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

Investigating

The search for authorship, for paternity, is to be connected to the process of the investigation. Indeed, both processes imply a movement backward in time towards the origins of a situation. Through ratiocination, the detective tries to go back to the origins of a crime, to find the `author' of the crime. Therefore, the Whodunit -who is the author of the crime?- can be translated into a Who wrote it: who is the author of the book? In The New York Trilogy, several characters are simultaneously authors and detectives. In City of Glass, Quinn is a writer turned detective. Blue, in Ghosts, is a detective turned writer and the narrator-hero in The Locked Room is a writer turned detective. Indeed, there is a certain continuity between the activities of writing and investigating as Quinn points out in City of Glass:

The detective is the one who looks, who listens, who moves through this morass of objects and events in search of the thought, the idea that will pull all these things together and make sense of them. In effect, the writer and the detective are interchangeable.^145(*)

Thus investigating is strongly linked around the notion of authorship in the sense that both author and detective are supposed to manage to unite disparate elements into a formal coherence. Moreover, as Madeleine Sorapure writes: «We can say that the detective is successful only insofar as he is able to attain the position of the author, a metaphysical position, above and beyond the events in the text.»^146(*) Thus the detective and the author share the characteristic to be able to distance themselves from the situation, to be `beyond the events', to perceive some cohesion between the scattered fragments. In the same way the reader coherently unites the disseminated islands of fiction into a mental gathering: the archipelago. However, in The New York Trilogy, in spite of applying the logic and methods of traditional investigation, the writer-detectives are never able to reach the status of authorial omniscience. They are unable to distance themselves from the events so that they are confined in limited knowledge and imperfect understanding of the case. But we must bear in mind that The New York Trilogy is a work of metafiction and it is precisely this frustration of not knowing everything that Auster exposes as the central fact about authorship.

2/ Seeking for authority

Playing the puppet-master

In Auster's novels, the desire to write, to become an author oneself, seems to stem from a need to control things, to have power over a world, exactly like in the image of Flower and Stone dominating the City of the World in The Music of Chance. Writing a story therefore boils down to creating a world over which the writer has absolute power. An essential thing to be pointed out is that the author always includes himself in his world of fiction, like Flower and Stone who are present within the small scale-model: «If you look carefully, you'll see that many of the figures actually represent Willie himself. (...)There, on the corner of that street, you see the two of us buying the lottery ticket.»^147(*) Quinn, in City of Glass, is a writer of mystery novels and his detective-hero, Max Work, is no less than an idealized Quinn on paper. Quinn thus manipulates his double within a world in which he has the satisfaction of controling everything. However, when he is hired as a detective, he finds himself under the authority of someone else: the author, Auster. Quinn is himself an obvious paper-Auster: «As a young man, he had published several books of poetry, had written plays, critical essays and had worked on a number of translations.»^148(*) Therefore, Auster is the central puppet-player, using his doubles in his books (Quinn, Marco, Solomon Barber, Fanshawe, Sachs...) as so many puppets to tell his own story. In The Invention of Solitude, Auster gives an eloquent illustration on this subject:

`When he recovered his senses, the Marionette could not remember where he was. Around him all was darkness, a darkness so deep and so black that for moment, he thought he had been dipped head first into an inkwell.' (...) By plunging his marionette into the darkness of the shark, Collodi is telling he is dipping his pen into the darkness of his own inkwell. Pinocchio, after all, is only made of wood. Collodi is using him as an instrument (literally, the pen) to write the story of himself.^149(*)

In actual facts, using a puppet, a double, is a way to take some distance in order to be able to write efficiently about oneself, as Auster explained in an interview: «What it came down to was creating a distance between myself and myself. If you're too close to the thing you are trying to write about, the perspective vanishes, and you begin to smother.»^150(*) But above all, Auster's use of a double is a way of illustrating Rimbaud's phrase `Je est un autre'. In this same interview, Auster makes this concept more explicit: «The moment I think about the fact I'm saying `I', I'm already saying `he'. It's the mirror of self-consciousness, a way of watching yourself think.»^151(*)

* ¹⁴⁵ City of Glass, page 8.

* ¹⁴⁶ Madeleine Sorapure : `The Detective and the Author : City of Glass' in Beyond The Red Notebook, Dennis Barone, page 72.

* ¹⁴⁷ The Music of Chance, page 79.

* ¹⁴⁸ City of Glass, page 9.

* ¹⁴⁹ The Invention of Solitude, pages 162-163.

* ¹⁵⁰ Contemporary Literature (Madison W1, spring 1992), page 18.

* ¹⁵¹ Ibid.