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

The search for THE place

For the characters, the arrival in a room always follows a period of roaming, another theme dear to Auster. Most of the time, this roaming is triggered off by the loss of the home base: Marco being evicted from his apartment, Effing leaving New York for the desert, Quinn and Blue having to leave their apartments for the sake of their investigation or Fanshawe quitting his wife and apartment to wander about the USA. The episode in which Effing is lost in the desert in search for a shelter has an obvious biblical overtone: the wandering of the Hebrews in the Sinai desert in quest of the Promised Land. This analogy is later taken up by Marco in a metaphoric way: «I had been lost in the desert and then, out of the blue, I had found my Canaan, my promised land.»^44(*) The characters are somehow all Wandering Jews insofar as they are forced into an exile because of the loss of their place of origin. Consequently, they are in a constant search for THE place, which would be a substitute for their place of origin. That is why they end up inescapably in rooms, the room being -in the Austerian universe- bound up with the notion of origin as in this sentence from The Book of Memory: «It begins therefore with this room. And then it begins with that room.»^45(*) Of course, THE place is not a particular instance of room, the rooms in Auster often being used as metaphors for the mind, THE place is more a state of consciousness that can be reached only after the experience of the actual room: «This room I discovered, was located inside my skull.»^46(*)

2/ The Womb

The experience of the cave

It is impossible to miss the striking parallel between Marco's sojourn in a cave in Central Park and Effing's stay in a cave in the middle of the desert. It is also clear that, for both characters, the sojourn in the cave entails the birth of a new being. Therefore, it can be said that the cave somehow plays the role of a generative space, a womb from which the characters come to life for the second time. It must be noticed that not only are the actual caves considered as caves but also all the places where there is «the experience of the cave»^47(*), that is to say a majority of rooms. It is therefore no coincidence if the words room, womb and tomb are linked in a triad that is one key to Auster's world: «The words rhyme, and even if there is no real connection between them, he cannot help thinking of them together. Room and tomb, tomb and womb, womb and room.»^48(*) The shape and the narrowness of the cave make it some sort of a womb on a human scale. The wellbeing of the characters inside the cave is then, in the Freudian interpretation, the expression of a subconscious desire to crawl back into the womb of the mother^49(*). Think of Fanshawe as a little boy in his cardboard box. Like most of the children of his age, he likes to shut himself up in small spaces and his behaviour is symptomatic of a desire to be back in one's mother's belly.

In order to perform its function as a womb, the cave must be hermetically shut. When Marco finds the cave in Central Park, he shuts himself in it: «I pulled some loose branches in with me to block up the opening.»^50(*) Effing's cave in the desert is also shut: «He pulled away the branches and twigs that blocked the opening and went in.»^51(*) Thus, the `womb-cave' has to be `virgin', shielded from the exterior world, in order to perform its function as a matrix. If room and tomb are linked phonetically, it is also the case with the words cave and grave. And indeed, the idea of death is omnipresent in the cave since the birth of a new being necessarily implies the death of the old one.

* ⁴⁴ Moon Palace, page 228.

* ⁴⁵ The Book of Memory, in The Invention of Solitude, page 80.

* ⁴⁶ The Locked Room, page 293.

* ⁴⁷ Moon Palace, page 276.

* ⁴⁸ The Invention of Solitude, pages 159-160.

* ⁴⁹ In De l'Interprétation Des Rêves

* ⁵⁰ Moon Palace, page 69.

* ⁵¹ Moon Palace, page 166.