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

Flirting with death

However, seeking to reach «the absolute floor of human being» is of course not without danger, and the danger is death pure and simple. Yet it does not keep the characters from continuing to starve even if their bodies gradually turn into skeletons as they get thinner. Marco realizes retrospectively: «It is true that I was alarmingly thin by the end, just 112 pounds.»^25(*) And the narrator in City of Glass declares: «It goes without saying that Quinn lost a good deal of weight during this period.»^26(*) The characters, through their constant flirting with death, are reduced to no more than living-dead and this is precisely the state they want to reach. This attitude corresponds to a theme that is particularly dear to Auster, that of hunger. In The Art of Hunger -an essay about the novel by Knut Hamsun- Auster says of Hansum's hero: «His fast then, is a contradiction, to persist in it would mean death, and with death, the fast would end. He must therefore stay alive, but only to the extent that it keeps him on the point of death.»^27(*) Quinn, in City of Glass, is a «hunger character» and he has the same attitude: «He did not want to starve himself to death (...) He simply wanted to leave himself free to think of the things that truly concerned him.»^28(*) Thus, the characters willingly try to approach death as closely as possible, somehow braving it, as if to provoke what the medical jargon designates as an NDE, a near-death experience, the moment lived by people whose brain is considered as dead and who nevertheless come back to life afterwards. It is now acknowledged that an NDE has important consequences on the minds of the people who have experienced it. It is most of the time felt as a kind of revelation that has definitively changed their lives. This experience is amazing enough for some adventurous people to want to have it in their turn. Besides, this has been the subject of the 1990 movie Flat Liners by Joël Schumacher. This film is about a group of medical students who deliberately put themselves in a state of clinical death for a few seconds in order to see for themselves what is beyond death.

Thus, it seems obvious that the Austerian characters, through their starving, aim at some sort of epiphany in the Joycian sense of the word: a deep and powerful revelation about themselves and the world.

The monk and the hermit

Isolation in small and bare places, deprivation of material goods and strict self-imposed discipline in a kind of general purge, all this aiming at some emancipation of the mind, is also known as ascetism. And this term is commonly associated with the figures of the monk and the hermit, two figures that are omnipresent throughout the two novels. First, through metaphorical descriptions of places. Marco's room at Effing's is described as «a rudimentary enclosure no larger than a monk's cell.»^29(*) In Ghosts, Blue entering Black's apartment: «It's the same monk's cell he saw in his mind.»^30(*) Then, the characters themselves are compared to these figures. In Ghosts, Blue disguises himself as Jimmy Rose: «These final details give him the look of an old testament prophet (...) a saint of penury living in the margins of society.»^31(*) Marco says of himself: «I was a monk seeking illumination.»^32(*) We must also bear in mind that Julian Barber (Effing) substitutes himself for an old hermit in the desert.

Inanition is also linked to the figures of the monk and the hermit as Auster wrote in one of his essays: «Mystics fast in order to prepare themselves to the words of God.»^33(*) And in effect, this point is crucial when comparing these two figures insofar as it demonstrates that isolation and starvation have been traditionally used by the mystics as a method to achieve revelation. The narrator-hero in The Locked Room sums this up in a commentary about Fanshawe: «The stringency of this life disciplined him. Solitude became a passageway into the self, an instrument of discovery.»^34(*) But contrary to the monk and the hermit who seek a spiritual or a mystical revelation, Austerian characters tend towards a revelation of themselves.

* ²⁵ Moon Palace, page 65.

* ²⁶ City of Glass, page 114.

* ²⁷ The Art of Hunger, page 13.

* ²⁸ City of Glass, page 114.

* ²⁹ Moon Palace, page 107.

* ³⁰ Ghosts, page 184.

* ³¹ Ghosts, page 170.

* ³² Moon Palace, page 123.

* ³³ New York Babel, in The Art of Hunger, page 33.

* ³⁴ The Locked Room, page 277.