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

C SEARCH FOR HARMONY

1/ Success and failure

The New Man

For the Austerian characters, disconnection, along with depletion, all this taking place in a womb-like environment, entails the birth of a new being. To what extent do the characters become new beings? The answer lies partly in the preface of the French edition of The Invention of Solitude by Pascal Bruckner: «la chambre (est) une sorte d'utérus mental, le lieu d'une seconde naissance où le sujet ne naît pas au monde mais à lui-même.»^60(*) Thus as a result of this second birth, the characters seem to reach a new state of consciousness, like Marco, who after numerous stays in rooms and periods of roaming, notices «I felt that some important question would be resolved for me. I had no idea what the question was, but the answer had already been formed in my steps (...) I was no longer the person I had once been.»^61(*) The feeling of inner harmony results from the characters' discovery of their «real» selves through mental introspection. Auster explained this in an interview: «We know who we are because we can think of who we are (...) and this takes place in absolute solitude.»^62(*) When Marco -just having been hired as Effing's new companion- strolls with him in the streets, Effing introduces him to his friends saying: «This is my new man.»^63(*) This ambiguous statement may signify that Effing -because he has experienced the same hardships as Marco- has understood that Marco is indeed a «new man» at this stage.

Reconnection

If disconnection is a preliminary condition to the birth of a new being, once he is born again, the opposite process begins and the character gradually reconnects to others. In this regard, Auster's heroes illustrate his philosophy perfectly. In an interview, he said: «You don't begin to understand your connection to others until you are alone, the more intensely you are alone, the more deeply you plunge into a state of solitude, the more deeply you feel that connection.»^64(*) The reconnection takes on different forms: Marco's new job at Effing's and above all, his love story with Kitty Wu, which is a proof of Marco's social reconnection. Effing, after his stay in the cave, becomes richer than ever, thus reconnecting through business. The narrator-hero in The Locked Room reconnects at the very last minute, jumping into the train that brings him back to his wife and children. It is interesting to point out that the characters eventually regain all that they have been deprived of: money, food and social life. It is also noticeable that the characters are no longer confined in small spaces at the end of the novels: Marco facing the Pacific Ocean, or Blue supposedly sailing to China. Not only in harmony with themselves, the newborn characters are also in harmony with others and Marco remarks this in the park «But you cannot live without establishing an equilibrium between the inner and the outer. The park did that for me.»^65(*)

* ⁶⁰ Preface of the Babel edition of L'Invention de La Solitude, page 7

* ⁶¹ Moon Palace, page 306.

* ⁶² An Interview with Larry Mc Caffery and Sinda Gregory in The Red Notebook, page 143.

* ⁶³ Moon Palace, page 124.

* ⁶⁴ An Interview with Larry Mc Caffery and Sinda Gregory in The Red Notebook, page144.

* ⁶⁵ Moon Palace, page 58.