Paul Auster Was Born in New Jersey in 1947

Paul Auster was born in New Jersey in 1947. After attending Columbia University, he lived in France for four years. Since 1974 he has published poems, essays, novels and translations. He has also edited the story collection The True Tales of American Life. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Thus is the preface of every single book Auster has published. Other than citing a few biographical facts, it however says little about the American author whose existence, he claims, is directed by chance. To get a full portrait of Paul Auster, one only has to read his literary work. His life is found in his fictions, translations, essays, and even in his movies; every story Auster creates reveals a few events of the author’s past. His experience in Paris after he quit Columbia University; his hand to mouth existence as a young poet; the books his uncle left in their house that incited his desire to become a writer; his room in Varick Street where he composes his texts. A central obsession of Auster's is what it means to be a writer spending most of your time alone in a room. The results emerge in his fictions that address existential issues and questions of identity, personal meaning and analyse relationships between men and their environment as well as focusing on different kinds of hunger and failure.

In 1979, when his father had his fatal heart attack, Auster was on the brink of financial and emotional ruin. He had writer’s block, a failing marriage, and a newborn son called Daniel. With the modest inheritance that rewarded his father’s death, Auster was suddenly floating instead of drowning: ‘For the first time in my life I had the time to write, to take on long projects without worrying how I was going to pay the rent. It’s a terrible equation, finally. To think that my father’s death saved my life.’ The Invention of Solitude is Auster’s touching exposé of his search for the identity of his father and himself. It is this ‘terrible equation’ as Auster puts it in his tribute to his departed father, which I address in this dissertation, focusing on the works and life of Paul Auster. From the moment of his father’s death, the theme of the father-son relationship dominates Auster’s oeuvre.

Abbreviations

AoHThe Art of Hunger

BFThe Brooklyn Follies

BoMThe Book of Memory

ICLTIn the Country of Last Things

IoSThe Invention of Solitude, consisting of ‘Portrait of an Invisible Man’, and ‘The Book of Memory.’

MoCThe Music of Chance

MPMoon Palace

MrVMr. Vertigo

NYTThe New York Trilogy, consisting of ‘City of Glass’ (CoG), ‘Ghosts’ (G), and ‘The Locked Room’ (LR)’

ONOracle Night

PoIMPortrait of an Invisible Man

RNThe Red Notebook

Characters

Aesop / a black boy saved by Master Yehudi who teaches him how to write and read in Mr. Vertigo
Anna Auster / Paul Auster’s grandmother who killed her husband, Sam Auster’s father
Daniel Quinn / An author who turns into Paul Auster the detective in ‘City of Glass’
David Zimmer / Marco’s friend who accommodates him after his near starvation in Central Park in Moon Palace
Fanshawe / an invisible figure in ‘The Locked Room’ who exists only through his best friend (narrator) whom he forces to step into his old life, marry his wife and adopt his son; the narrator’s alter ego
Grace / Sidney Orr’s wife in Oracle Night who has a secret affair with John Trause
Harry Dunkel / a gay antique bookshop owner in The Brooklyn Follies who ran away from his past
John Trause / an author who hasn’t published anything since his wife’s death in Oracle Night
Julian Barber / a painter who takes on the identity of Thomas Effing after he kills the Gresham brothers in a cave in the desert in Moon Palace
Kitty Wu / Marco’s girlfriend who has an abortion, which ruins their relationship in Moon Palace
M.S. Fogg / The protagonist in Moon Palace who discovers his origins
Master Yehudi / a Hungarian artist who teaches Walt to fly and simultaneously becomes his surrogate father in Mr. Vertigo
Mother Sioux / Master Yehudi’s house woman in Mr. Vertigo
Murks / Pozzi’s and Nashe’s supervisor in The Music of Chance
Nashe / a divorced fireman in The Music of Chance
Nathan Glass / a character who decides to die, but adopts the role of surrogate father and husband in The Brooklyn Follies
Peter Stillman Jr. / Peter Stillman Senior’s son in ‘City of Glass’
Peter Stillman / Peter’s father who imprisoned his son in ‘City of Glass’
Pozzi / a lonely poker player Nashe picks up from the streets in The Music of Chance
Sam Auster / Paul Auster’s father who witnessed his mother killing his father
Sidney Orr / an author who looks up to his literary father John Trause in Oracle Night
Solomon Barber / Marco’s long lost father who never knew of his son in Moon Palace
Thomas Effing / Solomon’s father and Marco’s grandfather in Moon Palace
Tom Wood / Nathan Glass’ nephew in The Brooklyn Follies
Walt the Wonder Boy / an orphan named Walter Claireborne Rawley who is adopted by Master Yehudi and learns to fly in Mr. Vertigo

Other characters

Anatole / Stéphane Mallarmé’s son who died at a young age
Hermann Kafka / Franz Kafka’s domineering father
Kafka / Franz Kafka, a German speaking author from Prague who died in 1923

The father in Paul Auster’s literature

Once upon a time, there was…

‘A king!’ my little readers will say right away.

No, children, you are wrong. Once upon a time there was a piece of wood.

The Adventures of Pinocchio

In Carlo Collodi’s brilliant fairy tale, Gepetto realizes his dream of becoming a father. When Master Cherry gives him a mysterious block of talking wood, Gepetto in fact creates his own son Pinocchio, who firstly shows little respect for his father. The Adventures of Pinocchio describes the mischievous adventures of the famous puppet undergoing disciplinary trials to become an ordinary boy. Pinocchio aspires to nothing more than being a good son to his father, which is the underlying moral of the story. His curiosity and impatience however lead him to continuously withdraw from Gepetto, until he finally gets the chance to save the man whom he is causing so much sorrow. For most of the tale, Gepetto and Pinocchio are separated but do not fail to long for each other. Father and son experience their grief in solitude, unaware of the other’s distress and genuine attempts to become reunited, until Pinocchio finally rescues Gepetto from the belly of the shark. The beloved story of Pinocchio has not only entertained generations of children around the world, it has also influenced filmmakers as well as writers of adult fiction. Paul Auster admits to be one of them. The contemporary American author takes great inspiration in fairy tales as their bare-boned narrative and lack of detail leave enough space for the reader’s imagination to complete the story. The Adventures of Pinocchio holds yet another quality for the author, famous for his fictions such as The New York Trilogy, Leviathan and Moon Palace. In his work that addresses the effects of chance and coincidence, exploration of the theory of language and story telling, the subjectivity of existence, and the fear of a lack of fixed identity among others, I want to discuss Auster’s preoccupation with the image of the absent father, the searching son and the solitary state of his subjects.

The story of Pinocchio symbolises that of Paul Auster and his father Sam. Their ending –Pinocchio saving Gepetto– differs from the original however. In Auster’s tale, the father dies. The son, unable to prevent Sam Auster’s lonesome death of a heart attack, tortures himself with the feeling that he came too late; too late to be reunited with his father. His reasons for embarking on a journey for his father resemble that of the puppet: Auster, feeling guilty about the abandoned relationship with his father, longs to be reconciled by being a good son. Realizing the impossibility of this task, Paul Auster wants, at least, to locate his father in his writing with the intention of lessening his mourning. In this dissertation, I aim to demonstrate that Auster’s fictional writing not only assumes certain characteristics that lead back to Pinocchio, but that his body of work entails such a great deal of autobiographical evidence that its origin must derive from his past. The consequences of his father’s emotional and physical absence in Auster’s youth that determines his prose is what I intend to reveal in this paper.

The father in his different guises functions as one of Auster’s principal subject matter and emerges as the strongest influence in the majority of his writing. The absent father, the search for the father, the father as a solitary figure, the surrogate father inevitably creating the image of the searching son, the lost son, haunts all of Auster’s fiction, just as much as he as a deserted child seems to be haunting the missing father. I am fully aware that a discussion in which the focus lies on the relationships between fathers and sons, as well as on the language applied to grasp such interaction determined by lack, calls for psychoanalytical investigation among others. However, I intentionally intend to exclude direct references to psychoanalysis, (post)structuralism and other literary theories. This perspective allows me to focus solely on Auster himself, his various texts and his intertextual references that form enough material to let his work speak for itself in three separate sections. The first part of this dissertation addresses the foundation of Auster’s prose work in which the themes of absence, solitude and loss are directly linked to Auster’s father. ‘Portrait of an Invisible Man’ is a report on the personality of Sam Auster and the revelation of the terrible truth that drove him into being the impenetrable man he remained until his death. This memoir is published in Auster’s debut prose text The Invention of Solitude together with ‘The Book of Memory’. The latter differs from the first part by the shifting in perception: Auster no longer mourns as a son, but talks as a father to his son. Influenced by Proust’s achievement in his masterpiece À la recherché du temps perdu, Auster engages in the discovery of his role as a son and a father by linguistically retelling and therefore preserving the past.

The approach slightly alters in the next part of this work. If the first section is mostly determined by absence and the attempt to understand the father, the second part confirms and expresses Auster’s search for a missing structure. Considering the father’s absence as catalyst, it explores the different ways in which the protagonists in Auster’s stories either seek for a surrogate father or the missing son in the vastness of the American fatherland. Emphasising on Mr Vertigo and Moon Palace especially, with reference to the symbolism in Pinocchio, I highlight the methodology through which this quest is represented in all of Auster’s fictions. The third part discusses the ways in which Paul Auster learns to cope with an absent father in his life. Referring to the manifold literary references and styles he adopts from different authors in his work, I argue that these authors have symbolically taken over the role of the absent father. Auster’s father raised his son only to a certain extent. His literary existence, which determines the writer’s life, is influenced by the likes of Kafka, Beckett, Hawthorne, Melville, Mallarmé, Sartre, Raleigh, Flaubert and many others. In the third part, the theme of absence is therefore replaced by a literary presence. However, the fatherly absence still plays a considerable role, as most of the authors that have influenced him, suffer from similar conditions. With the exception of Beckett, whose focus lies on the deconstruction of language, these writers’ biographies resemble Auster’s life in one way or another. By solely listing and analysing a fraction of their lives and writing at the beginning, I want these authors to initially speak for themselves. After presenting the evident similarities of Auster’s literary predecessors and their troubled relationship with fatherhood, I then compare these with Auster’s own past and writing. In my further argument, I claim that all the literary persons I list and explain also function as Auster’s father figures: he looks up to them, is influenced by their work and shares the same solitude once engaged with writing which he shapes according to his chosen father figures.

If the first part sets the setting for the father’s absence, part two and three are Auster’s reactions to the latter. Writing seems to somehow help him to find his father, and replace him in some way through all the literary figures and fictional characters that speak through him. This dissertation then deals with stories about fathers and sons. And it deals with the language that is used to capture the absent father from the hands of a deserted son.

Absence

The invention of solitude. Or stories of life and death. The story begins with the end. Speak or die. And as long as you go on speaking, you will not die. The story begins with death.[1]

One day there is life.[2]

It all began in 1979, ‘that’s when everything changed in my life’, Paul Auster says. On a winter Sunday morning, he receives the news of his father’s sudden death. ‘Death without warning.’ (IoS, 5) That which was already apparent for Auster, has now become manifest: The father’s absence. ‘Even before his death he has been absent, and long ago the people closest to him had learned to accept this absence, to treat it as the fundamental quality of his being.’ (6) The father’s distance –emotionally as well as physically- throughout the author’s life is now completed by his final withdrawal. Sam Auster is history. A history that is so void that his son is captivated to tell its nothingness. In a memoir dedicated to his father, Paul Auster chronicles an attempt to capture the past by marking absence: the story of his father, ‘Portrait of an Invisible Man.’ The title already reflects both Auster’s longing for completion and his rejection of its prospect as a means of preserving it. Part biography of his father, part autobiography, this text is a meditation on loss, familial love, fatherhood and memory.

‘Earliest memory: his absence.’ (21)

In his first published prose text The Invention of Solitude consisting of ‘Portrait of an Invisible Man’ and ‘The Book of Memory’, Auster is struggling with fundamental issues. How to portray a solitary man who leaves no traces? If a man leads a life that nobody else notices, did he really live? How to know a man who never offered anything by which to seize him; who barely mentioned his past; who detached himself from his surroundings? Auster remarks in this difficult mission to grasp the essence of his father how ‘he did not seem to be a man occupying space, but rather a block of impenetrable space in the form of a man.’ (7) Death has finally taken his father away from him, but how to cope with life after death when there is nothing that precedes it? In his written attempt to approach the father, Auster faces the problem of how and what to tell? To write absence or towards realizing this absence and replace it? The totally blank photo album he stumbles upon while unpacking his father’s belongings: This is Our Life, The Austers, exemplifies his situation. Paul Auster embarks on this project to make sense of his father’s, and therefore his own, existence in search of the past; a project that will be disappointing, as Auster mentions: ‘to recognise, right from the start, that the essence of this project is failure.’ (21) In this part, I not only explore this failure, but also discuss the notion of paternity and loss that shaped the life and therefore the work of Paul Auster.

The father’s lonesome death is a catalyst for the author’s resurrection as a writer. He literally saves Auster’s life by rescuing him from his financial distress. The father’s inheritance gives Auster a financial cushion that finally allows him to stop worrying about money to support his little family. For the first time, freed from this immense pressure, he can focus solely on writing. Yet his subject matter is determined by the father’s gift. The heritage carries a heavy burden, which the author struggles with throughout his writing career. Auster never finishes reimbursing his debt to his deceased father: even today it seems he is still reviving and maintaining the image of the man he barely knew. It seems paradoxical that the man, who never appreciated his son choosing literature over a financially secure job, actually stands to the author’s rescue. A man who worked so hard for his business;[3] who never understood that his son quit Columbia University to embark on a ship and later lead a hand to mouth existence in Paris. A man characterised by his reluctance for spending, for holding back everything he has to offer, for remaining silent, for worshipping solitude. The money he had so painstakingly saved through what Auster calls ‘bargain shopping as a way of life’, (57) allows the author to fully concentrate on his writing career. Paul Auster, the author who in the eyes of his father, was just ‘one more shadow’ (25) feels obliged to pay tribute to the man whose already absent presence made him ‘nervous’: ‘You felt he was always on the verge of leaving.’ (58) Auster realises this irony, and yet he faces it to deal with it slowly in and through his prose writing. In an interview he says: