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

Writing: moving inward and outward

In the same way that disconnection and starvation enable the characters to dig into themselves in order to find their own selves and then reconnect to the world, the process of writing has similar consequences. First, as «writing is a solitary business»^93(*), it is an activity that favors introspection. However, the book is an important element insofar as it is a kind of tool, let us say a spade, which helps the writer to dig deeper into himself. In an interview, Auster explains how he used the book he was writing as an instrument of investigation of the self:

I was looking at myself the same way a scientist studies a laboratory animal. I was no more than a little gray rat, a guinea pig stuck in the cage of my own consciousness; the book (...) was an attempt to turn myself inside out and examine what I was made of.^94(*)

In City Of Glass and Ghosts, the writer-characters do experience this introspection. Mention is made of a number of reminiscences the characters go through as they write, along with a number of questions they ask themselves. However, as their writings consist only of reports, that is, not literature, the process is not as strong as for Effing in the desert who discovers that «the true purpose of art was not to create beautiful objects (...) It was a method of understanding, a way of penetrating the world and finding one's place in it.»^95(*) So, writing, when it is an art, i.e. literature, enables its author to discover himself more fully and consequently, enables him to find his place in the world. This function of writing is summed up in The Invention of Solitude: «as he writes, he feels that he is moving inward (through himself) and at the same time, outward (toward the world).»^96(*)

2/ The book

Books and notebooks

When reading Auster's novels, one cannot fail to notice the omnipresence of books and notebooks in the stories and this is particularly apparent in our two novels. Books figure prominently in the life of the hero in Moon Palace. Marco's mother worked for «a textbook company of some sort»^97(*). His uncle was «a door-to-door encyclopedia salesman»^98(*) for a while. It is this same uncle who passes on to Marco his 1492 books, the boxes of which Marco will use at first as furniture. Marco's different jobs are all related to books: «part-time work in a book store»^99(*), library work and reader for Effing. Thus, `bookish' is an adjective that suits Marco well. In The New York Trilogy, Quinn is a writer of mystery novels in City of Glass. In Ghosts, there are numerous references made to novels and writers: Walden by HD Thoreau, Wakefield by Nathaniel Hawthorne... Finally, the narrator-hero in The Locked Room, is a writer who is the literary executor of his writer-friend: Fanshawe.Another point that is worth stressing is the characters' tendency to write in notebooks, most of the time red-coloured ones. Quinn writes down his observations in a red notebook and Stillman happens to have a red notebook «similar to Quinn's but smaller.»^100(*) It is in a red notebook too that Fanshawe writes his own story. In Moon Palace, when Marco lives in Central Park, he jots down his observations in a notebook^101(*) and Effing, while confined in his cave in the Utah desert, records his thoughts in a notebook too.^102(*) Naturally, the fact that the characters write in notebooks has a lot to do with Auster's own attachment to notebooks: «J'ai toujours travaillé dans des carnets. Je préfère le cahier aux feuilles volantes. Tout est contenu, rassemblé dans le même lieu. Le carnet est une sorte de maison pour les mots.»^103(*)

* ⁹³ Ghosts, page 175.

* ⁹⁴ An Interview with Larry Mc Caffery and Sinda Gregory in The Red Notebook, page 136

* ⁹⁵ Moon Palace, page 170.

* ⁹⁶ The Invention of Solitude, page139.

* ⁹⁷ Moon Palace, page 4.

* ⁹⁸ Moon Palace, page 17

* ⁹⁹ Moon Palace, page 17

* ¹⁰⁰ City of Glass, page 59

* ¹⁰¹ Moon Palace, page 63

* ¹⁰² Moon Palace, page 171

* ¹⁰³ In La Solitude du Labyrinthe, Interview with Gérard de Cortanze. 02/03/1992, page 87.