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

Giving names to people

If the characters give new names to things, it is worth mentioning that they also give new names to people. In The Locked Room, the narrator-hero meets a girl in a bar and he renames her: «She told me her name, but I insisted on calling her Fayaway»^200(*) Besides, he introduces himself as Herman Melville. This episode is to be put side by side with Marco's rescuing in Central Park. When Kitty Wu gets closer and bends down to look at him, Marco does not really recognize her and he calls her `Pocahontas' (MP, 70). Here again, a parallel can be drawn with La Faim in which the hero courts a girl and invents a name for her: Ulayali, and refuses to call her by any other name. So, renaming someone seems to be a way to fit the person with a name that expresses her personality more truly. As creating new words is a way to reduce the gap between the thing and the word, inventing names is part of a similar process: to reduce the gap between the person and its referent, its name. This raises a problem about identity. Indeed, if we examine the definition of identity, here is what we find: «The condition or fact of a person being that specified unique person as a continuous unchanging property throughout existence; the characteristics determining this.»<sup>201(*)</sup> Therefore, we are in a position to ask whether the name is a characteristic determining someone's identity. This question is central in Auster's work. Some of his characters have no name at all, some are called according to colours, many have an assumed identity. However, there are characters whose names are meaningful and completely suited to the characters' identity: Marco Stanley Fogg, Daniel Quinn, Thomas Effing... Yet it appears that one's name is closely related to one's identity in Auster's novels. Indeed, when Julian Barber decides to change his name in Thomas Effing, not only does he change his name, he becomes literally a new man, with a new identity. When Quinn, in City of Glass, usurps Paul Auster's identity, he `becomes' Paul Auster, he turns himself into a detective and when he introduces himself to Peter Stillman. He gives a `false' name, Quinn. «Since he was technically Paul Auster, it was the name he had to protect. Anything else, even the truth, would be an invention, a mask to hide behind and keep him safe.»^202(*) Therefore, inventing a new name is to create a new identity, a new person. In The Locked Room, when he meets a vaguely familiar young man in Paris, the narrator-hero decides that this person will be Fanshawe. «This man was Fanshawe because I said he was Fanshawe, and that was all there was to it.»^203(*) This statement directly echoes Humpty Dumpty's speech in Through The Looking Glass, also referred to in City of Glass : «When I use a word» Humpty Dumpty said, in a rather scornful tone, «it means just what I choose it to mean -neither more or less». «The question is» said Alice «whether you can make words mean so many different things.» «The question is» said Humpty Dumpty, «which is to be master -that's all.»^204(*) The common point between the narrator-hero in The Locked Room and Humpty Dumpty is that they are masters of naming, as the narrator-hero in The Locked Room remarks: «My happiness was immeasurable. I exulted in the sheer falsity of my assertion, celebrating the new power I had just bestowed up on myself. I was the sublime alchemist who could change the world at will.»^205(*) Therefore, the power of naming is almost a divine power since it somehow comes down to creating a person. With regard to this, naming and creating are closely linked. In the same way an author creates a character and gives him a name. So, not only can the namer-characters be compared to new Adams, but also to some extent to gods.

* ²⁰⁰ The Locked Room, page 295.

* ²⁰¹ The New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary (Oxford : Clarendon Press, 1993)

* ²⁰² City of Glass, page 74.

* ²⁰³ The Locked Room, page 296.

* ²⁰⁴ Lewis Carroll, Through The Looking Glass, in The Annotated Alice (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1981), page 269

* ²⁰⁵ The Locked Room, page 296.