences because he has lost the capacity to judge and evaluate information through a process of self-reflection. In order for Quinn to once again seek and find fulfillment he would have to give up his fantasy of closure and allow for the painful memories of his losses to surface as a means of processing and incorporating his experiences through self-reflection in order to learn and engage the present more consciously. His denial of this process prevents him from acknowledging his needs and working toward fulfillment in the present and a future open to new possibilities. Therefore, Quinn continues living unconsciously, in denial of his personal emptiness, because of his failure to assimilate his experiences and come to terms with the uncertainty and unpredictability of life.

To recall, Quinn’s failure to face the blank page is exemplified when he ignores a suspended moment of doubt after entering his name in the red notebook. His decision to press on following his hesitation before the blank page alludes to a key metaphor in “The Book of Memory” regarding Auster’s concerns with memory and the process of writing in the reconstruction of identity. The blank page serves as a metaphor for facing and encountering emptiness in solitude through which Auster shapes his text, and subsequently, his identity. In response to a question about City of Glass, Auster stated, “the whole process that Quinn undergoes in that book . . . is one of stripping away to some barer condition in which we have to face up to who we are. Or who we aren’t. It finally comes to the same thing” (AH 262). In The Invention of Solitude, Auster works through the process of finding himself as a literary writer, and he expresses his own encounter with this barer state metaphorically as the blank page, and also directly when he states, “in my bravest moments, meaninglessness is the first principle” (147). Quinn cannot dwell in solitude and face the empty space of the blank page where he would have to confront his past and create out of that dwelling. He eventually discovers who he is not when he finally must acknowledge his folly and the descent he has undergone in pretending to be a detective. His resistance to the reality of his personal condition finally cracks open, and when he takes to wandering the streets again and sees his reflection in a mirror of a window shop he accepts his state of transformation with equanimity:

simply, it had not occurred to him. He had been too busy with his job

to think about himself, and it was as though the question of his

appearance had ceased to exist. Now, as he looked at himself in the

shop mirror, he was neither shocked nor disappointed. He had no

feeling about it at all, for the fact was that he did not recognize the

person he saw there as himself. . . He had turned into a bum. . . He

looked at this new Quinn and shrugged. It did not really matter. He

had been one thing before, and now he was another. It was neither

better nor worse. It was different and that was all. (142-3)

Of course, Quinn’s reaction fits into his long-standing state of a lack of concern for himself which led him to this condition, but for the first time he is forced to confront himself and cannot deny what he sees, and he therefore is left with no choice but to deal with himself honestly.

Quinn resists the bareness and emptiness for as long as he can, but his impulse for adventure sets him on a parodic quest in which he is stripped of his illusions of finding absolute security and certainty in the world. The severity of his dissociation from his interior leads to complete self-forgetfulness, and his disappearance symbolizes that the distorted layers of construction through which he perceived the world have been stripped away. His self-negation and his insistence upon finding meaning and answers free from a process of self-questioning is a violent denial of emptiness which is conveyed at the outset of the novel through Quinn’s inability to remember his dreams: “in his dream, which he later forgot, he found himself alone in a room, firing a pistol into a bare white wall” (10). Through his denial of the ambiguity of his inner world and the intense emotions connected with his losses, he seeks to fill every gap and block any potential feeling of emptiness. The blank page requires stillness, but Quinn’s incessant need for motion serves as a method, as Sorapure says, “not to find himself” (76). Instead, he desperately needs meaning to be revealed in every detail, and his dread of emptiness is what causes him to ignore the moment of suspension in which he questions himself. His disappearance at the conclusion of the novel symbolizes that he has entered this barer state, but whether he can discover and work toward creating who he is remains unresolved. His decision to press on with the role of Auster following a poignant moment of doubt indicates his unwillingness and lack of capacity to give life to a language that emerges from a personal process, and therefore his potential for recovery is questionable. While his descent strips him of his denials and leads him into pure darkness where perhaps, like A., a recovery can eventually result through a process of dwelling within himself, Auster leaves Quinn’s fate unresolved to reflect the open-ended nature of the construction of identity. Auster explores the ongoing question of identity and its relationship to memory and narrative through Quinn, and he suggests that the difficult process of coming to terms with who we are or are not can only be discovered and defined individually by encountering our personal illusions and false constructions in a barer state that can only be reached in the darkness of solitude.

Chapter Three: Postscript—The Formation of the Storyteller in Moon Palace
Auster’s struggle through his personal crises in The Invention of Solitude was linked with the writing process in his effort to explore his identity and situate himself through a philosophical meditation on the nature of memory. I have posited, through Auster’s personal statements, that his first novel, City of Glass, is a continuation of this exploration through the creation of a character, Quinn, who fails to inhabit himself and work through the past. This failure leads to Quinn’s disappearance which represents his self-negation through a complete denial of his tragic experiences of loss that renders him incapable of living with his past in the present and blocked from the possibility of imagining and working toward a possible future. His disappearance represents his complete absorption into a timeless realm as his dissociation from himself is so pronounced that he completely loses access to his personal experience and a sense of continuity between past, present, and future. In Moon Palace, written several years after City of Glass, Auster’s exploration takes on a more cohesive and traditional form as the protagonist, Marco Fogg, recounts the story of his past as an adult, and has therefore managed to work through his personal struggles and losses and established a sense of coherence in his identity through authoring his tale.

Like The Invention of Solitude (IS) and City of Glass (CG), the themes of identity and authorship remain central as Fogg must face the loss of his last known relative, experience his own urge to vanish from the world, and then subsequently struggle to rebuild his life and call on his resources in an attempt to author his existence and create meaning in his life. A significant narrative distinction in Moon Palace, however, is that Fogg tells the story of his past adventures and struggles in retrospect through a first-person narrative. This distinction is very important as it denotes a time gap between the events of the past and the voice of the narrator in the present which indicates that Fogg already holds a position of authorship through his account of what he deems to be the life-shaping events of his past. Unlike IS and CG, Auster’s main character and narrator is not in the midst of crisis and working through, or denying, his past, but rather, Fogg has already attained critical distance and is in command of his story.

The themes of loss, emptiness, and the search for a stabile identity are all present in the novel, but the narrator’s control of his story in the present is characterized by a chronological account of poignant personal events which indicates that he has attained a sense of coherence and continuity in his identity. This sense of control and continuity foregrounds the topic of authoring as the central theme of the novel as Fogg depicts the strong influence of his Uncle Victor’s encouragement for him to become “the author of his own life” (7) in the opening segment of his tale. Additionally, another prominent and influential figure in Fogg’s story is the “sphinxlike” (99) Thomas Effing, the man that turns out to be his grandfather, who indoctrinates Fogg into the realm of storytelling and leads him along a path to attempt to uncover the mystery of his heritage. Fogg’s quest to uncover the facts of his past is ultimately unfulfilled, but this search was essential for him to be able to begin his own life by coming to an understanding that his past would always remain shrouded in mystery and embedded within a larger story.

Fogg, like Quinn, undergoes a personal crisis of severance from his family after the death of his Uncle Victor leaves him disconnected from all of his known family members. He proceeds along a path of disappearance by divorcing himself from all social contacts and allowing himself to physically wither away due to a restricted financial budget because he chooses to remain unemployed and isolated. However, whereas Quinn sealed himself from his memories and his personal identity of the past and did not wish to venture outside of the streets of New York City, Fogg does attempt to make contact with his friend, Zimmer, prior to his personal descent. This effort is what will enable his rescue from homelessness and a period of recovery that eventually delivers him into mysteries of his buried past beyond the confines of the city and into the Western frontier of America. In contrast to A.’s painful inhabitance of his solitude and his meditations upon the subject of memory, I have discussed Quinn’s inability to dwell within himself because he dissociated from his past and drifted into assuming other identities that left him severed from his memories and dreams. This dissociation led to his disappearance because of his repression of the past which rendered him incapable of negotiating life in the present. Fogg’s loss also leads him into personal dissolution and disappearance from society, but he survives his crisis because of his desire for connection that will restore a sense of stability in his identity so that he can eventually strive to author his life into the future.

Structurally, the story of Fogg’s personal dissolution occurs over the opening two chapters of the novel, and this section is marked by the importance of Marco’s connection with his Uncle Victor and his influence upon Marco’s imagination. The sudden death of his uncle propels him into the heart of an identity crisis that leads to his isolation because the loss causes him to feel that his life has lost meaning: “Not only was Uncle Victor the person I had loved the most in the world, he was my only relative, my one link to something larger than myself” (3). Fogg cannot absorb the shock of his loss, and the lack of a larger sense of connection leads to the dissolution of his identity as Fogg proclaims that he “began to vanish into another world” (3). He retreats from everyday life, takes refuge solely in his mind, and his absence of a will to survive is so severe that even his body begins to disappear through his lack of nourishment.

Fogg’s lack of knowledge of, and access to, his patrilineal heritage is suggested overtly through the history of his family name, and this has a strong effect on Marco because his name plays a prominent role regarding his sense of security in his identity and in his notion of being the author of his life. His uncle had revealed to him that “his father’s name had originally been Fogelman, but someone in the immigration offices at Ellis Island had truncated it to Fog, with one g, and this had served as the family’s American name until the second g was added in 1907” (3). Therefore, the obscurity of his heritage is suggested by the fact that Fogg is a misnomer; it is a fragment of the original name that has been slightly augmented in the tradition of American self-creation. The changes in his family name from Fogelman to Fog, and finally to Fogg signify the abortions and constructions already embedded in his history and prophesizes the limits inherent in his search for self-knowledge through his past. These changes point to events in the past that were beyond Fogg’s control and would always be unchangeable, but his uncle’s imaginative play with his name does encourage Fogg to strive to author his existence despite this limited access to his past.

Fogg’s name encompasses references to Marco Polo and Phileas Fogg, the hero of Around the World in Eighty Days. Marco notes that his uncle “never tired of expounding on the glories hidden in my name. . . . According to him, it proved that travel was in my blood, that life would carry me to places where no man had ever been before” (6). His imagination is supported and encouraged by his uncle, and this helped provide Marco with a sense of self-possession and authorship despite his sense of insecurity and fragility regarding his identity due to the ridicule he was subjected to during his youth:

Fogg lent itself to a host of spontaneous mutilations: Fag and Frog,

for example, along with countless meteorological references: Snowball

Head, Slush Man, Drizzle Mouth. . . . The o at the end of Marco was

obvious enough, yielding epithets such as Dumbo, Jerko, and Mumbo

Jumbo, but what they did in other ways defied all expectations. Marco

became Marco Polo; Marco Polo became Polo Shirt; Polo Shirt

became Shirt Face; and Shirt Face became Shit Face. (7)

It is his uncle who transforms his name from the subject of schoolyard ridicule into one of adventure and glory in proposing that his name suggests great travels. Through the inventiveness of his uncle’s imagination, Marco’s name takes on a multiplicity of meanings which are primarily associated with myth and story as opposed to his historical heritage or boyhood taunts. And in response to the ridicule he receives, Fogg cites his first impulse toward authoring his life:

This name was so bound up with my sense of who I was that I

wanted to protect it from further harm. When I was fifteen I began

signing all my papers M. S. Fogg, pretentiously echoing the gods of

modern literature, but at the same time delighting in the fact that the

initials stood for manuscript” (7).

But despite his uncle’s encouragement, Fogg never really shakes the severe ridicule he had to endure from his classmates: “Eventually, I lived through my schoolboy initiation, but it left me with a feeling for the infinite fragility of my name” (7).

Prior to his uncle’s death, when Marco leaves for college and is separated from him, the fragility of his identity is foregrounded in his desire “to stay in spiritual contact with him by wearing the suit” that his uncle gave him: “there were times when I imagined the suit was actually holding me together” (15). He offers that “I wore it for sentimental reasons. Under my nonconformist posturing, I was also satisfying the desire to have my uncle near me” (16). Following his death, Marco decides to read all of the books his uncle had given him, and at this stage the fragility of Fogg’s condition becomes even more apparent. In his determination, he not only wishes to hang onto the memory of his uncle, but also to simulate inhabiting his thoughts and feelings:

Each time I opened a box, I was able to enter another segment

of my uncle’s life, . . . and it consoled me to feel that I was occupying

the same mental space that Victor had once occupied—reading the

same words, living in the same stories, perhaps thinking the same

thoughts. It was almost like following the route of an explorer from

long ago, duplicating his steps as he thrashed out into virgin

territory. (22)

This simulation serves as a way for Fogg to keep his imagination alive in connection with his uncle’s encouragement for him to think of himself in terms of an explorer charting his own course as the author of his story. However, this inspiration and his sense of connection with Uncle Victor withers as Marco’s sense of reality grows more tenuous while working his way through the books and proceeding to sell them for cash in order to sustain his barebones existence in isolation.

Because Marco’s link to his personal history is severely restricted, his main sense of connection with the past was through his uncle and the man’s eccentric imagination. Therefore, the death of Uncle Victor serves as the cause for his process of vanishing, and his impending disappearance is not merely figurative. The bulk of his last remaining physical possessions connected with his uncle are several boxes of books that were given to him as a gift when he left for college. The boxes, which Marco had intended to return to his uncle, initially remained stored in their boxes and served as pieces of furniture throughout his apartment, and therefore, when he decides to read them and subsequently sell them for cash his furnishings begin to disappear. His dwindling possessions are dual in nature as the depletion of the books as intellectual objects are equivalent to the attrition of practical physical objects as well. Marco is emptying himself of possessions that remind him of the past and serve a function in the present, and his increasing weight loss represents his physical disengagement with the world via his possessions, social contacts, and in his physical being.

Once the strength of the memory of his uncle fades away, it appears that Marco has indeed used himself up because he has no memories of a father and has very little recollection of his mother as he reveals, “it is difficult for me to remember what she looked like” (4). What he does remember paints a portrait of a woman who was detached and lonely: “more often than not she was dreamy, given to mild sulks, and there were times when I felt a true sadness emanating from her, a sense that she was battling against some vast and internal disarray” (4). These comments suggest that Fogg may have absorbed her disposition as a young boy and that this would unconsciously influence his own urge to detach himself from his friends and isolate himself. His mother’s inability to deal with her troubles effected Fogg’s inquisitiveness about his past because his inquiries were thwarted at an early age: “With my father, however, all was a blank. . . . That was the one subject my mother refused to discuss with me, and whenever I asked the question, she would not budge” (4). Therefore, Fogg is left in the dark about the source of his mother’s personal disarray and shame regarding her affair with Solomon Barber, the man later revealed to be his biological father. The result is that Fogg suppresses his curiosity and comes to rely upon his imagination: “For want of something to cling to, I imagined him as a dark-haired version of Buck Rogers, a space traveler who had passed into the fourth dimension and could not find his way back” (4).

As his memories and possessions dwindle and his body weakens, however, so too does the potency of his imagination begin to fade in the face of his increasing self-enclosure. He comes to the realization that “the mind cannot win out over matter, for once the mind is asked to do too much” (29), and because of his weakness his connection with the present wanes: “my mind had begun to drift, and once that happened, I was powerless to stop it” (30). Ultimately, he is faced with a similar dilemma that A. encountered in “The Book of Memory”:

I had lost the ability to think ahead, and no matter how hard I tried

to imagine the future, I could not see it, I could not see anything at

all. The only future that ever belonged to me was the present I was living

in now, and the struggle to remain in that present had gradually

overwhelmed the rest. . . . each moment the future stood before me as a

blank, a white page of uncertainty. If life was a story, as Uncle Victor had

often told me, and each man was the author of his own story, then I was

making it up as I went along. . . . The question was what I was supposed

to do when the pen ran out of ink. (41-42)

The result is that Marco runs out of money, loses his apartment, and winds up living as a homeless man in Central Park. He survives being homeless for a few weeks, but he gets dangerously close to vanishing permanently when he becomes ill and delirious due to his weakened condition and must take shelter from a rainstorm in a cave in Central Park. In this account of events, Marco is completely overwhelmed by the present as his body and mind have weakened to the extent that he can no longer think or create spontaneously, and his only option is to desperately take refuge in the cave. Despite reaching a state of destitution, his full recovery is enabled because in the depths of his fall he is rescued by Zimmer and Kitty Wu.

Whereas Quinn isolated himself and disappeared at the conclusion of City of Glass because he had lost contact with all of his friends and faded away in his isolation as a pseudonymous writer, Fogg’s migration toward disappearance is aborted due to his desperate effort to make contact with Zimmer so that he can be saved from a similar fate. Akin to A.’s inhabitance of his room and the time required to dwell within himself on 6 Varick St., Fogg is provided with a space for his recovery in Zimmer’s apartment. The search for Zimmer marks Fogg’s desire to sustain his connection to life as well as his need to dwell and recover, and this is symbolized through Zimmer’s name, a German word which translates as room. Fogg’s solitude is therefore accompanied by a living connection, and this gives him the life support to recover and then venture into the uncertainty of the future via his journey through his buried past.

The moment in which Fogg is found by Kitty and Zimmer he embellishes his experience through a literary reference. This provides an initial sign that his imagination is on the mend and that he is able to contextualize his experience within a larger framework. He was not sure if he spent two or three days in the cave, though he tells them it was three “because three was a literary number, the same number of days that Jonah spent in the belly of the whale” (69). Marco’s experience in the cave prefigures Effing’s story about his cave, and what they both signify is the importance of recovery and a reinvigoration of the imagination and creativity. His rescue enables his recovery to proceed so that can begin to take action in the present and begin to envision possibilities of a future through his ensuing relationship with Kitty. While inside the cave, Fogg imagined the neon letters of the Moon Palace restaurant sign outside of his apartment which had initially sparked his imagination when he first moved into the apartment: