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

Control over life and death

In Auster's fiction, the act of writing is intertwined with the notions of life and death. It can even be said that writing seems to have an influence over life and death. First, Auster stresses that writing about a dead person somehow brings him/her back to life. This is explicitly stated in Portrait of an Invisible Man: «Instead of burying my father for me, these words have kept him alive, perhaps more so than ever.»^152(*) The same kind of reflection is present in The Locked Room where Sophie says to her husband who writes the biography of her ex-husband: «Don't you see what's happening? You're bringing him back to life.»^153(*) Naturally, these people do not come back to life physically, but they are literally resurrected in the characters' minds as well as in the readers' minds. But a crucial thing is that the act of writing is a process of creation. The author is a creator, his characters are literary creations...or creatures. In City of Glass, Quinn makes an interesting remark about his private-eye hero, Max Work: «Over the years, Work had become very close to Quinn. Whereas William Wilson remained an abstract figure for him, Work had increasingly come to life.»^154(*) Here, Quinn is to be compared to Dr Frankenstein or Gepetto, whose creation becomes a creature, i.e. a living being. Writing is also a way to stay alive. After three weeks in the City of Destruction, it is the writing of her novel-letter that keeps Anna Blume alive. Telling stories is also the means by which Shehrzad saves her life in The One Thousand and One Nights. Besides, in The Invention of Solitude, Auster explains how Shehrzad, at the end of the book, has borne the king three sons and he concludes: «Again, the lesson is made clear. A voice that speaks, a woman's voice that speaks, a voice that speaks stories of life and death, has the power to give life.»^155(*) The power to give life is a divine attribute and in effect, we can say that, over their created world, the authors are like gods.

Who controls whom?

In Auster's novels, especially in The New York Trilogy, one notices that there are many mirrored situations. In Ghosts for instance, Blue's situation is perfectly symmetric to Black's: «For in spying out at Black across the street, it is as though Blue were looking in a mirror.»^156(*) This characteristic raises a central issue in Auster's work: who controls whom? In The Locked Room, Fanshawe explains to the narrator-hero how he got rid of the detective (whose name is Quinn...) hired by his wife:
«I turned everything around. He thought he was following me, but in fact I was following him (...) I was watching him the whole time.»^157(*) This kind of reversal of situation is omnipresent in The New York Trilogy. In Ghosts, Blue is suddenly overcome by doubt about his supposed control of the situation: «Blue no longer knows what to think. It seems perfectly plausible to him that he is also being watched, observed by another one in the same way that he has been observing Black. If that is the case, then he has never been free.»^158(*) The detective who is supposed to be the observer, the one who works in the dark, actually finds himself the subject of someone else's investigation. The detective, initially assimilated to the writer, then loses his status as an author to become a character in the hands of some other author. An illustration of this turnaround is given in City of Glass where Quinn, who has been tailing Stillman, realizes that Stillman's wanderings in fact spell out the phrase `the Tower of Babel':

Thus, he had created the letters by the movements of his steps, but they had not been written down. It was like drawing a picture in the air with your finger. The image vanishes as you are making it. There is no result, no trace to mark what you have done. And yet, the picture did exist -not in the streets where they had been drawn, but in Quinn's red notebook.^159(*)

Thus Stillman becomes the author as he is able to write in Quinn's notebook. Consequently, Quinn somehow becomes the puppet through which Stillman writes his own story. The issue a stake here is that of freedom. When Blue considers that perhaps `he has never been free', he expresses the typically American dread that someone else is patterning your life. Therefore, all this seriously calls into question Uncle Victor's statement according to which «every man is the author of his own life.»^160(*) Indeed, The New York Trilogy challenges this view and casts a doubt in the reader's mind: am I the author of my life or am I the work of some external author?
In other words, am I a character of some fiction? This question is asked by Jorge Luis Borges in «Magie Partielle du Quichotte»:

Pourquoi sommes-nous inquiets que la carte soit incluse dans la carte et les mille et une nuits dans le livre des Mille et Une Nuits? Que don Quichotte soit lecteur du Quichotte et Hamlet un spectateur d'Hamlet? Je crois en avoir trouvé la cause: de telles inventions suggèrent que si les personnages d'une fiction peuvent être lecteurs ou spectateurs, nous, leurs lecteurs ou leurs spectateurs, pouvons être des personnages fictifs. En 1833, Carlyle a noté que l'histoire universelle est un livre sacré, infini, que tous les hommes écrivent et lisent et tâchent de comprendre, et où, aussi, on les écrit.^161(*)

* ¹⁵² The Invention of Solitude, page 32.

* ¹⁵³ The Locked Room, page 285.

* ¹⁵⁴ City of Glass, page 6.

* ¹⁵⁵ The Invention of Solitude, page 153.

* ¹⁵⁶ Ghosts, page 144.

* ¹⁵⁷ The Locked Room, page 307.

* ¹⁵⁸ Ghosts, page 168.

* ¹⁵⁹ City of Glass, page 71.

* ¹⁶⁰ Moon Palace, page 7.

* ¹⁶¹ Jorge Luis Borges, `Magie Partielle du Quichotte' in Autres Inquisitions (Paris : Gallimard, 1993) page 709