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

Jonah or the resurrection

«You will note that where you would think should be the end of Jonah, there was his safety.»^52(*) This sentence from Saint Jerome quoted by Auster in The Invention of Solitude is interesting to shed light on the antinomical relationship that the characters cultivate with death and birth in Moon Palace and The New York Trilogy. After the many mythological stories about a gigantic monster swallowing the hero and delivering him to a new life and the story of Pinocchio by Collodi, Auster revisits this motif -which counts among his favourite ones- simply omitting...the whale, or more precisely, transfiguring the whale in a geographical space, the room. Marco, when asked how many days he spent in the cave, answers three «because three is a literary number, the same number of days that Jonah spent in the belly of the whale.»^53(*)

The room is thus a place where the characters somehow die ,at least in the eyes of the other since they are now inside the whale, but it is also the place where they resurrect as new beings now able to see «clearly»:

And when the fish then vomits Jonah onto dry land, Jonah is given back to life, as if the death he had found in the belly of the fish were a preparation for a new life, a life that has passed through death, and therefore a life that can at last speak. For death has frightened him into opening his mouth.^54(*)

With regard to the fact that the whale is a marine mammal, i.e., an animal that carries its baby in its womb, the image of birth is all the more strong. Indeed, from an oviparous function of the room, which we found with the image of the egg, we have now a «mammal room» that represents a much more developed and elaborate form of birth.

Gestation: birth or miscarriage

It should be stressed that, before coming out of the «womb places», the characters spend a specific length of time in them that can be interpreted as a gestation. Marco spends three days in the cave, a highly symbolical number. Effing lives in his cave for nine months! Blue remains in his rented room «for almost a year.»^55(*) As for Quinn, it is not precisely specified but it is long: «A long time passed. Exactly how long it is impossible to say. Weeks certainly, but perhaps even months.»^56(*) Marco spends one month in Zimmer's apartment, which is a kind of incubator for the just-rescued Marco. If the stay in the room is a gestation, coming out from it is then a delivery. An illustration of this is the description of Marco, coming out of his cave, that can be read as the passing of the baby through the neck of the womb: «At some point, I must have crawled from the cave and stretched myself out on the grass.»^57(*) It is interesting to notice that Quinn, when confined in the Stillmans' apartment at the end of City of Glass, wonders about his own passing through his mother's womb: «he remembered the moment of his own birth and how he had been pulled gently from his mother's womb.»^58(*) However, if Marco, who was bound to die if he remained in his apartment, as a baby who cannot get out of his mother's belly, is saved by an induced delivery (his eviction), Quinn has not got this chance. No one knows where Quinn is, so that no one can take him out of the Stillman's apartment and when Auster and his friend come, it is only to notice that he has disappeared. There is an anecdote in The Book of Memory that presents similarities with Quinn's ending, Auster recalls that, in 1979, a boy had disappeared in his neighbourhood and what he writes about this event echoes Quinn's obliteration :

Whatever it was that happened to him, it happened without a trace. He could have been kidnapped, he could have been murdered, or perhaps he simply wandered off and came to his death in a place where no one could see him. The only thing that can be said with any certainty is that he vanished -as if from the face of the earth.^59(*)

The room is a motif to which Auster gives great importance. The room functions as a shelter for the characters, it enables them to withdraw from society and meditate. But once they have discovered new things about themselves, they must come out of the room and reintegrate society, expressing themselves, in a book for example. If they carry on digging into themselves, they are bound to sink into madness and disappear, like a snake eating its tail.

* ⁵² The Book of Memory in The Invention of Solitude, page 100.

* ⁵³ Moon Palace, page 69.

* ⁵⁴ The Book of Memory in The Invention of Solitude, page 125.

* ⁵⁵ Ghosts, page 168.

* ⁵⁶ City of Glass, page 113.

* ⁵⁷ Moon Palace, page 70.

* ⁵⁸ City of Glass, page 130.

* ⁵⁹ The Book of Memory, in The Invention of Solitude, page 101.