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

C THE AUTHOR-CHARACTERS

1/ A search for authorship

Characters in quest of their authors

At one moment or another, the characters, somehow feeling trapped or manipulated, go in search of the one person responsible for their situation, the one who pulls the strings: the author. This is particularly apparent in Ghosts where Blue tries to find and unmask White, Blue's mysterious employer, the author of the trick. «White is the one who set the case in motion -thrusting Blue into an empty room, as it were, and then, turning off the light and locking the door.»^142(*) Blue later finds his own reports in Black's apartment and discovers that Black and White are finally the same person. Therefore, the character Black/White is a figure of the two sides of the author. White is the one who sets up the trick, the plot. His role is that of the scenarist. Black records what happens, he does the writing work.A noticeable point is that the authors, or more exactly, the figures of the author, generally hide from their characters. Just as White wears a mask and takes great precautions not to be found out, Fanshawe takes great pains to hide from the narrator-hero in The Locked Room. Fanshawe is a figure of the author because he is himself a writer, but above all, he is the one who orchestrated the narrator-hero's new life, his meeting with Sophie and consequently their marriage and their financial well-being. Therefore, when he goes in search for Fanshawe, he is looking for the author of Neverland as well as the author of his new life.A rather puzzling scene occurs in City of Glass. At a point where Quinn is particularly troubled by Stillman's odd behaviour, he contacts Paul Auster who is supposed to be the real detective. As a matter of fact, it seems that Quinn, without being aware of it, directly asks his own author for help. Indeed, who other than the author himself, has the power to answer all the characters' questions? But, as it happens, Paul Auster is not a detective, he is himself a writer, working then on an essay dealing with the question of the authorship of Don Quixote, Cervantes's novel
-according to Auster- having been written collectively by four characters of Don Quixote.

Characters in quest of their fathers

A curious thing is that one of the synonyms for authorship is the word `paternity'. This word obviously derives from the Latin word `pater' which means father. The analogy between these two terms is interesting in this study insofar as, along with looking for their authors, the characters very often go in search of their fathers. Indeed, a common denominator between the characters in these two novels is the absence of the father. In Ghosts, we learn that Blue's father was a cop assassinated when Blue was very young. Fanshawe also loses his father early in The Locked Room. As for Marco, he spent his childhood without a father: «there was never any father in the picture, and so it had just been the two of us, my mother and I.»^143(*) As far as Solomon Barber is concerned, he grows up assuming that his father is dead. What is essential to pinpoint is that the lack of a father leaves deep traces in the characters' personalities. It can even be said that it is what defines them as Marco remarks:

For twenty-four years, I had lived with an unanswerable question, and little by little I had come to embrace that enigma as the central fact about myself. My origins were a mystery, and I would never know where I had come from. This was what defined me, and by now, I was used to my own darkness, clinging to it as a source of knowledge and self-respect, trusting in it as an ontological necessity.^144(*)

However, if for Marco, the absence of father is partly compensated by his uncle Victor, for Solomon Barber, the death of his father is lived as a trauma. That is the reason why, at the age of seventeen, he writes a fiction about his father, that is more a therapeutic work than a piece of literature. However, through his writing, Solomon Barber transposes himself into a story in which he makes up an imaginary father. Therefore, they are somehow reunited within the work of fiction. For the characters, looking for their fathers is a quest for origins, just like the search for their authors. This quest is necessary inasmuch as they need to know from where they have come in order to know who they are and where they are going.

* ¹⁴² Ghosts, page 169.

* ¹⁴³ Moon Palace, page 3.

* ¹⁴⁴ Moon Palace, page 295