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

Language makes our world and us.

In all his books, Auster attempts to write stories within the confines of a universe where language itself seems to be already and inevitably a confining structure determining the shape of the world it represents. Indeed, as Marco remarks cleverly when he is confronted with the difficulty of describing the world to a blind man, «The world enters us through our eyes, but we cannot make sense of it until it descends into our mouths.»^174(*) With this seemingly trivial sentence, Marco actually illustrates Wittgenstein's theory according to which it is impossible to think outside language. What Wittgenstein means by this is that when we think, we do not manipulate concepts, we manipulate words, the word being the physical medium through which the concept is expressed. Consequently, as the number of words -though immense- is not infinite, the set of possible words is limited, thereby our perception of the world is limited as well. It seems that Auster agrees with this conception of the language as a confining structure. Furthermore, not only considering language as the instrument of thought, he seems to show that language is the constitutive element of the world of man. In this regard, he meets Hans Georg Gadamer's thinking on the ontological dimension of language. In Vérité et Méthode, Gadamer exposes his theory according to which the world is made up through and by language: «Le monde se constitue langagièrement. Le monde où ce qui est objet de connaissance et d'énoncé est depuis toujours compris dans l'horizon du monde de la langue.»^175(*) So, it is not our perception of the world that is limited, but the world itself, as it is constituted by a language that is already a limited and confining structure.We know Auster's attachment to Rimbaud's phrase `Je est un autre'. Indeed, Auster discourses at length upon this phrase in The Invention of Solitude as well as in many interviews. But this phrase leads us to think that Auster believes in the confining effect of language upon man. Let us bring some light on this issue, by examining a very instructive extract from Le Signe: Histoire et Analyse d'un Concept, by Umberto Eco:

Le langage nous précède et nous détermine. Dans ce langage existe en effet une différence entre sujet de l'énonciation et sujet de l'énoncé, différence qui explique le processus par lequel le langage nous arrache à une `nature' inconnaissable, pour nous introduire à une `culture' dans laquelle nous nous objectivons. L'enfant qui, par l'usage de la parole, décide de se reconnaître comme sujet est le sujet de l'acte d'énonciation : il voudrait se désigner comme /je/, mais dès l'instant où il rentre dans l'orbe langagière, le /je/ qu'il émet est déjà le sujet de l'énoncé, de la phrase, du syntagme linguistique par lequel il s'extériorise : ce /je/ est déjà un produit culturel. (...) En s'identifiant au sujet de l'énoncé, le sujet de l'énonciation s'est donc déjà disqualifié comme subjectivité: le langage l'emprisonne dans une altérité, à l'intérieur de laquelle il devra s'identifier pour se construire, mais dont il ne parviendra plus jamais à se libérer.^176(*)

In view of this, Auster's use of `Je est un autre' seems to suggest that he, as a writer and a man, feels imprisoned by language, not only because it is a barrier between him and the world, but also because it is a barrier between him and himself.

* ¹⁷⁴ Moon Palace, page 122.

* ¹⁷⁵ Hans Georg Gadamer, Vérité et Méthode (Paris : Le Seuil, 1996), page 501.

* ¹⁷⁶ Umberto Eco, Le Signe : Histoire et Analyse d'un Concept. (Bruxelles, Labor, 1988), page 153.