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

The creation of another world

In Auster's world, the book is an element to which great importance is given. This importance stems from Auster's conception of the book as a place. Indeed, for Auster as for his characters, books are perceived as independent and parallel worlds in which the mind can freely wander. Whether in the process of writing it or reading it, the book is the work of the mind, is a world for the mind. This is what appeals to Marco when he toys with the idea of becoming a librarian: «Libraries aren't the real world after all. They are places apart, sanctuaries of pure thought. In that way, I can go on living in the moon for the rest of my life.»^104(*) Therefore, for the characters, books are a means to disconnect themselves from the `real world', to wander in a world created by their minds. Hence Marco's resentful statement about Chandler the bookseller whose conception of books has nothing to do with Marco's: «A book was no more than an object to him, a thing that belonged to the world of things, and as such is was not radically different from a shoebox, a toilet plunger, or a coffeepot.»^105(*) Contrary to Chandler, Solomon Barber considers books not as simple objects, but as doors to another world. Through reading, he is able to withdraw from the reality of his obesity: «By entering the words that stood before him on the page, he was able to forget his body.»^106(*) But if reading is a way to enter the world that is the book, writing is also a door to the world of the mind. Solomon Barber, when he is seventeen, writes a novel: Kepler's Blood, which enables him to escape from the reality of his absent father. In it, he projects himself in a story about his father's disappearance, and Marco comments on the novel saying «It demonstrates how Barber played out the inner dramas of his early life.»^107(*) The verb play out is interesting in relation to a quotation by Freud found in The Invention of Solitude: «Perhaps we may say that every child at play behaves like an imaginative writer in that he creates a world of his own or, more truly, he rearranges the things of his world and orders it in a new way.»^108(*) This quotation can explain the presence of the numerous characters writing in notebooks. Through writing, the character creates and controls another world in which he includes himself. Consequently, the character feels comfortable in a world where he orders things as he pleases.

The limits of the book

There is a problem with which many writer-characters are confronted at one moment or another during the course of their writings: the running out of pages in their notebooks. The most obvious example of this is Quinn in City of Glass who gradually disappears as the number of pages in his red notebook diminishes: «This period of growing darkness coincided with the dwindling of pages in the red notebook.»^109(*)

A similar situation occurs in Moon Palace. As days go by in his Utah cave, Effing runs out of canvasses to paint on: «Eventually, his materials were going to run out»^111(*) However, he manages to find notebooks and begins to write, but once again, he fills them up: «By mid-February, however, he had filled all his notebooks, and there were no pages left to write on anymore.»^112(*)

This running out of space soon turns to obsession for the characters for whom the number of blank pages left somehow represents their future: «each time he completed another canvas, the dimensions of the future shrank for him, steadily drawing him closer to the moment where there would be no future at all.»^113(*) Besides, this very traditional metaphor of the future as a blank page is already used by Marco at the beginning of Moon Palace: «At each moment, the future stood before me as a blank, a white page of uncertainty.»^114(*) Therefore, running out of paper signifies getting closer to one's end: «Little by little, Quinn was coming to the end. At a certain point, he realized that the more he wrote, the sooner the time would come when he could no longer write anything.»^115(*) The end of the notebook thus corresponds to the end of the character: Effing, alias Julian Barber, dies symbolically in the desert when he finishes his last painting and Quinn disappears for good when he fills up his notebook.

* ¹⁰⁴ Moon Palace, page 217

* ¹⁰⁵ Moon Palace, page 23

* ¹⁰⁶ Moon Palace, page 240

* ¹⁰⁷ Moon Palace, page 262

* ¹⁰⁸ The Invention of Solitude, page 164

* ^{109 110} City of Glass, page 130.

* ¹¹¹ Moon Palace, page 171.

* ¹¹² Moon Palace, page 172.

* ¹¹³ Moon Palace, page 171.

* ¹¹⁴ Moon Palace, page 41.

* ¹¹⁵ City of Glass, page 130.