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

Bridges between the spheres of fiction

Within the set of small islands of fiction that appears in Auster's work, it is worth mentioning that there exist countless bridges between the many stories and the different books. Here, an interesting analogy can be established between Auster's fiction and the structure of the city of Amsterdam that he describes in The Invention of Solitude: «The plan of the city is circular (a series of concentric circles, bisected by canals, a cross-hatch of hundreds of tiny bridges, each one connecting to another, as though endlessly.)»^118(*) This image is eloquent insofar as it well illustrates the innumerable connections within Auster's Russian doll-like fiction. An exhaustive list of all the intertextual threads being almost impossible to draw up, only a few examples will be given: Anna Blume, the heroine in In The Country of Last Things, is also Zimmer's absent girlfriend in Moon Palace. Besides, this same Zimmer appears in Leviathan. In Mr Vertigo, Walt, the hero, marries Molly Quinn, whose nephew is Daniel Quinn, the detective in City of Glass, also mentioned in The Locked Room. Thus, the characters circulate within Auster's world, they cross the bridges between the different stories and the different books, like passers-by wandering in the city of Amsterdam. Besides, it should be mentioned that the hero in Moon Palace was initially called Quinn before being called Marco.^119(*) Thus the micro-stories within each novel form an archipelago, which is itself included in a larger archipelago, made up by the set of Auster's books. Moreover, this latter archipelago is widened by a number of references to books by other writers who influenced Auster: Thoreau, Melville, Vernes, Cervantes, Kafka, Poe...Therefore, Auster's world is an archipelago that rests upon an intricate web of bridges. However, Auster does not content himself with a rich network of connections within the realm of fiction, he goes so far as to break the frame of fiction, building bridges between the inside and the outside of fiction. Through narrative metalepsis, Auster includes himself in City of Glass. In it, he plays his own role: he is Paul Auster the writer, a «tall dark fellow in his mid-thirties»^120(*) who lives with his wife Siri and his son Daniel and he is the friend of the narrator and so-called author of the story. This creates a rather puzzling effect on the reader as the distinction among the actual author, the author-narrator and the character is increasingly blurred. But this is precisely the point at stake here. By building so many bridges, Auster expects the reader to get immersed in his world of infinite connections and to perceive a unity in it.

Stories about story-telling

One of the reasons why there are so many embedded stories in Moon Palace and The New York Trilogy, is that both novels are about writers and writing. As a result, these two novels are about story-telling just like The One Thousand and One Nights, the plot of which Auster explains in The Invention of Solitude: «She begins her story and what she tells is a story about story-telling, a story within which are several stories, each one in itself, about story-telling.»^121(*) The One Thousand and One Nights is a good example of the spiral effect of the mise en abyme. This motif is declined in a variety of ways throughout Auster's novels but there is a particularly relevant illustration of this in The Music of Chance. It is the `City of the World': a miniature scale-model of a city in which the model maker intends to include a model of the city itself. Thus, building «a model of the model»^122(*) is somehow what Auster does in his books. This kind of fiction, concerned with the nature and techniques of fiction itself, is called metafiction. It usually depicts the process of writing and presents the novel as a literary construction but it also highlights the artificiality of the narrative conventions. In The New York Trilogy, it is the conventional genre of the detective novel that Auster uses to comment on the question of writing. The detective's investigation, with the putting together of different elements, symbolizes a search for truth, for meaning. Usually, at the end of a mystery novel, the detective manages to put the pieces back together, the case is solved, the truth is unveiled and order is restored. However, in The Trilogy, it is the opposite process that happens as Auster once explained: «[the detective] is the seeker after the truth, the problem-solver, the one who tries to figure things out. But what if in the course of trying to figure it out, you just unveil more mysteries?»^123(*) In view of this, The New York Trilogy is an excellent example of post-modern metafiction. Auster uses the genre convention of the detective novel to «get to another place»^124(*) and in effect, the book is intended to trigger off a metaphysical introspection in the reader's mind.

* ¹¹⁸ The Invention of Solitude, page 85.

* ¹¹⁹ Le Magazine Littéraire,(décembre 1995) page 18.

* ¹²⁰ City of Glass, page 92.

* ¹²¹ The Invention of Solitude, page 150.

* ¹²² The Music of Chance, page 81.

* ¹²³ Interview with Joseph Mallia, in The Red Notebook, page 109.

* ¹²⁴ Ibid.