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

Giving names to things

«Adam's one task in the Garden had been to invent language, to give each creature and thing its name»^194(*) This statement read by Quinn in Stillman's pamphlet is interesting in view of the various methods to master language. Indeed, it happens that several characters in Auster's work are depicted giving names to things. As Quinn realises, Stillman's wandering in the streets of New York are due to his principal activity: collecting broken items off the sidewalks and inventing names for them. Stillman's behaviour (though not so harmful) is not far from the experience he carried out on his son thirteen years earlier. In effect, he still wants to cancel the inadequacy of words in the representation of things as he explains to Quinn: «I give them names. (...) I invent new words that will correspond to the things.»^195(*) Thus, instead of trying to find the prelapsarian language empirically, Stillman now tries to create it, somehow turning himself into a new Adam. But what is worthwhile to notice, is that Marco, in Moon Palace, behaves similarly. When he ends up in Central Park, living like a bum, he also gives names to things: «I began giving funny names to the garbage cans. I called them cylindrical restaurants, pot-luck dinners, municipal care packages.»^196(*) Here again, the act of naming has obvious Edenic overtones. Central Park has certain similarities with the Garden of Eden when it is described by Marco:

[the park] offered a variety of sites and terrains that nature seldom gives in such a condensed area. There were hillocks and fields, stony outcrops and jungles of foliage, smooth pastures and crowded networks of caves. (...) There was the zoo, of course, down at the bottom of the park, and the pond.^197(*)

Consequently, Marco, sauntering about the park somehow becomes a new Adam too. Naturally, Marco's motivations for giving new names to things is different from Stillman's. On the one hand, Stillman's inventions of words are part of a complex investigation of language with lofty motives: to cancel the fall of man. On the other hand, for Marco, giving names to things is one performance of the art of hunger. Indeed, in La Faim, the novel by Knut Hansum -a strongly influential work for Auster- the narrator-hero, at the peak of a crisis of inanition, invents a name:

Soudain, je fais claquer plusieurs fois mes doigts et ris. ça alors, formidable ! hé ! Je m'imaginai avoir découvert un mot nouveau. Je me dressai dans le lit et dis : Il n'existe pas dans la langue, je l'ai inventé, kubouô. Il y a des lettres comme un mot, bonté divine, l'homme, tu as inventé un mot ... kubouô ... d'une grande importance grammaticale. Je reste les yeux ouverts, étonné de ma trouvaille, riant de joie. (...) J'étais entré dans la joyeuse démence de la faim. J'étais vide et sans douleurs, ma pensée n'avait plus de bride.^198(*)

However, the hero cannot think of a meaning for his word and struggling vainly to find what it can refer to, he eventually faints. These three examples of characters giving names to things have a common denominator, the act of creation. Indeed, creating a word, like creating a work of art, seems to be for Austerian characters a step towards the mastering of a situation. When they invent a new word, the characters create a new medium through which a new concept is expressed. The narrator-hero in La Faim realizes that his word `kubouô' actually means something spiritual: «Non, en fait ce mot était fait pour signifier quelque chose de spirituel, un sentiment, un état d'âme.»^199(*) As for Marco in Central Park, the names he gives to the garbage cans correspond to the new function they have for him. Thus, creating names belongs to the process of reducing the gap between the world and the word.

* ¹⁹⁴ City of Glass, page 43.

* ¹⁹⁵ City of Glass, page 78.

* ¹⁹⁶ Moon Palace, page 60

* ¹⁹⁷ Moon Palace, page 63

* ¹⁹⁸ Knut Hamsum, Faim (Paris: PUF, 1994), page 59.

* ¹⁹⁹ Ibid, page 60.