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

B ENCIRCLING FICTION

1/ The Russian-doll effect

Moon Palace and The New York Trilogy: archipelagoes of stories

What is striking when reading Moon Palace and The New York Trilogy is the architecture of these two novels. Indeed, the diegetic structure of both books is very complex. The New York Trilogy is composed of three stories that seem to be independent even though they intermingle partially and are eventually claimed by the narrator to be the same story. Moon Palace comprises several micro-stories that take place within the main story. Thus each novel contains a series of internal stories, each one being intricately interconnected to the others. This Russian-doll effect is due to Auster's specific way of superimposing the narrative layers. In Moon Palace, for example, within the main story that is Marco's, occur several retrospective narrations or embedded stories: Effing's adventure in the desert, Solomon Barber's own story and his novel Kepler's Blood. All these stories overlap and clarify one another in retrospect. As a result, the novel becomes labyrinthine, somehow on the pattern of The One Thousand and One Nights, in which the analepses themselves constitute the main story. The embedded stories within Moon Palace and the three stories that constitute The New York Trilogy, can be compared to small islands of fiction in the middle of the sea of diegesis. The reader perceives and establishes links between these islands of fiction, and thus, he mentally unites them into a whole: an archipelago. The image of the archipelago is primordial in order to understand the way Auster's fiction works. Indeed critic Christophe Metress brings out the essential difference between the archipelago and the island. According to him, the island is a concrete unity, a creation of nature, whereas the archipelago is an invention of the mind, a unity founded on artificial links established between dispersed fragments.

L'archipel (...) est une construction de l'esprit qui tient compte à la fois de la fragmentation et de la totalité, sans pour autant que ces deux notions s'excluent mutuellement. Un archipel est fait d'objets isolés qui ne se touchent pas, mais qui, bien que jamais en contact direct, sont reliés entre eux par l'imagination qui les conçoit comme les parties éparses d'un Tout plus grand.^116(*)

Auster himself uses the metaphor of the archipelago in In The Country of Last Things. When Anna explains her job as object hunter -an activity consisting in salvaging discarded objects or even fragments of objects- she says «The job is to zero in on these islands of intactness, to imagine them joined to other such islands, and those islands to still others, and thus to create new archipelagoes of matter.»^117(*)

By disseminating small fragments of fiction throughout his books, Auster expects the reader to use his mind, his imagination, to create by himself `archipelagoes of matter' i.e. to organize the fragments into a meaningful unity. This necessary involvement of the reader in the creation of the book is typical of Auster's way of writing, but this will be our subject later.

* ¹¹⁶ Christophe Metress, `Iles et Archipels, Sauver ce qui est récupérable : la fiction de Paul Auster' in L'Oeuvre de Paul Auster, Approches et Lectures Plurielles, (Arles : Actes Sud, 1995), page 250.

* ¹¹⁷ In The Country of Last Things, page 36.