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

The rift between thinking and writing

As we have seen, Auster's novels are riddled with writer-characters. What is noticeable about these writer-characters is that a great majority of them share the common feeling of the ineffectiveness of language. In other words, they feel they are unable to express what they want through words. If they nevertheless persist in doing so, the result does not satisfy them at all. One example of this is Peter Aaron in Leviathan, who compares his use of language to Sachs's: «Language has never been accessible to me in the way that it was for Sachs. I'm shut off from my own thoughts, trapped in a no-man's land between feeling and articulation, and no matter how hard I try to express myself, I can rarely come up with more than a confused stammer.»^181(*) Peter Aaron is not the only one to feel unsatisfied with language, Blue, in Ghosts, makes a similar observation as he reads over the reports he has made: «For the first time in his experience of writing reports, he discovers that words do not necessarily work, that it is possible for them to obscure the things they are trying to say.»^182(*) In The Locked Room, when he starts writing the biography of Fanshawe, the narrator-hero has difficulty telling in words the life of his friend: «Every life is inexplicable, I kept telling myself. No matter how many facts are told, no matter how many details are given, the essential thing resists telling.»^183(*) So, for Austerian characters, writing never exhausts what there is to say. It seems that words fail to convey `the essential thing'. This is somehow the other flaw of language according to Auster. Stillman, the linguist, brings out the ineffectiveness of words to express things, likewise, the writer-characters pinpoint the ineffectiveness of words to express thought. Furthermore, Auster seems to suggest that the evocative power of words diminishes as the thought becomes more important. This is what the narrator-hero in The Locked Room notices as well: «For when anything can happen -that is the precise moment where words begin to fail.»^184(*) It is this same feeling that Anna Blume expresses when she writes: «Words do not allow such things. The closer you come to the end, the more there is to say.»^185(*) This unavailability of words at the precise moment when an important thought springs to the mind of the writer is resented by Auster himself when he writes Portrait of an Invisible Man:

So great was my need to write that I thought the story would be written by itself. But the words have come very slowly so far. (...) Never before have I been so aware of the rift between thinking and writing. For the past few days, in fact, I have begun to feel that the story I'm trying to tell is somehow incompatible with language, that the degree to which it resists language is an exact measure of how closely I have come to saying something important, and that when the moment arrives for me to say the one truly important thing (assuming it exists), I will not be able to say it.^186(*)

So, through his writer-characters, Auster expresses his own difficulty with writing, once again presenting the language of words as an inadequate medium to convey thought. However, we shall see later that Auster's characters are not all dissatisfied with language, and that some of them manage to find ways to use it successfully.

* ¹⁸¹ Leviathan, page 55.

* ¹⁸² Ghosts, page 147.

* ¹⁸³ The Locked Room, page 247.

* ¹⁸⁴ The Locked Room, page 301.

* ¹⁸⁵ In The Country of Last Things, page 183.

* ¹⁸⁶ Portrait of an Invisible Man, in The Invention of Solitude, page 32.