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

Metaphoric rooms

«Books became a refuge for him early on, a place where he could keep himself hidden -not only from others, but also from his own thoughts as well.»^13(*) This statement from the narrator in Moon Palace about Solomon Barber explicitly introduces the fact that disconnection does not necessarily imply isolation in an actual geographical space. Indeed, there is a significant number of metaphorical rooms that are used by the characters to set themselves apart. Books, or more generally imagination can be one device, as for Solomon Barber for instance. Sometimes, imagination in addition to a geographical place can help the characters to detach themselves from reality, like Fanshawe as a little boy, with his cardboard box: «it was his secret place, he told me, and when he sat inside and closed it up around him, he could go wherever he wanted to go, could be wherever he wanted to be.»^14(*) Likewise, clothes can sometimes play the role of rooms like Marco's uncle's suit that is more to him than a simple garment: «I felt at home in it (...) It functioned as a protective membrane, a second skin that shielded me from the blow of life.»^15(*) However, what is interesting to notice is that the clothes in which the characters feel at home are always inherited from dead people: Effing gives Marco an overcoat that belonged to his former companion, now dead. Wearing it, Marco feels as if he were «Pavel Shum's ghost».^16(*) In his cave, Effing wears the dead hermit's clothes. The narrator-hero in The Locked Room is dressed in an overcoat inherited from a dead man.^17(*) Therefore, the association between room (even though metaphorical) and tomb still holds true.

But one's body can also be considered as a room when it confines its occupier and cuts him off from the others. It is the case with Solomon Barber's obese body in which he hides himself from others: « His body was like a dungeon, and he had been condemned to serve out the rest of his days in it.»^18(*) And it is also through his body that Effing detaches himself from the others. His apparent blindness confines him in a world of darkness where the visual image of the world no longer reaches him and his paralysis widens all the more the gap between him and the world.

2/ Starving

Depletion

«Little by little, I saw my money dwindle to zero; I lost my apartment, I wound up living in the streets.»^19(*) This decline in Marco's situation shows that the movement of disconnection is always accompanied by general depletion. If at first, the characters are victims of their depletion, they nevertheless do nothing to pull through it, and moreover, they always end up methodically depriving themselves of anything they previously had. The characters seem helpless, confronted with their alarmingly deteriorating situation This helplessness is conveyed by the grammatical form of the sentences where the object is put in a subject position, thus emphasizing the passivity of the characters. «The food supplies were going to run out»^20(*) «Quinn's money ran out at last.»^21(*) Having reached a certain point of destitution, they turn to self-inflicted starvation: « His ambition was to eat as little as possible.»^22(*) «I was trying to separate myself from my body.»^23(*) The radical decline the characters go through and seek is a feature that recurs strikingly in Moon Palace and The New York Trilogy. This process seems to be, for the Austerian characters, a necessary step towards their mutation. As Curtis White elegantly puts it:

B admired A's obsession with peeling away the layers of the self, of all the excrescences of life, like cars, possessions, money, food, other people. All for the exquisite dramatic purpose of arriving at the zero degree of the self, the absolute floor of human being where something enormous whether good or bad might be expected.^24(*)

* ¹³ Moon Palace, page 240.

* ¹⁴ The Locked Room, page 220.

* ¹⁵ Moon Palace, page 15.

* ¹⁶ Moon Palace, page 120.

* ¹⁷ The Locked Room, page 276.

* ¹⁸ Moon Palace, page 240.

* ¹⁹ Moon Palace, page 1.

* ²⁰ Moon Palace, page 168.

* ²¹ City of Glass, page 118.

* ²² City of Glass, page 114.

* ²³ Moon Palace, page 29.

* ²⁴ The Auster Instance: a Ficto-Biography. Curtis White, in The Review Of Contemporary Fiction, spring 1994, page 26.