Confinement in Paul Auster's Moon Palace and the New York Trilogy

Obliteration

However, if a great majority of the characters turn into new beings and are thus able to reconnect, there also occur failures, as it is the case with Quinn, the hero in City of Glass. Quinn, in his investigation, searches for Stillman so obsessively that he irrevocably misplaces himself and eventually disappears, leaving nothing behind him but a red notebook. With Quinn, Auster offers an example of the danger that disconnection represents. In Ghosts, Black tells Blue the story of Wakefield by Nathaniel Hawthorne in which the eponymous hero, pretending to be on a business trip, decides to rent a room in his own city and wait to see what will happen. It turns out that he stays in his room for more than twenty years before he comes back to his wife. In his book, Hawthorne gives the moral of this story: «By stepping aside for a moment, a man exposes himself to the fearful risk of losing his place forever.»^66(*) This statement can apply to Quinn. Indeed, little by little, Quinn loses everything and eventually loses himself. Because of his absorption in the Stillman's case, Quinn finds himself locked in it. A similar situation happens in The Locked Room where the narrator-hero becomes a prisoner of the biography he is writing. He too comes very close to ending up like Quinn as his wife observes: «I sometimes think I can see you vanishing before my eyes.»^67(*) However, as far as Quinn is concerned, he does not manage to catch up with life and therefore he is caught in a disconnecting process that leads him irrevocably towards obliteration. But what makes Quinn different from the other characters? In actual fact, from the very beginning of the novel, Quinn is depicted as someone `out of place'. He writes under a pseudonym and never uses his proper name. He lives alone and avoids contact with people (he has never met his agent). He has lost his wife and his son so that he has nobody to count on. Thus, as the narrator says in the first pages: «Quinn had allowed himself to vanish, to withdraw in the confines of a strange and hermetic life (...) Quinn tended to feel out of place in his own skin.»^68(*) The Stillman's case therefore is just what breaks the final fibres of the moorings that still tied Quinn to the world. Quinn was, from the start, predisposed to vanishing.

2/ Art

The room: the matrix of artistic creation

As previously seen, the room enables some characters to reach a state of harmony with themselves and others. But the room plays another role. It is the matrix of artistic creation. As he explained in an interview, Auster experienced this phenomenon as a young writer:

En 1979, c'est au 6 Varick street que j'ai écrit, dans la minuscule chambre qui était la mienne, la plus grande partie du Livre de la Mémoire. C'était horrible, la misère absolue. Sans l'expérience de cette chambre, le livre aurait été complètement différent. C'est dans ce lieu que l'idée du livre est née.^69(*)

Writing in rooms is a characteristic shared by all Auster's writer-characters. In Leviathan, Peter Aaron writes his book in a cabin in the countryside. In Moon Palace, Marco types out Effing's biography in his «monk's cell». Samuel Farr, in In The Country of Last Things, writes a book in his bedroom in the library. Anna Blume begins to write her novel-letter in a corner of her bedroom in the Woburn Residence. Quinn ends up filling his notebook in a room «that measured no more than ten feet by six feet.»^70(*) Throughout his novels, Auster constantly alludes to a number of writers who wrote exclusively in rooms: Hawthorne, Hölderlin, Anne Franck and Emily Dickinson whose bedroom has a fundamental importance according to Auster:

Emily's room acquires an atmosphere encompassing the poet's several moods of superiority, anxiety, anguish, resignation or ecstasy. Perhaps more than any other concrete place in American literature, it symbolizes a native tradition, epitomized by Emily, of an assiduous study of the inner life.^71(*)

Auster himself writes in a room: «his office, a small studio apartment, is bare and white and smudged with Brooklyn grime. He sits under two naked bulbs. The window shades are always drawn.»^72(*) The room is therefore presented as a necessary condition and at the same time as a catalyst to artistic creation, and the work of art is itself the product of the room as Auster wrote: «A man sits alone in a room and writes. Whether the book speaks of loneliness or companionship, it is necessarily a product of solitude.»^73(*)

* ⁶⁶ Nathaniel Hawthorne. Wakefield. page 161.

* ⁶⁷ The Locked Room, page 286.

* ⁶⁸ City of Glass, page 9.

* ⁶⁹ Interview with Gérard de Cortanze, in La Solitude du Labyrinthe (02 /03/1992), page 114.

* ⁷⁰ City of Glass, page 126.

* ⁷¹ The Book of Memory, in The Invention of Solitude, page 123.

* ⁷² The New York Times Magazine. August 30th 1992, Adam Begley, page 41.

* ⁷³ The Book of Memory in The Invention of Solitude, page 136.