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

Hermeneutics

As previously seen, Auster's approach to the word and the world is very close to that of Gadamer, who considers that the world is made up through and by language. In other words, it is the word which is at the root of our world and us. Now, we have seen that the Austerian characters are seekers: they quest after their real selves, they look for their origin, they pursue connectedness, they want to find their place in the world and in the end, they want to know, to understand. It is this universal need for meaning that Auster seeks to communicate in Moon Palace and The New York Trilogy. Hence, it is not surprising to see all these characters trying to interpret words or the connections between the words. This practice has a name: hermeneutics. Let us study a definition of this branch of philosophy:

Gr: hermèneutikè « art d'interpréter » Discipline qui a pour objet la mise a jour du sens exact d'un texte. Rigoureusement parlant, ce terme s'emploie pour l'interprétation de la Bible (...). Par extension, on applique ce mot à l'interprétation des textes symboliques dont le sens est caché, et, plus généralement, à l'interprétation de tous les textes difficiles.^252(*)

Considering this definition, it seems that all the Austerian characters practice hermeneutics; they look for the exact meaning. In this respect, it can be argued that the characters somehow aim to find the exact meaning of their text, i.e. their own story that is being written by Auster. The characters try to penetrate their text `dont le sens est caché', or rather `dont le sens leur est caché'. Naturally, this interpretation is only valid on the assumption that the characters can somehow be aware, or at least have doubts about their statuses as characters. With regard to this idea, Marco's statement in Central Park takes on another dimension:

I understood that I had already spent too much time living through words, and if this time was going to have any meaning for me, I would have to live in it as fully as possible, shunning everything but the here and now, the tangible, the vast sensorium pressing down on my skin.^253(*)

It seems that Marco somehow becomes aware that his life is just a sum of words on paper, i.e. that his life is a literary creation, the meaning of which the author keeps hidden from him. Therefore, he reacts and he claims a `real' life whose meaning could be accessible to him. Marco is the only character who goes that far. Indeed, the narrator-hero in The Locked Room concludes: «Lives make no sense, I argued. A man lives and then he dies, and what happens in between makes no sense.»^254(*) As far as the other characters in The Trilogy are concerned, in spite of their doubts, they never reach Marco's state of consciousness, especially Quinn who pursues meaning till death. Eventually, it is Peter Aaron, at the end of Leviathan, who seems to hold the key to this question: «The struggle was to accept that, to coexist with the forces of my own uncertainty. Desperate as I was for a resolution, I had to understand it might never come.»^255(*)

* ²⁵² Mourral et Millet, Petite Encyclopédie Philosophique (Paris : Editions Universitaires, 1993.), page 146.

* ²⁵³ Moon Palace, page 63.

* ²⁵⁴ The Locked Room, page 250.

* ²⁵⁵ Leviathan, page 272.