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

The need for transparency

Austerian characters, through their different quests, all seem to share a need for transparency. Indeed, the work of introspection they all go through boils down to the discovery of the self, i.e. the correspondence between the container -the character- and the contents, the character's personality. So, finding one's real self, unveiling one's true personality is part of a move towards transparency. Likewise, writing is the result of a similar process. First, it pursues the operation of discovery of the self and then, it permits the writer to go back to square one with a situation, to clarify it, to make it transparent. Furthermore, writing drives the writer to questions on language. In effect, the problems raised by language all deal with transparency, the transparency between the thing and the word, between the signified and the signifier, between the thought and the word... Therefore, all the characters tend to seek transparency, tend to penetrate the essence of things, of themselves, of the world. They do all this with the aim of seeing through, of being free. Besides, the titles of The New York Trilogy denotes this. The titles City of Glass and Ghosts connote transparency. So, Austerian characters are like pilgrims searching for transparency, for correspondence between signified and signifier. It is therefore no coincidence if all these seeker-characters invariably attempt to bring out significant correspondences between everything and anything. In City of Glass, Quinn watches the sky endlessly, studying the clouds, «trying to learn their ways, seeing if he could not predict what would happen to them» and he concludes «these all had to be investigated, measured and deciphered.»^235(*) In Moon Palace, Marco also feels this compelling need for transparency: «the more I opened myself to these secret correspondences, the closer I felt to understanding some fundamental truth about the world. I was going mad, perhaps, but I nevertheless felt a tremendous power surging through me, a gnostic joy that penetrated deep into the heart of things.»^236(*) Hence the need for transparency drives the characters to look for connectedness at all costs, but, as the next part will show, such a quest induces dangers.

2/ Meaning

Seeking connectedness

In order to satisfy their need for transparency, Austerian characters unfailingly go in search of connectedness. This generally takes on the form of a detective investigation: no detail must be rejected, no stone must be left unturned. This method induces a number of whimsical inquiries. Quinn, in City of Glass, investigates the sky very cautiously, classifying the clouds according to their shape and colour. In Ghosts, Blues makes lists of objects according to their colour but eventually finds the task endless and boring. In Moon Palace, when he lives in Central Park, Marco adopts the same attitude; he catalogues faces according to which animals they resemble. In actual facts, Marco is a character who, from the very start, seems bound to pursue a quest for connectedness. Indeed, at the beginning of the novel, his uncle puts the following idea into his head: «everything works out in the end, you see, everything connects. The nine circle. The nine planets. The nine innings. Our nine lives. Just think of it. The correspondences are infinite.»^237(*) Marco is thus prone to connectedness, and the way he connects things in his mind is one of his particularities which is much emphasized in Moon Palace. A significant instance of this is the vertiginous mental development Marco makes about the Moon Palace sign:

Everything was mixed up in at once: Uncle Victor and China, rocket ships and music, Marco Polo and the American West. I would look out at the sign and start to think about electricity. That would lead me to the baseball games played at Wrigley Field, which would then lead me back to Uncle Victor and the memorial candles burning on my windowsill. One thought kept giving way to another, spiralling into ever larger masses of connectedness.^238(*)

Marco's manipulation of thoughts obviously echoes Auster's approach to words. Indeed, it is well known that Auster is very sensitive to the correspondences between the sonorities of words. Besides, it seems that his books circle around some of his fundamental games with words like the triad tomb/womb/room exposed in The Invention of Solitude. In this same book, remembering his childhood games with words, he writes: «he can remember himself at eight or nine years old, and the sudden sense of power he felt in himself when he discovered he could play with words in this way -as if he had accidentally found a secret path to the truth: the absolute, universal and unshakable truth that lies hidden at the center of the world.»^239(*) This is very reminiscent of Marco's statement: «the more I opened myself to these secret correspondences, the closer I felt to understanding some fundamental truth about the world»^240(*). Consequently, as Auster later explains, just as two words can rhyme, «it is possible for events in one's life to rhyme as well.»^241(*) Thus, Auster's vision of connectedness englobes the words as well as the events in one's life and this conception pervades all his books. Indeed, what sticks out a mile in Auster's fiction is his reliance on connectedness, synchronicity and coincidence in the plots of his novels. In Moon Palace, Marco happens to be the nexus of a connection: his family. Effing, his employer, turns out to be his grandfather, and Effing's son, Solomon Barber proves to be Marco's absent father. This connectedness, disclosed by chance might seem overexaggerated, yet it is only a representation of Auster's own sense of how life operates: «I consider myself a realist. Chance is part of reality: we are continually shaped by the forces of coincidence, the unexpected occurs with almost numbing regularity in all our lives.»^242(*) So, according to Auster, connectedness is everywhere and it is only the work of the mind which brings the disparate elements together, establishing a connection. Therefore, the mind is at the core of all the connections, like when it unites disparate elements into a coherent entity, the archipelago. However, Auster also suggests that there is a danger that lies behind the connection: the craving for a significance.

* ²³⁵ City of Glass, page 117.

* ²³⁶ Moon Palace, page 33.

* ²³⁷ Moon Palace, page 14.

* ²³⁸ Moon Palace, page 32. (my italics)

* ²³⁹ The Invention of Solitude, page 160.

* ²⁴⁰ Moon Palace, page 33.

* ²⁴¹ The Invention of Solitude, page 161.

* ²⁴² An interview with Larry McCaffery and Sinda Gregory in The Red Notebook, page 117.