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

2/ To capture the essence

Factuality: a failure

In Auster's fiction, as previously seen, all the main characters, at one moment or another, are confronted with the issue of the inadequacy of language. If the writer-characters resent the frontier between the world and the word and `the rift between thinking and writing', they also become aware of the paramount difficulty in capturing and conveying the essence of things. Furthermore, when faced with this issue, many Austerian characters are forced to radically revise their use of language. A striking illustration of this can be found in Moon Palace. When Marco takes Effing on walks downtown, he is asked to describe the environment and this is precisely the moment when Marco realizes that his use of language is totally inefficient in order to convey the feel of things to a blind man. In effect, Marco indulges in the extreme over-exactness of data, delivering an over-detailed description of what he sees, but he soon recognises the inefficacy of his method: «I was piling too many words on top of each other, and rather than reveal the thing before us, they were in fact obscuring it, burying it under an avalanche of subtleties and geometric abstractions.»^206(*) But Marco is not the only character who calls into question the inefficacy of factuality. In Ghosts, when he has to write his first report, Blue considers including the stories he has made up about the case but he decides against this, rather sticking just to the facts, as usual:

He painstakingly composes the report in the old style, tackling each detail with such care and aggravating precision that many hours go by before he manages to finish. As he reads over the results, he is forced to admit that everything seems accurate. But then why does he feel so dissatisfied, so troubled by what he has written? He says to himself: what happened is not really what happened. 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.^207(*)

Quinn, the detective in City of Glass, also relies on this method: «He decided to record every detail about Stillman he possibly could.»^208(*) However, factuality -as they all come to conceive it- is a failure in the conveying of the essence of things. Marco only slowly learns how to convey the essence of things to Effing: «it took me weeks of hard work to simplify my sentences, to learn how to separate the extraneous from the essential.»^209(*) This alleviation of the discourse is precisely the way to reveal things instead of obscuring them. In this way, words can be compared to food, as Ellmann explains in her book: The Hunger Artists: Starving, Writing and Imprisonment. «If someone has their mouth so full of food that they cannot chew or swallow, that person will go hungry. In order to digest, some of the food must be taken away.»^210(*) Likewise, if a discourse is swamped with too many words, it is bound to remain ineffective. In order to convey the essence of things, some words must be taken away.

* ²⁰⁶ Moon Palace, page 123.(my italics)

* ²⁰⁷ Ghosts, pages 147-148. (my italics)

* ²⁰⁸ City of Glass, page 62.

* ²⁰⁹ Moon Palace, page 123

* ²¹⁰ Maud Ellman, The Hunger Artists : Starving, Writing and Imprisonment. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993), page 65