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

B TOWARDS ORIGINS

1/ The room

The shelter

For most of the main characters in Moon Palace and The New York Trilogy, the room is a place where they come to find shelter. The White Horse Tavern, the bar where Zimmer takes Marco, is a figure of shelter: «It was pleasant to be huddled there in our little booth»^35(*) The «little booth» suggests a tiny place and the verb «huddle» evokes baby birds in their nests. Now how can we fail to notice the resemblance between the word shelter and the word shell? The shell that protects the embryo (the future being to be born). The shell and the image of the egg inherent to it appear in the two novels. In Moon Palace, there is a much-detailed episode when Marco drops his last two eggs on the floor and this «disaster» deeply affects him. But what is striking is that this scene is immediately followed by Marco's eviction from his apartment. The parallel is therefore clear: The broken shell of the egg proleptically announces the loss of Marco's shelter. Likewise, it is the image of a falling egg that forecasts Marco's father's death: «I understood how fragile my world had become. The egg was slipping through my fingers, and sooner or later, it was bound to drop. Barber died on September fourth, just three days after this incident in the restaurant»^36(*)

The locked room where Fanshawe takes shelter in Boston is located on Columbus Street. There is an uncountable number of allusions to Columbus in Moon Palace and The New York Trilogy but what is essential to pinpoint is the association between Columbus and the figure of the egg. In City of Glass, Stillman tells the story according to which Columbus cracked the bottom of an egg in order for it to stand on its end. Effing also refers to the `Egg of Columbus', which was the name given to an exhibition on electricity by Tesla. It is interesting to notice that the rooms which perform the function of shelter for the characters, i.e. a shell that protects them from the outer world, are often associated with the image of the egg as if the characters expressed a subconscious desire to return to their origin.

The retreat

Along with the function of shelter, the room has the function of a privileged space of inwardness and meditation. Marco's apartment is described as «a bare and grubby room (that) had been transformed into a site of inwardness.»^37(*) Then, Marco says about his cave in Central Park: «It became a sanctuary for me, a refuge of inwardness.»^38(*) This function of the room is also found in the same terms in Leviathan: «it was a sanctuary of inwardness, a room in which the only possible activity was thought.»^39(*) The rooms are thus presented through the Pascalian view according to which to stay in them is essential in order to mature: «All the unhappiness of man stems from one thing only: that he is incapable of staying quietly in his room.»^40(*) Auster, when writing about the rooms in which his characters live and meditate, certainly bears in mind his own days in limited spaces such as his 1965 stay in Paris that he recalls in The Book of Memory: «The room he lived in was a dream space, and its walls were like the skin of some second body around him, as if his own body had been transformed into a mind, a breathing instrument of pure thought.»^41(*) The stay in the room is therefore assimilated to a spiritual retreat like those gone into by the sceptic philosophers. The image of Quinn, living in his garbage bin, depriving himself of all that is not indispensable to strict survival, is very reminiscent of Diogenes in his tub or Descartes and his theory of the Tabula Rasa. Auster had certainly these thinkers at the back of his mind when writing these novels, but he must have thought even more of 19^th century American writers such as Emerson and more particularly Henry David Thoreau and his famous Walden. Walden, the Massachusetts's countryside place where Thoreau exiled himself to concentrate exclusively on his inner life is referred to -directly and indirectly- countless times in both novels. In Ghosts, Walden is the book that both Black and Blue are reading. In this same story, Black tells an anecdote about Thoreau visiting Whitman next to a chamber pot. In The Locked Room, the narrator-hero alludes to a childhood friend named Dennis Walden. In City of Glass, Quinn guesses at the reason why Stillman uses Henry Dark for pseudonym: «`HD' he said `For Henry David? As in Henry David Thoreau.'»^42(*) Marco, in Central Park, is an obvious Thoreau-like character, as Thoreau's own words could well come out of Marco's mouth:

I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner and reduce it to its lowest terms.^43(*)

* ³⁵ Moon Palace, page 82.

* ³⁶ Moon Palace, page 298.

* ³⁷ Moon Palace, page 17.(my italics)

* ³⁸ Moon Palace, page 58.(my italics)

* ³⁹ Leviathan, page 63.(my italics)

* ⁴⁰ Quoted in The Book of Memory, in The Invention of Solitude, page76.

* ⁴¹ The Book of Memory in The Invention of Solitude, page 89.

* ⁴² City of Glass, page 80.

* ⁴³ Henry David Thoreau, Walden, page 135.