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

The artist in exile

Detachment and solitude allow the characters to stand back from society for some time and it is through this process that they mature as artists: «Fanshawe was alone for the whole time, barely seeing anyone, barely even opening his mouth (...) I believe this period marked the beginning of his maturity as a writer.»^74(*) We have seen that, following a period of detachment, the characters generally reconnect with society. But one can wonder to what extent this is true. Indeed, once he has become an artist, the character is no longer the same. If, as a man, he is able to reconnect to society, his status as an artist has created some kind of a definitive distance between him and the world. Indeed, the perception of the world by an artist is different from that of an `ordinary' man. Besides this distance is essential for the act of creation. In an interview with Gérard de Cortanze, Auster brings out this point: «Presque tous les écrivains, poètes ou non, se sentent à l'écart de la vie, de la societé.»^75(*) In this, Auster meets Edmond Jabès's views according to which there is a parallel in the statuses of writers and Jews: «I feel that every writer, in some way, experiences the Jewish condition, because every writer, every creator lives in a kind of exile.»^76(*) Being himself a Jewish writer, Auster is particularly sensitive to this feeling of exile. Futhermore, the galout -the Hebraic word meaning both exile and scattering- and the book are two elements that are closely tied up in the Jewish tradition:

Du fait que l'autonomie politique et l'indépendence nationale sont perdues, que l'unique lieu du culte légitime ( le Temple de Jérusalem) est détruit, le judaïsme doit s'inventer pour survivre, des formes de conscience et de cohésion compatibles avec la nouvelle situation historique. (...) C'est donc le Livre, ou mieux les livres, qui vont devenir la patrie `temporaire' des juifs.^77(*)

So, even when it is over, a form of exile lingers on for the characters as they are now artists.

The hunger artist

If disconnection and starvation are indispensable factors to the birth of the artist, for Auster, they also constitute an art of its own. In his fundamental essay The Art of Hunger, in which he analyses the novel Hunger by Knut Hamsun, Auster defines the art of hunger as being «an art that is indistinguishable from the life of the artist who makes it. That is not to say an art of autobiographical excess, but rather, an art that is the direct expression of the effort to express itself.»^78(*) So, not only is the concrete product of the experience a work of art but also the experience in itself as well as the experimenter. Auster's characters can therefore be qualified as `works of art of hunger'. Take Marco and Quinn who methodically deprive themselves of possessions and food and who consciously flirt with death. Their attitude corresponds to that of Hamsun's hero who «seeks out what is most difficult in himself, courting pain and adversity in the same way other men seek pleasure.»^79(*) Starving, as Marco comes to conceive it, is then an artistic performance: «I sought out the hidden advantages that each deprivation produced, and once I learned how to live without a given thing, I dismissed it from my mind for good. (...) Slowly but surely, I discovered that I was capable of going very far, much farther than I would have thought possible.»^80(*) The practice of the art of hunger leads the characters towards a clearer perception of the world. Marco, at the peak of a period of inanition, notices: «I had entered that strange half-world in which everything starts to shine, to give off a new and astonishing clarity.»^81(*) This same phenomenon is observed by the hero in La Faim: «Rien n'échappait à mon attention, j'avais toute ma clarté et ma présence d'esprit, le flot des choses me pénétrait avec une netteté étincelante comme si une lumière s'était faite subitement autour de moi.»^82(*)

* ⁷⁴ The Locked Room, page 278.

* ⁷⁵ In La Solitude du Labyrinthe, Interview with Gérard de Cortanze. 02/03/1992, page 87.

* ⁷⁶ Conversation With Edmond Jabès, in The Art of Hunger, page149.

* ⁷⁷ Elena Loewenthal, Judaïsme. Milan : Liana Levi, 1998. Pages 16-17.

* ⁷⁸ The Art of Hunger, page 18.

* ⁷⁹ The Art of Hunger, page11.

* ⁸⁰ Moon Palace, page 27.

* ⁸¹ Moon Palace, page 31.

* ⁸² Knut Hamsun, La Faim (paris : PUF. 1989) page 12.