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

AoH

The Art of Hunger

BF

The Brooklyn Follies

BoM

The Book of Memory

ICLT

In the Country of Last Things

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

MoC

The Music of Chance

MP

Moon Palace

MrV

Mr. Vertigo

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

ON

Oracle Night

PoIM

Portrait of an Invisible Man

RN

The 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.

One day there is life.

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; 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:

In some sense, all the novels I’ve written have come out of that money my father left me […] It’s impossible to sit down and write without thinking about it. It’s a terrible equation, finally. To think that my father’s death saved my life.

The ghost of his father therefore keeps reappearing in Auster’s literature. For it presents a too heavy load for Auster that the end of one person means the beginning for another. Especially if the nature of the homage opposes everything the father believed in. However, the burden Auster slowly discharges is not only centred on the materialistic aspect of the inheritance. Auster is left with less than before which he realized. The money the father set aside never fills the emotional void he causes in Auster’s life, before and after his death. The performance of paternal absence -while still alive and continued past death- is recalled in all of his prose. Before discussing the absent fathers in Auster’s fiction however, I want to focus on the work that triggered this evolution in his literature. For all his work is to some extent autobiographical. He refers to The Invention of Solitude as ‘everything I have done has come out of that book. The problems and questions and experiences that are examined there have been the meat of the things I have done since.’ The Invention of Solitude is thus the key work to Auster’s career, which Dennis Barone reads as ‘Auster’s chosen and invented mythology, as the first cause of all his subsequent works’, or as Pascal Bruckner states: ‘To understand him we must start here; all his books lead us back to this one.’ Therefore, the underlying message of Auster’s body of work must be determined in this part and developed in the next two parts of this dissertation.

Paul Auster, once informed about his father’s death, immediately feels the urge to write about him, to capture this familiar and yet alien person with words. ‘I knew that I would have to write about my father. […] I thought: my father is gone. If I do not act quickly, his entire life will vanish along with him.’ (6) His literary spark -that never extensively manifested itself in his poetry- returns while looking for the man he had already lost a long time ago. His intention is to translate the memory of his father into words; to save him from oblivion; to find and keep him alive through language, perhaps more alive than he ever was to him. He aims to grasp this absence that presided over his father’s presence; this person who was ‘somewhere else, between here and there. But never really here. And never really there.’ (19) To search for the traces his father had never even left. And at the same time try to understand why his father was who he was, why he behaved like he did. Why he barely shared his life with his son, who so desperately wanted a piece of him. Why he deliberately failed to attend his first son’s birth; why he didn’t even acknowledge his only grandson other than wishing Auster good luck with it; the son that means everything to Paul Auster. Why he couldn’t confront reality. Why he remained living in a house on his own that could accommodate seven people. A man ‘who finds life tolerable only by staying on the surface of himself, with offering no more than his surface to others.’ (15) His memories of his father are dominated by a craving for love, approval and attention, which his father withheld from him. He describes how ‘I mulishly went on hoping for something that was never given to me- or given to me…rarely and arbitrarily. (21) That Auster is facing a blank, impenetrable wall, becomes apparent with the following description of his father whom he refers to as ‘tourist of his own life’ (9):

Devoid of passion, either for a thing, a person, or an idea, incapable or unwilling to reveal himself under any circumstances, he had managed to keep himself at a distance from life, to avoid immersion in the quick of things. He ate, he went to work, he had friends, he played tennis, and yet for all that he was not there. In the deepest, most unalterable sense, he was an invisible man. Invisible to others, and most likely invisible to himself as well. If, while he was still alive I kept looking for him, kept trying to find him, kept trying to find the father who was not there, now that he is dead I still feel as though I must go on looking for him. Death has not changed anything. The only difference is that I have run out of time. (7)

Auster’s lack of fatherly love strongly affects him. Especially now that he realises that it is too late, that the image of the unlocatable, odourless man without appetite, whose clothes ‘seemed to be an expression of solitude, a concrete way of affirming his absence’ (59) resides in his head. And yet he keeps on looking for him. He invades his father’s privacy, desperately searching for evidence that might change his perception of him. Silk ties that remind him of his childhood, used razor blades, a packet of condoms, pictures and other leftovers of his father’s past do not reveal the truth about him. Like the photographs, Sam Auster remains silent. In his incapability of coming to terms with death, Auster is convinced that a different person is buried inside his father. He wants to find this other, to unbury the ‘real’ Sam Auster. ‘One could not believe that there was such a man -who lacked feeling, who wanted so little of others’, he says ‘and if there was not such a man, that means there was another man, a man hidden inside the man who was not there, and the trick of it, then, is to find him.’ (21) He therefore turns to writing; writing is his vehicle to dive into the depths of his father and himself and share their solitude; to dig out the truth about his fatherless existence and express it. Only through the realm of language can he now connect with his father. ‘On the condition that he is there to be found.’ (21) He doesn’t give up, he keeps on writing even though he finds that particularly difficult:

The closer I come to the end of what I am able to say, the more reluctant I am to say anything. I want to postpone the moment of ending, and in this way delude myself into thinking that I have only just begun, that the better part of my story still lies ahead. No matter how useless these words might seem to be, they have nevertheless stood between me and a silence that continues to terrify me. When I step into this silence, it will mean that my father has vanished forever. (69)

Auster is stuck; because of his desire to satisfy his hunger and at the same time preserve it, he finds himself trapped between his ability to assuage his pain through writing about his father and his fear of losing him when he stops writing about him. He chooses the former: to freeze this emptiness into language and make sense of it thereafter. Words become a deferral, or a displacement, of absence and of silence. As long as he prolongs his father’s story and keeps on looking for him –be it in this memoir or in his following prose writing- the image of his father remains alive. Only when he stops writing does he realise the extent of his misery, which turns him into the same invisible man his father once was. For at the instant he writes his recollection, he sits alone in a room, lost in his thoughts about his father, oblivious to the world. As soon as he stops, he becomes aware of his loneliness- a fatherless man, divorced from his wife, and painfully separated from his son David. ‘A man sits alone in a room and writes.’ The Invention of Solitude is in fact an expression of his own introverted state. His desire to write then is to escape his misery and reunite with his father. But within the narrative itself he clearly says that this desire cannot be satisfied:

‘Impossible, I realize, to enter another’s solitude’. (20)

Does Auster actually find what he is looking for, a hint of emotion from the man who was afraid to show it. Does he really grieve his father, or is this reflective memoir just a story that serves a good plot, a profitable fictional biography? Can words replace a person? ‘You do not stop hungering for your father’s love, even after you are grown up.’ (20) His attempt to mark his father through language fails for in retrospective, he still remains the same unaffectionate person he remembers. Even Auster’s story cannot change this fact. Auster becomes more and more depressed throughout the book in realizing that what he is looking for stays hidden, what he is trying to say will possibly remain unsaid. He recognizes that there is a gap between presentation and reality, that the story he is about to tell somehow escapes language.

Never before have I been so aware of the rift between thinking and writing. […] I have begun to feel that the story I am trying to tell is somehow incompatible with language, that the degree to which it resists language is an exact measure of how closely I have come to saying something important, and that when the moment arrives for me to say the only true important thing (assuming it exists), I will not be able to say it. (34)

Language is in effect inexpressible; it can never fully render what one intends to communicate, nor does it serve to understand a man like Sam Auster. ‘Language is not truth.’ (173) Auster feels trapped in a terrible situation for he knows that his only tool that may effectively pay tribute to the father is also the least one to do it. Especially if the subject matter ‘absence’ seems impossible to be translated into words. He realizes that he has missed his chance to come to terms with his father: writing about his father does not return him, nor reveal why Auster must have meant so little to him other than exposing a terrible secret.

There has been a wound, and I realise now that it is very deep. Instead of healing me as I thought it would, the act of writing has kept this wound open. […] Instead of burying my father for me, these words have kept him alive, perhaps more so than ever. I not only see him as he was, but as he is, as he will be, and each day he is there, invading my thoughts, stealing up on me without warning: lying in the coffin, underground, his body still intact, his fingernails and hair continuing to grow. A feeling that if I am to understand anything, I must penetrate this image of darkness, that I must enter the absolute darkness of earth. (34)

This Kafkaesque description of the father invading Auster’s thoughts, introduces the family secret, which is uncovered by mere coincidence just before Auster is about to give up: the gruesome story of his grandfather’s murder through the hands of his own grandmother. The darkness of the story means the enlightenment for Auster. The finishing sentence -‘I hope that this will shed some light on your Father’s actions over the past years’- (37) of the cover letter that carries the information about his father’s past, opens Auster’s eyes. In order to understand his relationship with his father, he must accept that his father’s idea of paternity was shattered. Sam Auster never experienced fatherhood; he was too young to know his father and therefore refrained from being one as he was too afraid. At the age of three, the perfect age to become more acquainted with the parent, Sam’s mother killed her husband and thus taking away the most important person in a boy’s life. The brutal act, which Anna Auster covered up as suicide, was never spoken about. ‘It was as though the family had decided to pretend he had never existed.’ (35) Even in the family photo depicting the mother with her five children, the father is missing: the photo is torn, the father eliminated. It is then that Auster realises the consequences of the past: ‘a boy cannot live through this kind of thing without being affected by it as a man.’ (38) The own mother committing a brutal murder, and -after being shot at by her brother-in-law– is released from prison free of charges. The children who have witnessed the events must then embark on an escape journey: always moving, never staying in one place for more than three months, without friends or money. All these terrible events were buried within Sam Auster and never released but through his remoteness. It seems that the father wanted to protect his son from his terrible past, and therefore remained at a safe distance from the present as his way of dealing with the past.

Revealing and writing the truth opens up the door to his father’s behaviour. Yet Auster still cannot identify with his father’s attitude and keeps blaming him for his neglected childhood. What does he expect of his father? Unsatisfied, he still lacks and looks of the father’s recognition. In retrospect, Auster seems to project his distress solely onto his father, which casts a shadow on the latter. What about Auster as a son though? As a reader, we only get one part of the story, as the father cannot speak for himself anymore. Could it be that he has missed eventual signs for his father’s affection? Does he see it from a wrong perspective? Why can’t he accept the father the way he was? Why does he blame his father for not visiting him in Paris when he is the one who ran off? Why does he accuse his father for neglecting his literature when he hardly publishes anything creditable? Auster comes to the conclusion that he ‘must have been a bad son; a disappointment, a source of confusion and sadness. It made no sense to him that he had produced a poet for a son’ (64). He realizes at the end of ‘Portrait of Invisible Man’ that he must change his perspective and see the past from a father’s viewpoint: ‘to end with this.’ (73) Instead of talking to and of his father, he ends his memoir by addressing his son Daniel. His next step is to meditate further into the depths of fatherhood, which explains the second part of The Invention of Solitude that ‘grew out of the first and was a response to it.’ (TRN, 106) If the driving force behind the first part was to understand his father, the second part is determined by Auster’s yearning to understand himself as Daniel’s father. He must question his mode of being a parent to discover what it entails and then discern whether his father failed in performing his role.

In ‘The Book of Memory’, Auster soon finds out that the father’s death leaves traces in his life that slowly destroy his idyllic family existence as well as his idea of paternity. Like his father, he divorces from his wife and moves into his office at 6 Varick Street. Alone again, Auster retreats to his writing. The thought of being separated from his son –conversely to the impression we get about his father- is unbearable to him. He starts ‘The Book of Memory’ contemplating his solitude, which Auster continuously describes in his prose. Only by distancing himself from his own self and referring to himself in the third person as A., can he objectify and understand his situation and search for the reasons of his isolation. He investigates whether his son will also condemn him for his physical absence and slowly understands that Auster himself is partly the catalyst that creates his father’s absence. The revelation to this chain of thoughts comes to him while reading The Adventures of Pinocchio to his son Daniel. He reflects upon this story about father and son that mainly focuses on the lost child, the escaping child, the searching father, the remote father and the realization that only in their unification, can they both be father and son. He finally understands that a harmonious relationship can only be complete when both father and son invest in it. Did Auster contribute enough of himself to be worthy to his father, or did he, like Pinocchio, simply run away? Stephen Fredman argues that throughout the Invention of Solitude Auster cultivates a fantasy, most fully represented by the Pinocchio story, that the son will rescue the father. A statement that in my opinion stems from the following quote:

A. has watched his son’s face carefully during these readings of Pinocchio. He has concluded that it is the image of Pinocchio saving Gepetto (swimming away with the old man on his back) that gives the story meaning to him. (143)

A. is captured in his room, in his memory, surrounded by his guilt, like Gepetto in the belly of the shark. Akin to the fairy tale, the son comes as his rescue; Auster is saved by his son from the belly of the shark that is his room. He finally understands the essence of fatherhood that makes everything else seem less important. Rather than grieving the past, he lives in the present now. The second part seems to complement for the loss of the first part, for Auster, for the first time, realizes his father’s position. His son frees him from his solitude while he devotes to the role he has to play and thus finds what he thought was absent. ‘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 perhaps, a memory of his own boyhood as a son to his father.’ (85)

Auster still grieves the past and regrets for not trying to embody his father’s ideal son, even if he endeavours to compensate for this by being a good father. He continues wondering whether ‘it is true that one must dive to the depths of the sea and save one’s father to become a real boy?’ (83) Auster comes too late to save his father while he was still alive. Saving him from the solitude that his father has created around himself. Instead he realizes that the nature of his distress lies in never accepting his father for whom he was. Through the act of writing, he recognizes that he took his father for granted; instead of worshipping what his father has to offer, he only sees his disappointments as a father. Auster seems ashamed and resentful of his behaviour and therefore turns to writing. He realizes that it is too late to change his father, but must accept him the way he is. He reflects on what he has invested in their relationship and ponders his high expectations he had for his father. Now that he is in the same position, he understands the twofold direction of a father-son bond. He realizes that it is not necessarily the father who saves the son, but that the son must also contribute to this harmony, which he learns from Pinocchio. That his father’s behaviour and attitude nevertheless keep affecting him becomes clear in the fictions that follow The Invention of Solitude. In the next part, I want to demonstrate that Auster is still haunted by, and haunts the image of the absent father.

When the dead weep, they are beginning to recover,’ said the Crow solemnly.

‘I am sorry to contradict my famous friend and colleague,’ said the Owl, ‘but as far as I’m concerned, I think that when the dead weep, it means they do not want to die.’

The Adventures of Pinocchio.

Search

The search for the father and the missing son is reminiscent to the tale of Pinocchio and runs through Auster’s prose like a red line. Similar to the investigation of fatherhood in The Invention of Solitude, every story written thereafter implicates a comparable notion that re-enacts the author’s quest for his own father and the condition of the missing son. Absent fathers haunt his fiction like ghosts; the search for the latter determines the action of the plot. Dennis Barone notes that ‘from the Invention of Solitude to Mr. Vertigo characters have searched for a home’. All his characters embark on endless explorations to find some sort of emotional or physical shelter. Either directly or indirectly, Auster’s picaresque heroes are somehow looking for a father figure, or conversely, ‘Pinocchios’ are reclaimed by lonely ‘Gepettos’. Nashe, for example in The Music of Chance, or Nathan, in The Brooklyn Follies, acknowledge another father position towards younger men, even though their own daughters lack their parental care. Like Dickensian orphans who require a sense of structure, Auster’s male heroes undergo certain disciplinary rituals in their adventurous discovery of their past or presence in the vastness of the American fatherland. Explorers either by force or nature, his characters detach themselves from everyday reality to intuitively compensate for an emotionally neglected childhood in the search of their own identity. Is Auster trying to compensate for his past by letting his characters experience the same abandonment of fatherly love? Bruckner argues that Auster’s literature is a response to his yearning for the absent father: ‘And the author, who had to lose his father in order to find him, would respond by filling his novels with figures of weak, colourless, pitiful parents, overwhelmed by their offspring and incapable of assuming fatherhood.’

In the following paragraphs, I demonstrate Bruckner’s argument by listing a few of Auster’s characters and their behaviour that match the description above and replicate Auster’s personal search for the father. Nashe, a divorced fireman who, like Auster, inherits a large sum after his father’s death in The Music of Chance, leaves his daughter behind to drive around America and seek ontological suspension until he picks up the street kid Pozzi: ‘the stranger he saw as a reprieve, because he had already given up’. (MoC, 1) After a joint poker adventure that dramatically fails, he lingers with an absurd wall-building project for two millionaires instead of facing his miserable existence as an incapable father beyond the wall. In the shelter of his mission, Nashe develops a father-son relationship with Pozzi who only met his father twice. ‘I barely knew who he was.’ (37) After Nashe is unable to ‘take on the role of Pozzi’s guide and protector’, (45) and save the boy’s life, he longs for revenge by killing his supervisor’s grandson, a dull 4-year old who in turn perceives Nashe as his father. At the end, he is incapable of pulling through with it. Having nothing to look up to –Pozzi is most certainly dead, his daughter prefers to stay with her foster parents, no one seems to notice his absence- he rather takes his life, along with that of his supervisors.

Marco Stanley Fogg, a restless inquisitor in Moon Palace loses every touch with the world once his last relative dies. Yet he regains stability when he stumbles into discovering his origin: he meets his father he thought dead. Kitty Wu becomes Fogg’s girlfriend after she saves him from solitary confinement in Central Park. An orphan herself, she embraces every father figure that passes her life, from Fogg to his father Barber, but denies her own paternity while pregnant and has an abortion. In ‘City of Glass’ Peter Stillman escapes into his room after his father imposed a state of isolation from reality upon him. He then hires the detective Paul Auster –himself a fatherless son whose child has just died- to watch Stillman Senior. It follows an incredible account of chasing, identity matters and an analysis of the meaninglessness of language. Quinn alias Auster at one point introduces himself to the old Stillman as his son, before he waits himself into oblivion outside his apartment. The unnamed narrator in ‘The Locked Room’ takes on his former best friend’s identity, Fanshawe, an author who had to watch his father, ‘a silent man of abstracted benevolence’, (218) die slowly. The narrator marries Fanshawe’s wife, adopts his son and publishes the friend’s biography while he is simultaneously turning the world inside out to find Fanshawe. Harry Dunkel’s daughter in The Brooklyn Follies perceives him as ‘a dark man’. (35) Instead of being a father, he ends up in prison after an affair with a gay artist and fraudulent incident in business. In the same story, Nathan Glass compensates for his own unsuccessful attempt at paternity by acting as father to his nephew and his niece. Even Mr Bones, a speaking dog in Auster’s untypical story Timbuktu, is on a journey to replace his dead master.

Other characters devour or starve themselves into unconsciousness as they lack sense of primary stability in their lives: Solomon Barber, who ‘eats his way to the brink of oblivion’ (MP, 242) and Tom Wood, the brother who acts as his sister’s father, are two lonely figures who hide behind their own immensity; neither of them are in contact with their parents. Fogg and Quinn become barely recognisable as their reluctance to eat renders them into walking corpses. Again, both of them are without relatives at that point. Even Auster seems to have a troubled relationship with food. All these protagonists have no guidance, no father to direct them, no Gepetto that longs to be saved by his son. And all of them fall into a degenerative obsession for understanding their origins, to fill their sentimental shortcomings.

The narrative that mostly resembles Collodi’s brilliant moral tale is that of Auster’s 6th novel completed in 1994. Auster says ‘if there is any book that Mr. Vertigo is connected to, it’s Pinocchio. In some odd way you could say that Walt is Pinocchio, Master Yehudi is Gepetto, and Mrs Witherspoon is the Blue Fairy.’ Equally structured, Mr Vertigo is Auster’s first real attempt to explore the genre that has mostly influenced him: the fairy tale. By definition, a narrative that is passed on from generation to generation, from father to son, fairy tales are especially fascinating for Auster, as he enjoys nothing more than discovering them with his son, Daniel. As he remembers in ‘The Book of Memory’ while reading his son The Adventures of Pinocchio:

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. (143)

This source of inspiration –the author saved from his solitary state- along with his aim to be a good father, led Auster translate a childhood dream into a book. The idea of flying, of experiencing a sense of weightlessness similar to death, has always fascinated Auster and is significantly explored in his writing. Auster claims that this obsession derives from an incident that happened to his father. Sam Auster, while working on a roof, slipped and started stumbling through the air until a clothesline saves him from death. The father’s descent is taken further in Mr Vertigo. Walt’s parental loss coincides with the end of his ability to fly, as if Auster decided to complete his father’s story with a different ending: that of death. In Mr Vertigo, flying does not only symbolise freedom, it also encompasses death and exemplifies the entrapment in one’s own body and the surrender to the forces of nature and gravity. The young orphan, Walter Claireborne Rawley, becomes a successful artist once a father figure enters his life and takes care of him. His career comes to a drastic end once puberty takes hold and his foster father is killed. Before discovering his gift, he stays with his cold-hearted uncle, Slim, until the Hungarian circus artist, Master Yehudi, adopts him. Walt never encountered the feeling of having a father. His hunger for recognition leads him to embark on this adventurous journey with the stranger. Even though Master Yehudi firstly insults the boy as ‘a piece of human nothingness, no better than an animal’, (3) Walt grows more and more acquainted with the strange man and slowly they form a bond that can only be broken by death. In the care of his new family -his brother Aesop and his mother Sioux, both eventually killed by the Ku-Klux-Klan- and after harsh disciplinary preparations, he pulls off what his surrogate father predicted: to levitate.

At the beginning, Walt is afraid of the dark man and doesn’t trust Yehudi. The latter, unconscious of his fatherly affection for the boy, sees in Walt his door to show business: ‘You’re my meal ticket, remember? I wouldn’t hurt a hair on your head’. (7) Similar to Pinocchio, Walt keeps running away, but realises that all his escapes lead him back to Master Yehudi, his creator, who proves his good intentions. The two need and complement each other, underlined by the dying Yehudi when he says: ‘whatever you are it’s because of me. It works both ways. Whatever I am, it’s because of you.’ (208). Walt in fact embodies the lost son Yehudi always looked for. Through their adventures around America, they become an inseparable team. The support and attention Walt receives from Yehudi awakens new spirits in him. At the moment he most senses the Master’s affection, he symbolically accepts him as his father:

He put his hand gently on my shoulder [...] I felt nothing but trust for him at that moment. […] That’s probably how Isaac felt when Abraham took him up that mountain in Genesis, chapter twenty-two. If a man tells you he’s your father, even if you know he’s not, you let down your guard and get all stupid inside […] He tells you, Come with me, and so you turn yourself in that direction and follow him wherever he’s going. (38-39)

Walt is happier than ever. The thought of disappointing his father puts him in distress. When he imagines Yehudi’s rejection, as Walt still doesn’t believe in his ability to fly, he fears he ‘had lost him forever.’ Auster’s own yearning for his father’s recognition is here translated into Walt’s realisation that he desires nothing more than ‘the master to love me again […] I hungered for the master’s affection […] He had made me in his own image, and now he wasn’t there for me anymore.’ (53) Even though the Master is not his real father, Walt nevertheless recognizes that his father has stimulated in him a desire to please. Soon after these thoughts and a few terrifying events through which he imagines losing his new family, Walt lifts himself off the ground for the first time. He expels his sorrows and becomes weightless. Detached from the world, he hovers through the air. Walt’s levitation is not so much his protest against the fear of losing his father, but rather an expression of gratitude for the love and confidence he receives from Yehudi. The boy manages to realise the impossible, and the drive for this lies in his desire to please Yehudi. Flying must then be the expression of finally feeling complete, so complete that Walt can empty himself out without being afraid that this feeling returns once upon ground again. Is this fairy tale an allusion to the author’s life, an experience he never had? Auster never managed to delight his father with his talent; death took his chance and he surrenders to the forces of nature. Throughout Sam’s life, Paul Auster’s literary career did not lift him up, but now he seems to be flying in success. Due to his father, who will never know; Auster cannot save his father.

Walt’s ability to fly is the permit to their joint adventure and nothing seems to damage the strong bond between father and son. After the Master’s death and Walt’s surrender to puberty that ends his flying, however, Walt feels lonelier than before. He returns to the streets and drifts aimlessly around America until he finds the man who killed his substitute father: Uncle Slim. His story, so the narrator informs us, ends in the arms of Mrs Witherspoon. Other than telling the story of Walt the Wonder Boy, Auster takes us on a journey of his fatherland. The tour around the vastness of America covers many historical facts and geographical references. From Kansas to Oklahoma, Michigan and Illinois and finally Hollywood, Auster lets Walt experience his country in which key aspects like that of baseball and culture, American authors, technical progress, slavery, racism, Ku-Klux-Klan, emigration, Indians and the Wild West all play a part. Similar to the description of his father in The Invention of Solitude, Auster devotes a lot of time to exploring his country through language, uncovering its history and unfolding it in great depth. His fictions are full of travelling reference, of going from one place to another in order to find oneself.

In his previous fiction, Auster takes us from New York –where the trace for the missing father begins- westwards to the desert in Utah, where all the gaps of paternal origins are filled. In a subtle way, he links the personal development of the protagonist Marco Stanley Fogg with the movement of American history. The novel’s beginning sentence indicating the first moon landing, determines not only the historical timeframe but also the agency of the plot. Narrated in concentrated circles in which the question of identity is once again prominent, Moon Palace evolves around the three generations of complete strangers who belong to the same family: all fatherless sons and fathers who are oblivious of their offspring. The motifs of Moon Palace are all extremely familiar to Auster readers: the beleaguered orphan, the missing father, the ruined romance, the squandered inheritance, the totemic power of the West, the journey as initiation. Born in the same year as Auster, the protagonist is a restless explorer whose name proves that ‘travel is in his blood’: Marco refers to the wide-ranging traveller, Marco Polo, the first European to visit China; Stanley stands for the man who tracked down Livingstone and found fame in darkest Africa; Fogg is directly related to Phileas, the explorer who travelled the world in 80 days. (6) All of these men were seekers, voyagers into the uncharted and unknown; a journey the protagonist evidently pursues as all these men combined in his name, already point to his fractured, made-up identity and the thirst to unearth his genealogy.

The image of the moon shapes Fogg’s experiences, acts as his orientation, and shines over his final destination like the moon in the centre of Blakelock’s painting Moonlight that Fogg analyses at the core of this Bildungsroman. A fortune cookie in a Chinese restaurant with the same name as the title of the book, tells Fogg: ‘The sun is the past, the earth is the present, the moon is the future.’ (233) Not really grasping the full meaning of the sentence, he puts it away to only later come across what the fortune-teller had predicted. The moon keeps resurfacing in the novel, both as physical appearance in the sky and linguistically within the text. As long as the moon is present, Fogg instinctively follows it. His foster parent Uncle Victor –who raises the boy after his mother’s death- joins a band called Moonlight Moods. When he dies from a similar unexpected condition as Auster’s father, ‘the man I have loved most in the world’ as Fogg informs us, his only ‘link to something larger than myself’ simply ‘drops dead,’ (3) Fogg falls into distress. After reading and selling the only thing that is left from his uncle –the 1492 books that serve as his furniture and later as temporary rescue from his financial distress- he ventures into Central Park where he sleeps under the moon while Neil Armstrong takes his first steps. After a few days, he is rescued just before death from starvation by his friend David Zimmer and Kitty Wu. That Fogg clearly lacks the structure of family ties becomes clear when his self-destructive nature nearly kills him after his uncle’s death. He is a fragile person who grew up without a real father figure. As an orphan, Fogg, like all of Auster’s characters, craves for a sense of belonging, and before he finds his true identity, he puts his life under certain tests. He retreats inwards to see whether his world has enough on offer to come to terms with himself.

I decided to give up the struggle […] because I thought that by abandoning myself to the chaos of the world, the world might ultimately reveal some secret harmony to me, some form of pattern that would help me to penetrate myself. (80)

This secret harmony finally begins when he ends up with Thomas Effing, an eccentric cripple who is in fact his grandfather and simultaneously his next stability. Former painter Julian Barber, he changes his identity to Thomas Effing after a tragic experience in the American desert. Just before Barber explores the lunar landscape, he unknowingly fathers a son -Solomon Barber. Slowly Effing reveals some of his past to his unknowing grandson and contracts him to approach Barber after his death to deliver his obituary. Effing senses that his death will put Fogg out of orbit when he says: You need someone to look after you […] Once I am gone, you’ll be right back where you started.’ (216) Effing failed to be a father to his son, but he somewhat unknowingly preserves Fogg from the same experience by opening the path on which son and father meet: ‘Barber took us under his wing as though he meant to adopt us. Since Kitty and I were both orphans, everyone seemed to benefit from the arrangements.’ (274)

The obese Solomon Barber who hides himself in his body -like Auster in his room- is unaware that his father’s life ran parallel to his own. Neither does he know that the deliverer of this message is his son, even though he senses it straightaway when he makes allusions to Fogg’s mother, his one time affair. Again, one cannot help but trace similarities in Barber’s life to Auster’s own. After Effing dies, Barber inherits a large sum of money, which enables him to concentrate on his writing. He moves to New York to spend more time with his unknowing son Marco. As an author he has also published a book on fathers and sons called Kepler’s Blood. Described as an adolescent novel that features the quest of a young boy for his origin, Barber tries to understand his fatherless condition through writing. Like Auster who keeps looking for his father, Barber actually embarks onto the discovery of Effing’s cave, to find out whether the man he knows from Fogg’s stories actually existed. Barber never ‘finds’ his father. His search is interrupted when he confirms his yet unreleased paternity to Fogg after which he falls into an open grave. Fogg, suddenly aware of his descent, therefore continues Barber’s quest. In every generation, Auster launches a search for the father that ends in the unearthing of a character’s genealogy.

The moon imagery that shapes the plot, stands in direct opposition to Fogg’s biological father Solomon Barber: he notices that sol means sun in both Spanish and Elizabethan poetry as well as ground in French: ‘it intrigued him that he could be both the sun and the earth at the same time.’ (251) Once he ‘finds’ his father he always thought dead standing at the family grave, Fogg literally loses him to the French connotation of the father’s name. At the moment he realizes that the plump man weeping at his mother’s grave is indeed his father, Fogg verbally attacks Barber who consequently stumbles into a freshly dug grave, that soon becomes his own. Barber receives a similar funeral ceremony from his son that Auster organised for his dead father. The recognition of Barber as his father comes almost simultaneously with Fogg’s own frustrated attempt at paternity that is finally shattered with his girlfriend’s abortion.

I wanted to be a father, and now that the prospect was before me, I couldn’t stand the thought of losing it. The baby was my chance to undo the loneliness of my childhood, to be part of a family, to belong to something that was more than just myself, and because I had not been aware of this desire until then, it came rushing out of me in huge, inarticulate bursts of desperation: ‘If you kill our baby, you’ll be killing me along with it.’ (280)

With Effing and Barber dead, an unborn child and a broken relationship, the novel comes full circle and Fogg is alone again, under a full moon. Orphaned many times over, destitute, he feels lost in the lunar landscape after the failed endeavour to uncover the truth about his origin: the same spot where Effing changes his identity is now covered by a lake. Unable to solve the mystery of his roots, Fogg continues his journey westward. Only there can his regeneration begin, drawn to the same direction his two ancestors took to change their life. The book must end, under the full moon, for there is no one left to save him. Fogg is abandoned again. ‘And that’s where we leave him – getting ready to begin.’

The figure of the selfish, absent or ignorant parent looms in the background of other Auster fictions. In ‘City of Glass’, an oppressive account of an innocent son and his cruel father dominates the plot. In his isolating experiment with his child, Stillman Senior wants to reach God's language by denying his son the interaction with human language. He keeps him imprisoned in a dark room for seven years and crushes him into submission. However, the father's language experiment badly fails and only creates a Beckettian puppet without identity; a creature lost in the real world. Paternal struggles and betrayed relationships are explored in Oracle Night as well as Leviathan. Sidney Orr’s wife Grace debates an abortion as she is unsure who the father of her child is: Sidney or else, John Trause, her father’s best friend, as well as surrogate father and secret affair. Trause on the other hand, already parent of his son Jacob, refuses to see the latter. After financially supporting him, he finally disinherits him when his literary pupil, Sidney, reports of his drug addiction and abusive behaviour. Jacob despises his father for choosing Grace over him and releases his jealousy in beating Grace and her unborn child to death. Fanny on the other hand, Benjamin Sachs’ wife in Leviathan, is unable to bear children. In her belief that her author husband is sleeping with other women, she convinces the couple’s best friend to start an affair with her. In the end, both her husband –who retreats to supposedly finish his book- and the narrator, abandon her.

The loneliness and desertion Auster’s characters experience especially in relation to paternity, seem to trigger a desire to crawl back into their mother’s womb. ‘Room and tomb, tomb and womb, womb and room,’ (BoM, 171) Auster symbolically implies this fact throughout his prose. Most of his writing –that Auster completes in his own retreat- mentions the subject entrapped in an interior: Jonah in the belly of the whale, Gepetto imprisoned for three years inside the shark; Quinn, Stillman, Fanshawe, Paul Auster himself, David Zimmer, all trapped alone in a room, sharing their solitude with nothing but their thoughts. Fogg in his cave in Central Park, Effing in his cave in the American desert; Barber trapped in his body; Nashe imprisoned behind the wall; the writer inside his room. All these fatherless characters withdraw from the world and hide in their solitude. An enclosed space seems the only protection for a subject in pieces from which it must be rescued. ‘The son saves the father’, or conversely, the father stands as the rescuer of his son? The next part addresses the writer’s solitude through which he finds himself as well as other solitary figures he adopts as substitute fathers.

Authorial Presence

My writing was all about you; all I did there, after all, was to bemoan what I could not bemoan upon your breast.

Franz Kafka

Pères, ne l’oubliez pas, vos

enfants sont votre unique avenir.

Il dépend de vous que vous les

massacriez ou qu’ils vous sauvent

du néant : car vous ne vous sauverez

pas tout seuls, je vous le dis.

Jean-Paul Sartre

no – I will not

give up

nothingness

father – I

feel nothingness

invade me

Stéphane Mallarmé

In his long letter to his father written in 1919, a thirty-six year old Franz Kafka expressed the detachment he felt towards the man who charged him with ‘coldness, estrangements and ingratitude.’ The description of the troubled relationship he had with Hermann Kafka in his short life, determines the language of the message that was however never delivered to its recipient. The German speaking Jew, born in Prague in 1883, suffered immensely from his father’s domineering authority, from his rules ‘that had been invented only for [him] and which [he] could, [he] did not know why, never completely comply with.’ Most of the time, his father was absent; he didn’t share his life with his family as he was too occupied with his job. His presence however made Kafka feel uncomfortable, afraid even. He retreated into his own literary world that he fills with autobiographical elements, spent nights rendering his life into novels that hold a nightmarish quality.

The young novelist opposed Hermann Kafka’s ‘aversion’ to his writing and ‘to everything that was connected with it.’ Instead, he dealt with this rejection by charging his prose with imposing figures that refer to the man who could be so disheartening in his behaviour towards his son. Kafka’s texts reflect his statement that ‘the revolt of the son against the father is one of the primeval themes of literature, and an even older problem in the world.’ According to his close literary friend Max Brod, Kafka wanted to lump all his writing together under the banner ‘attempt to get away from my father.’ The act of writing enabled Kafka to digest his inner loathing against his father. All his heroes are to some extent versions of himself: weak, abandoned, insecure and threatened by their fathers’ abusive dominance. In The Metamorphosis for instance, the father treats his son Gregor Samsa like vermin when the latter awakes as huge insect one morning; an alien prospect that can be read as allegory for Kafka’s final subjection to become a writer, the existence with which his father dissents. Samsa Sr. punishes Gregor for crawling along the walls by chasing him back into his room and excluding him from the family life. Although he is not responsible for his peculiar state, Gregor feels guilty for upsetting his father. In fact, Kafka always excuses his father’s behaviour and blames himself for Hermann’s outbreaks: ‘you were perhaps more cheerful before you were disappointed by your children, especially by me, and were depressed at home.’ A similar behaviour is admitted in ‘Portrait of an Invisible Man’ when Auster, in his last attempt to understand his father, says: ‘I realise now that I must have been a bad son. Or if not particularly bad, then at least a disappointment, a source of confusion and sadness.’ (64)

Kafka was also worried about not pleasing his father, which must have deteriorated his health problems. He, like Auster, fuses autobiographical facts with fiction. In The Metamorphosis, Kafka alludes to his own situation: the father (un)intentionally causes Gregor’s death when he hits the latter with an apple as he fights what his son had turned into. Gregor is a feeble creature that, like Kafka who died of lung tuberculosis at an early age, slowly perishes away in solitude. Auster states that ‘in the public mind Kafka was Gregor Samsa of The Metamorphosis […] his life and work were inseparable.’ Considering Kafka’s letters and fictions, the father always personifies the evil character or stands in close connection to the author’s despair. Kafka, in his life as in his writing, was too weak to confront the adversary and rather stood in the shadow of this tyrannical man who never offered any affection to his son. In Letter to My Father, Kafka tries to understand why he was so distant:

I cannot believe I was particularly difficult to manage; I cannot believe that a kindly word, a quiet taking by the hand, a friendly look, could not have got me to do anything that was wanted of me. Now you are, after all, basically a charitable and kind-hearted person, but not every child has the endurance and fearlessness to go on searching until it comes to the kindliness that lies beneath the surface.

Kafka went on searching for this affection to find an explanation for Herrmann’s emotional withdrawal until his death. Different biographical accounts on Kafka demonstrate that, like Sam Auster, Hermann Kafka’s behaviour is marked by a difficult childhood that obstructed him from forming a bond with his son. And like Auster, Kafka wrote to understand why and how this has an effect on his own life. But just like Sam Auster, Hermann Kafka never read his son’s personal message to him, and thus both never realized the painful moments their sons endured.

It seems a common denominator that a father’s deserting behaviour causes a written reaction in some authors, furthermore demonstrated by Jean-Paul Sartre, who clearly abhorred his father. According to Sartre, who wrote unflaggingly about paternity, the latter ‘signifies a way of looking upon the other, a way of perceiving, a regard -in the sense of thought, attention, concern, respect, deference- from each of the two vantage points.’ Auster could never expect this attitude from his father, nor did Sartre; in their relationships the sons’ admiration for the father was hardly returned. When Sartre wrote: ‘there is no good father, that’s the rule. Don’t lay blame on men but on the bond of paternity which is rotten. To make children: nothing better; to have them: what iniquity! Had my own father lived, he would have lain on me full length and crushed me,’ one can clearly sense his rejection of paternity. Sartre truly despised his father and refused to become one, which doesn’t however object him from being a literary father figure for his pupils later in his life. Unlike other people, Sartre declared his father’s death, in The Words, as a blessing that allowed him to escape paternal dominance. Whether Sartre however rejoiced, as he insists in The Words at not being emburdened by a father or whether he suffered from his father’s premature death and therefore created a fatherless world remains unclear, in his life as in his writing.

It is a different kind of distress considering the literature of the French poet Stéphane Mallarmé. This time the perspective shifts from the author as a neglected son to a deserted father who describes the loss of his child. When his son Anatole died at a young age, Mallarmé found retreat only in his writing that led him to compose the poem ‘A tomb for Anatole’. In this act of mourning, he tries to recreate his son through words, to mark the absence his son left, to express his sorrows and bury them, as the title suggests. Anatole meant everything for Mallarmé ‘who considered himself largely responsible for the child’s suffering’ which he recorded in various letters to his literary friends such as Robert de Montesquiou and John Payne. Auster feels drawn to Mallarmé. He perfectly identifies with Mallarmé’s sorrows as he encountered similar anxieties: the fear of not being a good father and the vulnerability when death approaches. Fortunately, unlike Anatole, Auster’s son Daniel did not die but fell severely ill. The dreadful memories of his son in hospital return to him when he reads the poem Mallarmé wrote at the bedside of his dying son. Auster wants to confront his fright and share it with the same feelings his French mentor endured. He therefore translates this and other poems by Mallarmé into his own language. Here, he grasps the full meaning of fatherhood; he realises through his son’s near death what it means to be/have a father, a feeling he never before experienced:

It was precisely this idea, A. realized that moved him to return to these texts. The act of translating them was not a literary exercise. It was a way for him to relive his own moment of panic in the doctor’s office that summer: it is too much for me, I cannot face it. For it was only at that moment, he later came to realize, that he had finally grasped the full scope of his own fatherhood: the boy’s life meant more to him than his own: if dying were necessary to save his son, he would be willing to die. And it was therefore only in that moment of fear that he had become, once and for all, the father of his son. (BoM, 116-7)

I want to suggest a different perception from which to interpret Auster’s appeal to translate Mallarmé’s poetic fragments: that of Paul Auster as a son. In his introduction to a collection of Mallarmé’s poetry, Auster explains: ‘Mallarmé would take it upon himself to give the boy the one indomitable thing he was capable of giving: his thought. He would transmute Anatole into words and thereby prolong his life. He would literally resurrect him, since the work of building a tomb –a tomb of poetry- would obliterate the presence of death […] it was as though he had not died. He was still alive in his father, and it was only when Mallarmé himself died that the boy would die as well.’ (TRN, 85-6) Is Auster here projecting his own approach to literature on Mallarmé’s poem? Auster wants to keep his father alive through words, which I have demonstrated in the first part. His reason for marking him into existence reflects Mallarmé who believes responsible for Anatole’s fatal illness: Auster feels guilty! He cannot bear the thought that through his father’s death he survives as an author. As long as he keeps writing about his father, he slowly repays the debt he owes and swallows his absence. He therefore fills his fiction with stories that depart from his own, telling his and his father’s life.

Why turn to Mallarmé, Sartre, Kafka and authors to follow, when this work discusses Auster and the father figure? It is no coincidence that the above-mentioned authors have a troubled relationship with fatherhood, which they also process in their literary works. And it is certainly no coincidence that these authors, and many more, appear right through Auster’s fiction. Not only do their stories and lives interest the American author and inspire his texts. Auster believes that ‘through writing we can choose other fathers to compensate for our own.’ And this is what he continuously does: he finds replacement for his father’s emotional distance by consulting men that are in a similar position to him. It is not only their shared interest in writing that Auster feels attracted to. He sees most of the different writers listed in his work as his role models, his literary fathers who stimulate his desire to write and thus fill the void his own father bestowed upon him. With some of them, Auster even had a closer relationship. He met up with Beckett and Jabès in Paris, for instance. In ‘The Book of Memory’ –his dedication to his literary influences from which he quotes liberally- Auster speaks of his own isolation as a writer: ‘every book is an image of solitude.’ (145) However, even while separated from his son, divorced from his wife, abandoned by his father, he, A., consciously shares this solitude:

A. sits down in his room to translate another man’s book, and it is as though he were entering that man’s solitude and making it his own. […] It is no longer solitude, but a kind of companionship. Even though there is only one man in the room, there are two. (145)

Conversely to what he says about the impossibility of entering his father’s solitude, (PoIM, 20) here, Auster forms an imaginary but solid bond with an author who also experiences these isolated moments: decoding the words of another writer is a profoundly intimate form of relationship, in which the translator often finds identities melting. Even though Auster is the initiator and sole bearer of that relationship, he nevertheless feels understood; a feeling that cannot be taken away from him as Auster is in control. He is no longer dependent on someone –the father- for recognition, but he instead creates a similar kind of recognition for himself. In this abstract space that he conceives through converting words that do not belong to him, he is no longer alone, but replaces his loneliness through words and concurrently becomes connected to something beyond language. Like he speaks of his father to locate him, Auster speaks through all the literary figures that inhabit him. If translating other people’s work fills the absence Auster experiences with presence, writing through and of other authors has a similar effect. I want to suggest that, because of his father’s abandonment, Auster turns to literary authors as compensation. These authors whom he admires, who teach him and whom he feels connected to, provide him with an impression of fatherhood, the only one he knows. I now demonstrate the presence of these literary fathers in Auster’s text and the way he uses their vocabulary to express his devotion.

Kafkaesque is the label to describe some of the unpleasant incidents that Auster intentionally cites in his fiction. The nightmarish situations of Nashe’s imprisonment behind the wall in The Music of Chance, evokes Kafka’s The Great Wall of China. Auster’s version has another uncanny quality to it, as its publication coincides with the fall of the Berlin Wall. The absurdity of Barber falling into a freshly dug grave from which he is lifted by a crane, just before revealing his fatherhood to Fogg, could stem from Kafka’s pen. Anna Blume’s escape from the apocalyptical city in The Country of Last Things, especially after surviving the human butchery, is another example. The origins of the speaking dog in Timbuktu lie in The Metamorphosis. Then there is the story Orr writes in Oracle Night, about a character who is trapped in the remote ‘Bureau of Historical Preservation’ –a library full of telephone books- and no one to answer his calls. Quinn’s anonymity in ‘City of Glass’, confirmed by the telephone company’s refusal to acknowledge his existence. Or else, his flat occupied by a stranger after he withdraws into an alley to observe an already dead person. Especially the ending of The Brooklyn Follies foreshadows grotesque circumstances when Nathan walks the streets of New York moments before the two planes hit the towers of the World Trade Centre. Auster and Kafka both manage to present the most unbelievable things as mundane. Even their narrative style is comparable, especially when Auster adopts Kafka’s lugubrious convention of referring to himself in the third person as in ‘The Book of Memory’, or implicating himself in the story like in ‘City of Glass’.

Another feature Auster shares with Kafka is his constant presence. Auster’s life is filtered in his work. ‘Writing is an activity that helps me to relieve some pressure caused by these buried secrets. Hidden memories, traumas, childhood scars-there is no question that novels emerge from these inaccessible parts of ourselves.’ His autobiographical fictions often describe events that have left an impression on him, mainly that of loss. References to Auster’s first unhappy marriage, the inevitable divorce and the perfect relationship he enjoys with his second wife, appear in a few of Auster’s fictions. And then not to mention: the missing father, the deserted son. However, more remarkable is that every single work includes allusions to at least one of his literary role models that have, in some way affected his life. Auster’s range of influences is not limited to authors suffering from troubled parental relationships but he is self-conscious of his literary heritage. He extends his selection of father figures only to worship them in his many prefaces, critical essays and translations on Mallarmé, Melville, Hawthorne, Joubert, Jabès, Borges, Sartre, Raleigh and many more. The way he evokes his literary idols in his fictions varies: either directly through their names, references to their works, or by adopting their writing style. Representatives of the American Renaissance, French Symbolists and modern writers -such as Beckett, Proust, Collodi, Thoreau to name but a few- are part of his collection of literary icons whose works he fuses with his own. When asked about his favourite writers, Auster directly affirms: ‘of prose writers, unquestionably Kafka and Beckett. They both had a tremendous hold over me. […] Of older writers, there were Hölderlin and Leopardi, the essays of Montaigne, and Cervantes’ Don Quixote, which has remained a great source for me.’ The effects literary figures have on Auster are obvious in yet another guise: many of his fictional characters are in fact authors themselves who allude to the stories Auster is mostly intrigued by.

Paul Auster, an author in ‘City of Glass’ for example, takes Don Quixote apart and explains Quinn –a creator of detective stories that he composes under a pseudonym- the nature of his critical text. The dropout literature student Tom Wood compares Hawthorne and Poe in his dissertation; (BF) two writers Auster is fascinated by. Wood later tells the story of Kafka consoling a little girl by sending her a letter each day in the name of the doll that she has lost. Sidney Orr is a novelist in Oracle Night, who develops his own version of a story that his closest friend, literary mentor and renowned author Trause alerts him to. Benjamin Sachs, a talented author, debates his career with the narrator Peter Aaron (note the initials) who struggles to finish his own book in Leviathan –a novel Auster dedicated to Don DeLillo. The title refers to Melville’s Moby Dick as Leviathan signifies sea monster. In The New York Trilogy especially, authors invade Auster’s language: Auster borrows the name William Wilson from his American predecessor Poe to develop the genre of the detective fiction (CoG). Fanshawe, another author, carries the same name as Nathaniel Hawthorne’s first book title (LR). In ‘Ghosts’, Blue and Black compose each other’s biographies while observing one another; a story inspired by Walden. What stands out mostly in The New York Trilogy however, is the struggle with language that Auster adopts from Samuel Beckett. The presence of the Irish writer is in fact strongly felt: ‘The influence of Beckett was so strong that I couldn’t see my way beyond it,’ Auster admits.

Beckett is famous for his bare-boned, absurd and insignificant texts that use language in such an abstract, contradictory and nihilistic manner to complicate the process of understanding. Beckett’s ‘literature of the unword’ is an attack upon verbal communication. Even some of his titles, like Texts for Nothing or The Unnameable, reveal what the text is about: nothing. Beckett, who like Auster lived in Paris, defines his work as ‘the expression that there is nothing to express, nothing with which to express, no power to express, together with the obligation to express.’ This reveals Beckett’s frustration towards language: he is aware that the only human means of communication is deemed unsuccessful. Texts for Nothing especially demonstrates this destruction of representation.

Name, no, nothing is nameable, tell, no, nothing can be told, what then, I don’t know, I shouldn’t have begun.

I have very little (perhaps nothing) to say to you, I have very little (perhaps nothing) to show you. You will learn nothing from it; you will gain no moral profit from it; it will not even enhance your life with that delight or superior pleasure with which you have been led to believe, artists have the obligation to provide you.

Language no longer operates as a vehicle for meaningful expression. In Beckett’s work, language presents an endless stream of signifiers, signifying insufficiently. His words disappear into sheer materiality; they become empty deposits of ink on paper. Peter Stillman’s expedition to find a pure language reveals a similar attitude. The search evokes Beckett’s literary investigations, especially when Stillman explains his idea of language:

Yes. A language that will at last say what we have to say. For our words no longer correspond to the world. When things were whole, we felt confident that our words could express them. But little by little these things have broken apart, shattered, collapsed into chaos. And yet our words have remained the same. Hence, every time we try to speak of what we see, we speak falsely, distorting the very thing we are trying to represent. […] Consider a word that refers to a thing- “ umbrella”, for example. […] Not only is an umbrella a thing, it is a thing that performs a function. […] What happens when a thing no longer performs its function? […] the umbrella ceases to be an umbrella. It has changed into something else. The word, however, has remained the same. Therefore it can no longer express the thing.’(CoG, 77-8)

In his mission, Stillman literary walks the letters that form ‘The Tower of Babel’ to strip language of its unnecessary vocabulary and reduce it to meaningful fragments. Conversely to Beckett, whose texts destroy the signifying potential of language, Stillman tries to return to it. In a prescribed area in New York, he wants to discover the principle by which words correspond to the things they name. His goal is to fill the gap between signifier and signified by in effect reinstating the instrumental function of language. Stillman’s endeavour fails; Auster leaves the reader with a literary subject living a Waiting for Godot-like existence. Auster has rightly understood the way in which language as a meaning-creating tool fails. However, he does not offer a solution: Stillman commits suicide before he can finalize his attempt to fix language. Auster analyses, exemplifies and sometimes even explains structuralist and poststructuralist thinking in his subject’s utterances, especially when they are searching for identity and meaning in their existence. In the final pages of ‘The Locked Room’, language reaches its non-signifying climax in a Beckettian manner:

All the words were familiar to me, and yet they seemed to have been put together strangely, as though their final purpose was to cancel each other out. I can think of no other way to express it. Each sentence erased the sentence before it, each paragraph made the next paragraph impossible. (313)

This linguistic skepticism has another connotation as the self-destructive words simultaneously erase the person whom they refer to –Fanshawe- as well as the person reading them –the narrator. In ‘The Locked Room’, Fanshawe, whose identity he is forced to adopt, directs the narrator’s existence. When he senses the impasse in Fanshawe’s final words, his assumed identity disappears at the same moment Fanshawe dies. The narrator is alone again when telling Fanshawe’s story, his story. So is Paul Auster. The words used to explain Fanshawe’s abandoned situation recall this signifying absence in Auster’s work: the absence of his father, which he feels equally connected to as the narrator to Fanshawe. Be it through Beckett, Kafka, or his different characters, Auster uses everyone’s language to express his solitude that he creates in response to the fatherly absence. He however slowly learns –triggered by the investigation in ‘Portrait of an Invisible Man’- that language cannot bring a person into being; that it can never fully deliver the world since language is always bestowed with a certain absence. In Auster’s world, the father, his father, signifies this inexpressible absence; an absence that he fights against. He therefore seems to open up his narrative to another dimension in which authors that have influenced him, tell their story through Auster. Each book is a tribute of a writer to all those who have helped him create. Most of these literary figures are combined in ‘The Book of Memory’, the text he wrote in connection to his dead father about which he says:

‘You don’t begin to understand your connection to others until you are alone. And the more intensely you are alone, the more deeply you plunge into a state of solitude, the more deeply you feel that connection. It isn’t possible for a person to isolate himself from other people. No matter how apart you might find yourself in a physical sense you discover that you are inhabited by others. Your language, your memories, even your sense of isolation- every thought in your head has been born from your connection with others. This is what I was trying to explore in ‘The Book of Memory’, to examine both sides of the word ‘solitude’. I felt as though I were looking down to the bottom of myself, and what I found there was more than just myself –I found the world. That’s why the book is filled with so many references and quotations, in order to pay homage to all the others inside me. On the one hand, it’s a work about being alone; on the other hand, it’s about community. That book has dozens of authors, and I wanted them all to speak through me. In the final analysis, ‘The Book of Memory’ is a collective work.’

How to get out of the room that is the book?

Paul Auster must accept this abandonment he describes in The Invention of Solitude to validate his literary existence. Auster’s identity as an author is defined through his father’s past, his behaviour, his absence and what Auster creates out of it, which he tries to identify with in all his writing but especially in The Invention of Solitude.

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 the bravest moments, he embraces meaninglessness as the first principle. […] He is in his room in Varick Street. His life has no meaning. There is the world, and the things one encounters in the world, and to speak of them is to be in the world. (158)

Auster acknowledges the past, although he still does not fully get to the core of his father and therefore carries on dealing with it in the prese