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  • 8/10/2019 Pensamiento de Paul Auster

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    132 CRITIQUE

    New York was an inexhaustible space, a labyrinth of endless steps, and nomatter how far he walked, no matter how well he came to know its neigh-bourhoods and streets, it always left him with the feeling of being lost. Lost,not only in the city, but within himself as well. Each time he took a walk,he felt as though he were leaving himself behind, and by giving himself upto the movement of the streets, by reducing himself to a seeing eye, he wasable to escape the obligation to think, and this, more than anything else,brought him a measure of peace, a salutary emptiness within. [. . .] On hisbest walks, he was able to feel that he was nowhere. And this, finally, was allhe ever asked of things: to be nowhere. New York was the nowhere he hadbuilt around himself, and he realized that he had no intention of ever leavingit again. ( NYT 4) 1

    Considering this disorienting inexhaustible space that is experienced as a voidof sorts, one can hardly wonder why some commentators have seen Austerselaborate penetration of urban space as a superimposition of the American desertover New York. 2 The motifs of voluntary starvation and material exhaustion thatfeature so prominently in novels such as In the Country of Last Things (1987)and Moon Palace(1989) also invoke similar images of an open, arid landscapeeven when the scenes are set in the middle of the city. The desert is indeed theprincipal type of environmental image that the modern cultural imaginary wouldassociate with a concept such as nowhere, which conveys something like aspatial entity detached from known spatiality. The fact that Austers characters,especially in Moon Palace, also undergo major personal transformations in thebarren lands of the U.S. Southwest underlines the connection. The boneyard ofoblivion, as the old artistic explorer Thomas Effing calls the desert ( MP 154),represents the image of the self as tabula rasa that connects Austers fiction to theAmerican mythology of fresh new beginnings and re-created identities.

    The wasteland in the wilderness also seems an apt physical embodimentorat least a substitutefor what could be figured as the destination of the medita-tive quest. Ilana Shiloh has traced the basic outlines of that scheme in her book Paul Auster and Postmodern Quest: On the Road to Nowhere, which focuses onthe failure of teleological modes of thought and conduct in the authors novels.Shiloh lays the emphasis on the grand-scale journey, the search of a proper telos,which in Auster is generally doomed to futility. As her subheading implies, theimagined objective of the quest is figured as dissolving into nothingness in thecourse of a journey. Nowhere becomes a place not even worth reaching; theKerouac-style journey, whether a literal road story or not, represents the sumtotal: Only the going itself would matter ( MP 288). Like Sisyphus rolling therock uphill, Shiloh concludes, Austers quester exerts his whole being towardaccomplishing nothing (200). But the salutary emptiness within celebratedby Quinn in the midst of his peripatetic meditation is hardly nothing; in fact, itconstitutes a valuable resource for the character. My purpose here is not to ques-tion Shilohs conclusions on the personal journey whose elements tend to canceleach other out but to relocate the discussion of Nowhere (hereafter capitalized)

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    onto an altogether different plane of analysis and evaluation. In contrast to thevocabulary of the useless quest, I would like to introduce the Nowhere represent-

    ed in Austers texts as a beneficial state of the creative mind, less a projected telosthan a specific mental topos, a source of refreshing and regenerative impulses.It should therefore be apparent that this site invites a metaphorical alliance

    with an oasis within a desert rather than merely the desert itself. While the mys-tery of the deserts perceived void continues to haunt public imagination, thebiblical subtext of an unspecified space of fasting and meditation is combinedin contemporary America with connotations of state machinery and nuclearweaponry (test grounds), of secrecy (military installations), and of supernaturalor extraterrestrial presences (see Beck). The sense of looming danger in thebarren landscape is not a recent invention in the United States; it comes with a

    historical baggage. In Virgin Land , Henry Nash Smith writes of the insistenceon the uninhabitability of the arid land by civilized people, a notion excludingmigratory tribesmen, nomadic brigands, and adventurers and desperadoes(17677, 183). The idea of a desolate nonplace, as embodied in the desert, haslong ago acquired a sense of the off-limits for what defines itself as respectablesociety. Inevitably, the barely mappable void of the desert has begun to find itsurban counterpart in the marginal wastelands (harbor fronts, empty lots, ware-house districts, industrial areas) that serve in popular culture as typecast venuesfor violent crime and retaliation. Positive refiguring of the site named Nowherethus requires that the inflexible links to both the futile postmodernist quest and

    the physical desert be severed. In this essay, I propose to dissociate the idea ofNowhere somewhat from these featureless or infertile environments and contextsbut retain its identity as a type of test zone in a constructive sense, a refuge fromthe pressures of supply and demand, or a site of freedom for independent psy-chological regenerationa salutary emptiness within. Given that this creativespace, conceived in this manner, represents a topos in interior geography, theconsciousness of the self is necessarily located in its center.

    I outline below three interlinked constructions of Austers Nowhere, based onthree different spatial experiences dominant in his fiction: the phenomenologyof the writers locked room (representative of confined spaces in general), the

    state of being lost (concerning, above all, the walker in the city la Quinn), andthe dissociation from place inherent in travel by car (indicative of the generaltrope of the road story). The various incarnations of this inspiring experientialstate exemplify how spatial freedom and containment, while logical opposites,can in specific circumstances creatively translate into one another. The themeof spatial freedom, on the other hand, is necessarily intertwined with issuesconcerning political liberties, and the psychological aspect of being Nowhere is

    just as closely linked with epistemologies of space and place. Because Austersliterary protagonists and alter egos function as the experiencing subjects here, ananalysis such as this involves a method one could describe as a phenomenologi-

    cal approach to fictional spatiality.

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    The Relativity of Spatial Freedom

    Auster cherishes paradox on the level of individual phrases and sentenceseven the passage from City of Glass quoted above contains several passing exam-ples, from the idea of getting lost within oneself to the classification of a knowngeographical location, New York, as nowhere. 3 One can detect similar paradoxicalexpressions on the thematic macro-level of his texts, including a constant inter-play of notions of freedom and imprisonment. One of the two writer-protagonistsin Leviathan (1992), Benjamin Sachs, was in his youth a conscientious objectorwho went to prison to avoid participation in the Vietnam War. Life in the peni-tentiary, he points out, was not as bleak as one could assume: [Y]our whole lifeis mapped out for you in advance. Youd be surprised how much freedom that

    gives you (20). Warren Oberman (199) cites this passage together with Sartresstatement on the freedom inherent in imprisonment and connects Austers writingto Erich Fromms philosophy of escape from freedom. Indeed, the author hashimself contended that this is where paradox extends into his dominant paradigmsof spatiotemporal experience:

    [L]ooking back over my work now, I can see that it does shuttle betweenthese two extremes: confinement and vagabondageopen space and her-metic space. At the same time, theres a curious paradox embedded in allthis: when the characters in my books are most confined, they seem to bemost free. And when they are free to wander, they are most lost and confused.

    ( AH 327)While spatial confinement sustains psychological freedom, spatial freedom tendsto incur a sense of disorientation and confusion, even mortal danger. As Sachsasserts concerning his mothers experience of vertigo inside the Statue of Liberty,freedom entails numerous hazards: If you dont watch out, it can kill you ( L35).Nashe, the hero of The Music of Chance (1990), similarly finds that his freedom-seeking road journey is conducive to ever-present danger: There were constantperils to watch out for (12). The individualism inherent in a life on the open roadand the barely definable promise of political and economic emancipation symbol-ized by Lady Libertythese may well be the two most dominant archetypes ofthe concept of freedom in the United States. Auster exploits them lavishly butsimultaneously exposes their inner contradictions. Sachs turns himself into a sym-bolic terrorist because he feels the Statue of Liberty, by succumbing to the ubiq-uitous consensus of the market, has betrayed its own spirit. Nashe never achievesthe happiness he seeks on the road; instead, he finds a measure of tranquility inhalf-voluntary imprisonment that turns into a pastoral meditation on the politicsof spatial enclosures.

    Perhaps the prime example of the relativity of freedom in Auster is, however,the obsession on small confined spaces that especially his early prose worksreflect. The philosophy of the closed room, understood as a space of immense

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    significance for a writer, is emphasized and literalized in Ghosts (1986); The Locked Room (1986), the final part of the trilogy, carries the image in its very

    title. Yet the same ideas were already most explicit inThe Invention of Solitude

    (1982), where this image of the writers room as the ultimate space of life andcreation becomes a founding metaphor for the whole book, especially the sec-ond of the two parts, The Book of Memory. The room, containing the writingsubject, epitomizes the metaphysical space in which the fictional text comesinto existence, grows, and assumes a life of relative independence. The funda-mentally dual nature of the room is reflected in two consecutive sections in TheBook of Memory, the first dealing with the dangers lurking inside it and thesecond suggesting reasons for being in the room ( IS 98, 101). This division isreminiscent of Otto Bollnows remark that human-inhabited space appears in a

    double manner [. . .] as something that belongs to man as a limb, and then againas something that confronts him from outside as hostile or at least as strange(qtd. in Cook 554). 4 Austers closed room, like some of the other dominantspaces of his fiction, bears such a double face. The forces of birth and deathconverge through phonetic wordplay: Room and tomb, tomb and womb, womband room ( IS 15960). Memory itself, the central tool of imagination, can beimagined as a room, as a body, as a skull, as a skull that encloses the room inwhich a body sits (88). This paradoxical configuration of inside and outsidetwists a simple Chinese-box model into a Mbius Strip. The writers room is themost essential physical entity for the work of imagination, but it can also house

    horror, as it does when Peter Stillman, Sr., imprisons his small son in City ofGlass. In that text, the quest for pure, prelapsarian language turns into an experi-ment that wrecks human identity. Austers curiosity on the ability of single enti-ties to contain such extreme dualitiesa characteristic that may bear a relationto his obvious love of paradoxhas remained manifest in his representationsof physical space. Like several of the writers other obsessions, the closed roomembodies the rampant, totally mystifying force of contradiction ( IS 61).

    The overall emphasis, especially in the autobiographical world of The Bookof Memory, remains on the positive aspects of confinement, the infinite pos-sibilities of a limited space ( IS 89). The authors alter ego, A., realizes that a

    crammed, most strictly bounded spaceif kept under the minds controlcan beequated with boundless imagination. As Gaston Bachelard wrote about the poetsreveries, the universe comes to inhabit his house (51). While the consistent jux-taposition of A. with Robinson Crusoe, Jonah of the biblical Book of Jonah, andPinocchios father Geppetto invokes images of solitude and claustrophobia, theroom maintains a powerful aura as a near-magical space of creation. The writerunderstands that in the deepest solitude of his room [. . .] he had become morethan just himself ( IS139). Standard rules of society and perception have ceasedto apply. In A.s little dwelling at Varick Street, the conditions are regulated bysome prankster deity: Electricity and telephone use cost nothing, for each firm

    insisted they had never heard of him (79). It is as if the writer, in his determina-

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    tion to discover the essence of his textual universe, were transferring the room tothe realm of imagination. Freedom and confinement may seem logical opposites,

    but Austers writer-protagonist, living in this nonplace unacknowledged by soci-ety, is able to reconcile the notions into a creative symbiosis.The distinctive space-time phenomenology of the writer-protagonists room

    like other spatialities central to Austers fiction such as the peripatetic meditationsof Quinn and otherscan appropriately be analyzed by means of the concept ofchronotope. According to Bakhtin, the term, deriving from the Greek chronos(time) and topos (place), refers to the intrinsic connectedness of temporal andspatial relationships that are artistically expressed in literature (84). My use ofthe term here refers to the subjects or characters spatiotemporal experience spe-cific to a given space or mobile state. In the case of the writers room, contrary to

    Bakhtins assertion on the general dominance of time over space in literary chro-notopes (85), one could claim that spatiality much outweighs the temporal ele-ment. The writing room is a space specifically configured for the erasure of thetime spent there from the record (that is, the text written in and about the room).The presence of the evolving text confuses temporal relations; the writers expe-rience of time does not correspond to the regularity of the clock. Reflected in thefragmented structure of The Book of Memory, the text produced in the roomhas no traditional beginning, middle, or end. It is a work of little chronology inwhich everything, in a sense, happens simultaneously. The room chronotope, inwhich concrete movement is minimized, is thus dominated by its idiosyncratic

    topos. Identified as a space of memory, the room collapses the temporal con-tinuum in the mind of the self or replaces it with a fictional one. 5

    More important, this complex intertwining of spatiality and consciousnessdoes not take place within a hermetic sealeven though the word hermetic fasci-natingly captures the imaginary and imaginative nature of Austers room throughits second, older meaning of concerning magic or alchemy. 6 A., as the narratorwrites, does not mean to neglect the windows that are sometimes present in theroom. The room need not be an image of hermetic consciousness (140). Instead,it resembles an image of the text with its intertextual connections and contextualobligations. The idea itself refers to Edgar Allan Poes enigma of the locked

    room in The Murders in the Rue Morgue (1841), a pioneering detective storywhose original spatial mystery has inspired not only Auster but also numerousother authors, including Borges. For meaning to exist, as Poes Auguste Dupininsists, the room cannot be completely sealed off. There has to be an opening tothe locked space in which the enigma, or the text, is born, as, otherwise, meaningcould not be created in the first place. The key to the solution of Poes mystery isthe means of egress employed by the murderers (157), a combination of a hid-den spring and a broken nail; a corresponding opening in Austers room enablesthe writers interaction with the world.

    In fact, total spatial blockage, a hermetic seal, would not only imply narrative

    closureit would also convey the impossibility of narrative. The theoretical idea

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    of absolute closure, narrative and spatial, is at the core of Austers 1975 essay,The Death of Sir Walter Raleigh ( AH 7581). This piece is one of the mostlucid expressions of the authors conception of confinement and freedomevenconfinement as freedom. The initial image of Raleighs cell, repeating the skull-body-room juxtaposition, is that of a hermetic seal: The Tower is stone andthe solitude of stone. It is the skull of a man around the body of a manand itsquick is thought. But no thought will ever reach the other side of the wall (75).This prison seems a space of closure in the sense of arrest of motion, the logicalopposite of freedom, but it too soon assumes an air of possibility: [T]houghtnevertheless determines its own boundaries, and the man who thinks can nowand then surpass himself, even when there is nowhere to go. [. . .] Where nopossibility exists, everything becomes possible again ( AH 75). A negativenowhere to go thus transforms into a positive Nowhere that offers boundlessroom for mental maneuver. Several phrases in this passage recur and reverberateelsewhere in Austers fiction. Indeed, despite the almost ubiquitous presence ofwalls, fences, chambers, wombs, boxes, caves, and other obstacles and spaces ofconfinement, one can read most of his novels as reaffirmations of the belief thatthought [. . .] determines its own boundaries. The act of writing remains thebest way to realize that limitless possibility.

    Disorientation as Liberation

    Modern political theory generally considers the issue of personal freedomin conjunction with social responsibility. Freedom does not refer to a limitlesscontinuum of space into which the subject can advance, unfettered by socialregulation; instead, it denotes a state in which the individual is able to makeinformed and unforced choices within set social and institutional parameters. AsThomas Hobbes formulated it, [t]he Liberty of a Subject, lyeth [. . .] only inthose things, which in regulating their actions, the Sovereign hath praetermitted(148). Imprisonment is societys response to when citizens cross a particularlegal limit in taking concrete, inappropriate liberties.

    However, as Austers texts powerfully demonstrate, confinement in space can-not necessarily be equated with captivity. The figure of the writer has long beenregarded as being somewhat outside the conventional social contract: Writersexploit a position as observers rather than members of societys mainstream, asanalysts and critics rather than actors. In extreme caseswhether seen by con-temporaries as creative geniuses, suffering artists, or simply pathetic outcastswriters have assumed their positions in societal peripheries by adopting the life-style of a hermit. From Poe and Thoreau to Salinger, Kerouac, and Pynchon, theAmerican literary canon is marked by attempts to retreat from the social machineor failures to adapt to its requirements and side effects. Besides its aesthetic andexperiential implications, the closed room of the writer is symbolic of this rela-tively self-imposed isolation. The physical appearance of the ascetic room, as

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    described in Auster (or, say, Beckett or Federman), is not unlike that of a prisoncell. From the viewpoint of the socioeconomic mainstream, the writer is alwaysalready on the verge of breaking the social contract. This perceived mainstreamconsists of people who have real jobs within the immediate mechanics of sup-ply and demand, who must pay their bills (unlike A. in The Book of Memory),and who directly contribute to the means of material production. One couldinterpret Sachss decision to go to prison in Leviathan as a logical consequenceof his chosen trade, a mere expression of the outsider status of the writer throughits radical dissidence.

    Among other things, Austers Leviathan discusses the issue of personal freedomthrough its titles allusion to Hobbes and the weighty symbolism attached to theStatue of Liberty. Hobbes might not have approved of Sachss dissidence but nei-ther would he have considered conscientious objection illegal: to avoyd battell, isnot Injustice, but Cowardice (152). There is a certain analogy between this stanceand the way in which society, especially a totalitarian one, can regard its writers asirresponsible subjects. Most Auster protagonists are writers by profession; most ofthose who are not still possess a distinct writerly identity. 7 The spatial isolation ofthe writer in the closed room could be seen to have a social dimension: his refusalto participate in the machinery of societys more material economies.

    The punitive rationale of imprisonment is to prevent the inmate from leadingthe life he or she desires. In the case of the writer, however, this objective is real-ized incompletely, as his or her occupation requires little more than the cell he orshe is provided. While in prison, Sachs starts writing his debut novel, unfetteredby his physical surroundings. The particular type of irresponsibilityfailure tocomply with the requirements of societyfor which he is being punished is thesame property that renders his work possible and himself, in effect, unpunishable.The Foucauldian exhaustive disciplinary apparatus in its basic form fails tocontrol the writers aptitude to work (see Foucault, Discipline 23536). Even inprison, the writer, in Hobbess phrase, is not hindred to doe what he has a will to(146), and is therefore free in a fundamental sense of the word. To illustrate thepoint, Auster (through Sachs) inserts here an old joke about a suspicious husbandwho finds a stranger in his bedroom closet. Asked about his reason for being there,the man answers, Everybody has to be somewhere (20). As long as the isolatingseal is not absolutely hermetic, prison is as good a place for writing as any other.In literary authorship, the somewhere of the joke translates into anywhere, asthe site of creation is not geographically determined. For the same reason, thisfoothold of the imagination can approach the Nowhere toward which Quinnlikeother Auster protagonistslaunches his characteristic daily quest.

    The image of the writer as a Robinson Crusoe, divided from mankind, asolitaire, one banished from human society ( IS 80), is, of coursedepending onthe vantage pointnihilistic, idealistic, or romantic. In any case, it hardly aimsat capturing the real-life complexities of the literary profession. Quinn, albeit awriter, reaches the place called Nowhere not by sitting in his closed room but by

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    adopting the role of the street flneur and modifying it for his own purposes. Thespace that he constructs around himself stems from a similar type of geographi-cal indifference as Sachss writerly obsession. More often than not, analysesrelating to the flneur make extensive references to Walter Benjamins pioneer-ing treatment of the topic in Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of HighCapitalism(1973). Benjamins (and Baudelaires) heroic stroller is not directlytransferable to Austers world, but Quinn does share a few essentials with theParisian observer: Benjamin wrote of an intoxication [that] comes over thosewho wander through the streets for a long time without any particular goal (qtd.in Gilloch 152). Whereas the Baudelairean urban observer was a privileged fig-ure of vision, a student of authentic place, flnerie for Quinn ultimately becomesa method of escaping cognition, of not seeing what is around him. This entailsindifference to buildings, other landmarks, and peopleanything providing asolid point of reference external to the self. One could call this self-constructedNowhere an epistemological void. It thus foregrounds the postmodernist dimen-sion of the trilogy by questioning the validity of the traditional epistemologicalconcerns of the detective genreconventions that provide an ostensible frame-work for the three texts.

    The autobiographical premises of this fictionalized state of perambulatorybeing shed light on the extent of voluntary disorientation. There was some-thing compulsive about the walks I took, an insatiable urge to prowl, Austerreminisces on his time in Dublin at the age of eighteen. During these walks, heclaims, the streets were transformed into something wholly personal for me,a map of my inner terrain ( HM 22). Indeed, space is internalized in Austerspedestrian disorientation as it is in the space of writing; the setting becomes littlemore than roaming ground for consciousness, a skull that encloses the room( IS 88). One is reminded of Beckettsprobably Austers most important literaryinfluencestage directions in Endgame and the configuration of the room set inthe shape of the human skull. In The Invention of Solitude, on the other hand, A. wanders in the streets of Amsterdam, unable to build a coherent mental mapof the place. Accustomed to the rectangular grid of New York and curiouslyreluctant to consult a map, he loses his way in the typical circular arrangementof an old European city: For three days it rained, and for three days he walkedaround in circles ( IS 86). This particular state of being lost, however, results inanything but desperation. On the contrary, it fills A. with joy, as losing ones wayin the streets (of memory, as the text suggests) amounts to a sense of personaldiscovery, which he breathed [. . .] into his very bones and said to himself,almost triumphantly: I am lost (87).

    Within the rationalist grid of the American city, as in the fictional Manhattanthat Quinns walks penetrate, such misnavigation may require more effort. InDonald Barthelmes short story The Balloon, the orientational function of thegrid is momentarily erased. The fantastic appearance of the huge balloon on topof the city swallows the rigid patterns and uniformity of the grid, offering the

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    possibility [. . .] of mislocation of the self (Barthelme 21). In the absence of suchan overwhelming deus ex machina, the pedestrian wishing to lose himself must,

    paradoxically, do so with a degree of deliberation.The urge to be lost and the creative potential hidden in that urge can be explainedthrough a distinction between space and place as defined by Yi-Fu Tuan. Like othertheorists such as Michel de Certeau, Tuan acknowledges that place can denotepause when compared to the movement allowed by space. However, he placesthe emphasis on the security and stability of place as opposed to the openness,freedom, and threat of space (6). Furthermore, the self determines its position inspace by the simple coordinates of up/down, front/back, and left/right. Being lost,Tuan explains, means that the directions corresponding to these coordinates are notgeared to external reference points (36). This state incurs an absence of a sense of

    security, of place. The self finds itself surrounded by threatening space, which, how-ever, also contains an alluring promise of freedom. It is this promise that A. carriesinside himself in the city, a feeling that can render being lost a desirable, even lib-erating experience. The lack of a place, an easily recognizable and nameable entity,is what induces the feeling of being nowhere that was all [Quinn] ever asked ofthings in City of Glass. The uplifting state attainable in Austers pedestrian chro-notope seems to be dependent on this placelessness and aimlessness. That elementof near sublimity is contained within the very concept of space as Tuan defines it.To be Nowhere, in the way Quinn and A. are during their walks, is to be surroundedby pure, undifferentiated space where all places became equal ( NYT 4; emphasis

    added). As curious reluctance to identify his location on a map is a mental reac-tion to protect this state of existential purity from the invasion of the familiar.When Fredric Jameson introduced his concept of cognitive mapping, he pre-

    sented it as a combination of spatial and social orientation. The spatial dimensionstems directly from the mechanics of urban way-finding as discussed by KevinLynch in his seminal book The Image of the City (1960). Late-modern cognitivemapping, according to Jameson, involves an extrapolation of Lynchs spatialanalysis to the realm of social structure (Cognitive Mapping 283); its pur-pose is thus to enable a situational representation on the part of the individualsubject to that vaster and properly unrepresentable totality which is the ensemble

    of societys structures as a whole ( Postmodernism 51). Here Jameson refers toAlthussers definition of ideologythe representation of the imaginary relation-ship of individuals to their real conditions of existence (162)to show that thepractice of cognitive mapping can be transferred from its directly geographicalcontext to that of social and political space. This is a useful theoretical frameworkwith regard to the bliss of being lost in Auster, for the inability to map spatiallyimplies an equivalent detachment from social reality. Lack of contact with exter-nal points of reference will result in spatial disorientation, but perhaps its mostmomentous psychological impact concerns the autonomy of the subject. Freedomfrom place can be experienced and enjoyed as freedom from the social machine.

    Thus the elaborate analogies that Auster draws between haphazard walking and

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    writerly cognition (for example, IS 122, NYT 8087) can be explained not onlyas metaphors of thought processes but also as reflections of the writers indepen-

    dence of, or self-induced separation from, societal reference points.

    The Essence of Nowhere

    Besides the writers confinement in his room and the walkers aimless move-ment in the streets, there is a third significant type of intoxicating spatiotemporalexperience, or chronotope, in the textual world of Auster. What I choose to callthe car chronotope is realized most conspicuously in the transcontinental travelsof Jim Nashe ( MC ) and Marco Stanley Fogg ( MP). The description of Nashes

    mind-set is exemplary:Speed was of the essence, the joy of sitting in the car and hurtling himselfforward through space. That became a good beyond all others, a hunger to befed at any price. Nothing around him lasted for more than a moment, and asone moment followed another, it was as though he alone continued to exist.He was a fixed point in a whirl of changes, a body poised in utter stillness asthe world rushed through him and disappeared. The car became a sanctumof invulnerability, a refuge in which nothing could hurt him anymore. Aslong as he was driving, he carried no burdens, was unencumbered by eventhe slightest particle of his former life. ( MC1112)

    This is reminiscent of Baudrillard, for whom driving represents a spectacular formof amnesia. Everything is to be discovered, everything to be obliterated (9). Theroad and the car do not only stand for themselves; their mere presence attaches ameaning of purity, of a fresh start, to the quest. In effect, this type of motorism createsa state of mobility characterized by a lack of retrospective vision: The conspicuousabsence of the past is maintained as long as the car is moving. One way of relatingAusters car chronotope to the other two spatiotemporal experiences predominantin his fiction is to see it as an amalgamation of their components. A private interior(of the vehicle) is combined with a movement conducive to creative freedom, andan additional element of speed (a whirl of changes, the world rushed through

    him), created by technology, intensifies the experience.8

    However, because thebody remains immobile and inactive (in utter stillness) in relation to its immedi-ate surroundings, it can be considered a fixed point despite its factual velocity. Theimpression is of everything else moving and the body remaining still, an effect thatrenders the self the center of the perceptible universe. Apparently, this specific fea-ture of the chronotope is what produces the sense of power Nashe enjoys, the feelingof omnipotence and invulnerability for which he develops an addiction.

    In his meditative solitude and indifference to the outside world, Nashe experi-ences the same kind of phenomenological purity as A. does when buried in hiswriting chamber or walking disoriented in the streets. The room and car chrono-

    topes effect a type of closure not only on the concrete occupied space (by way of

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    walls, floor, and roof) but also, in consequence, on perception. The sanctum ofinvulnerability both protects the self from undesirable stimuli and dictates cer-

    tain limits for sensory observation: In the car, vision is framed by the windscreenand windows, the soundscape dominated by the engine, other senses regulatedby the insulated and air-conditioned interior. This is not freedom in the sense oflimitless accessible space. The body of the moving vehicle detaches the self fromplace as thoroughly as the state of being lost in the pedestrian chronotope.

    Nashes addiction to the experience of the car chronotope at the beginning ofThe Music of Chancereplicates the sentiment of Fogg at the end of Moon Pal-ace. The author has directly admitted that the decisive incentive for writing JimNashes story stemmed from the conclusion of his previous novel, in which Foggscar is stolen: I realized that I wanted to get back inside that car, to give myself

    a chance to go on driving around America ( AH 325). Therefore, Foggs storyends with the same centrifugal impulse with which Nashes begins. Indeed, onemust bear in mind that driving around the United States is, mythologically andideologically, an experience distinct from road trips elsewhere. Foggs westward

    journey replicates the mythic course of national progress toward the Turnerianfrontier and the tabula rasa of the desert. Nashes immersion in the life on theroad also shares some basic features with the prototypical frontiersman narrative,most notably the obliteration of the personal past and the inability to commit tofamily. It is crucial to acknowledge the analogies between the archetypal Americannarrative of westward travel as rebirth and the more immediate disconnection

    from mundane reality provided by direct spatiotemporal experience. Given thatthe former motif, exploited in various ways, recurs in several Auster novels, oneis tempted to conclude that the urge to get lost in Nowhere represents somethinglike a late-modern frontier impulse of a modest, urban sedentarist scale. Thelack of attachment to place and other structures implying permanence or societalhegemony evokes nomadism as a philosophical concept. There is no genuineteleology, spatial or other, in Austers road-trip motif, which renders the connectionto the immobile writers and wandering pedestrians all the more conspicuous. Allthese experiential chronotopes are reminiscent of what Gilles Deleuze wrote in hisessay Nomad Thought: that the nomad is not necessarily one who moves: some

    voyages take place in situ, are trips in intensity (149).Austers recent novel The Brooklyn Follies (2005) returns to the theme of theliberating mental space in a notably explicit manner. One of the main characters,Tom Wood, has written a senior thesis, Imaginary Edens, about the notion ofthe inner refuge in Poe and Thoreau. According to Tom, these two canonicalwriters escaped the real world into a utopian spatial configuration composed ofthe ideal room, the ideal house, and the ideal landscape ( BF 1415). Whatis more, their visions expressed a rejection of American society as they saw it.Tom, academically an Americanist andlike Austera great admirer of Kafka(152), sees the imaginary room as a vault of contemplation, a noiseless sanctuary

    [. . .] a sensible alternative to the conditions of the time in a country preparing

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    for civil war (16). Finding such an alternative space becomes the main objectivefor several characters in the novel; its various passing physical incarnations range

    from the small room in Brooklyn to the inn in the countryside, from the movingcar to the curtained hospital cubicle. In the last of these, the ailing narrator, NathanGlass, is forced to surrender his active sense of external reference points:

    I dont think Ive ever been more numb to my surroundings than I was thatnight, more locked into myself, more absent. [. . .] I know it doesnt make anysense, but lying in that boxed-in enclosure with the beeping machines and thewires clamped to my skin was the closest I have come to being nowhere, tobeing inside myself and outside myself at the same time. ( BF297)

    While the narrators life-threatening condition can hardly be equated with

    the same kind of pleasant disorientation as the three experiential chronotopesdescribed above, it still entails disconnection from reality and places individualconsciousness at the center of the perceptible universe. It also produces a simi-lar regenerative effect as the other Austerian encounters with the tabula rasa ofNowhere: Glass emerges from the Brooklyn hospital into the morning of 11September 2001, with new energy and a new passion, as happy as any man whohad ever lived (304).

    What Austers street wanderers, confined writers, and obsessed drivers haveconcretely in common is, in a nutshell, detachment from their surroundings.This condition is necessarily connected to a philosophy of aimlessness, a strong

    sense of antiteleological orientationor, rather, disorientation. The conceptof Nowhere, as these examples illustrate, is an indication of a site outside ofidentifiable geography. By definition, it precludes any attempt to find a pointof reference on a map of any kind. As a spatially conceived element of thepsychological realm, it transcends corporeality by defining itself through detach-ment and dissociationfrom time, place, the body, and society. An oasis withinthe desert, it is the space of the mind that remains indifferent, in the words ofCharles Baudelaire, to the fugitive pleasure of circumstance (12)the mindthat finds liberation to a large extent within itself. It is fitting that the first elabo-rate disposition of the theme in Auster is called The Invention of Solitude; for the

    individualist consciousness of the roaming subject (which Baudelaire equateswith modernity) is so actively introspective that it renders the self an object ofinvention rather than discovery. As Foucault puts it, this ethos that is tied toan indispensable asceticism [. . .] compels [man] to face the task of producinghimself (Enlightenment 42).

    In Moon Palace, Fogg achieves this self-productive state during the time hespends homeless in Manhattans Central Park. With the onset of a sense of place-lessness in a space devoid of associations, Fogg can start shedding the mentalconstraints of urban society and concentrate on introspective meditation, turningthe park into a private refuge of inwardness (56). The notion of nonplace thus

    links up with Austers dominant and recurrent theme of asceticism and exhaus-

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    144 CRITIQUE

    tion. The movement toward zero is simultaneously a movement toward a-topia,or void, in which the lack of points of reference can produce a therapeutic effect

    akin to a feeling of freedom. Evidently this liberating space of refuge has muchin common with analogous ideas stemming from American cultural heritage onthe one hand and the traumatic Jewish past on the other. The classic Turnerianconcept of the frontier as safety valve and the specifically Jewish need to escapecorporeality in the long wake of the exodus and the Holocaust both influence theconfiguration and functions of Nowhere.

    It should be noted that the two cultural contextsthe Jewish and the Ameri-canmay not be very easy to separate. History links them both to each otherand to the desert, that original biblical site of regeneration. As W. J. T. Mitchellwrites, modern American imagination has tended to presuppose the existence of

    a desolate site, real or imaginary, as a place where nomadism serves a purposeof moral purification: The Great American Desert was an ide fixe imposedon the reality of the fertile Western plains for several generations, as if theAmericans needed a desert to wander in, a diasporic ordeal to purify them forthe promised Canaan of California (201, 204; emphasis in original). This Judeo-Christian context sheds light on the psychological aspirations of Austers fastingascetics, the nonpracticing Jews who experiment with the art of hunger. As far asliterary treatments of hunger are concerned, it is also against this same backdropthat the authors early essays on Kafka and Hamsun should be read. 9 NathanGlasss hospital experience in The Brooklyn Follies demonstrates that Nowhere

    can undeniably assume the guise of a serious ordeal, but this nonplaceindeedthe word itselfalso contains a definite utopian promise. Glass does not onlydiscover his true self in the hospital but, in effect, invents himself anew.

    The idea of a liberating nonplace in the selfs interior geography can be seenas rooted on classic epistemological foundations of the modernist consciousness.Arguably, despite the critical tradition of treating Auster as primarily a postmod-ernist writer whose texts foreground questions of self-referentiality and fictionalontology, such concerns have always been central to his fiction. 10 The concept ofNowhere suggested by his texts is above all a refuge for the mind under pressurein existing socioeconomic conditions. This figurative location appears in many

    guises in Auster, but its deep functions remain constant: to release the self fora moment from the treadmill of constant partnership with societys productiveoperations. Definable by its disconnectedness from fixed reference points, itrepresents not a teleological goal but a state attainable within the process of thequest or the retreat. As such, the site of Nowhere allows the self temporarily toshed socially constructed layers of identity and confront whatever is to be foundat the inner core of consciousness.

    U NIVERSITY OF T AMPERE T AMPERE , F INLAND

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    NOTES

    1. Austers works are abbreviated here in parenthetical references: AH = The Art of Hunger , HM =

    Hand to Mouth, IS = The Invention of Solitude, L = Leviathan, MP = Moon Palace, MC = The Musicof Chance, BF = The Brooklyn Follies, NYT = The New York Trilogy.2. See, for example, Cohen, who directly equates Austers vision of writing as a place of insatia-

    ble hunger and unquenchable thirst, a perpetual burning with the desert (100). He goes on to claimthat the displacement of desert onto city becomes a governing motif in Austers texts (101).

    3. When Marc Chnetier suggested to Auster in an interview that his writing is very often a writ-ing of paradox, the author readily agreed (28).

    4. From Mensch und Raum (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1963) 20. Cook translates from the originalGerman.

    5. For a more detailed scrutiny of Austers proverbial room of the book, see Fredman, whoconcludes that the room has several overlapping functions, all of them central to the authors poetics.Perhaps most important, the writing space serves as an alchemical retort in which a parthenogenictheory of creativity can be proposed (38).

    6. According to the New International Websters Comprehensive Dictionary of the English Lan-

    guage, the etymology of hermetic can be traced back to Hermes Trismegistus, the Greek name forthe Egyptian god Thoth, regarded as the founder of alchemy and other occult sciences.

    7. The only exceptions seem to be fireman Nashe in The Music of Chance and Max Klein, the heroof the early pseudonymous detective novel Squeeze Play (1982).

    8. Because velocity is mathematically made up of time and distance, it could be considered afundamental variable in any experiential chronotope.

    9. See the title essay, Pages for Kafka, and Kafkas Letters in The Art of Hunger . 10. In Postmodernist Fiction, Brian McHale famously presented the shift from literary modernism

    to postmodernism as precisely a replacement of the epistemological dominant with an ontologicalone. In Austers case, The New York Trilogy highlighted ontological questions to the extent that it maybe seen as influencing all subsequent Auster criticism.

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    Auster, Paul. The Art of Hunger: Essays, Prefaces, Interviews, and The Red Notebook. New York:Penguin, 1997.

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    Baudrillard, Jean. America. Trans. Chris Turner. London: Verso, 1988.Beck, John. Without Form and Void: The American Desert as Trope and Terrain. Nepantla: Views from South2 (2001): 6383.

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    What does Singin in the Rain have to do with syphilis? What is

    the postfeminist signicance of Charlies Angels ? The Journal of

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