The Invention of Solitude (2 page)

In the beginning, therefore, are sin and dispossession. Only an accident, a rupture, will shake the self from its apathy, from the pseudo-intimacy it maintains with itself. It is here that Auster’s series of staggering paradoxes begins.

For Auster, confinement is a form of exile.
The Invention of Solitude
can be read as a celebration of rooms and closed spaces. This enclosure has nothing to do with the so-called panegyric of private life, or “cocooning.” There is neither public nor private in this novelistic universe since the individual does not own himself. His center is located outside himself. This penchant for narrow spaces, where the spirit can project itself against the walls (the examination of this theme in Hölderlin, Anne Frank, Collodi, Van Gogh, or Vermeer is fascinating) makes the room a kind of mental uterus, site of a second birth. In this enclosure the subject gives birth, in essence, to himself. From mere biological existence he now attains spiritual life. This confinement transforms him into a voluntary castaway, a Robinson Crusoe run aground in the middle of the city, wedged into a tiny fissure of the urban habitat. This shipwreck is necessary, even if it resembles a deferred
suicide. The self must die
, Auster
seems to say
,
in order
to live; there is a redemptive sense to annulment; hence Auster’s heroes push themselves to the limit of hunger and physical deprivation. This self-destructive passion, which barely avoids total annihilation (in a way similar to that analyzed by Auster in Knut Hamsun’s
Hunger
), transforms this confinement in one’s room into a sort of secular asceticism without transcendence, without God. As if the fathers’ actual death required the fictitious death of their sons, Auster’s character is always ready to offer himself in sacrifice. The only valid existence is that which has experienced extinction.

Auster’s work explores a second paradox: death is the first step toward resurrection. Since this life given us by another is invalid, descent into hell is the only way to reclaim an authentic existence, to kill the old man within. Our room is a prison that opens the gates of freedom; the self is a dungeon we must voluntarily enter in order to find escape. If confinement leads to nomadism, the latter in turn will guide the protagonists toward self-reconciliation.

Auster also examines a third paradox: wandering is intimacy’s helpmate. In his work, it is fate, ironic and mischievous providence, that breaks down the false barrier between the near and the far, between mine and yours, ours and theirs. No matter how far he roams, the individual will ultimately meet himself; he is inclined to be at home everywhere, since he is not at home in his own house:

During the war, M.’s father had hidden out from the Nazis for several months in a Paris
chambre de bonne.
Eventually, he managed to escape, made his way to America, and began a new life. Years passed, more than twenty years. M. had been born, had grown up, and now was going off to study in Paris. Once there he spent several difficult weeks looking for a place to live. Just when he was about to give up in despair, he found a small
chambre de bonne.
Immediately upon moving in, he wrote a letter to his father to tell him the good news. A week or so later he received a reply: your address, wrote M.’s father, that is the same building I hid out in during the war. He then went on to describe the details of the room. It turned out to be the same room his son had rented. (80)

All of Auster is there in this love of coincidences that rhyme the most remote, improbable events. He excels at sprinkling his characters’ adventures with correlations, which have no a priori meaning, but to which the story gives unexpected consequences. Noting the signs that fate strews along our path is the only way to combat the arbitrary: suddenly, in the randomness of existence, a certain order appears just below the surface, an order which seems mysteriously to control us. There is meaning in the world, but this meaning is only suggested, never clearly expressed. Therefore, everything in Paul Auster’s work occurs by chance; and what better image of chance than an inheritance—an event as harmful as it is beneficial. It is as if money of the deceased were an oppressive gift that could drag us, with its donor, beyond the grave. The novelist’s challenge here is to endow this image of the unexpected with the weight of necessity, to continue converting the improbable into the inevitable, to avoid gratuitousness. The novelist must also be a bit of an acrobat: plunging his characters into confusing situations, then weaving among them a fabric of dense analogies, linking the episodes together in such an inevitable manner that the reader cannot imagine the story occurring any other way. This penchant for reversals, for sudden about-faces, also places Paul Auster in the picaresque tradition, at the opposite extreme from his avowed masters, Kafka and Beckett.

Wandering, in Auster, has this original aspect: rather than pitting the individual against a cold, hostile world, it forces him to confront himself and the scattered fragments of his existence. Everything relates back to the self, and, while the closed room serves as a microcosm, the outer world itself becomes an enclosure, which speaks in veiled tones. “Home” is everywhere since the self is not at home with itself.
The Invention of Solitude
announces a theme that Paul Auster will raise to the level of a true obsession: nomadism as a means of cloistering oneself; introspection as a means of escape. (Hence the appeal of pseudonyms and non-places in
City of Glass
, the characters’ capacity to take on other identities, the kaleidoscope of doubles, of contingent selves, the suspended moments when a person almost chooses to become someone else, illusions that bathe this trilogy in a kind of subdued Platonism.) “Exiling himself in order to find out where he was” (16). This formula that Auster applies to Thoreau suits Auster perfectly. He is able to reverse the language of mobility and immobility, of the wanderer and the sedentary. Through escape, we experience intimacy; through confrontation, estrangement. And this reversal may be rooted in the experience of a young boy who, in the presence of his father, felt total absence and solitude.

It is easy to see what distinguishes Paul Auster from other contemporary writers and to see why he is so successful. There is no one less narcissistic than this novelist obsessed with the self. This is because he challenges two attitudes that are common today: the proud, in-control self with no ties and no past, and the traditionalist or minority, proud of his identity, his roots, his people. Auster’s point of view is different: he recognizes his connection to a family, a tradition, a culture, but he also realizes that this is a highly problematic link. In short, to paraphrase the famous verse of Rene Char, the legacy is ambiguous: the will is missing. Since nothing has a priori meaning—this, the very curse of modernity—the self, like solitude and tradition, must literally be invented and re-created. Auster is not an advocate of difference; he claims no particular status, does not ghettoize himself in any group. He does not seek what separates people, but, rather, what brings them together; and what they have in common is a similar confusion about their identity. But he has also avoided what has been killing Western literature for the past twenty years: the invasive proliferation of autobiography, of the diary, of self-preoccupation as a genre in and of itself. This literature, which tends to narrow rather than broaden experience, is most frequently reduced to a bitter whine, since it conveys above all the impossibility of escaping the self. And it is the unfortunate irony of these books, devoted to revealing the individual’s most intimate essence, their subjectivity unparalleled, that they all end up resembling each other, as if written by the same person. With these publications writing becomes an isolating activity, which contradicts its intended universality. And its fanatical celebration of the writer’s uniqueness or interiority repels the reader, who is reluctant to let himself be trapped or fascinated. Instead of creating a world where all might live together, the writer takes from the community its common tool, language, which he then uses to distance himself from the group and to express his own uniqueness. All these voices raised in soliloquy, detailing their petty problems, create a universe of mutual deafness where each person, talking about himself, no longer has the time to listen to others.

Unlike this orgy of egotism, Auster’s
The Invention of Solitude
is a story whose strength lies in its very simplicity. Through this apparent banality the reader finds himself, and narrative regains its true identity. It is once again a homeland open to all without distinction, a place of welcome: “I don’t feel that I was telling the story of my life so much as using myself to explore certain questions that are common to us all,” Auster says in an interview. Auster’s hero is not someone who prefers himself, to repeat Brecht’s definition of the bourgeois, but someone who doubts and communicates this doubt to the reader. Readers identify less with the protagonists’ adventures than with the strangeness they feel about themselves—for whom being or becoming someone constitutes the ultimate difficulty. Auster does not condemn, like classical writers, the self’s wretchedness in the face of God’s grandeur. He does worse: he dissolves this self, declares it a nonentity. Uncertainty eats into the core of our being; our heart is empty or cluttered with so much static that it seems to hold nothing.

This work clearly also expresses the genealogical passion of the uprooted, and it is not insignificant that Auster is an American entirely oriented toward Europe. But this proximity is misleading. A reading of Auster produces a double sensation of familiarity and disorientation, for Auster, deeply anchored in the New World, does not write European books in America; he enriches the American novel with European themes.
The Invention of Solitude
, a tribute to Auster’s departed father, continues in the second part with a warm greeting to all those poets and thinkers who have influenced the author. Through writing we can choose other fathers to compensate for our own, discover a spiritual link, go beyond ourselves. Memory is immersion in the past of all those others who comprise us. The narrator distinguishes, one by one, these voices that speak through him that must be quieted before his true inner voice can be heard. But this goal is impossible to attain: the palimpsest self, like an ever-unpeeling onion, resists categorization. This peregrination through the continents of memory may be a marvelous journey, but it does not succeed in easing the pain. No matter how far it roams, the self is always haunted and tortured by the others; it is a room full of strangers and intruders who speak in his place. Auster’s approach is not, of course, the same as Proust’s anamnesis, an attempt to compensate for life’s imperfections by fixing the flight of time in a work of art. It is an eternal quest, without guaranteed results, which can never achieve closure. A detective of the self, Paul Auster applies an uncompromising narrative skill to a metaphysical quest: Why is there a self rather than nothing? To facilitate this task, he presents his fiction in the protective guise of the detective novel. In the end, however, nothing is resolved. Each book is a collective work, the tribute of a writer to all those, past and present, who have helped him create. But this courtesy toward the dead, calling them to his bedside, inviting them to a vast, cross-century symposium, does not expunge the debt. Just as a son can never stop paying for the death of the father who gave him life, so, too, the self can never stop paying its due. It could even define itself this way: the eternal debtor always under obligation to others. That is why this literature must tirelessly rewrite its missing testament. And if, as the famous saying goes, a prophet is someone who remembers the future, the writer, according to Auster, is someone who predicts the past in order first to capture and then to free himself from it. But memory’s archives are both chaotic and infinite, and the clerk who attempts to record them will soon get lost in the maze.

Paul Auster completely renews the coming-of-age novel. With unusual talent he reveals how painful it is to be an individual today thrust out from the protective shell of a belief or tradition. After these extensive investigations he offers no final wisdom. Each of his novels outlines the beginning of a redemption, which it subsequently rejects. The lack of response, or of comfort, the stubborn refusal to abandon the pain of this issue, that is the strength of these works. As each plot is unraveled an increasingly more obscure enigma is revealed. His literature is like a brief burst of sunshine between a hidden and an exposed mystery, a glimmer between two shades of darkness. “Just because you wander in the desert, it does not mean there is a promised land.” All his characters—vagabonds, gamblers, semi-tramps, magnificent losers, failed writers—are under way. Like Marco Stanley Fogg at the end of
Moon Palace
, facing the ocean in the hazy moonlight, these characters are more serene at the end of the day, but they are never sovereign. Their chaotic odyssey never ends in peace, and they always fail to regain their lost innocence. Writing never removes the agony, but, rather, alters and deepens it. Writing is futility because it fails to express the experience of loss and renunciation. Perhaps Paul Auster’s rich works already prefigure what certain historians foresee as the religion of the future: Christian-Buddhism, that is, a concern with personal salvation linked to an acute awareness of uncertainty and the void.