Stephen A. Fredman

Notre Dame
stephen.a.fredman.1@nd.edu

 

I.

 

Reading the novels of Paul Auster over the years, I find myself drawn back again and again to his first prose text, The Invention of Solitude (1982), especially to its second half, “The Book of Memory,” a memoir-as-meditation, in which Auster confronts all of his central obsessions, obsessions that return in various forms to animate his subsequent novels.¹ One of the most resonant images from “The Book of Memory” that recurs in Auster’s later work is that of “the room of the book,” a place where life and writing meet in an unstable, creative, and sometimes dangerous encounter. In the present essay, I would like to examine the room of the book through three interpretive frameworks that will help to make its dimensions apprehensible. These frameworks represent dynamic issues that arise from within the room of the book, issues that account for some of the characteristic complexities of Auster’s work: 1) a contest between prose and poetry that colors much of his writing; 2) a parthenogenic fantasy of masculine creativity that he constructs with great effort; and 3) a pervasive preoccupation with Holocaust imagery. In my reading of Auster’s prose, the postmodern inquiry into the relationship between writing and identity metamorphoses into a confrontation with a series of gender issues, oriented around the father, and then metamorphoses again into an interrogation of the particularly Jewish concern with memory. Using memory to probe the ruptures in contemporary life, Auster returns ultimately to the unspeakable memories of the Holocaust, thus laying bare ways in which the postmodern is inescapably post-Holocaust.

 

To set the stage, we will look at an exemplary dramatization of the equation between “the room” and “the book” in Ghosts (1986), the second volume of Auster’s New York Trilogy. The protagonist of Ghosts, Blue, has recently completed an apprenticeship to a master detective, Brown, and the novel narrates Blue’s first “case,” in which he hopes to establish an identity as self-sufficient “agent.” Blue has been engaged by White to “keep an eye on” Black, a simple “tail job” that turns out to be much more demanding than Blue could have imagined. It’s not that Black is difficult to follow; in fact, he hardly ever leaves his room. From his own room across the street, Blue, using binoculars, can see that Black spends most of his time writing in a notebook and reading. In order to record Black’s activities, Blue takes out a notebook himself and begins to write, thus initiating the equation between the room and the book.

 

After nearly a year of tailing Black, following him on long walks and watching him read and write, Blue begins to find his lack of knowledge about Black, White, and the case unbearable. Unsuccessful in his attempt to precipitate a disclosure from the ever-elusive White, Blue realizes that his perpetual spying on the nearly sedentary Black has rendered Blue a virtual prisoner in his own room. It dawns on him that Black and White may be in collusion, and that in fact he may be the one under surveillance:

 

If so, what are they doing to him? Nothing very terrible, finally -- at least not in any absolute sense. They have trapped Blue into doing nothing, into being so inactive as to reduce his life to almost no life at all. Yes, says Blue to himself, that's what it feels like: like nothing at all. He feels like a man who has been condemned to sit in a room and go on reading a book for the rest of his life. This is strange enough -- to be only half alive at best, seeing the world only through words, living only through the lives of others. But if the book were an interesting one, perhaps it wouldn't be so bad. He could get caught up in the story, so to speak, and little by little begin to forget himself. But this book offers him nothing. There is no story, no plot, no action -- nothing but a man sitting alone in a room and writing a book. That's all there is, Blue realizes, and he no longer wants any part of it. But how to get out? How to get out of the room that is the book that will go on being written for as long as he stays in the room? (NYT 201-2)

 

Not an intellectual or even much of a reader, Blue has been metamorphosed into a writer — that is, into someone who lives inside a book. Every other aspect of his life has been taken away from him — he has abandoned his fiancée, his mentor refuses to offer advice, etc. — and he realizes the terror of the writer: “There is no story, no plot, no action — nothing but a man sitting alone in a room and writing a book.” This primal condition of the writer in the present age — imprisoned, facing a blank page without the structures of story, plot, or action to support him — has become Blue’s life, and he begins to suspect that Black (or White?) has planned it that way, willing this monstrous metamorphosis.

 

Blue’s suspicions that his life has been captured by a book are confirmed during two visits to Black’s room. In the second, Blue crosses the street one night when Black is out and steals a pile of papers stacked on Black’s desk. When he begins to read them, Blue sees that they are his own weekly reports; this means that Black and White are the same person and that, in some mysterious way, Blue and Black have been writing the same book. With these realizations, Blue collapses into vertigo and enters a state of irresolvable doubleness:

 

For Blue at this point can no longer accept Black's existence, and therefore he denies it. Having penetrated Black's room and stood there alone, having been, so to speak, in the sanctum of Black's solitude, he cannot respond to the darkness of that moment except by replacing it with a solitude of his own. To enter Black, then, was the equivalent of entering himself, and once inside himself, he can no longer conceive of being anywhere else. But this is precisely where Black is, even though Blue does not know it. (226)

 

When Blue realizes that Black is his double, he also becomes aware that Black’s room is the uncanny scene of writing, which Blue, who had never conceived of himself as a writer, had been afraid of entering all along. In confronting Black’s solitude, he meets his own; in confronting Black’s writing, he recovers his own and realizes that he has become a writer. When he walks across the street to Black’s room one more time, Blue finds out why Black/White has hired him. Upon entering the room, Blue encounters Black pointing a revolver at him, intending to end both of their lives. In the ensuing dialogue, Blue, the bewildered detective, tries one more time to understand what has been happening:

 

You're supposed to tell me the story. Isn't that how it's supposed to end? You tell me the story, and then we say good-bye.You know it already, Blue. Don’t you understand that? You know the story by heart.

 

Then why did you bother in the first place?

 

Don’t ask stupid questions.

 

And me — what was I there for? Comic relief?

 

No, Blue, I’ve needed you from the beginning. If it hadn’t been for you, I couldn’t have done it.

 

Needed me for what?

 

To remind me of what I was supposed to be doing. Every time I looked up, you were there, watching me, following me, always in sight, boring into me with your eyes. You were the whole world to me, Blue, and I turned you into my death. You're the one thing that doesn't change, the one thing that turns everything inside out. (230)

 

Black has turned Blue into his ideal reader, for whom every moment of Black’s existence in a room writing a book has been full of unfathomable meaning. And by allaying the writer’s constant fear that the external world will dematerialize during his residence in the space of writing, Blue’s gaze has “turn[ed] everything inside out” for Black, making his writing into a fateful, and ultimately fatal, act. Having created this external witness to his internal activity as writer, Black has also transformed his reader, Blue, into a double, into a writer himself. Black has kept Blue trapped in a room, with Blue’s gaze fixed upon Black, in a successful effort to enclose himself in the space of writing until the demands of the book are met. And because Blue is also the writer of the book, its demands cannot be fully met until Blue comes to understand that all along he has been author of his own fate. When Blue achieves this recognition, the story that Black is writing ends in death — but not quite as Black had planned. For Blue is now the author, who physically overpowers Black and beats him, presumably to death, as though doing away with an insufferable mirror, which has kept him confined inside the room that is the book.

 

II.

 

For whom can it be said that entrapment within the room that is the book is intolerable? Certainly Blue, who has always thought of himself as a man of action, rather than a reader, finds it so: “He feels like a man who has been condemned to sit in a room and go on reading a book for the rest of his life” (NYT 201-2). But through the character of Blue, Auster also paints a portrait of a type of writer about whom Blue knows nothing: the modern poet. It is the modern (male) poet whose condition is most fully epitomized by the statement, “There is no story, no plot, no action — nothing but a man sitting alone in a room and writing a book” (202). In the course of explaining why he became a performance poet, David Antin has characterized this solipsism of the modern poet in derogatory terms:

 

as a poet i was getting extremely tired of   what i considered
   an unnatural language act   going into a closet so to
  speak   sitting in front of a typewriter and nothing is
   necessary   a closet is no place to address anybody
(Antin 56)

 

Although he may be perverse in Antin’s terms, Auster is powerfully drawn to this “unnatural language act,” for the image of the lonely poet trapped inside the room that is the book haunts his writing. On another level, though, it is not self-enclosure that constitutes an “unnatural act” in Auster’s writing, but rather the intrusion of poetry into narrative prose. His fiction and memoirs have remained remarkably open to poetry and to what are thought of as poetic concerns, and this openness results in unusual pressures on the writing, pressures that account for many of its salient characteristics.

 

Typically, if we call a novel “poetic,” we mean that it has a “lyrical” quality, like André Gide’s L’Immoraliste or Virginia Woolf’s The Waves, or we mean that the words have been chosen with particular relish for their sound and exactitude, as in the stories of Guy Davenport or in Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient. Auster’s fiction, however, is not especially lyrical in its rhythm or its diction; indeed, its tone is deliberately flat, in the manner of factual statement. And although by carefully portraying dilemmas of understanding he creates characters whose driving concerns are epistemological, his exactitude is of a phenomenological or hermeneutic sort, rather than a matter of heightened verbal precision. In other words, the poetic element in Auster’s fiction is not a “formal” concern. Instead, it can be located in his engagement with a range of the fundamental issues that have defined twentieth-century poetry: the materiality of language, the relations between words and objects, the commanding presence of silence, the impact of prose upon poetry, and the ways in which, as Marina Tsvetaeva puts it, “In this most Christian of worlds / all poets are Jews” (quoted by Auster, AH 114).

 

Just as the identity of the poet hides in the character of Blue, these poetic issues hide among the more immediately noticeable metafictional qualities of Auster’s writing. Admittedly, a general description of his fiction might make it hard to differentiate Auster’s work from that of any number of postmodern novelists, for whom poetry would be the least of their concerns. To give such a general description of Auster’s fiction in a single sentence, you could say that his books are allegories about the impossibly difficult task of writing, in which he investigates the similarly impossible task of achieving identity — through characters plagued by a double who represents the unknowable self — and that this impossible task takes place in an irrational world, governed by chance and coincidence, whose author cannot be known. And then it would be easy to construct a map of precursors and sources as a congenial modern terrain in which to situate Auster’s work: the textual entrapments of Kafka, Beckett, Borges, Calvino, Ponge, Blanchot, Jabès, Celan, and Derrida; the psychological intensities of Poe, Hawthorne, Melville, Thoreau, Dickinson, Dostoevsky, and Freud; the paranoid overdeterminations of Surrealism, magic, alchemy, and Kabbalah. This capsule description and list of affinities and affiliations slights two important features: Auster’s extensive work as a poet and as a translator of French poetry and the crucial ways in which his narrative prose stages an encounter between poetry and the novel.

 

For many novelists at the beginning of their careers, poetry may function as a form of finger exercises, but in Auster’s case there was a curiously persistent vacillation. In an interview with Larry McCaffery and Sinda Gregory, he chronicles some of the dodges he took between verse and prose, before his decisive turn to fiction: “I had always dreamed of writing novels. My first published works were poems, and for ten years or so I published only poems, but all along I spent nearly as much time writing prose. I wrote hundreds and hundreds of pages, I filled up dozens of notebooks. It’s just that I wasn’t satisfied with it, and I never showed it to anyone” (AH 291). Reportedly, he became so frustrated with his efforts at fiction that he stopped altogether in the mid-seventies, restricting himself to composing and translating poetry and to writing critical essays. The poems, as Auster rightly notes, initially “resembled clenched fists; they were short and dense and obscure, as compact and hermetic as Delphic oracles” (AH 293), but during the later seventies they began to open up: “The breath became somewhat longer, the propositions became somewhat more discursive” (AH 294). Finally, though, at a time of acute emotional and financial distress, he reached a profound impasse: “There were moments when I thought I was finished, when I thought I would never write another word” (AH 294). Having touched bottom, as many of his characters do, Auster was ready for a breakthrough, which he says came when he attended a dance rehearsal: “Something happened, and a whole world of possibilities suddenly opened up to me. I think it was the absolute fluidity of what I was seeing, the continual motion of the dancers as they moved around the floor. It filled me with immense happiness” (AH 294). The next day he began writing White Spaces (1980; D 101-110), his one work of what I would call “poet’s prose,” which he describes “an attempt on my part to translate the experience of that dance performance into words. It was a liberation for me, a tremendous letting go, and I look back on it now as the bridge between writing poetry and writing prose” (AH 295).²

 

Over the past two centuries, poets have attested again and again to a liberating sensation when they begin to write poetry in prose. One might expect such freedom to be a result of escaping from the rigorous demands of meter and rhyme; but instead, it’s as if the poet finds him or herself on the other side of a heavily fortified wall — outside the “closet” — able for the first time to step beyond the tiny social space accorded to verse and to take command of some of the vast discursive reservoirs of prose. In Auster’s case, it’s as if verse (ordinarily associated metaphorically with dance) were frozen stock still, while prose (usually imagined as plodding) were free to dance; where his verse “resembled clenched fists,” his poet’s prose represented “a tremendous letting go.” A truly generative work for Auster, White Spaces marks the moment when prose and poetry actually meet in his writing; out of this moment arises Auster’s central poetic project in prose: the investigation of the scene of writing. It is an immense project — a kind of detective assignment that may well take him the rest of his career. In White Spaces, Auster records a primary investigative discovery, at once phenomenological, mystical, and social: writing takes place in a room. In the following passage, he begins to explore this room:

 

I remain in the room in which I am writing this. I put one foot in front of the other. I put one word in front of the other, and for each step I take I add another word, as if for each word to be spoken there were another space to be crossed, a distance to be filled by my body as it moves through this space. It is a journey through space, even if I get nowhere, even if I end up in the same place I started. It is a journey through space, as if into many cities and out of them, as if across deserts, as if to the edge of some imaginary ocean, where each thought drowns in the relentless waves of the real. (D 107)

 

In this work of poet’s prose, Auster insists over and over again on the physicality of writing. He makes this physicality graphic by welding together three distinct spaces: the room, the space in which writing is enacted; the interior space where writing happens in the writer; and the space on the page the words occupy. In White Spaces, as later in Ghosts, Auster represents the physicality of writing by an equation of the room with the book: “I remain in the room in which I am writing this,” he says, as though he were occupying the “white spaces” of the page, the mind, and the room. Whichever way he turns in this symbolic architecture, the writer seems to find his physical body trapped: when he writes, it enters into the closed space of the book; when he gets up from the book, it paces the narrow confines of the room. This claustrophobic situation draws attention to what Antin might deplore as the marked leaning toward solipsism in Auster’s writing, a tendency that we will look at from different vantage points in later sections of this essay. At this point, however, it is important to note that the outside world does manage to break through the self-inscribed mental sphere of Auster’s characters, imposing actual consequences upon their ruminations and conjectures. In the passage above, he acknowledges at least the idea of interpenetration between the mental and the social worlds by locating, in the manner of Wallace Stevens or Marianne Moore, an “imaginary ocean, where each thought drowns in the relentless waves of the real.”

 

III.

 

Auster is not, of course, the first writer to figure the book as the allegorical scene of writing. In particular, two French poets who wrote extensively in prose, Stéphane Mallarmé and Edmond Jabès, have provided Auster with important examples. He has translated Mallarmé’s poetic fragments on the death of his young son, A Tomb for Anatole (1983) (some of which appears first in The Invention of Solitude), and Mallarmé’s notion of a grand Book that includes the entire world hovers in the background of Auster’s explorations of the scene of writing. But even more directly pertinent to Auster’s obsessions are those of Jabès, the Jewish Egyptian poet, whose remarkable seven volumes of meditative and oracular poet’s prose, The Book of Questions (1963-73), have had a shaping hand in Auster’s poetic narratives.³ Auster makes explicit the connection between Jabès and Mallarmé in an article he wrote originally in 1976 for The New York Review of Books, in which he links the Jewish themes of The Book of Questions to central issues animating modern French poetry:

 

Although Jabès's imagery and sources are for the most part derived from Judaism, The Book of Questions is not a Jewish work in the same way that one can speak of Paradise Lost as a Christian work. . . . The Book is his central image -- but it is not only the Book of the Jews (the spirals of commentary around commentary in the Midrash), but an allusion to Mallarmé's ideal Book as well (the Book that contains the world, endlessly folding in upon itself). Finally, Jabès's work must be considered as part of the on-going French poetic tradition that began in the late nineteenth century. (AH 113-14)

 

Although Jabès himself has no wish to deny his placement within French poetic tradition, he takes great pains, in a subsequent interview that Auster conducted with him, to differentiate his notion of the book from that of Mallarmé: “Mallarmé wanted to put all knowledge into a book. He wanted to make a great book, the book of books. But in my opinion this book would be very ephemeral, since knowledge itself is ephemeral. The book that would have a chance to survive, I think, is the book that destroys itself. That destroys itself in favor of another book that will prolong it” (AH 164). Jabès favors a midrashic approach to the book over an idealist one, a text composed of questions rather than answers, a book from which one can at least provisionally escape.⁴ Like midrashic commentary upon Scripture, Jabès’s Book of Questions proceeds by locating anomalies or paradoxes or gaps in understanding, using such questions to generate further writing — as if one first had to become lost in order to be found. Such characterizations of Jabès’s work may sound like re-statements of deconstructive truisms — and one should note the profound impact Jabès’s writing has had upon Derrida and other French theorists — but there is also a desire for truth and wholeness in Jabès’s work (regardless of the difficulty of articulating such things) that seems at odds with deconstruction as a movement, and this desire is something Auster unashamedly espouses as well. Jabès pursues a wholeness based in fragments, and he claims to maintain an awareness of the entire book at every moment of writing, so that the whole exerts an irresistible pressure that determines the composition of the book word-by-word:

 

When I say there are many books in the book, it is because there are many words in the word. Obviously, if you change the word, the context of the sentence changes completely. In this way another sentence is born from this word, and a completely different book begins . . . I think of this in terms of the sea, in the image of the sea as it breaks upon the shore. It is not the wave that comes, it is the whole sea that comes each time and the whole sea that draws back. It is never just a wave, it is always everything that comes and everything that goes. This is really the fundamental movement in all my books. Everything is connected to everything else. . . . At each moment, in the least question, it is the whole book which returns and the whole book which draws back. (AH 168)

 

His highly elaborated notion of the book as the central poetic principle of writing — as that which holds open the space of writing — allows Jabès to make a radical distinction between the novel and the (poetic) book. Although The Book of Questions has characters, dialogue, and an implicit story, and although it is classified on the jacket of the English version as “fiction,” Jabès vehemently rejects the storytelling function of the novel as undermining the writer’s fidelity to the book. For the book makes moment-to-moment demands that Jabès believes should supersede the commitment to telling a particular story. He complains,

 

The novelist's high-handed appropriation of the book has always been unbearable to me. What makes me uneasy is his pretense of making the space of the book the space of the story he tells -- making the subject of his novel the subject of the book. . . . Novelistic fiction, even when innovative, does not, from my point of view, take charge of the totality of [the risk involved in writing]. The book loses its autonomy. . . . A stranger to the book, its breath, its rhythm, the novelist imposes an exterior, exclusive speech: a life and a death, invented in the course of the story. For him the book is only a tool. At no moment does the novelist listen to the page, to its whiteness and silence (Jabès Desert 101).

 

As a poet in a textual age, Jabès locates the space of poetry within the book, which has a life of its own. Aided by the evidence that a vital Jewish imagination has been able to survive within the book for two millennia, he seeks to defend this space from incursions by those lesser poetic talents, the novelists, who impose the stories of particular characters over the mysterious imperatives of the book. In his own investigations of “the space of the book,” Auster takes seriously the challenge issued by Jabès, endeavoring to enter the room of the book by attending to its “whiteness and silence.” Like Jabès in The Book of Questions, Auster writes a prose animated by the poetic issues of investigating and responding to the “white spaces” of the book. Unlike Jabès, however, Auster also has a commitment to the novel, and a deep tension arises in his prose from a confrontation between narrative and the book. At the beginning of his published prose, with The Invention of Solitude and The New York Trilogy, Auster’s fidelity resides primarily with the book. This results in a flatness of characterization and in a dialogue that appears more like its surrounding descriptive prose than like the speech of discrete characters; likewise, the narrative of his early novels seems wholly governed by plot. Over the course of his four subsequent novels, In the Country of Last Things, Moon Palace, The Music of Chance, and Leviathan, Auster expands his ability to create realistic characters and begins to elaborate narratives that unfold beyond the exigencies of plot. Still, his characteristic explorations of the scene of writing take place within a palpable tension between novel and book.

 

Auster’s first book of prose, The Invention of Solitude, contains a Jabèsian text, “The Book of Memory,” in which he explores the space of writing through an obsessive attention to the book that nearly rivals the poetic fixation of Jabès. And yet Auster does not, like Jabès, wholly eschew narrative, for the “Book of Memory” brims with anecdotes and little stories; it is here that Auster begins to create a fiction of the book. In his article on Jabès, Auster gives a summary description of The Book of Questions that applies equally well to his own “Book of Memory:” “What happens in The Book of Questions, then, is the writing of The Book of Questions — or rather, the attempt to write it, a process that the reader is allowed to witness in all its gropings and hesitations” (AH 111). “The Book of Memory” begins with a literal enactment of “listen[ing] to the page, its whiteness and silence”: “He lays out a piece of blank paper on the table before him and writes these words with his pen. It was. It will never be again” (IS 75). Then, we continue to “witness in all its gropings and hesitations” the further attempts to write the book:

 

Later that same day he returns to his room. He finds a fresh sheet of paper and lays it out on the table before him. He writes until he has covered the entire page with words. Later, when he reads over what he has written, he has trouble deciphering the words. Those he does manage to understand do not seem to say what he thought he was saying. Then he goes out to eat his dinner.That night he tells himself that tomorrow is another day. New words begin to clamor in his head, but he does not write them down. He decides to refer to himself as A. He walks back and forth between the table and the window. He turns on the radio and then turns it off. He smokes a cigarette.

 

Then he writes. It was. It will never be again. (IS 75)

 

As in Ghosts, Auster creates a scene of writing that is both book and room, and for which the question of identity is inseparable from the writing of the book. “The Book of Memory” is an autobiography, in which the author “decides to refer to himself as A.” in order to create enough distance to be able to see himself. He places himself at a turning point — “It was. It will never be again.” — which allows him to investigate the present in terms of the past, utilizing memory as a kind of book that, in Jabès’s terms, “destroys itself in favor of another book that will prolong it” (AH 164): “The Book of Memory” destroys memory by making it into a book. Likewise, the present sense of self is an enclosure created anew over and over again by interrogating the past. In other words, the question that Blue asks in Ghosts, “How to get out of the room that is the book that will go on being written for as long as he stays in the room?” (NYT 201-2), animates “The Book of Memory” as well. The room and the book are thematized in many ways in “The Book of Memory:” A. describes the room in which he lives and writes (as well as a number of significant rooms in his past) in obsessive detail; as in the old art of memory, he portrays memory in architectural terms, comprised of rooms in which contiguous impressions are stored; in addition, A. explores the principles that determine such contiguity — chance, coincidence, free association.

 

Like Thoreau, whose Walden he plays with in Ghosts, Auster is fascinated by solitude; many of the images that recur throughout “The Book of Memory” evoke solitary enclosure, such as the references to Jonah in the whale, to Pinocchio in the shark, to Anne Frank in hiding, and to George Oppen’s phrase “the shipwreck of the singular.” Regardless of the imagery with which it is portrayed, enclosure within the room of writing invokes not just a sense of aloneness but an actual claustrophobia in Auster’s characters: “It is as if he were being forced to watch his own disappearance, as if, by crossing the threshold of this room, he were entering another dimension, taking up residence inside a black hole” (IS 77). Ultimately, what we have been considering as a poetic anxiety about the room of writing is revealed as a fear of death, a fear so acute that A. tries to evacuate his life out of the present in order to observe it safely, albeit in a disembodied fashion, from the future:

 

Christmas Eve, 1979. His life no longer seemed to dwell in the present. Whenever he turned on his radio and listened to the news of the world, he would find himself imagining the words to be describing things that had happened long ago. Even as he stood in the present, he felt himself to be looking at it from the future, and this present-as-past was so antiquated that even the horrors of the day, which ordinarily would have filled him with outrage, seemed remote to him, as if the voice in the radio were reading from a chronicle of some lost civilization. Later, in a time of greater clarity, he would refer to this sensation as "nostalgia for the present." (IS 76)

 

In this passage, Auster employs four different methods of displacing the present: by portraying A. as bouncing between the past and the future, hearing first a report of present events as though it were referring to the distant past, and next trying to imagine himself looking at the present from the future; then, in the last sentence, by having a narrator locate himself at a future point, “Later,” looking back upon A. in the “present” moment; and finally, by giving this alienated condition the label “nostalgia for the present,” which further congeals and reifies it. There is, of course, a long genealogy behind the enactment of extreme alienation in modern literature — especially, for this text of Auster’s, in Jewish writers: Kafka, Freud, Scholem, Benjamin, Celan, Jabès, Barthes, Anne Frank, George Oppen, Charles Reznikoff, Henry Roth, etc. But in “The Book of Memory” Auster deploys the effects of alienation in a particularly active way that he shares with a smaller circle of writers, like Samuel Beckett and the John Ashbery of Three Poems. These writers create what I have called elsewhere a translative prose, which is always engaged simultaneously in investigating identity and writing, bringing forth a tenuous fiction from the ever-new exigencies of the book.⁵ At one point in “The Book of Memory,” Auster invokes translation as an image for what occurs when one enters the room of the book:

 

For most of his adult life, he has earned his living by translating the books of other writers. He sits at his desk reading the book in French and then picks up his pen and writes the same book in English. It is both the same book and not the same book, and the strangeness of this activity has never failed to impress him. Every book is an image of solitude. . . . A. sits down in his own room to translate another man's book, and it is as though he were entering that man's solitude and making it his own. (IS 136)

 

In the act of translation, identity is both found and lost: rewriting the words of another writer is a profoundly intimate form of relationship, in which the translator finds identities melting, mingling, or repelling one another. The translator invades the solitude of the space of writing, and the intruder never knows whether he or she will leave that violated solitude with a sense of self fortified or weakened by the encounter. For Blue, in Ghosts, this penetration into another’s solitude results in a terrifying mise en abime: “Having penetrated Black’s room and stood there alone, having been, so to speak, in the sanctum of Black’s solitude, he cannot respond to the darkness of that moment except by replacing it with a solitude of his own” (NYT 226). Like the later fictional character Blue, “A. imagines himself as a kind of ghost of that other man, who is both there and not there, and whose book is both the same and not the same as the one he is translating” (IS 136).

 

Out of this meditation upon translation, though, A. achieves a realization that gives the ghostly existence of translation a new sort of life: “it dawns on him that everything he is trying to record in “The Book of Memory,” everything he has written so far, is no more than the translation of a moment or two of his life — those moments he lived through on Christmas Eve, 1979, in his room at 6 Varick Street” (IS 136). Translation not only renders the writer a ghost enclosed in the room that is the book; it is also a way out. For the moment that inaugurates “The Book of Memory” — the recognition that A.’s life and his writing have been on a collision course that has finally eventuated in their complete merging, a recognition provoked when he sits down at his desk and writes, “It was. It will never be again.” (IS 75) — also begins a translation of that moment out of itself. The only way to get out of the room that is the book is by writing the book, for writing translates the moment that inaugurates the book into an ongoing present that opens out of the memory of that moment. Auster makes explicit the notion of escape through the translation of memory by citing the example of Pascal’s “Memorial,” an ecstatic testimony that was sewn into the lining of the philosopher’s clothes as a constant reminder of his moment of mystical illumination, on the night of November 23, 1654 (137). The memory of such a moment illuminates the space of writing, so that as the writer dives into the memory he can see a way of moving beyond his solitude and out into the world and, ultimately, into history:

 

As he writes, he feels that he is moving inward (through himself) and at the same time moving outward (towards the world). What he experienced, perhaps, during those few moments on Christmas Eve, 1979, as he sat alone in his room on Varick Street, was this: the sudden knowledge that came over him that even alone, in the deepest solitude of his room, he was not alone, or, more precisely, that the moment he began to try to speak of that solitude, he had become more than just himself. Memory, therefore, not simply as the resurrection of one's private past, but an immersion in the past of others, which is to say: history -- which one both participates in and is a witness to, is a part of and apart from. (139)

 

The poet is trapped in narrative prose, the writer is trapped in the book, the “agent” is trapped in the room: can these figures use memory to come out into the world, into history? One way of looking at this conundrum would be to notice that for both Pascal and A., memory already includes simultaneously an inside and an outside: when Pascal writes his memory and then sews it into his clothing, he gives it a double exteriority, which matches the way that A. moves both inward and outward by writing about what he remembers of Christmas Eve, 1979. But thinking of memory in this way offers too easy a solution to Auster’s dilemma. We can complicate the notion of memory by seeing it not only as a matter of interiority and exteriority, but also as an interplay of remembering and forgetting. From the latter perspective, we will have to hold off deciding whether to accept Auster’s affirmation that memory leads out of the room and into history, until we have looked at what his text actively forgets.

 

IV.

 

In order to think about what is repressed in “The Book of Memory,” I would like to bring a second framework into play, which is that of the parthenogenic fantasy of masculine creativity embedded in the text. “The Book of Memory” is ostensibly a book of mourning, for A.’s father has just died and his grandfather dies during its composition. The previous half of The Invention of Solitude, “Portrait of an Invisible Man,” treats the death of Auster’s father and his subsequent discovery that his paternal grandfather was murdered by his grandmother. Throughout “The Book of Memory,” Auster reflects upon the relations of fathers and sons, brooding particularly on his feelings toward his own young son in the midst of his reflections upon the traumas and losses inscribed within the continuity of generations.⁶ The mood of the text is one of melancholy, veering between hopelessness, nostalgia, and obsessive self-regard, but its desperately sought goal seems to be the regeneration of a life through writing. In this context, the room of the book receives a different set of figurative equivalents from those found in Ghosts. In the latter, the room of the book is a place where Blue is trapped, and where he is forcibly initiated into the brotherhood of writers. In “The Book of Memory,” the room of the book is figured as a void, a place of nothingness or meaninglessness, a site for the confrontation with death. Auster makes explicit a metonymic chain of rhyming words that underlies this particular figuration of the room as scene of writing: “Room and tomb, tomb and womb, womb and room” (IS 159-60).

 

The implication of this chain of equivalents is that the room of the book is a place where death can be transformed into rebirth. But this can only happen, Auster asserts, if we take meaninglessness as a first principle. By meaninglessness, Auster has a specific denial in mind, that of the motivated connection between any two factors:

 

Like everyone else, he craves a meaning. Like everyone else, his life is so fragmented that each time he sees a connection between two fragments he is tempted to look for a meaning in that connection. The connection exists. But to give it a meaning, to look beyond the bare fact of its existence, would be to build an imaginary world inside the real world, and he knows it would not stand. At his bravest moments, he embraces meaninglessness as the first principle . . . . (147)

 

By enshrining meaninglessness as first principle, Auster seems to be striking a blow against the conventions of the novel, which rest upon the assumption that a meaningful connection between events can be constructed; without this assumption, the ideological work of the novel as creator of identity within a social world would collapse. Auster undermines the ideological basis of the novel by telling a series of stories in which coincidences and connections are never sufficient to ensure identity.

 

Auster asserts the “principle” of meaninglessness several times in “The Book of Memory,” particularly when discussing coincidence or chance. After telling a story about M., a friend who finds himself living in Paris in the exact same attic room where his father had hidden from the Nazis twenty years before, A. notes the further coincidence that he, too, lived in such a chambre de bonne and that it was where his own father had come to see him. These thoughts cause A. to “remember his father’s death. And beyond that, to understand — this most important of all — that M.’s story has no meaning” (81). In this passage, the principle of meaninglessness is associated directly with A.’s father’s death, and beyond that with the equation of the room of the book with the tomb. From this void, however, comes A.’s impulse to write, to make of his memorializing book a site of regeneration, to find himself anew within the act of mourning. Recognizing that M.’s story is meaningless, A. counters,

 

Nevertheless, this is where it begins. The first word appears only at a moment when nothing can be explained anymore, at some instant of experience that defies all sense. To be reduced to saying nothing. Or else, to say to himself: this is what haunts me. And then to realize, almost in the same breath, that this is what he haunts. (81)

But what does haunt Auster and his character in this experience of nothingness? He offers a clue to his haunting in the equations quoted earlier: “Room and tomb, tomb and womb, womb and room.” These equations take us beyond the ostensible subject of mourning into a repressed but highly significant motivation of the writing; to tie the room and the tomb with the feminine image of the womb brings in gender considerations to a narrative that is otherwise almost exclusively masculine. It seems to me that in this text terms like “nothingness” and “meaninglessness” are gendered feminine, and that based upon this equation women are rendered as void and men are imagined as self-generating. Having projected so many desires upon the notion of nothingness, it’s as though Auster then takes the Buddhist image of the “pregnant void” and splits it in half, assigning the void to women and pregnancy to men. In “The Book of Memory,” Auster attempts a kind of parthenogenesis, using the room as a womb to give birth to the book, without the intervention of the feminine. Let me offer some illustrations to make this assertion convincing.

 

In a discussion of Paris and of a composer he meets there, S., who becomes a father figure to him, A. gives a striking description of the room as a place at once claustrophobic (to the body) and infinitely generative (to the mind) — a masculine womb. He begins the description by noting, “These are his earliest memories of the city, where so much of his life would later be spent, and they are inescapably bound up with the idea of the room” (89). Having highlighted the room’s significance, A. goes on to describe first its claustrophobic quality: “S. lived in a space so small that at first it seemed to defy you, to resist being entered. The presence of one person crowded the room, two people choked it. It was impossible to move inside it without contracting your body to its smallest dimensions, without contracting your mind to some infinitely small point within itself.” Here, the claustrophobia seems to affect both the body and the mind, as though the room were attempting to squeeze both down to nothingness. For the mind, however, this extreme form of contraction results in its opposite, a sudden expansion, inaugurated by becoming aware of the contents of the room:

 

For there was an entire universe in that room, a miniature cosmology that contained all that is most vast, most distant, most unknowable. It was a shrine, hardly bigger than a body, in praise of all that exists beyond the body: the representation of one man's inner world, even to the slightest detail. S. had literally managed to surround himself with the things that were inside him. 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. This was the womb, the belly of the whale, the original site of the imagination. (89)

 

In this masculinist fantasy of self-generative creativity, the enwombing room is “like the skin of some second body around him,” capable of giving birth to the solitary artist’s works of art, without the intervention of woman, or even of the body. This is a kind of male “hysteria,” in which the wandering womb of the room takes on the generative qualities of the composer’s inner life.⁷ The most fully realized image of masculine birth in “The Book of Memory” is that of Pinocchio, who is sculpted into being by his father, and this image, as I shall later demonstrate, runs as a leitmotif throughout the text. Another major image of masculinist self-generation, Leibniz’s monadology, recurs at several points in the text and also partakes of the psychological disturbance of male birth. For instance, further on in the same meditation that produces the equation of room with tomb and womb, A. imagines that language is a kind of monadology, a matrix of rhyming words that “functions as a kind of bridge that joins opposite and contrasting aspects of the world with each other:”

 

Language, then, not simply as a list of separate things to be added up and whose sum total is equal to the world. Rather, language as it is laid out in the dictionary: an infinitely complex organism, all of whose elements -- cells and sinews, corpuscles and bones, digits and fluids -- are present in the world simultaneously, none of which can exist on its own. For each word is defined by other words, which means that to enter any part of language is to enter the whole of it. (160)

 

A. ascribes tremendous potency to language, imagining it as the matrix of being, as the genetic matter of the world. He sums up this apotheosis of language by invoking Leibniz: “Language, then, as monadology, to echo the term used by Leibniz” (160). The monadology is the interconnected network of the “monads” that compose the universe, each of which is affected by the motion of all the others. After a long quote from Leibniz, Auster concludes, “Playing with words in the way A. did as a schoolboy, then, was not so much a search for the truth as a search for the world as it appears in language. Language is not truth. It is the way we exist in the world” (161). This seemingly Heideggerean recognition, that language “is the way we exist in the world,” is given a particular twist, though, by A.’s fantasy that “language . . . is an infinitely complex organism” with “cells and sinews, corpuscles and bones, digits and fluids,” as though language were not just a mode of existence in the world but a replacement for life in the body; for, when “it is possible for events in one’s life to rhyme as well” (161), the monadology of language has taken over everything. At the end of this three-page meditation on the power of language, A. arrives at the mysterious recognition that, in fact, everything is beginning to rhyme for him:

 

What A. is struggling to express, perhaps, is that for some time now none of the terms has been missing for him. Wherever his eye or mind seems to stop, he discovers another connection, another bridge to carry him to yet another place, and even in the solitude of his room, the world has been rushing in on him at a dizzying speed, as if it were all suddenly converging in him and happening to him at once. Coincidence: to fall on with; to occupy the same place in time or space. The mind, therefore, as that which contains more than itself. As in the phrase from Augustine: "But where is the part of it which it does not itself contain?" (162)

 

To see interconnections can be a result of a visionary heightening of consciousness, or, with the sense that “the world has been rushing in on him at a dizzying speed,” it may well be that A. is experiencing a moment of sheer paranoia. If this is a moment of paranoia, it must have a causal connection to A.’s masculinist notion of self-generation, of mind outside body in a room. In fact, A.’s imagining of the human mind as the entire monadology goes far beyond Leibniz, whom Auster quotes as cautioning that “A soul, however, can read in itself only what is directly represented in it; it is unable to unfold all at once all its folds; for these go on into infinity” (161). In his more paranoid rendition of a monadology, A. has taken something like Robert Duncan’s poetic conceit about “the structure of rime” and inflated it into the fantasy of a wrinkle-free existence, in which all interconnections are apparent to the mind.⁸

 

The gender implications of this fantasy of disembodiment are most disturbingly represented in an earlier scene in the text, in which A., “for no particular reason,” wanders into a topless bar in Manhattan. In a completely detached tone of voice, Auster describes how A. “found himself sitting next to a voluptuously naked young woman,” who invites him into the back room. “There was something so openly humorous and matter-of-fact about her approach, that he finally agreed to her proposition. The best thing, they decided, would be for her to suck his penis, since she claimed an extraordinary talent for this activity.” At the moment of ejaculation, the Leibnizean monad is revealed as an image of masculine parthenogenesis:

 

As he came in her mouth a few moments later, with a long and throbbing flood of semen, he had this vision, at just that second, which has continued to radiate inside him: that each ejaculation contains several billion sperm cells -- or roughly the same number as there are people in the world -- which means that, in himself, each man holds the potential of an entire world. And what would happen, could it happen, is the full range of possibilities: a spawn of idiots and geniuses, of the beautiful and the deformed, of saints, catatonics, thieves, stock brokers, and high-wire artists. Each man, therefore, is the entire world, bearing within his genes a memory of all mankind. Or, as Leibniz put it: "Every living substance is a perpetual living mirror of the universe." For the fact is, we are of the same stuff that came into being with the first explosion of the first spark in the infinite emptiness of space. Or so he said to himself, at that moment, as his penis exploded into the mouth of that naked woman, whose name he has now forgotten. (114)

 

In this passage the conjunction of woman as nothingness with masculine parthenogenesis is made explicit. The sexual function of the woman is located in the mouth, not in the womb, and absolutely no connection, aside from mechanical friction, is made between the woman and the man. Not only is the woman nameless, but her name is actively erased by A.’s seemingly unnecessary final qualification: “that naked woman, whose name he has now forgotten.” There is a barb in that statement, which we will have to look at momentarily. In the meantime, note the careful working out of a parthenogenic procreation: the emotionless ejaculation is converted into a purely mental reverie — as though the phallus were the mind, capable of generating the entire world by its explosive satisfaction. The woman’s role in this fantasy of masculine self-generation is “effaced” (that is, she is rendered faceless), and as recipient of the exploding penis she becomes mute.

 

A few pages further on in “The Book of Memory,” A. makes a seemingly technical reference to “Solitude,” a song recorded by Billie Holiday (whose heart-wrenching vocal style registers unforgettably the effects of masculine aggression). Following the technical reference, A. notices that the mention of Billie Holiday and an immediately prior description of Emily Dickinson’s room (“it was the room that was present in the poems and not the reverse” [123]) constitute “First allusions to a woman’s voice. To be followed by specific reference to several” (123). But he does not deliver on this promise. Instead, he launches into an odd speculation: “For it is his belief that if there is a voice of truth — assuming there is such a thing as truth, and assuming this truth can speak — it comes from the mouth of a woman” (123). This conjectured truth never arrives in the text, where, ironically, the only thing that “comes from the mouth of a woman” is A.’s penis. It’s as though Billie Holiday and Emily Dickinson are invoked only to be silenced. The question arises, then, why this desire to erase the woman’s voice?

 

A clue to answering this question appears in a passage describing A.’s relationship to the one other character in “The Book of Memory” who is denied a name — also a woman. A. is telling a story about his two-year-old son’s sudden illness and resultant stay in the hospital. The fearful parents spend every waking hour with him:

 

His wife, however, began to show the strain. At one point she walked out to A., who was in the adult sitting room, and said, "I give up, I can't handle him anymore" -- and there was such resentment in her voice against the boy, such an anger of exasperation, that something inside A. fell to pieces. Stupidly, cruelly, he wanted to punish his wife for such selfishness, and in that one instant all the newly won harmony that had been growing between them for the past month vanished: for the first time in all their years together, he had turned against her. He stormed out of the room and went to his son's bedside. (108)

 

The woman-without-a-name in “The Book of Memory” is A.’s wife. In the passage above, his repressed anger begins to leak out. Her statement, “I give up, I can’t handle him anymore,” is something one expects to hear from the mother of a two-year-old at least daily. But its effect upon A., who has transferred the force of his anger at his wife to an excessive doting upon his son (which appears in many passages of “The Book of Memory”), is to break through the shell of his repression. Rather than commiserate with her, “A. fell to pieces,” that is, he became angry: “stupidly, cruelly, he wanted to punish his wife for such selfishness.” What is “stupid” and “cruel” in the context of a marriage, though, is not the anger itself but the reported repression of it for so many years: “for the first time in all their years together, he had turned against her.” If these two characters have suppressed conflict for so many years, it’s no wonder that their marriage is falling apart and that A.’s anger toward women has reached a bizarre climax in his attempt to exclude them completely from the room of the book. The parthenogenic fantasy running through “The Book of Memory” and the masculine genealogy of fathers and sons that Auster constructs in the entire Invention of Solitude must arise, at least in part, from the unacceptably explosive potential that resides in a bottled-up anger toward women. One important facet of this psychic economy is A.’s transforming his anger and sense of betrayal into a smothering identification with his son: in the passage quoted above, for instance, A. “stormed out of the room and went to his son’s bedside,” shifting his affection and allegiance from wife to son. In his identification with the son, Auster writes the mother out of the family romance; he effects this erasure by portraying A.’s wife as her son’s betrayer and by shifting the focus of the divorce drama onto the relationship of the parents to the son.

 

If this is a book of mourning, a book of confrontation with death, then the fatality that looms largest within it but is given least expression is the death of a marriage. At one “ghostly” level, this is a book of divorce, a book of memory born from the almost total suppression of the memories of a marriage. A. allows his nameless wife very few appearances, and in none of them does she represent any of the positive creative qualities of regeneration that A. so desperately seeks. For instance, he figures their marriage as hopelessly unproductive from its outset: “He remembers returning home from his wedding party in 1974, his wife beside him in her white dress, and taking the front door key out of his pocket, inserting the key in the lock, and then, as he turned his wrist, feeling the blade of the key snap off inside the lock” (145). Rather than explore the interior landscape of his marriage in order to understand how what we might interpret as a symbolic castration took place, A. retreats to a room and writes a book of self-regeneration, in which he invents a masculine genealogy of creativity that will substitute for his father’s emotional distance and will also mourn the father’s recent death. From the perspective of this fundamental inability to confront the breakdown of his marriage and his feelings about women, it’s the connection between death and divorce that makes the most striking “coincidence” in the book: “Two months after his father’s death (January 1979), A.’s marriage collapsed” (101). In his desperate attempt to deny the true consequences of his divorce — the collapse of his ability to relate to women in a mutually beneficial manner — A. turns, as we have noted, to his son: “it was quite another thing for him to swallow the consequences it entailed: to be separated from his son. The thought of it was intolerable to him” (101).

 

V.

 

Within the masculine genealogy of this text, all of A.’s hopes for regeneration are transferred to his son. His feelings toward his son are not just those of the understandably protective father in such potentially damaging circumstances, but they also partake of a messianic desire for deliverance that the son is imagined as fulfilling. Throughout The Invention of Solitude Auster cultivates a fantasy, most fully represented by the Pinocchio story, that the son will rescue the father.⁹ Like Gepetto, A. as father hides in the room of the book, creating his own son parthenogenically as his savior. Given the depiction in “Portrait of an Invisible Man,” the first half of The Invention of Solitude, of Auster’s own desperately wounded father (who witnessed his father’s murder at the hands of his mother), the provenance of this desire for the son to rescue the father is painfully apparent as a patrimony Auster inherits. This desire is not, however, only a feature of Auster’s psychological makeup, a response to his father’s maddening emotional distance; it also corresponds to the desire to rescue their parents experienced by children of Holocaust victims and survivors. The connection between Auster’s personal history and a post-Holocaust sensibility runs throughout “The Book of Memory.” Of all the scenes of hiding in a room rehearsed in the text, the most central thematically is that of Anne Frank, writing her own identity in a book while hiding from the Nazis. To consider further the relationship of a masculine redemptive genealogy to hiding within the room of the book, we must begin investigating the third framework, which is the post-Holocaust imagery pervading “The Book of Memory.”

 

I say “post-Holocaust” because, although he includes a number of scenes from the Holocaust itself, Auster is a Jewish writer born after the war, and so what’s pertinent, both in his recounting of Holocaust material and throughout the text, is the way his imagination has been infected by the Holocaust. Although his secularity and his close reliance upon Protestant American writers like Poe, Hawthorne, Thoreau, and Melville may inadvertently hide the pervasiveness of the Jewish context for his writing, Auster provides a significant gauge of this context in his essays, collected in The Art of Hunger. Of the nineteen essays, eleven discuss secular Jewish writers, all of whom have had telling influences upon Auster’s writing: Laura Riding (2), Franz Kafka (2), Louis Wolfson, Charles Reznikoff, Paul Celan, Edmond Jabès (2), George Oppen, and Carl Rakosi. For Jews like Auster, born after World War II, two paramount realities demand attention: the Holocaust and the State of Israel. Auster makes mention of Israel in “The Book of Questions” only by reproducing an encyclopedia entry about a relative, Daniel Auster, who became the first mayor of Jerusalem after independence (85). Daniel is also the name of A.’s son (who is the only character given a full name in the text), so that this coincidence ties his Israeli relative into the genealogy A. is constructing. The invocation of Israel takes place, significantly enough, within the context of an extended meditation upon and identification with Anne Frank. During this meditation, Auster identifies Anne Frank’s room directly with the room of the book, setting forth the post-Holocaust thematics of his text.

 

On a short trip to Amsterdam, ostensibly to look at art, A. finds himself confronted by the traces of Anne Frank. As in his entry into the topless bar, A. goes to Anne Frank’s house “for no particular reason.” By this point in the narrative, it is clear that this phrase indicates not chance but overdetermined motives:

 

For no particular reason (idly looking through a guide book he found in his hotel room) he decided to go to Anne Frank's house, which has been preserved as a museum. It was a Sunday morning, gray with rain, and the streets along the canal were deserted. He climbed the steep and narrow staircase inside the house and entered the secret annex. As he stood in Anne Frank's room, the room in which the diary was written, now bare, with the faded pictures of Hollywood movie stars she had collected still pasted to the walls, he suddenly found himself crying. Not sobbing, as might happen in response to deep inner pain, but crying without sound, the tears streaming down his cheeks, as if purely in response to the world. It was at that moment, he later realized, that the Book of Memory began. As in the phrase: "she wrote her diary in this room." (82-3)

 

Anne Frank’s room of the book, in which she wrote her diary, supplies an originary moment for “The Book of Memory.” Entering this room, A. experiences not just a psychological but an ontological pain, as if the condition of hiding imposed upon Anne Frank by the threat of the Holocaust had now become the condition of being in the world. Two paragraphs later, A. imagines this claustrophobic ontology as “a solitude so crushing, so unconsolable, that one stops breathing for hundreds of years” (83) — as though every post-Holocaust experience of solitude, every self-encounter, were haunted by Anne Frank’s absolute isolation. Looking out her window at children’s toys in a yard, A. wonders “what it would be like to grow up in the shadow of Anne Frank’s room” (83), in the shadow of that breath-stopping solitude. In a figurative sense, all Jews after the war grow up within this shadow. Whenever Auster enters the room of the book, he seems to find it enveloped by this shadow, as if his writing were a repetition-compulsion brought about by the trauma of the Holocaust. In an ironic juxtaposition, A. quotes a famous saying of Pascal, “All the unhappiness of man stems from one thing only: that he is incapable of staying quietly in his room” (83), as though Anne Frank’s life in the room of the book were a reproach to the monastic psychology of hiding and self-incarceration as a freely chosen way of life. Growing up figuratively in the shadow of Anne Frank’s room, A. feels trapped inside the room of the book; he chooses not his location but his identification with Anne Frank as writer, as though his overwhelming task of mourning were given concretion and containment by her room and her book.

 

Not only does A. identify himself with Anne Frank, but he also notes that “Anne Frank’s birthday is the same as his son’s” (83), thus placing her into the genealogical chain of fathers and children, rather than opening up for her occupation the closed space of the feminine. Following this recognition of a kind of post-Holocaust kinship between Anne Frank and himself, A. quotes from an extraordinary document of familial trauma: “Israel Lichtenstein’s Last Testament. Warsaw; July 31, 1942,” in which one of the resistance fighters of the Warsaw Ghetto, knowing he is about to die, asks not “for gratitude, any monument, any praise. I want only a remembrance” (84). Lichtenstein asks for remembrance of himself, of his wife, and especially of his preternaturally gifted daughter: “Margalit, 20 months old today. Has mastered Yiddish perfectly, speaks a pure Yiddish. . . . In intelligence she is on a par with 3- or 4-year old children. I don’t want to brag about her. . . . I am not sorry about my life and that of my wife. But I am sorry for the gifted little girl. She deserves to be remembered also” (84). Traumas of this magnitude — involving the obliteration of individuals, of communities, and, most poignantly for A., of marvelous children — are suffered not only by those who experience them; they are passed on to future generations as unfinished projects of mourning. At the family level (in traumas such as Auster’s father’s witnessing of his father’s murder) and at the societal level (in traumas such as the Holocaust or American slavery), unbearable memories are braided within the continuity of generations, so that the trauma maintains a virulent force, which has the ability to yank a member of a succeeding generation out of the present and into its secret room. When A. imagines the continuity of generations, he cannot call up a biblical plenitude within which to reside; instead, the trauma displaces him into a realm of isolation, in which the generations are squeezed into an individual body — itself incapable of inhabiting the present:

 

When the father dies, he writes, the son becomes his own father and his own son. He looks at his son and sees himself in the face of the boy. He imagines what the boy sees when he looks at him and finds himself becoming his own father. Inexplicably, he is moved by this. It is not just the sight of the boy that moves him, nor even the thought of standing inside his father, but what he sees in the boy of his own vanished past. It is a nostalgia for his own life that he feels . . . . Inexplicably, he finds himself shaking at that moment with both happiness and sorrow, if this is possible, as if he were going both forward and backward, into the future and into the past. And there are times, often there are times, when these feelings are so strong that his life no longer seems to dwell in the present. (81-2)

 

When he is transported out of the present by trauma, A. lives in a genealogical world in which time is speeded up and fathers and children subsume one another: “Each time he saw a child, he would try to imagine what it would look like as a grown-up. Each time he saw an old person, he would try to imagine what that person had looked like as a child” (87). This Blakean vision of the “mental traveller,” whose “life no longer seems to dwell in the present,” takes on a possibly misogynist twist when A. gazes at women:

 

It was worst with women, especially if the woman was young and beautiful. He could not help looking through the skin of her face and imagining the anonymous skull behind it. And the more lovely the face, the more ardent his attempt to seek in it the encroaching signs of the future: incipient wrinkles, the later-to-be-sagging chin, the glaze of disappointment in the eyes. He would put one face on top of another: this woman at forty; this woman at sixty; this woman at eighty; as if, even as he stood in the present, he felt compelled to hunt out the future, to track down the death that lives in each one of us. (87)

 

The post-Holocaust haunting by death dovetails with A.’s inability to imagine regeneration through the feminine, such that fertility and fecundity are replaced by dissolution and decay. A. ends this passage with a dispiriting quotation from Flaubert: “The sight of a naked woman makes me imagine her skeleton” (87).

 

Casting aside the feminine as a source of regeneration, A. turns to the hope that the son can rescue the father. When the father has suffered an unbearable trauma, it is natural for the son to entertain the fantasy of rescuing the father. An impulse of this sort must be at work, for instance, in Maus, Art Spiegelman’s remarkable Holocaust narrative. By foregrounding his difficult relationship with his father during his telling of the father’s tale of survival, Spiegelman subtly inscribes the son’s desire to rescue the father into the narrative. In “Portrait of an Invisible Man,” Auster presents himself as trapped within trauma, incapable both of rescuing his father and of mourning him satisfactorily, for complete mourning would require exorcising the trauma, and this he is unable to do: “There has been a wound, and I realize now that it is very deep. Instead of healing me as I thought it would, the act of writing has kept this wound open. At times I have even felt the pain of it concentrated in my right hand, as if each time I picked up the pen and pressed it against the page, my hand were being torn apart. Instead of burying my father for me, these words have kept him alive, perhaps more so than ever” (32).

 

To attempt the rescue of his unburied father, A. goes into the room of the book and begins to write, seeking through writing to find his way back to the present: “The world has shrunk to the size of this room for him, and for as long as it takes him to understand it, he must stay where he is. Only one thing is certain: he cannot be anywhere until he is here. And if he does not manage to find this place, it would be absurd for him to think of looking for another” (79). It sounds as though A. is setting himself a phenomenological project of learning to inhabit the room, as in the saying by Heidegger, “But we do not want to get anywhere. We would like only, for once, to get just where we are already” (Heidegger 190). But instead of proceeding to register his sense of location in phenomenological terms, A. turns figurative immediately and begins to remember stories: “Life inside the whale. A gloss on Jonah, and what it means to refuse to speak. Parallel text: Gepetto in the belly of the shark (whale in the Disney version), and the story of how Pinocchio rescues him. Is it true that one must dive to the depths of the sea and save one’s father to become a real boy?” (79). Through the intertwined stories of Jonah and Pinocchio A. tries to understand what it means to live in the room of the book and how such dwelling might result in a rescue of the father. Thinking about Jonah’s residence inside the whale, A. notes that the whale “is by no means an agent of destruction. The fish is what saves him from drowning in the sea” (125). Such confinement represents incarceration as salvation, a kind of symbolic death that is “a preparation for new life, a life that has passed through death, and therefore a life that can at last speak” (125).

 

The room of the book is an alchemical site, in which Auster hopes to make death speak life through the regeneration of the father by the son. In “The Book of Memory,” this alchemy makes its fullest appearance when A. meditates upon Pinocchio as he reads the story to his young son. Noting how “the little boy never tired of hearing the chapter about the storm at sea, which tells of how Pinocchio finds Gepetto in the belly of the Terrible Shark” (130), A. quotes Pinocchio’s charged exclamation, “Oh, Father, dear Father! Have I found you at last? Now I shall never, never leave you again!” (131). On one level, this exclamation gives direct expression to the feelings of these particular readers: “For A. and his son, so often separated from each other during the past year, there was something deeply satisfying in this passage of reunion” (131). On another level, this exclamation reiterates A.’s desire to recover his own father and, beyond that, to recover a patrilineal power from the dead that will enable him to speak. In his own life, as in the story of Pinocchio, the reunion with the father has become essential for the son’s regeneration: as A. notes, the bulk of Pinocchio “tells the story of Pinocchio’s search for his father — and Gepetto’s search for his son. At some point, Pinocchio realizes that he wants to become a real boy. But it also becomes clear that this will not happen until he is reunited with his father” (132).

 

When this reunion happens, however, the story is far from over. For regeneration to take place, for Pinocchio to become a “real boy,” for A. to redeem his traumatized father, the boy must emerge from the belly of the shark with his father upon his back. The parthenogenically created boy must give birth to himself out of the womb/tomb. This image resides at the core of Auster’s fantasy of regeneration through the room of the book, and he has A. meditate upon it intensively:

 

The father on the son's back: the image evoked here is so clearly that of Aeneas bearing Anchises on his back from the ruins of Troy that each time A. reads the story aloud to his son, he cannot help seeing . . . certain clusters of other images, spinning outward from the core of his preoccupations: Cassandra, for example, predicting the ruin of Troy, and thereafter loss, as in the wanderings of Aeneas that precede the founding of Rome, and in that wandering the image of another wandering: the Jews in the desert, which, in its turn, yields further clusters of images: "Next year in Jerusalem," and with it the photograph in the Jewish Encyclopedia of his relative, who bore the name of his son. (133)

 

In this swirling series of associations, the Greco-Roman “master”-civilization is brought into conjunction with the “wandering” Jewish culture and with A.’s own family. Here, the Jewish son carries his tradition upon his back, redeeming “Hebraism” in the face “Hellenism.” The story of Pinocchio is so seductive for A. because of the redemption of the fathers (and, proleptically, of the son) that it promises.

 

For A.’s son, who spends an entire summer dressed as Superman, this fantasy of omnipotence and salvation is as irresistible as it is for his father:

 

And for the little boy to see Pinocchio, that same foolish puppet who has stumbled his way from one misfortune to the next, who has wanted to be "good" and could not help being "bad," for this same incompetent little marionette, who is not even a real boy, to become a figure of redemption, the very being who saves his father from the grip of death, is a sublime moment of revelation. The son saves the father. This must be fully imagined from the perspective of the little boy. And this, in the mind of the father who was once a little boy, a son, that is, to his own father, must be fully imagined. Puer aeternus. The son saves the father. (134)

 

Through the regenerative figure of the Puer aeternus, the son gives birth to the father — and thus to himself as “a real boy.” This represents the son’s wish-fulfillment of the overcoming of the father’s trauma, as well as the post-War Jew’s fantasy of saving the victims of the Holocaust. Through the agency of the “incompetent little marionette,” a mere simulacrum of a boy, the world of the fathers is to be redeemed. At the same time, however, A. as father remains only too aware of his own son’s vulnerability. In a meditation upon sons who die before their fathers, A. muses upon an imaginary stack of photographs: “Mallarmé’s son, Anatole; Anne Frank (‘This is a photo that shows me as I should always like to look. Then I would surely have a chance to go to Hollywood. But now, unfortunately, I usually look different’). . . . The dead children. The children who will vanish, the children who are dead. Himmler: ‘I have made the decision to annihilate every Jewish child from the face of the earth'” (97-8). These are the children whose fathers were unable to rescue them; their fate is encompassed by Himmler’s chilling anti-redemptive vow: for if there are no children, then there is no one to rescue and no one to do the rescuing.

 

VI.

 

It is time to return for a final look at the central question of this essay: what happens, then, inside the room of the book? Answer: a Book of Memory is being written. By engaging in such writing, Auster follows a central command reiterated throughout the Jewish scriptures: Remember! The Jewish historian, Y. H. Yerushalmi, notes that “the verb zakhar [to remember] appears in its various declensions in the Bible no less than one hundred and sixty-nine times, usually with Israel or God as the subject, for memory is incumbent upon both” (Yerushalmi 5). Remembering is a central activity of Jewish culture, a form of commemoration that takes the place of priestly rituals, sanctifying the present through linking it to the past. In the Passover seder, for instance, the celebrants are enjoined to place themselves directly into the biblical scenes of deliverance, in order to understand that they are celebrating not something done by God for their ancestors but something done for themselves. As A. writes himself deeper and deeper into the room of the book, his relationship to memory undergoes a change: memory, when made active, need not be only a means of hiding from the present by residing in the past; instead, it can be a way of allowing the past, with all its traumas, to inform a more fully lived in present. “As he writes, he feels that he is moving inward (through himself) and at the same time moving outward (towards the world)” (139).

 

By claiming that writing effects a dual movement — both inward and outward — A. posits a way for memory to lead him at least partially outside his confinement in the room of the book. To the extent that the memory of trauma can function as restorative — as, in Kabbalistic terms, tikkun (a mending of the broken vessels of creation) — there is an opportunity for the writing that occurs in the room of the book to re-imagine not only individual experience but also history. From this perspective, A. begins to realize that his initial entry into the room of the book (“He lays out a piece of blank paper on the table before him and writes these words with his pen. It was. It will never be again” [75].) contained a far greater potential than he was aware of at the time:

 

What he experienced, perhaps, during those few moments on Christmas Eve, 1979, as he sat alone in his room on Varick Street, was this: the sudden knowledge that came over him that even alone, in the deepest solitude of his room, he was not alone, or, more precisely, that the moment he began to try to speak of that solitude, he had become more than just himself. Memory, therefore, not simply as the resurrection of one's private past, but an immersion in the past of others, which is to say: history -- which one both participates in and is a witness to, is a part of and apart from. . . . If there is any reason for him to be in this room now, it is because there is something inside him hungering to see it all at once, to savor the chaos of it in all its raw and urgent simultaneity. (139)

 

A. believes that memory will never “make sense” of the past, but that it is instead a necessary form of vision that keeps the past alive in the present. When he is inhabiting the room of the book in this way, A. seems to be writing as though his very life depended upon it, for the traumatic world of the fathers represents a burden this latter-day Pinocchio must carry in order to become “a real boy.”

 

As a post-Holocaust narrative, The Invention of Solitude takes the memory of trauma as the groundless ground from which writing and life begin. The past cannot be possessed or made whole, but trauma and memory can become generative forces. Thinking about Jabès’s poetry as a response to the Holocaust, Auster speaks of the writer’s duties with regard to such memories: “What he must do, in effect, is create a poetics of absence. The dead cannot be brought back to life. But they can be heard, and their voices live in the Book” (AH 114). When the survivors emerged from the camps after World War II, their nearly uniform reaction to the Holocaust was expressed in two words: “Never again!” This meant, we must remember so that the moral revulsion created by these memories will prevent such situations from ever recurring. The last line of “The Book of Memory” seems to allude to this resolution: “It was. It will never be again. Remember” (172). These words bring “The Book of Memory” full circle, repeating the inaugural statements of the book and adding to them the command, “Remember.” Can this injunction to remember trauma create the conditions for understanding history? In his famous image of the Angel in the “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” Walter Benjamin gives us a figure for history who stands open-mouthed at the traumatic wreckage of history piling up at his feet without cessation (Benjamin 259). This gesture bears a family resemblance to the “crying without sound” that overcomes A. in Anne Frank’s room, a reaction that arises not only “in response to deep inner pain,” but also “purely in response to the world. It was at that moment, he later realized, that the Book of Memory began” (82-3).

 

As a writer, Auster has made use of the room of the book as a way to interrogate the relationship of writing to history, through an invocation of memory. With respect to “The Book of Memory,” the question that needs asking is whether memory makes it possible for Auster to witness the world in such a way that he succeeds in releasing himself from the confining quality of the room of the book. On balance, I think we would have to answer that question in the negative, particularly in light of his refusal to remember the issue of divorce and of his unacknowledged anger toward women. But I would like to applaud the seriousness of Auster’s attempt to place issues of writing at the center of issues of living. Confronting head-on the situation of “a man sitting alone in a room and writing a book” (NYT 202), Auster makes of that situation an incredibly rich field of meditation, in which profound intellectual, historical, and personal issues arise and ask to be heard. As we have seen, Auster’s room of the book houses a fascinating struggle between the absolutizing qualities of poetry and the narrative investment in fictional characters; it functions for the male writer both as a site of retreat from engagement with women and as an alchemical retort in which a parthenogenic theory of creativity can be proposed; and it becomes a space of hiding and torment, in which the irresolvable problems of writing with reference to the Holocaust can be embodied. Within the room of the book, Auster stages with compelling expertise central dilemmas of the writer, dilemmas that will not go away. To Blue’s question, “How to get out of the room that is the book that will go on being written for as long as he stays in the room?” (NYT 202), the only decisive answer would be to walk out of the room that is the book. But for the writer, infinitely vulnerable to accusations of not living up to the moral claims enunciated in the writing, to walk out of the room of the book would be impossible: it would mean to stop writing.¹⁰

 

Notes

 

1. In “Paul Auster, or the Heir Intestate,” an excellent short essay on The Invention of Solitude, Pascal Bruckner also makes a strong case for the centrality of this book in Auster’s oeuvre.

 

2. For a definition of poet’s prose, see Fredman xiii, 1-2.

 

3. On the back cover of From the Book to the Book: An Edmond Jabès Reader, Auster writes: “I first read The Book of Questions twenty years ago, and my life was permanently changed. I can no longer think about the possibilities of literature without thinking of the example of Edmond Jabès. He is one of the great spirits of our time, a torch in the darkness.”

 

See Finkelstein for a short consideration of Auster’s relationship to Jabès (48-9); for more extended discussions of Jewish elements in Auster’s work, see Finkelstein (48-53) and Rubin (60-70).

 

4. When Jabès speaks of a “book that would have a chance to survive,” he means also a book whose reader would have a chance of surviving it. See Marc-Alain Ouaknin’s The Burnt Book for a fascinating meditation, via Jabès and Levinas, on the creative necessity of an escape from the book.

 

5. Perloff argues strongly for the contribution of Beckett to contemporary poet’s prose. There is a discussion of Ashbery’s “translative prose” in Fredman, 101-35.

 

6. For a useful application of notions of genealogy to Auster’s Moon Palace, see Weisenburg.

 

7. In many ways, Auster’s fantasy of masculine self-generation is similar to Melville’s in Moby-Dick — an analogy quite appropriate in light of A.’s characterization of S.’s room as “the womb, the belly of the whale.” In Chapter 95 of Moby-Dick (350-51), a character also wears “the skin of some second body around him,” namely the “pelt,” or outer covering, of the whale’s penis. Having skinned and dried it, the “mincer” wears the sheath to protect himself from boiling blubber. Melville presents this investiture as a form of primitive phallus-worship (and then, as he does so often in Moby-Dick, compares jeeringly the “primitive” with the Christian: “what a candidate for an archbishoprick, what a lad for a Pope were this mincer!” [351]); but interestingly, by turning the phallus into a sheath, the mincer has, in effect, invaginated it.

 

8. “The Structure of Rime,” one of Duncan’s two open-ended poetic sequences, first appears in The Opening of the Field. Although Duncan calls the Structure of Rime “an absolute scale of resemblance and disresemblance [that] establishes measures that are music in the actual world” (13), he does not allow the mind to imagine itself as privy to this “absolute scale.” He ascribes this knowledge, instead, to a feminine presence, whom he designates in “Often I Am Permitted to Return to a Meadow” as the “Queen Under the Hill / whose hosts are a disturbance of words within words / that is a field folded” (7). As in Leibniz, interconnectedness remains for Duncan “folded within all thought” (7).

 

9. It is interesting to note how Auster, in crafting a Jewish interpretation of the Pinocchio story, makes nothing of the puppet’s embarrassingly prominent nose. See Gilman, especially Chapter 7, “The Jewish Nose,” for reflections on the stigma of the nose and the history of the “nose job.”

 

10. Auster was recently given the opportunity to walk out of the room and yet continue writing. In the midst of shooting a film, Smoke, for which Auster wrote the screenplay, the director, Wayne Wang, Auster, and one of the actors, Harvey Keitel, were having so much fun they decided to improvise another film. Auster outlined the screenplay on the fly and even directed Blue in the Face for two days when Wang took sick. After describing the joys of working with actors like Keitel, Michael J. Fox, Roseanne, Lou Reed, Jim Jarmusch, Lily Tomlin, and Madonna, Auster was asked by a journalist if he plans to direct or write screenplays again. He answered in the negative, but noted a signal benefit from the endeavor: “It was a great experience, it got me out of my room” (Chanko 15).

 

Works Cited

 

• Antin, David. Talking at the Boundaries. New York: New Directions, 1976.
• Auster, Paul. The Art of Hunger. New York: Penguin, 1993. Abbreviated AH.
• —. Disappearances: Selected Poems. Woodstock, NY: Overlook Press, 1988. Abbreviated D.
• —. The Invention of Solitude. 1982. New York: Penguin, 1988. Abbreviated IS.
• —. The New York Trilogy. 1985, 1986, 1986. New York: Penguin, 1990. Abbreviated NYT.
• —, ed. The Random House Book of Twentieth-Century French Poetry. New York: Random, 1982.
• Barone, Dennis, ed. Beyond the Red Notebook: Essays on Paul Auster. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 1995.
• Bruckner, Pascal. “Paul Auster, or the Heir Intestate.” Barone 27-33.
• Benjamin, Walter. Illuminations. Trans. Harry Zohn. New York: Harcourt, 1968.
• Chanko, Kenneth. “‘Smoke’ Gets in Their Eyes.” Entertainment Weekly 281/282 (June 30/July 7, 1995): 14-15.
• Duncan, Robert. The Opening of the Field. New York: Grove, 1960.
• Finkelstein, Norman. “In the Realm of the Naked Eye: The Poetry of Paul Auster.” Barone 44-59.
• Fredman, Stephen. Poet’s Prose: The Crisis in American Verse. 2nd. ed. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1990.
• Gilman, Sander. The Jew’s Body. New York: Routledge, 1991.
• Heidegger, Martin. Poetry, Language, Thought. Trans. Albert Hostadter. New York: Harper, 1971.
• Jabès, Edmond. From the Book to the Book: An Edmond Jabès Reader. Trans. Rosmarie Waldrop. Hanover, NH: Wesleyan UP, 1991.
• —. From the Desert to the Book: Dialogues with Marcel Cohen. Trans. Pierre Joris. Barrytown, NY: Station Hill, 1990.
• Melville, Herman. Moby-Dick. Norton Critical Edition. Ed. Harrison Hayford and Hershel Parker. New York: Norton, 1967.
• Oppen, George. “Of Being Numerous.” Collected Poems. New York: New Directions, 1975. 147-179.
• Ouaknin, Marc-Alain. The Burnt Book: Reading the Talmud. 1986. Trans. Llewellyn Brown. Princeton: Princeton U P, 1995.
• Perloff, Marjorie. “Between Verse and Prose: Beckett and the New Poetry.” The Dance of the Intellect: Studies in the Poetry of the Pound Tradition. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1985. 135-54.
• Rubin, Derek. “‘The Hunger Must Be Preserved at All Cost’: A Reading of The Invention of Solitude.” Barone 60-70.
• Spiegelman, Art. Maus: A Survivor’s Tale I and II. New York: Random, 1986, 1991.
• Weisenburg, Steven. “Inside Moon Palace.” Barone 130-42.
• Yerushalmi, Yosef Hayim. Zakhor: Jewish History and Jewish Memory. 1982. New York: Schocken, 1989.