Lost in the Labyrinth: Authoring of Identity in the Works of Paul Auster by
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the force with which those words assaulted me drowned out every practical reference and association. They were magic letters, and they hung there in the darkness like a message from the sky itself. . . . A bare and grubby room had been transformed into a site of inwardness, an intersection point of strange omens and mysterious, arbitrary events” (17). This had occurred prior to his uncle’s death, and it indicates how Marco’s imagination had begun to dominate his sense of reality while in isolation. He read the words as a magical sign which gave meaning to his circumstances and simultaneously helped repress his thoughts and worries about the future. Inside the cave, however, he imagines the large o’s from Moon and sees himself dangling dangerously from the enormous letters. This is immediately followed by his perception that the letters appeared as “gigantic human eyes that were looking down at me with scorn and impatience” (70). Fogg’s experience of eyes staring at him and doubling in the figure of letters quickly escalates beyond their merely human character: “I became convinced that they were the eyes of God” (70). The combination of these images infers the power of language in its direct Biblical association with creation, or the Word of God, and the danger that is implied through these images is that Marco is entirely at the mercy of the letters and has given up all efforts toward authoring his existence. To this point in the novel, Fogg has survived his descent into oblivion due to feeling severed from a larger connection after the passing of his final relative, Uncle Victor. His feeling of finding himself adrift as an orphan was insurmountable for him as he was seemingly unable to overcome the fragility of his identity with the loss of the one person who offered positive connotations to his name. He disappears into a fog, resigned to vanish from the world, only to be saved by a fellow orphan, Kitty, whom he meets serendipitously during his search for Zimmer, or symbolically speaking, for a room wherein he can rest and recover. The subsequent period in which he is holed up with Zimmer in solitude prepares him for his journey forward into the roots of his mysterious past when he takes a job with Thomas Effing. The end of his fall and his sense of increased stability with his identity becomes apparent during his initial interview with Effing: “Emmett Fogg,” the old man said, spitting out the words with contempt. “What kind of a sissy name is that?” “M. S. Fogg,” I replied. “The M stands for Marco, the S for Stanley.” “That’s no better. If anything, it’s worse. What are you going to do about it, boy?” “I’m not going to do anything about it. My name and I have been through a lot together, and I’ve grown rather fond of it over the years.” (101) The character of Effing, and Fogg’s relationship with him, are central to the novel in regard to the theme of Fogg authoring his story. Carsten Springer addresses the centrality of Effing in relation to the novel’s overall structure: “the character’s power as a man who has managed to create a new identity for himself is also demonstrated by his dominance in the central part of the novel” (143). Fogg’s time with Effing occupies the middle three chapters of the novel, and Effing’s position as a forceful and enigmatic figure of command who keeps Fogg off-balance and has him transcribe the outrageous tale of his life is a crucial passage for Fogg in coming to an indirect understanding of what is entailed in being the author of one’s life. This section of the novel, with Effing at its center, can be read symbolically as Fogg’s strange indoctrination into the art of storytelling. Effing as a predominant figure is seemingly indecipherable in his introduction through Fogg’s eyes: “Everything about him was walled off, remote, sphinxlike in its impenetrability” (99). He is a very old man in a wheelchair, and Fogg notes, “he struck me as the frailest person I had ever seen. . . . his body slumped to one side like some miniscule broken bird” (99). But it quickly becomes apparent that Effing is in enigma because even his physical stature is incredibly difficult to decipher as he comes to life a few moments later during the interview: He straightened himself up in his chair. It was remarkable how quickly he transformed his appearance. He was no longer a comatose semi-corpse lost in a twilight reverie; he had become all sinew and attention, a seething little mass of resurrected strength. As I eventually learned, this was the real Effing, if real is a word that can be used in talking about him. So much of his character was built on falsehood and deception, it was nearly impossible to know when he was telling the truth. (99) This central figure to the story appears as a riddle, is portrayed as entirely unreliable in matters of factual truth, and his very character presents a challenge to Fogg’s tacit assumptions regarding the nature of reality. Effing wears eyepatches upon first meeting Fogg, and he is likely blind, but a degree of uncertainty always lingers for Fogg because of the old man’s penchant for playing games with his identity as he sometimes removes the patches or wears a single eyepatch. In other moments, even with the patches on, Marco feels as though Effing were looking at him. His blindness remains ambiguous physically, and Fogg can find no direct connection with Effing in regards to sight and vision: “For all the hundreds of hours I spent gazing into them, Effing’s eyes never told me a thing” (110). Rather than relying upon vision, Effing is alive through his voice, and the moment he comes to life is when he verbally challenges Fogg during the interview. The relationship between Fogg and Effing is characterized by verbal exchange and storytelling, and the period in which Fogg works for Effing serves as an indoctrination into a place of discovering his voice on his road toward authoring his existence as a storyteller. As a companion to Effing, Fogg ‘s primary duties are to read aloud to him and describe the outdoor scenery when he wheels him through the streets. During these daily walks, Fogg’s role is to actively be the eyes for Effing and he is immediately berated by Effing for “spouting drivel about ‘your average lamppost’ and ‘perfectly ordinary manhole covers.’ I want to see what we’re looking at, goddamnit, I want you to make things stand out for me!” (120). The task of detailed description is one which Fogg had never engaged in previously, and he recognizes, “I had always had a penchant for generalizing, for seeing the similarities between things rather than the differences” (121). His lack of examination of the differences in the external world is intermingled with his personal crisis in which he was formerly determined to vanish because he defined himself solely through his connection to his lone remaining family member, Uncle Victor. He had been unable to sustain his individuality despite his attempt to distinguish himself as M. S. Fogg, and the process of detailing imagery for Effing and reading stories aloud to him can be viewed as part of his identity formation as an author through having to carefully focus upon individual details. The essence of Effing’s character and what Fogg inherits from him is self-described by Effing and foreshadows the long tale he will orate to Fogg in order to document the ‘true’ story of his past. On one of their ventures in the city Fogg asks Effing why he doesn’t live in the country after noticing his pleasure of sitting in a park, and Effing tells him, I’ve done it, and now it’s all in my head. All alone in the middle of the wilderness for months, for months and months an entire lifetime. Once you’ve done that boy, you never forget it. I don’t need to go anywhere. The moment I start to think about it, I’m back. That’s where I spend most of my time these days- back in the middle of nowhere. (126) Effing is the consummate storyteller because he spends most of his time in the middle of nowhere, a space in which he can creatively spin tales in his head. This is precisely the space which begins to effect Fogg’s sense of reality while in his presence. While reading to Effing, Fogg begins to tangibly experience the old man’s mysteriousness and enigmatic character: “Effing, in his wheelchair, and I on the sofa across from him, and there were times when I became so engrossed in what I was reading that I hardly knew where I was anymore, that I felt I was no longer sitting in my own skin” (112). Again, the question of the ‘real Effing’ and the matter of his mysterious identity arises in this statement, and when he tells Fogg that he knows his death is approaching and the tale of his past must be told, Marco will unwittingly find himself inscribed within the mythic tale of self-creation that is part of his inheritance. He is no longer seeking shelter and recovering from his recent slide, but his steps toward stabilizing himself are unsteady as they are directly tied to the mythological Effing.
The tale that gradually unfolds grows increasingly miraculous as Effing reveals that he used to be Julian Barber, a painter who decided to travel to the West to paint the landscape. The story which ensues is nothing less than a mythic representation of a journey into the Western frontier and the formation of a self-made man. It is complete with a near death experience, the assumption of another identity, an ambush and murder followed by an escape with bags of gold and a continued migration westward to California. When he reveals that he had previously been known as Julian Barber and lived overseas after winding up in a wheelchair, Effing boasts of the stories he made up about his condition: “I made up several stories, each one an improvement on the ones that came before it. I’d pull them out according to the circumstances and my mood, always changing them slightly as I went along” (130). His comment highlights the likelihood that the tale he urges Marco to transcribe may be complete fabrication. In fact, as their relationship develops and they are deeper into Effing’s story, Fogg states that “his narrative had taken on a phantasmagoric quality. . . and there were times when he did not seem to be remembering the outward facts of his life so much as inventing a parable to explain its inner meanings” (183). Effing’s believability is always open to question, and prior to telling his tale, Marco read several adventure stories and travel diaries to him as part of his companionship to the old man. Among these were narratives by John Wesley Powell, Sir John Mandeville, Cabeza de Vaca, and eighteenth and nineteenth century captivity stories. Fogg comments, “These readings were not a form of recreation so much as a line of pursuit, a dogged investigation of certain precise and narrow subjects.” (110) This pursuit enables Effing to fill his head with an amalgam of details prior to spinning his yarn about his own adventures in the West as Julian Barber. Carsten Springer comments on Effing’s motivation behind his story: “Effing is no longer interested in the establishment of factual truth but in authorial control” (144). As Effing orates his tale he offers that “the land is too big out there, and after a while it starts to swallow you up in the end it’s all a figment. The only place you exist is in your head” (156). The question of what are truly Effing’s personal memories and what are a collaboration of tales that he listened to and processed during Fogg’s recent readings serves to highlight Effing’s impenetrability, his sphinxlike character, and that the bulk of his story may be in his head as pure invention and have little to do with personal recall. One of the most relevant life-changing events that Effing conveys to Fogg is an apparent encounter with Nikola Tesla, whom Effing portrays as a strange and mysterious figure: “he was like a prophet of the future age, and no one could resist him. The total conquest of nature! A world in which every dream was possible!” (144). Effing describes the encounter as a pivotal life-altering moment: our eyes met and I could feel him looking right through me as though I didn’t exist When Tesla’s eyes went through me, I experienced my first taste of death I was seventeen years old, and all of a sudden I understood that my life was my own. (146) It is in this moment, as Julian Barber, that Effing says he decided to become a painter and give up a more secure financial path available to him as the son of a prominent business tycoon. Tesla comes across as a transcendent figure who inspires Effing to take a hold of his own life and transcend his heritage. However, the movement toward transcendence leads to disaster for Julian Barber and results in the complete obliteration of his existence and the eventual formation of himself as Thomas Effing, with the creation of his surname, Effing, as a pun for “the man who fucked his life” (184).
The significance of Effing’s story regarding his encounter with Tesla is his experience of transcendence and a heightened sense of mortality that occurs in a meeting of the eyes between the two men. Since Effing’s eyes are completely inaccessible to Marco and never reveal anything to him, Marco can only relate to Effing through his words and voice, and this connection imbues Fogg with a feeling of immanence as opposed to Effing’s experience of transcendence: His voice never seemed to let him down. I began to live inside that voice as though it were a room He was alone with the story in his head, and I was alone with the words that poured from his mouth. Those words filled every inch of air around me, and in the end there was nothing else for me to breathe. (183-4) Though Marco feels the tale is preposterous, it is the words and voice of Effing which envelope Marco and cause him to ascertain an element of truth in his narrative. He identifies with the outlandishness of the tale by reflecting on the improbability of his own story in which he survived his brief period in a cave and then landed a job as scribe and companion to the strange old man who will later be revealed to be Fogg’s grandfather: The hermit’s cave, the saddlebags of money, the Wild West shootout- it was all so farfetched, and yet the very outrageousness of the story was probably its most convincing element. . . . I could not help thinking of him as a kindred spirit. Perhaps it started when we got to the episode of the cave. (183) The experience of solitude in the cave that Effing claims to have lived within for months has been internalized to such an extent that he passes on this feeling to Marco who finds himself enshrouded within Effing’s tale. Fogg identifies with Effing’s tale because the old man taps into transcendent themes of loneliness and loss which Fogg has experienced and identifies with. His voice speaks to the importance of language as well as the notion of authoring existence through the imagination and the depths of the sonorous word. Even though Fogg experiences a strong sense of identification with Effing, the outrageousness of his tale and the self-mythologizing of Effing also serves to create distance. Fogg is wrapped inside Effing’s presence and his story yet he is simultaneously aware of their separation and lack of connection. Shortly following his expression of kinship, Fogg notes, “Effing wore the black patches over his eyes almost constantly now, and there was no chance to deceive myself into thinking there was some connection between us” (184). They are blood-related, but Fogg’s knowledge of his bloodline is less important than his paradoxical relationship to Effing as Fogg realizes that they share similar experiences and yet are completely separate as individuals. While Effing’s blindness remains indeterminate as a physical fact, the black eyepatches he wears are symbolic of his choice to close his eyes on his former life as Julian Barber. The telling of the tale to Fogg will eventually shore up the gaps in Fogg’s knowledge of his past, but Effing endures as an enigma and Fogg’s lineage will always be shrouded in the fog of his truncated name. What really happened to Julian Barber and how he became Thomas Effing will remain mysterious but what Effing does communicate through the yarns he spins are myths, and he sets the groundwork for Fogg to become a storyteller through his job of reading and bringing details to life for Effing before Marco embarks upon a journey that will eventually lead to his own narrative account of the past. Fogg’s relationship with his past will ultimately be characterized by Effing’s phantasmagoria because the old man is the grandfather he never knew, and even in the flesh, there remains a question regarding the nature of his reality. He is an example, par excellence, of the American self-made man who ventured through the rugged Western frontier and survived to tell the tale under a new name. However, Fogg is well aware of Effing’s deceits and his penchant for invention, and he is therefore cognizant of the fact that Effing’s tale is a parable embellished through Fogg’s readings as opposed to anything approaching a factual account. In this way, Effing’s life as a man who went mad and self-destructed serves as a caution to Fogg regarding the potential consequences of the excesses of mythic self-creation. Paradoxically, however, it is because of his period with Effing that Fogg would travel through the West and come to comprehend the meaning of Effing’s portrayal of feeling overwhelmed and obliterated by the vastness of the frontier. The question as to whether Effing ever traveled through the land or merely spun yarns based on travel narratives and myths of the West will always remain uncertain, and it is this ambiguity through which Fogg must travel in order to discover who his father is and that his knowledge of his heritage ends with the enigmatic Effing, the self-made man who fucked his life. Effing is a self-created man, an inventor of his identity, and his presence exemplifies that the only available model of inheritance to Fogg is to become a storyteller if he wants to creatively author his life. The West represents a timeless location ripe with the potential for mythological self-creation where old identities and tradition can be shed and familial lineage is defined through myths associated with the land. It is a place of mythic transcendence, though the experience of the frontier includes violence and destruction, and this is also a vital aspect to Effing’s tale. Springer offers that Effing’s wild west tale symbolizes the limits of the psyche: “Auster significantly chooses the frontier areas of the American West for Effing’s story of an artistic quest. These areas become the setting for the character’s confrontation with the frontier in his own psyche” (142). While direct familial heritage is clandestinely present in their exchange, it is the process of engagement in the story and transcribing of Effing’s words that are crucial for Fogg as part of his indoctrination as a storyteller as he will have to destroy his childhood fantasies about his past in his efforts to author his existence. Once Effing finishes with his story about the Western frontier and covers the pun which becomes his new identity, he ends his tale and reveals that he wants a copy sent to Solomon Barber, the son he has never known. Though Effing spent twenty years in Paris and lived in virtual anonymity for another thirty years in New York he dismisses these periods as unimportant as he has selected the important details that were pertinent to his transition from one identity to another that are to be passed on in the form of a parable to his son. His anonymity allows him to stay hidden from the world and be in absolute control of other’s perceptions through his tales: “I liked being dead, and after it got written in the papers, I was able to stay dead” (129). He was the creator of a personal orphanage by negating his previous life as the unsuccessful painter, Julian Barber. This negation included the abandonment of his son, Solomon Barber, who subsequently abandons Marco through his affair with Fogg’s mother, and so they both inherit the status of bastard sons. As Effing created these conditions through his abandonment, he also possessed the power to shore up this distance before dying by giving Barber, and subsequently Fogg, their pasts: “Everyone has a right to know his past. I can’t do much for him but at least I can do that” (198). His fantastic tale, however fabricated, serves as a symbolic attempt to explain his departure and personal degradation in an effort to give Solomon Barber a story that connects him with his past. Of course, the irony is that Effing’s tale is superfluous to Barber, but with Fogg as the deliverer of the story Barber is reconnected with the past that he abandoned as well. The story will connect Barber with an extraordinary mythology of his father, but more importantly, it will connect he and Fogg to their buried pasts.
Once they establish personal contact and Barber knows that Marco is his son, Solomon decides to move to New York to be in close contact with him. It is the subject of the cave that will bind them as Barber keeps his identity hidden from Marco and suggests that they travel west in search of Effing’s cave: “Ah, the cave,” I repeated. “The enigmatic cave in the desert.” “I can’t stop thinking about it. It’s like one of those old songs that
“An old song. An old story. There’s no getting rid of it. But how do we know there was a cave?” “That’s what I was going to ask you. You were the one who heard the story. What do you say, M. S.? Was he telling the truth or not?” Before I could gather my wits to answer him, Kitty leaned forward on her elbow, looked to her left at me, looked to her right at Barber, and then summed up the whole complicated problem in two sentences. “Of course he was telling the truth,” she said. “His facts might not always have been correct, but he was telling the truth.” (276) The cave is a symbolic mystery which they share, and the power of Effing’s story, his mythos, is the cornerstone of their pasts as it becomes the central mystery that links them to their strange heritage. Effing will forever be a riddle as the consummate trickster storyteller, but the truth of his central command in this position is undeniable as Barber and Fogg’s lives have been significantly shaped by Effing’s decision to sever himself from his past. Fogg and Kitty’s relationship ends when Kitty becomes pregnant and Marco will not consent to her desire for an abortion. Their dispute causes them to split, but Kitty’s decision to get an abortion ends the possibility of another orphan in the lineage that Effing created. The split also delivers Fogg into his past and through the terrain of the West where he will come to a better understanding of the meaning of Effing’s tale and can subsequently take hold of his own life. Following their break-up, Fogg stays with Barber until he shakes Marco out of his despondence and convinces him to head west together to look for Effing’s cave: Perhaps it was the sheer hopelessness of the venture that clinched it for me. . . The idea of a useless quest, of setting out on a journey that was doomed to failure appealed to my sense of things at that moment. . . Only the going itself would matter, and in the end we would be left with nothing but the futility of our ambitions. This was a metaphor I could live with, the leap into the emptiness I had always dreamed of. (288) Download 248.74 Kb. Share with your friends:
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