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

The achievements

While Auster's main characters always encounter problems with language, it is observable that there is a set of secondary characters who seem to be perfectly at ease with language and who even seem to master it in an outstanding way. We can take for example Effing's description of Pavel Shum, his former companion: «a master of the poetic phrase, a peerless inventor of apt and stunning images, a stylist whose words could miraculously reveal the palpable truth of objects.»^211(*) This description of Pavel Shum's use of language obviously contrasts with Marco's, who at that stage, is still unable to describe things efficiently to Effing. And this contrast is the whole point of the presence of those characters who master language. It is through this contradictory comparison that the main characters understand that it is possible to counteract their `bad' use of language. In Leviathan, the pair Benjamin Sachs / Peter Aaron is a perfect illustration of this. Peter Aaron, like Paul Auster, is a struggling writer. «I have always been a plodder, a person who anguishes and struggles over each sentence (...) The smallest word is surrounded by acres of silence for me, and even after I manage to get that word down on the page, it seems to sit there like a mirage, a speck of doubt glimmering in the sand.»^212(*) Whereas Sachs is exactly the opposite:

The act of writing was remarkably free of pain for him, and when he was working well, he could put words down on the page as fast as he could speak them. It was a curious talent and because Sachs himself was hardly even aware of it, he seemed to live in a state of perfect innocence. Almost like a child, I sometimes thought, like a prodigious child playing with toys.^213(*)

Sachs, for whom `words and things match up'^214(*) thus strongly corresponds to the description of Adam by Stillman in City of Glass:

In that state of innocence, his tongue had gone straight to the quick of the world. His words had not been merely appended to the things he saw, they had revealed their essences, had literally brought them to life. A thing and its name were interchangeable.^215(*)

So, it seems that Sachs's use of language bears similarities with the prelapsarian language in the sense that it manages to convey the essence of things. There is another pair of characters which highlights an opposite use of language, it is Fanshawe and the narrator-hero in The Locked Room. The narrator-hero is a struggling writer who is very reminiscent of Peter Aaron and Auster himself in his use of words. On the contrary, Fanshawe resembles Benjamin Sachs in his talent for writing. The fact that Fanshawe and the narrator-hero spent their childhood together is an important element because it brings out their interreferenciality. Indeed, in the first chapter of this story, the narrator writes: «We met before we could talk (...) he was the one who was with me, the one who shared my thoughts.»^216(*) Saying this, the narrator seems to suggest that his relationship with Fanshawe preceded language, so the barrier of words did not stand between them yet. This explains why they were somehow able to share thoughts. However, as time goes by, Fanshawe's ability with words becomes increasingly impressive as the narrator-hero notices:

By now, Fanshawe's eye has become incredibly sharp, and one senses a new availability of words inside him, as though the distance between seeing and writing had been narrowed, the two acts now almost identical, part of a single unbroken gesture.^217(*)

When he declares this, the narrator-hero indirectly compares himself with Fanshawe and it seems that beyond fascination, there is a failure to understand how his friend is able to do what himself cannot do.

* ²¹¹ Moon Palace, page 121.

* ²¹² Leviathan, page 55.

* ²¹³ Leviathan, page 55. (my italics)

* ²¹⁴ Leviathan, page 55.

* ²¹⁵ City of Glass, page 43. (my italics)

* ²¹⁶ The Locked Room, page 199.

* ²¹⁷ The Locked Room, page 277.