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

I. SPATIAL CONFINEMENT

A SOCIAL DEATH

1/ Disconnection

The room, the tomb

In Moon Palace and The New York Trilogy, almost all the main protagonists, at one moment or another, disconnect themselves from the standards of «normal» life. This detachment from others is always characterized by confinement in an enclosed space: most of the time, a room. The theme of the room is undoubtedly one of Auster's favourite motifs and it comes in a variety of ways in all his work. The enclosed spaces are not always rooms strictly speaking; they can be caves, garbage bins, small apartments... But they all belong to the category of rooms in that they share common characteristics: they are small, bare, often dimly lit and above all, they are enclosed spaces in which the characters are alone and which are impenetrable to others. The number of allusions to rooms in Moon Palace and The New York Trilogy is paramount: Marco's roommate's name is Zimmer -which means bedroom in German- and it was also the name of the carpenter who built a tower for the poet Hölderlin in which he lived alone for thirty six years. In City of Glass, Quinn walks in Varick Street and passes number six which is the precise address where Auster himself rented a tiny room in 1979 and where he started writing The Invention of Solitude. The title of the last story in The New York Trilogy is The Locked Room. These examples are only the visible part of an intricate network of references and allusions to which we shall come back later. Although the theme of the room is traditionally associated with solitude and meditation as in Pascal's Pensées^3(*) for example, in Auster, the room -by virtue of its disconnecting function- is also linked to death as in the euphony between the words room and tomb in The Invention of Solitude.

The association of room and tomb takes on the form of numerous comparisons and metaphors in Moon Palace. Effing's cave in the desert is compared to «his private monument, the tomb in which he had buried his past.»^4(*) The building superintendent says of Marco's apartment: «it reminds me of a coffin»^5(*) This is reminiscent of a similar statement made by the nameless hero of La Faim^6(*) who resembles Marco in many respects: «Cette chambre vide dont le plancher ondulait à chaque pas que j'y faisais était pareille a un lugubre cercueil disjoint.»^7(*) Besides, the last story in The New York Trilogy is called The Locked Room. This title reminds us of some `Poesque' plot dealing with a murdered body discovered in a closed room, the exits of which have been locked from the inside.

Thus the room is the place that a number of characters choose to cut themselves off from the others, from social life. Consequently, these characters, confined in their rooms, can be said to be socially dead. It is therefore no coincidence if their small and lightless rooms are compared to tombs.

* ³ In Pensées, Pascal explains that man is constantly roaming and fleeing in order to avoid the anguish of immobility, for immobility sends him back to his inner self, i.e. despair. Paradoxically, for Pascal, to stay alone in a room is the only way to be happy.

* ⁴ Moon Palace, page 182.

* ⁵Moon Palace, page 45.

* ⁶ La Faim is a novel that influenced Auster deeply. Indeed, his MA thesis was centered on its hero.

* ⁷ Knut Hamsun, La Faim (Paris : PUF, 1986) page 2.