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

Lost in the Labyrinth:

Authoring of Identity in the Works of Paul Auster

by

Bradley S. Lewis

December 2007

TABLE OF CONTENTS
I. Introduction. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3

II. Chapter One: Authoring Identity in The Invention of Solitude. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11

III. Chapter Two: City of Glass: Lost in the Labyrinth. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31

IV. Chapter Three—Postcript: The Formation of the Storyteller in Moon Palace. . . . 67

V. Conclusion. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 92

VI. Works Cited. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 95

Introduction

“At bottom, I think my work has come out of a position

of intense personal despair, a very deep nihilism and hopelessness

about the world, the fact of our own transience and mortality, . . .

the isolation of one person from another. And yet, at the same time,

I’ve wanted to express the beauty and extraordinary happiness of

feeling yourself alive.”

- Paul Auster

If, as Auster says, all of his work emerges from this sense of personal despair, his memoir, The Invention of Solitude (IS), which is his first major work, addresses this feeling through themes that reappear in his subsequent novels. This is particularly apropos to the second half of the memoir, “The Book of Memory,” in which Auster struggles to situate himself via a written inquiry into his past as a means of working through personal crises that include his father’s death, his divorce, and the hospitalization and impending death of his maternal grandfather. The text develops into an inquiry upon the subject of memory which delves into the field of influences that have contributed to the shaping of his identity as a means to contextualize himself within a larger framework. The memoir thus becomes, in part, an explication of the past, but more significantly it develops into a meditation upon the nature of memory and the necessity to explore its depths and interpret the past through the process of writing. Ilana Shiloh comments, “The Invention of Solitude. . . offers the blueprint for all his subsequent works,” and she points to the central “theme and narrative pattern adumbrated in The Invention of Solitude: the quest and the mystery of the self” (14).

In Auster’s memoir, the quest takes on the form of an internal deliberation through the labyrinth of memory in solitude which enables a process of self-recovery during his period of crisis. The quest is therefore characterized as a descent into the darkness of solitude that is integral to Auster’s creative process and helps him work through his despair. His journey is not represented via a clear linear framework, but rather, the path into the self is fragmented, labyrinthine, associative, and inherently unstable. He attempts to represent this circuitous path through a reflective writing process that emphasizes the instability of identity and leaves gaps in the text as a way to represent the transient and selective nature of memory that can never be finalized, but rather, is always subject to continuous reflection and reinterpretation. Auster is cognizant of the seemingly impossible task of creating a narrative structure to represent the associative and open-ended character of a journey into the past, yet he manages to create a poetic framework of correspondences that capture the elusive and mysterious connections that have marked his life.

Auster’s reflective search as a writer can only take place in solitude, and it is within this solitary space that he is able to establish a vital relationship between an exploration into the vast interior realm of memory and the need to inhabit its winding corridors in order to draw upon his imagination as part of the process of working through the past through writing. The text explores the importance of storytelling and narrative construction such that an individual is, consciously or not, continually authoring his life through a negotiation of personal, social, historical, and fictional narratives. Auster remarks, “you don’t begin to understand your connection to others until you are alone. And the more intensely you are alone, the more deeply you plunge into a state of solitude, the more deeply feel that connection” (309). Solitude is therefore free of negative connotations for Auster, but is instead an essential human condition that involves an opportunity to dwell with oneself in order to recognize the wealth of connections and influences that have helped shape the self. An integral part of the process of feeling his connections in solitude and moving beyond the confines of a strictly personal narrative includes Auster’s incorporation of literary influences in his texts. The inclusion of these influences carries the text beyond his personal history and signifies his broader and richer sense of connection to history that is not prosaically represented and temporally consistent, but rather, is fragmented and repetitive, poetic and meditative.

An important adjunct to the multitude of references within the memoir is Auster’s choice to speak of himself in the third person as ‘A.’ This places him within the text as a central character and serves to emphasize the extent to which both personal and literary influences have helped shape his identity. Auster emphasizes, “Our lives don’t really belong to us, you see – they belong to the world, and in spite of our efforts to make sense of it, the world is a place beyond our understanding” (AH 279). Therefore, writing about himself in the third person serves a dual purpose: it is a way for Auster to represent how one’s identity essentially remains mysterious because it has been formed by numerous factors that are beyond complete accessibility and comprehension; and it allows a measure of distance from himself in order for him to select important details and influences while creating a poetic framework that apprehends the associative nature of memory. Auster comments that, “The Invention of Solitude is autobiographical, of course, but I don’t feel that I was telling the story of my life so much as using myself to explore certain questions that are common to us all: how we think, how we remember, how we carry our pasts around with us at every moment” (300). His emphatic reminder to “Remember” (172), the memoir’s final word which stands alone, reinforces this sense of the importance to realize that the past always remains present within us and is open to further interrogation and interpretation. Therefore, rather than remain unconsciously in the grip of unresolved elements of the past, he implores the importance to be both a witness to and active participant with one’s past in a process that self-referentially engages in a reconstruction of the past through the act of writing.

In a letter to Dennis Barone about critical responses to his work, Auster comments that critics “confuse the thoughts and statements of the characters in my books with my own beliefs. . . . As far as I was concerned, Quinn’s approach to writing was an example of his alienation – his terrible distress and sadness as a man” (Beyond the Red Notebook 14). Quinn, though living alone in a room, does not inhabit himself and his memories, but denies his internal world and access to his past through the serendipitous adoption of the identity of a detective. This act marks a heightened level of dissociation from himself and leads to his disappearance because of his complete severance from his memories, friends, and former literary career. His adoption of this identity is connected with his flight from engaging with the ambiguities and contradictions inherent in the process of interpreting his past in favor of a search for absolute transparency and wholeness. This search encompasses a desperate need to believe in deductive and rational solutions, and it builds into an obsessive quest that protects him from the nebulous and uncomfortable journey into the realm of memory. The inability to deal with his affects leaves Quinn in a state of timelessness because he foregoes an ongoing internal narrative and therefore remains unable to re-invent and represent himself as Auster strives to do in The Invention of Solitude. Because Quinn represses his past and therefore does not investigate or interpret it, he fails to mourn the losses of his wife and son and does not recontextualize his relationship with these past traumas through the process of writing.

Quinn’s repression of his past as a poet develops into a linguistic regression to the extent that he seeks transparency in language in his external search for stabile and secure signs of representation as an escape from the unstable process of re-experiencing through memory and interpreting the past. As a result of the thoroughness of his repression and his failure to experience and engage his past, Quinn remains sealed in an enclosed present without room for change and lives purely in a timeless realm with no sense of continuity, or even relationship, between past, present, and future. He instead comes to resemble an automaton, or a still-man, and the elder and younger Stillmans, along with other figures in the novel, act as reflections of his psychological state. Quinn’s desire for unity and solution and his complete denial of ambiguity and contradiction leaves him severed from more of himself and to a world beyond himself, and therefore his obsessive pursuit leads him along a path to paralysis and eventual disappearance. The result of his self-denial is that he seeks to lose himself through his delusional pursuit of a case which can only remain a case because of his failure to question the path he has taken.

At stake then, for Quinn, is a more authentic relationship with the world and the possibility of a future by creatively interacting in the present. His inability to work through the past under present circumstances and revisit the traumatic effects of his personal losses means that he cannot re-experience the affects of the past and retranslate past traumas, and this equates to a failure to bring his imagination into play as a way to recontextualize the past so that he can move forward with his life. While A. is aware of feeling lost and works through his crises by writing “The Book of Memory,” Quinn remains lost for lacking this cognizance and not dealing with his personal losses. He does not open his conception of his identity and pay homage to others by exploring the depth of his influences. Therefore, his identity remains fragmented and he desperately seeks integration through a fantasy of empirical totality which leads him into greater isolation because he remains emotionally sealed from the depths of his past. A. engages the presence of the past as part of his struggle to understand himself and construct an identity to continue into the future despite a feeling of disparity within himself, while Quinn represents an antithesis to A. as an individual who gives up this struggle. The overtly metafictional and comedic elements that pervade City of Glass perhaps mask and lighten its darker undertones, but the perplexing uncertainty and protean aspects of the novel reverberate with the unsettling core questions regarding identity. The ramifications of what can happen to an individual in the face of destabilizing crises who fails to mourn the past, and therefore denies it, is that he is in danger of dissociating from himself and subsequently becoming static in the present.

In Moon Palace, Auster presents a character, Marco Fogg, who is not in the midst of crisis but has worked through the past and is therefore in control of his tale and is able to shape the important influences in his life through a chronological account that results in the narrative of Moon Palace. In contrast to Quinn’s failure to work through his past and his resulting disappearance due to his delusional pursuits, Marco survives his desire to vanish from life in response to his troubles. Similarly to Quinn, he begins to empty himself and falls into a state of extreme isolation. However, because he seeks connection prior to his descent he is rescued from oblivion by his friends, and this action enables a process of recovery for Marco which nurtures his ability to move ahead with his life and strive to create into the future.

The drastic instability and disorientation of the interpretive process and its connection with authoring identity that Auster is concerned with in City of Glass is smoothed out in Moon Palace through a first-person narrator who details the journey of his personal quest in his youth from a more stabile perspective as an adult in the present. Moon Palace also incorporates the theme of disappearance, but as opposed to being a story of descent and the loss of identity like City of Glass, Fogg details his own narrative from descent to recovery in his journey toward becoming the author of his own life. Auster’s chief concerns with authoring identity, the importance of interrogating the past and the inherent instability of this process remain integral themes, but they are framed within a more traditional form of a picaresque narrative that is less jarring and demanding of the reader. The narrative voice of Marco Fogg is clear and assured from the opening page: “I took the job with the old man in the wheelchair. I found out who my father was. I walked across the desert from Utah to California. That was a long time ago, of course, but I remember those days well, I remember them as the beginning of my life” (1). Fogg, as a character who is narrating his story in retrospect, has allowed for and claimed his memories, the life-shaping events and the emotional content of his past, and so he is able to retranslate and transcribe his personal affective experiences and subsequently open himself to new experiences. Therefore, he remains open to a real future in the sense of being capable of authoring his existence in the present.

Chapter One: Authoring Identity in The Invention of Solitude

“The labyrinth is man. He creates his self-labyrinth as he struggles

to give significance to everything around him. In constant need of recovering

presence, everyman is the labyrinth-maker, killing the monsters of the past,

awaiting future cities.”

-Enrico Garzilli, Circles Without Center

The opening epigraph to Paul Auster’s, “The Book of Memory,” is an intriguing citation from The Adventures of Pinocchio that sets up a theme of contradiction and differing interpretations. And perhaps more relevantly, the reference to the weeping dead offers an intriguing question about the boundary between life and death in regard to the influence of the dead upon the living through memory’s traces, and so the epigraph also serves as a metaphor for the living self in life undergoing transformation. The Crow offers a somber and symbolic view that the dead “are beginning to recover” when they weep while the Owl counters with the plain declaration, “as far as I’m concerned, I think that when the dead weep, it means they do not want to die” (73). Their differing views both suggest that the dead are clearly suffering over their condition, but the question that is begged in the epigraph chosen by Auster is, ‘who is dead?’ Is Auster the dead man?

The opening page following the epigraph appears to offer this possibility through the repetition of an open-ended statement: “It was. It will never be again” (75). Auster writes the “The Book of Memory” (the second section of The Invention of Solitude) entirely in third person, and he states at the outset, “He decides to refer to himself as A.” (75). The implementation of third person narration suggests a severance from an authorial “I” that reminisces about a personal past in order to inscribe his feeling of detachment from the immediate present and to situate himself within a larger historical scope. The personal stories of A., who represents Auster, are placed within the context of, and correspond with, a series of literary and philosophical references that place the question of identity under the microscope by moving away from a traditionally formulated memoir that implicitly assumes an “I” at its center. The opening epigraph and third person narrative create a level of distance such that Auster is presenting an “in memoriam” about himself, or the person he used to be. Ironically, though, this separation from himself serves as the road to his recovery and expansion toward new life in a struggle with death through his desire to continue living. For even though a sharp severance from the past is inscribed in the assertion that what was can never be again, the only way for Auster to cross the threshold into a new stage of life distinct from the past is to move through that past and inscribe it in the form of “The Book of Memory.”

As Auster delves into the chambers of memory, he describes a feeling of absence from himself: “Christmas Eve, 1979. His life no longer seemed to dwell in the present. . . . Even as he stood in the present, he felt himself to be looking at it from the future. . . . Later, in a time of greater clarity, he would refer to this sensation as ‘nostalgia for the present’” (76). The absence, or loss, of a sense of self that Auster elicits is coterminous with a feeling of temporal disorientation. The feeling of loss in this case is attributable to significant personal losses and processes of separation which propel Auster on an inner journey into the realm of memory. His inward turn takes on the character of an archeological descent as though he were excavating material to be unearthed and arranged as a way to orient himself within the labyrinth of memory, and therefore, exercise authorship by attempting to represent its associational and circuitous nature. Auster recalls being lost while wandering through the streets of Amsterdam, and he connects this solitary state of the past with his present feeling of disorientation which he equates with a journey through hell:

He wandered. He walked around in circles. He allowed himself to be

lost. . . . It occurred to him that perhaps he was wandering in the circles

of hell, that the city had been designed as a model of the underworld. . . .

And if Amsterdam was hell, and if hell was memory, then he realized that

perhaps there was some purpose to his being lost. (86)

Auster’s effort to orient himself involves an acceptance and attribution of meaning to his disorientation by engaging the process of dwelling within himself and exercising authorship through a representation of his memories on the page as a means of negotiating the labyrinth of the self. His struggle to achieve this orientation is predicated upon a citation of Pascal that serves as one of the vital reverberations in the memoir: “all the unhappiness of man stems from one thing only: that he is incapable of staying quietly in his room” (76). Auster’s initial citation of Pascal is repeated throughout “The Book of Memory” like a mantra that serves as a marker of what he feels he must achieve, and it appears to signify a personal challenge: the task of confronting himself in his existential state and commencing a quest of self-recovery during a period of crisis. Auster must confront his disorientation and unhappiness in solitude, and the necessary journey into memory is posited as a potential site of redemption wherein he can work toward alleviation from his suffering and restore his sense of self: “for it is only in the darkness of solitude that the book of memory begins” (164).