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

Fogg is once again navigating the unknown, and at this point he relishes the opportunity. The revelation concerning Barber’s identity is characterized by violence when they visit the gravesites of Victor and Emily Fogg.

Barber’s identity is unveiled in the midst of an emotional unraveling for both of them at the gravesites as Marco, in his confusion and anger, causes a sobbing Barber to stumble and fall into an open grave. He descends into a coma and Fogg sits with him in the hospital and watches him transform as his tremendous bulk shrinks: “as the bloat of fat cells and puffy flesh continued to subside, a second Barber came up to the surface, a secret self that had been locked inside him for years” (296). When Barber awakens from the coma he tells Fogg the story of his affair with Emily, but Marco stubbornly resists accepting his story until he can no longer deny full recognition of what he witnesses in Barber’s transformation: “I finally understood what I had been seeing. . . . I found myself studying the contour of his eyelids. . . and all of a sudden I realized that I was looking at myself” (296). Fogg’s outburst and Barber’s misstep leads to the death of Marco’s father, therefore, almost as quickly as Fogg discovers who his father is he loses him. The event fills the gap in his lack of knowledge and also breaks down any lingering fantasies wherein his father existed as a fantastic and heroic figure. It is a crucial event for Fogg, and he will continue westward in search of Effing’s cave in order to gain first-hand experience of what Effing meant by ‘the middle of nowhere’, and yet he will also demythologize the extravagance of the old man’s tale.

Following Barber’s funeral, and a final futile attempt to see if Kitty will take him back, Marco unleashes his emotions upon the furnishings of a cheap motel room and assesses that “I had finally done something logical, something truly worthy of the occasion” (302). This episode and his outburst upon Barber point to the elements of destruction that are also an important step in Fogg’s movement toward beginning a new life for himself. His tirades, however, are not self-destructive like Effing’s annihilation of his previous identity, but rather, they help him to push ahead and continue the quest he set on despite Barber’s death and his separation from Kitty:

I would do what Barber and I had set out to do in the first place, I

decided, and knowing that I had a purpose, that I was not running away
from something so much as going toward it, gave me the courage to

admit to myself that I in fact did not want to be dead. (303)

In contrast to his early descent in New York City when he was determined to wither away and vanish, Fogg affirms the future however uncertain and bleak it may appear. He pushes on and opens himself up to the frontier, and in only a few days he senses the truth within Effing’s tales:

I felt that I was beginning to understand some of the things Effing

had talked about. . . that the hugeness and emptiness of the land had

begun to effect my sense of time. The present seemed to no longer bear

any of the same consequences. Minutes and hours were too small to be

measured in this place, and once you opened your eyes to the things

around you, you were forced to think in terms of centuries, to understand

that a thousand years is no more than the tick of the clock. (303)

Fogg is taken completely out of himself and delivered into the vastness of the landscape where he feels a connection larger than himself in a way he had never been able to previously. His search ends when he visits an old couple who verify the cave’s existence in association with Effing’s tale, but tell him that he “wouldn’t get nowhere looking for it now” (304) because it is buried under Lake Powell. This literal fact is metaphorically significant regarding the permanent inaccessibility as to whether Effing lived in the cave or not, and this significance is conveyed through an associative doubling of Lake Powell and John Wesley Powell, the author of Expeditions Down the Colorado River, a narrative that likely served as a key source for Effing’s tale. What is relevant is that Fogg has identified with a sublime truth in Effing’s tale which enables him to complete his journey through his heritage and understand that he has moved on toward a new chapter in his life which he alone can begin to author through personal experience:

Once I reached the end of the continent, I felt that some important

question would be resolved for me. I had no idea what that question

was, but the answer had already been formed in my steps, and I had only

to keep walking to know that I had left myself behind, that I was no

longer the person I had once been. (306)

On his journey west his car is stolen, and he injures his ankle and is laid up in a small town where he is seduced by a waitress. His adventures are not fantastic and his story is not mythologized like Effing’s, but he has passed through his patriarchal lineage and is on the road to “authoring his own life” (7) after continuing his journey to the Pacific. His tales are more commonplace than heroic, though the enigmatic Effing is central to Fogg’s personal narrative. Marco is essentially still living within Effing’s story until he embarks upon his own adventure westward so that he can finally come to terms with his past and escape Effing’s script by traveling through “the middle of nowhere” (156) and accrue his own experiences. Springer suggests that “only by finding out the correspondences between himself and his male progenitors does the protagonist find out about himself” (149). Fogg needed the sublime experience of traveling through the West in order to reach a point of a new beginning so that he can truly be the author of his own life. And his account, as the narrator of the novel, places his identity in context within a larger inheritance which he has selectively authored. Marco searches for himself through his unknown past and comes to the realization of the importance of storytelling as opposed to finding definitive answers. The journey cannot lead him to anything definitive except to serve as a launching point toward his own self-creation. He no longer lives in the fog without his past nor is he wrapped within Effing’s enigmatic stories, but rather, he encounters his own emptiness which he comes to terms with and mythologizes: “I had come to the end of the world, and beyond it there was nothing but air and waves, an emptiness that went clear to the shores of China. This is where I start, I said to myself, this is where my life begins” (306). He survives the journey through the literal and metaphorical terrain of his personal heritage, and therefore, he can tell the tale of his struggles and adventures and become the “author of his own story” (42).

Conclusion

I agree with Auster when he remarks, “there’s always some indefinable something that makes you attend to a writer’s work – you can never put your finger on it, but that something is what makes all the difference” (AH 274). In an attempt to express my own draw to Auster’s work, I can very generally comment upon my admiration of his ability to combine philosophically introspective narratives that challenge the reader’s tacit assumptions about everyday reality in an entertaining fashion. At a deeper level, as I have tried to illustrate in this thesis, I feel that he deals with essential human questions and mysteries regarding our particular fates. He invites readers to think about the extent to which we can author our identities and control our own destinies in the face of chance events and forces which remain well beyond our control and capacity to fully understand or untangle. His work suggests that the creative act requires an acceptance that our lives are beyond our control, but that one must be willing to embrace uncertainty and the forces of contingency and enter into a relationship with the unknown, or emptiness, at the heart of the creative act in order to remain open to the present moment and actively create into the future. Auster continuously returns to the perplexing question of identity and the instability of living as we are always subject to the unexpected and chance events which contain the potential to significantly alter the course of our lives and our self-perceptions.

I have not focused upon the subject of chance in the texts I have explored, though it is a prominent theme in Auster’s work and has played a part in my own process of completing this thesis. As a primary example, I quote the following words of Auster which I did not discover until the end of this project:

Suddenly a crisis occurs when everything about ourselves is called into

question, when the ground drops out from under us. I think it’s at those

moments when memory becomes a most powerful force in our lives. You

begin to explore the past, and invariably you come up with a new reading

of the past, a new understanding, and because of that you’re able to

encounter the present in a new way. (Irwin 114)

These words serendipitously confirmed a prominent theme I have read in these texts that I had not seen discussed at great length in previous scholarly criticism on Auster’s work. For Auster, what does lie within our control is the opportunity to dwell with our memories in solitude and explore them in order to shift our relationship with the past, and therefore, open the door to alternate self-conceptions and fresh possibilities of engagement with life in the present. This, in my view, is a central concern in the three texts that I have explored.

Auster’s philosophical concerns with identity, with what it means to exist and live a fully human life, are inextricably bound with memory and the importance of exploring the past in order to attain a deeper conception of one’s place in the world. This exploration enables the potential to resituate oneself through a narrative process, and it thereby offers hope for constructing a future through a deeper engagement with the present. This theme is perhaps so elemental to Auster’s work that it may be easy to overlook because his fiction is engaging, moving, and humorous as well as challenging and enigmatic. Throughout his entertaining and sometimes beguiling storytelling, narrative is foregrounded as a vital component to each protagonist’s success or failure to work through crises and come to a better understanding of his place in the world in the present, and therefore achieve some stability and be capable of striving to create into the future. A. and Marco Fogg succeed in delivering themselves from the depths of their crises while Quinn fails to be up to the task and disappears. The characters in these texts must face uncertainty and the instability inherent in living in order to be impelled to search themselves and draw upon their inner resources, or else, Auster suggests, they will lose an essential core of themselves and vanish in isolation by failing to work through the darker aspects of their interiors.

Works Cited

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Bachelard, Gaston. The Poetics of Space. 1958. Trans. by Maria Jolias. Boston: Beacon Press,

1964.

Barone, Dennis. “Auster’s Memory.” The Review of Contemporary American Fiction, Vol. 14,

No. 1, Spring 1994, 32-34.
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Irwin, Mark. “Memory’s Escape: Inventing The Music of Chance--- A Conversation with Paul Auster.” Denver Quarterly 28.3 (1994): 111-122.
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