Paul Auster’s work has, of late, become the focus of much critical attention. In the following piece, Markus Rheindorf looks to the roads and streets of Auster’s cities, detailing a peculiar process of urban embodiment that involves blending in or disappearing as a negotiation between the internal and external.

Processes of Embodiment and Spatialization in the Writings of Paul Auster [printable version]

Markus Rheindorf

These are no doubt spiritual matters, but they have their analogue in the material world. My brilliant stroke has been to confine myself to physical things, to the immediate and tangible.

Peter Stillman, Sr., in City of Glass (76)

<1> Processes of embodiment and the spatialization of interior categories such as thought and memory are defining characteristics of Paul Auster's novels, essays, and poetry, and a brief survey of these aspects can offer a new perspective on Auster's oeuvre as an organic whole. It is the underlying assumption of this paper that the transformation of interior into exterior constitutes a specific instance of the transpositional processes discussed therein. Within the theoretical framework of cultural studies -- as opposed to the more narrowly defined literary studies -- such transformations can be regarded as processes of embodiment, that is to say the process of making physical, if only temporarily, that which is normally without a body. In order to establish a point of departure for a more general analysis of the embodiment of interiority in Auster's writing, I will initially focus on the roads and streets in his work before analyzing the embodiment of his poetics as such.

Processes of Embodiment and the Road

<2> Auster's use of the road -- including the manifold permutations it has undergone -- is a good case in point for the essential continuity of his work, beginning as it does with his early poetry in the 1970s and continuing in his much more successful novels of the 1980s and 1990s. A better-known and perhaps more easily accessible consequence of the processes of embodiment in question are the notions of the connectedness and readability of the world of exteriors which Auster's writing invariably draws upon and which he developed in his first book, The Invention of Solitude (1982). It is essential, however, to realize that these holistic notions are indeed secondary to Auster's interest in an embodiment of interiority that necessarily precedes his holism. Both readability and the connectedness of all things are possible in Auster's work only because the world of his characters is infused with the belief that reality exists only through their minds; that is to say that thoughts and memory do not merely become part of the world of exteriors through a process of embodiment, but that embodiment is actually always already happening -- that the world of exteriors and bodies is constantly brought into existence and maintained by our thoughts and the embodiment of those thoughts.

<3> In philosophical terms, of course, this kind of Weltanschauung comes rather close to an idealist or even solipsist position. Auster's version of "mind over matter," however, is not in any way a consistent paradigm. Rather, it emerges more often than not in partial terms as a sudden crossing of one thing (be it interior or exterior) into the opposite domain (be it interior or exterior) [1]. This most often happens with and in the thoughts of Auster's characters, as it does in Marco Fogg's realization in Moon Palace (1989) that "the inner and the outer could not be separated except by doing great damage to the truth" (MP 25). This relatively high degree of reflexivity is usually encountered in the minds of characters in Auster's early fiction, while his later works do not simply embed issues formerly discussed explicitly, but rather transform or transpose them, in the terms of the theory of intertextuality, from one system of signification into another. Thus, what is argued in very clear terms in Auster's early work becomes part of the very fabric of reality in his later fictions. Here, the relations and changes which were once discussed in abstract terms take place for real; it is, in other words, objects and people that disappear inexplicably rather than thoughts and values.

<4> Since virtually all of the characters in Auster's fiction -- vagabonds and tramps, gamblers and exiles, failed writers and deliberate losers alike -- are on a journey that is as much spiritual as it is physical, the roads and paths they follow offer an ideal example of the ways in which Auster has confronted the issue of embodiment throughout his work as a writer of poetry, essays, and novels. These wanderings, rather than pitting Auster's characters against a hostile world, usually force them to confront their interior selves. Wherever their journey may take them, and whatever they may encounter on the road, everything seems to relate back to the self, and the whole world in the end will not show them anything but themselves, simply because everything they encounter on the road is always already an embodiment of their own interiority. Significantly, it is the city which becomes the prototypical site of these wanderings in nearly all of Auster's narratives. For his characters, city streets function somewhat like a giant checkerboard for their interior journeys, allowing them to embody their thoughts by moving their own bodies through the streets. Here, in the streets of the city, Auster's characters are forced into an intense inwardness which does not really take place inside of them, but outside in the world of exteriors. However, when thus submerged, as it were, in the very streets of the city, it becomes impossible to see the text one is writing with one's own body. On the other hand, this walking as writing can be traced, for example, on a city map so as to transcribe a path, which, like words or any other form of code, is then open to interpretation and meaning-making. In fact, Auster treats the act of moving on streets and roads as a semiotic practice and "productivity" in much the same way that Julia Kristeva regarded literary (inter-)texts as sites of production [2].

<5> The actual cities that Auster generally uses as the sites of these journeys, such as New York or Amsterdam, seem to suggest that the prototypical space for an embodiment on and through the road in his work is the large, gridded metropolis of the closing twentieth century. It is the modern city as experienced by the individual as near-perfect isolation and anonymity in the midst of equally anonymous masses. In the streets of these cities, Auster's characters are faced with the possibility of both epiphany and obliteration, two aspects of the city as a text that needs to be "deciphered" which go back to Auster's early poetry. Thus, his poem "Disappearances" (1975-1977), already prefigures some of the oppositions that are central to Auster's conception of the city as embodiment: "for the city is monstrous,/ and its mouth suffers/ no issue/ that does not devour the word/ of oneself./ Therefore, there are the many,/ and all these many lives/ shaped into the stones/ of a wall" (Ground Work 67).

<6> Lost among the "stones" that are the masses and lost, equally, in nameless streets, Auster's characters experience "a city / of the undeciphered event" (GW 61) and must consequently strive to read the chaos and meaninglessness surrounding themseves lest they lose their name and identity. This is the crux of their on-going struggles to mean and make meaning, and some of them find that "walking in the city" may constitute its own language, a "rhetoric of walking," as it were, which promises to be an effective countermeasure against the monstrous city that would "devour the word / of oneself."

<7> At a time when Auster was writing what were to become his last poems -- pieces which are perhaps best described as a "protracted farewell to poetry" (Finkelstein 56f) -- Auster was also working on his first prose book, The Invention of Solitude. In this seminal autobiographical work, Auster's ideas concerning a possible embodiment of interiority emerged fully for the first time in his descriptions of a spatial experience of memory:

Memory as a place, as a building, as a sequence of columns, cornices, porticoes. The body inside the mind, as if we were moving around in there, going from one place to the next. (IS 82)

Not much later in the same chapter, Auster effectively folds the domains of interior and exterior into each other when he recounts and admittedly fictionalizes a trip he once made to Amsterdam:

he saw that his steps, by taking him nowhere, were taking him nowhere but into himself. He was wandering inside himself, and he was lost. (IS, 86f)

As in the passage quoted above, the connection between interior and exterior throughout Auster's memoir is extended far beyond what might be called metaphor, and as the transformation is re-enacted time and again, city streets and memory become virtually indistinguishable, so that Auster as the narrator of his own autobiography can ultimately claim that:

what we are really doing when we walk through the city is thinking, and thinking in such a way that our thoughts compose a journey...and even if we do not leave our room, it has been a journey, and we might safely say that we have been somewhere, even if we don't know where it is. (IS 122)

The actual mapping and reading of the city as a text, only hinted at in The Invention of Solitude, is realized for the first time in Auster's writing by Daniel Quinn in City of Glass. In this tracing of an embodied interiority, as elsewhere in the novels that comprise The New York Trilogy (1987), the reader finds that the notions of readability and connectedness which held a central place in The Invention of Solitude are acted out and embodied by various characters.

<8> In fact, the very first thing the narrator gives away about Quinn is that, while he has many interests, "more than anything else, however, what he liked to do was walk" (NYT 3). Although his wanderings may at first appear to be similar to those recorded by Auster as his own in The Invention of Solitude, Quinn walks the streets only in order to forget himself, to lose his self. What he is looking for, then, is simply "a place where one could finally disappear" (NYT 109):

On his best walks, he was able to feel that he was nowhere. And this, finally, was all he ever asked of things: to be nowhere. New York was the nowhere he had built around himself, and he realized that he had no intention of ever leaving it again. (NYT 4)

Moreover, Quinn seems to have internalized to a considerable degree the principles explicated in Auster's earlier work. "His excursions through the city," so the narrator, "had taught him to understand the connectedness of inner and outer" (NYT 61). The particular embodiment as text that Quinn is interested in as a detective/reader of the city is being written by another character, Peter Stillman, who seems to be using his steps for ink and the streets of New York for paper. This type of reading and writing, in the terms of de Certeau, is possible only because the grid-like makeup of the modern city "allows a certain play within a system of defined places...on a checkerboard that analyses and classifies identities" (106).

<9> But while Auster thus seems to share many theoretical assumptions of a semiotics of the everyday, he at the same time strives to ground the New York Trilogy narratives in the "real" New York by including lengthy descriptions of routes that would match any street map perfectly. There is, of course, more to these depictions of New York streets than a simple realism of setting. The case which Quinn accepts under the pretense of being the private detective "Paul Auster" does not begin just anywhere, but on East 69th Street. Since this is a story of mistaken identities and doubles, the address could hardly be more fitting than the number 69, representing equally circuity and two mirrored entities. At the end of his story, when Quinn must realize that his failure is complete, and just as he tries to get back to East 69th Street, the auspices of his quest -- the numbers 6 and 9 -- are poignantly reversed as he breaks down on 96th Street near Central Park. Clearly, New York's streets -- and thus what de Certeau has termed the "rhetoric of walking" in his semiotics of the everyday -- are as integral to Quinn's story as the Stillman case itself or even his writings in the mysterious red notebook.

<10> Long before his breakdown, however, there comes the moment when Quinn, "for no particular reason that he was aware of" (NYT 67), begins to draw a map of Stillman's movements each day, relying on the extensive notes he had begun to keep four days into the case. He eventually realizes that each day's map resembles a letter, spelling the sequence "WER OF BAB." Making due allowances for the fact that Quinn has missed the first four days and that Stillman has not yet finished, "the answer seemed inescapable: THE TOWER OF BABEL" (NYT 70). Himself a believer in the connectedness of inner and outer, Quinn comes to accept this reading of the facts as satisfactory, since the man he has been "tailing" seems to be obsessed with language, and has in the past written extensively on the subject of the tower of Babel. In this respect, then, the streets of New York function for the narrative (and its protagonists) as a kind of urban alphabet, a semiotic matrix or grid on which the inner preoccupations of a character can be made visible -- visible for the reader, that is, but also for those characters who possess detective-like qualities, effectively aligning them with the role of the reader [3]. Just as Auster had theorized in The Invention of Solitude, interior is translated into exterior through the process of walking the streets of the city and is thus transposed into an embodied and ultimately decipherable code.

<11> To conclude this preliminary survey of embodiment in connection with streets and roads in the writing of Paul Auster, it is necessary to move from city streets and cityscapes in the East to roads and highways in the West. As Tim Woods has argued, Auster may have written a road novel in The Music of Chance (1990), but rather than present the great American road in traditional terms, it clearly continues his exploration of the connections between interior and exterior landscapes. Nevertheless, the story of Jim Nashe begins like any "proper" road novel or movie. The rather ordinary protagonist -- here, Jim Nashe, a fire-fighter who inherits a small fortune from his long-missing father -- is somehow thrown off the beaten track of his life, and finds himself "on the road" (or, as in this case, does not find himself). Nashe discovers that he has committed himself to "the wrong road" (MC 6), and it seems to him that the earth has opened around him and swallowed him up. In fact, Nashe is incapable of stopping, and his driving -- like any other form of movement in Auster's writing -- constitutes a language of and in itself, a semiotic system existing beyond the need of being read. Only dimly aware of the messages he is embodying through his driving, Nashe nevertheless feels the need to "punctuate his movements" (MC 13) in order for them to make sense.

<12> Near the end of his time on the road Nashe finds himself studying an intricate model of a city called the City of the World, which is literally a model embodiment of somebody else's interior world. In the streets of this model city, as in all embodiment of memory as conceived of by Auster, the past and the present co-exist alongside each other, as spatial rather than temporal categories. But while Nashe is inexplicably drawn to the city itself, he has very little respect for the sanctity of this idealized space and goes so far as to steal a piece that seems central to it. For the remainder of the novel Nashe and his companion Pozzi remain unable to resolve the question whether this theft has or has not violated some fundamental law of the universe. Notwithstanding their speculations, Nashe's actions raise an important issue with regard to the inviolability of embodied interiority. Do thoughts pass from a private into the public domain as a consequence of embodiment, and does that transformation also entail a loss of not only privacy but also of identity? Considering the most common results of continual embodiment for Auster's characters, especially the disappearance and literal erasure of his protagonists, the answer would appear to be yes. However, once one brings in the category of the public or the social into a consideration of embodiment in Auster, matters become far more complicated almost instantly.

<13> As it is, practically everything that has been said so far, in this essay as much as in the entire critical discussion of Auster's work, rightfully recognizes but only inadvertently acknowledges the solipsistic nature of his narratives. Indeed, the social seems an unlikely category for an analysis of Auster's writing, and yet it is ubiquitous in so far as his work is an intertext of American culture and its embodiments. From this point of view, it becomes impossible to speak about the private without speaking about the social, and even more so because the two are always in conflict in Auster's writing; or else, due to the fact that the private and the social are always already constituted by and constitutive of each other.

<14> As a consequence, an analysis of roads and streets in Auster's work like this one -- and, indeed, any analysis of embodiment in Auster's work in general -- has two important implications. One, the manifestations of a collective culture, such as roads or city streets, can be appropriated by the individual who can then put them to his or her own and often very private uses. Second, with Auster's characters, these uses of embodied culture often subvert the most common and institutionalized meanings attached to such manifestations of American culture. His novel Leviathan is a good case in point as its main character, like all of Auster's protagonists, finds himself traveling on a road that exists both inside of him and in the real world (as the place where he finally kills himself). As the narrator puts it, Benjamin Sachs has effectively "traveled from one end of himself to the other, and by the time he came to that last place, I doubt he even knew who he was anymore" (L 13). But Sachs is not a mere victim of embodiment as a cultural and public phenomenon, he is also a terrorist engaged in a fight against it. His self-imposed mission of destruction and de-construction is to travel across the United States and to attack and destroy the sheer endless number of in-scale replica of the Statue of Liberty. The message he is trying to convey through this violent severing of the object from the ideals or values it is supposed to embody, even if he fails to communicate that message very successfully, is this: "Wake up America. It's time to start practicing what you preach. Prove to me that you're not a hypocrite. Do something for your people besides building bombs" (L 216). In the light of the present reading of Auster's work as informed by a concern with the workings of embodiment, one might rephrase or add to Sachs' warning call: "Do not trust institutionalized manifestations of culture, of inner values. Do not take for granted that the things that are embodied and celebrated so often are also truly respected."

The Transformation of Auster's Poetics

<15> Critics, such as Norman Finkelstein, have generally identified the last of Auster's published poems as a trajectory taking him away from his poetic convictions and toward the conventions of fiction. Even when his later writing has been recognized as a prose of, at times, near perfect poetry, the relationship between that fiction and Auster's poetics has not been investigated. Tim Woods, for instance, in his essay on urban space and the postmodern in In the Country of Last Things (1987) comments on the astonishing parallels between Anna Blume's experience in the City of Destruction and Auster's essay on Charles Reznikoff's poetry, but then leaves that trail unpursued. It is my aim to not only follow the development of those traces through the body of his oeuvre, but also to study Auster's In the Country of Last Things as the most complete embodiment of his poetics.

<16> Although the narrative of In the Country of Last Things is itself the most remarkable instance of embodiment in Auster's oeuvre, the special position and significance of that novel with regard to his work as a whole is not generally recognized. Because the novel can be regarded as something of a palimpsest of all his earlier work (and, to some extent, of his later work, too), In the Country of Last Things allows the reader to approach the text as a nexus, a place where, on the one hand, the different aspects of Auster's writing finally meet and connect, while, on the other hand, their realization is to date also the least abstract and most physical in his oeuvre.

<17> As far as city streets are concerned, the book's first-person narrator, Anna Blume, experiences a heightened version of the urban landscapes described in Auster's earlier writings. In the Country of Last Things, "the streets of the city are everywhere," writes Anna Blume and seeks to "melt into the streets," to pretend she doesn't exist: "not anything but the street, all empty inside" (CLT 57). But Anna Blume's story also draws heavily on Auster's twin conceptions of the city as an embodiment of thought and of the mind's wanderings as a walking through the city. Significantly, her halting narrative -- which is itself a journey through the memory of her time in the city -- reflects and reenacts her difficulty in physically negotiating the streets of the city. What is more, in the course of her experiences the city literally emerges around her as a text, being a part of which Blume is convinced that, in order to survive, "you must learn to read the signs" (CLT 6). For Blume, part of the immediate danger of the streets lies in their shifting nature, which forces the signs that need to be constantly read by anyone who would navigate them into a precarious state of instability [4] , and she therefore has to come to terms with the realization that "every time you think you know the answer to a question, you discover that the question makes no sense" (CLT 85).

<18> Significantly, Anna Blume never refers to the city in her story specifically as "this" city, but always generically, as in "when you live in the city" and "that is how it works in the city" (CLT 85). As with the city of New York in Auster's trilogy, the City of Destruction can serve as the site of Blume's story precisely because of its generic make-up: devouring individuality, it does not itself possess a distinctive identity either. While there are rumors of other places existing beyond the limits of the city, no one living within in its boundaries really believes in them, and "the city" thus becomes all there is to life, stretching from horizon to horizon. "Nothing," Anna Blume has come to realize, "can get out" (CLT 85), and because it is all-encompassing, the city reduces, as it were, the humanity of its inhabitants in almost every conceivable way, making them steal, rob, and murder -- even turning them into cannibals. Temporarily lifted above the city when climbing to the rooftop of a building, Blume manages to get her first look on a substantial part of the city, and it is only then that she can see rather than understand that the city makes the people "too small to be human anymore" (CLT 74). Note the primacy of her perceptions and the almost pre-reflective nature of her consciousness, which is nevertheless the narrative consciousness of the novel.

<19> As intertext In the Country of Last Things also represents a transposition of Auster's poetics themselves, a poetic paradigm close to the objectivist tradition of Reznikoff and others that can be pieced together from Auster's early poetry and essays [5]. Although related to, and at times indistinguishable from the former, Auster's poetics differ significantly in that they cast the poet in a more active and responsible role. This is apparent in the writer's need to establish, maintain, and, at times, to recover his trust in language as the tool of his trade. While Auster explores the relation between word and thing, between signifier and signified, he also attempts to return name, and thing named, to a meaningful relation.

<20>In his essays, Auster is noticeably less daring in these ambitions than he is in his works of fiction, and merely asks his readers to "consider the word 'it'. 'It' is raining, we say, or how is 'it' going?" (GW 83). Needless to say, investigations of language at this level do not take Auster very far in his struggles, while both his poetry and fiction are apparently much better suited to the task. As it is, many of his protagonists exhibit a strong interest in all aspects of Auster's preoccupation with language and meaning. Quinn, for instance, has also thought about "it," but "what that 'it' referred to Quinn had never known" -- nevertheless Quinn is willing to hazard a guess: a "generalized condition of things as they were, perhaps" (NYT 111). Blue similarly experiences language as a riddle, a coded version of the world itself: defined by it and, somehow, also defining it. Although words are essentially "transparent" to him, they function as "great windows" that stand between Man and the world -- hence their power to both reveal and obscure that which we can see only through language.

<21> Even as Auster's interest in these issues remains constant, his treatment of them in his fiction changes over time, as it does with nearly all his interests, from theory and speculation into a part of his characters' world. They become, in other words, more and more embodied. For instance, Frick's peculiar relationship to words in In The Country of Last Things, though less obvious than Stillman's experiments with language in The New York Trilogy or the narrator's dadaistic pleasure in experiencing language "as a collection of sounds" (NYT 287), can finally be traced to the same concerns on Auster's part. For even if the old man has "difficulty maneuvering them around his tongue, and...sometimes stumble[s] over them as though they were physical objects, literal stones cluttering his mouth," that apparent deficiency has the advantage of making him "especially sensitive to the internal properties of words themselves: their sounds as divorced from their meanings, their symmetries and contradictions" (CLT 133).

<22> The most striking of these endeavors involving language, of course, is Stillman Sr.'s quest for a prelapsarian speech which he supposes will facilitate the construction of a new Tower of Babel. Linguistically speaking, Stillman's diagnosis of the brokenness of modern language echoes the structuralist recognition of the arbitrary or non-referential nature of language [6]. This notion, however, is also to be found in Auster's early essay "Dada Bones" (1975). In his musings on Hugo Ball's diaries, Auster focuses on Ball's "almost mystical desire to recover what he felt to be a prelapsarian speech" and to return to the "innermost alchemy of the word" (GW 132). Auster's attempts to counteract or reverse modern alienation from language have been studied, among others, by Madelaine Sorapure. In her essay "The Detective and the Author" (1995), Sorapure connects his search for a meaningful whole in language to the search undertaken by the protagonist of the traditional detective novel in order "to escape his position in the midst of a broken world, operating with a broken language" (82) [7].

<23> Nowhere in Auster's writing is the decay of language as completely embodied as in Anna Blume's City of Destruction, where it entails a much more general state of decay. Because signifier and signified are so closely connected, a change in the domain of the one will affect the other. In fact, no one can really tell whether it is the shortages of virtually every knowncommodity that are affecting the linguistic and interior representations of things or the other way around. Words, in Auster's view, figure somewhere in between, as intermediaries between thing and thought, and are equally affected:

It is a slow but ineluctable process of erasure. Words tend to last a bit longer than things, but eventually they fade too, along with the pictures they once evoked...for a time you will be able to recognize those words, even if you cannot recall what they mean. But then, little by little, the words become only sounds, a random collection of glottals and fricatives, a storm of whirling phonemes. (CLT 89)

The result of this process is that almost everyone in the city already speaks "his own private language," and that instances of shared understanding (and, consequently, of successful communication) are becoming increasingly rare [8].

<24> In this regard, the state of Blume's City of Destruction represents Stillman Sr.'s fears about alienation from language come true, but it also echoes Auster's reading of Knut Hamsun's turn-of-the-century novel Hunger: "He cannot say who he is because he does not know. His name is a lie, and with this lie the reality of his world vanishes....Reality has become a confusion of thingless names and nameless things for him. The connection between self and world has been broken" (GW 110). Like Hamsun's protagonist, Stillman Jr., has been infected with this "language disease," and the connection between his interior and exterior world has consequently broken down: "This is what is called speaking. I believe it is the term. When words come out, fly into the air, live for a moment, and die. Strange, is it not?...There are many of them. Many millions, I think. Perhaps only three or four" (NYT 16).

<25> The equation of the Fall of Man with the "fall of language" lies at the heart of Auster's concept of a prelapsarian speech. Adam's primary task in the Garden of Eden, so the argument goes, had been to invent language and give to each creature and thing its name: "his tongue had gone straight to the quick of the world. His words had not been merely appended to the things he saw, they had revealed their essences" (NYT 43). In this ideal state of innocence, so Stillman Sr., a "thing and its name were interchangeable. After the Fall, this was no longer true. Names became detached from things; words developed into a collection of arbitrary signs" (NYT 43). As a result, the world of today is in fragments: "Not only have we lost our sense of purpose, we have lost the language whereby we can speak of it" (NYT 76). In its essence, Stillman, Sr.'s diagnosis tallies with Blue's discovery that words no longer correspond exactly to the thing described, and this realization brings his world tumbling down: "for the first time in his experience...he discovers that words do not necessarily work, that it is possible for them to obscure the things they are trying to say" (NYT 147f). Out of the need to reassert his mastery over language, Blue tests himself by fixing his attention on various objects and saying their names, but fails because the broken connection between word and thing makes him feel "as though the lights are out" (NYT 148).

<26> In order to demonstrate to Quinn the universal brokenness of the world, Stillman presents to him an object he has obtained during one of his scavenging expeditions. It is a perfectly ordinary umbrella shorn of its cloth: "You open the spokes, put them over your head, walk out into the rain, and you get drenched" (NYT 77). Significantly, this item reappears in Moon Palace, where it is accepted by Effing and Fogg as a present from a stranger named Orlando. The umbrella, with its protective cloth stripped off and the spokes spread uselessly in the air, is thus a poignant and recurrent emblem of the dangers that lie in the rift between words and objects. Although Fogg and Effing try to accomplish "the act of bringing nonexistent things to life" (MP 209), the umbrella ultimately becomes the agent of Effing's destruction only a few days later -- simply because (as Stillman Sr., would argue) it no longer is an umbrella, while we stubbornly and falsely continue to call it so.

<27> As suggested above, successfully naming things and thereby closing the gap between signifier and signified is more or less the essence of Stillman Sr.'s project, and its initial stage consists of scavenging or rescuing derelict objects in the streets. In this, Stillman's quest largely anticipates the desperate struggle of Anna Blume in the Country of Last Things, where her very life depends on the success of her scavenging expeditions. Published shortly after The New York Trilogy, this novel has variously been labeled as a post-apocalyptic version of present-day New York, a postmodern attempt at describing hell, or even the futurist critique of a totalitarian society. All of these labels, however, betray a general neglect of the novel's relation to Auster's work as a whole, and, in particular, to its roots in his poetics. It is not so much that Blume's story is not or cannot be what it has previously been described as, but that it is -- almost by necessity -- something else before all that: a remarkably consistent transformation of Auster's poetics as they are to be found in his own poetry and his essays on other poets.

<28> Auster's poetics of embodiment focus on the relation between objects and their abstract representations such as words. As Stillman in City of Glass claims of the brokenness of language: "these are no doubt spiritual matters, but they have their analogue in the material world" (NYT 76). Essentially, this is the principle of any process of embodiment and the equation between interior and exterior through which Anna Blume finds herself in the City of Destruction. For if the reader can consider In the Country of Last Things a depiction of post-apocalyptic New York, this is only because Stillman, Sr., has already identified the site of his own project as "the most forlorn of places, the most abject. The brokenness is everywhere....You have only to open your eyes to see it. The broken people, the broken things, the broken thoughts" (NYT 78). While the most central aspects of Auster's poetics are embodied in some form or other in all his works of fiction, it is In The Country of Last Things, more than any other novel, which constitutes Auster's parable of the poet as an exile in "the modern nothingness" (IS 110).

<29> In fact, being a poet without one's knowing is something that happens to many characters in Auster's novels. Although not as faithful in their embodiment of his poetics as Anna Blume, they too become faceless readers of the world around them -- a world that is defined and constituted by the text of city. Here, to be a poet in Auster's sense is not to write poetry, but to do the work that may lead to a poem -- a dictum which makes art an "incidental by-product" (GW 212) of the poetic process. This view of art, however, is not restricted to poetry or even writing, and Auster has Thomas Effing reveal it also in his paintings in Moon Palace, to whom the "true purpose of art was not to create beautiful objects....It was a method of understanding, a way of penetrating the world and finding one's place in it" (MP 170).

<30> What all of Auster's characters with even a trace of the poet in them also have in common, regardless of their position in life, is that they see the world around them as alien. This injunction coincides with the fact that they are all, in some sense, alienated from their surroundings, outsiders even in their very homes. Again, the embodiment of the abstract notion of alienation is most complete in the case of Anna Blume, come to a foreign city as a stranger on a hopeless quest. Even more importantly, Blume is also Jewish, a fact that Auster terms the most universal form of exile in his essay on Reznikoff's poetry [9]. What is more, in both The Invention of Solitude and his essay on Edmond Jabès, Auster quotes Marina Tsvetayeva on the theme of exile: "In this most Christian of worlds / all poets are Jews" [10] . At least in terms of his poetics, Auster equates the experience of otherness that virtually defines the poetic identity with the Jewish experience of exile, the Diaspora. While the manner in which Anna Blume encounters her own Jewishness has sometimes startled and annoyed critics as being rather contrived (cf. Finkelstein, 51-53), it takes on special significance in this reading of the novel. To be Jewish, in the equation made by Tsvetayeva and subscribed to by Auster, is to be a poet. Blume is at first unaware of both aspects of her identity, and thus it is with "a flicker of recognition" shuddering through her that she looks into the Rabbi's eyes, seeing herself as though for the first time. It is something of a private joke on Auster's part to flash this hint to the reader, showing that Blume does not know herself as a Jew and thus, by implication, also does not know herself to be a poet.

<31> As the art of reading the world, and as "an effort to perceive...a moving outward" (GW 212), poetry brings with it the obligation to see and to encounter the world. In his own poetry, Auster speaks of this first injunction on the poet primarily in conjunction with the image of "the eye" and of the world as it "enters" the eye of the poet [11]. Thus, Auster's poetry refers to itself as "the word that is born / in the eye" (GW 66), and as "the brief miracle / of the open eye" (GW 69). Therefore, only "the eye / will teach you" (GW 21), teach you, that is, poetry in the sense that Auster understands it. The central effort and challenge of his poetic ambition, then, is "to be equal / to whatever it is / my eye will bring me" (GW 94), and the only success the poet can hope for is that a "flower falls from his eye / and blooms in a stranger's mouth" (GW 33). Like the lyrical self of Auster's poems, Anna Blume knows that she must not "become inured," for in the city "habits are deadly" (CLT 7). In Auster's Country of Last Things, what was once a poetical concept for Auster has been transposed into Anna Blume's struggle for mean survival. The strategies, however, are remarkably similar in both cases: "Even if it is for the hundredth time, you must encounter each thing as if you have never known it before. No matter how many times, it must always be the first time" (CLT 7). Just like the things that enter "the fathomless hole" of the poet's eye, and which are "all that he is not: a city" (GW 61), the things Anna Blume sees in the city are also dangerous to her: "Whatever you see has the potential to wound you, to make you less than you are, as if merely by seeing a thing some part of yourself were taken away from you" (CLT 19).

<32> As discussed above, the city is the quintessential home of Auster's version of the post-modern poet [12]. Utterly apart from it, and faced with its wall-like monstrosity and anonymity, the poet must learn "the language of walls" (GW 46), and in order to "read the braille wounds / of the inner wall" (GW 44) so that he may finally find himself "standing in the place / where the eye most terribly holds / its ground" (GW 54). Although lost and terribly alone in the city, Anna Blume does hold her ground as a poet. Rather than simply becoming a garbage collector, Anna instead chooses to become an object hunter, "always searching for broken and discarded things" (CLT 35). That job is perhaps the clearest transposition of the work of the poet in Auster's fiction, and certainly the most obvious parallel to Stillman's project, as to both him and Blume "nothing is really itself anymore. There are pieces of this and pieces of that, but none of it fits together" (CLT 35). Each and every object encountered by Blume is a fragment of the world in which it has almost lost its place, and it is the poet's and object-hunter's job to "rescue things before they reach this state of absolute decay" (CLT 35). She must restore meaning to what is now only "a cipher of it-ness," "must examine, dissect, and bring back to life" (CLT 36) what another has seen fit to throw away. But the city in Blume's story is only one instance among many in Auster's writing that require the resurrection of broken things and broken language. In his dreams, for example, Daniel Quinn seems to follow Blume on her journey and arrives "in a neverland of fragments, a place of wordless things and thingless words," finding himself "in the town dump of his childhood, sifting through a mountain of rubbish" (NYT 72).

<33> It is, after all, Quinn the detective who comes almost as close as Blume to the poet's role in reading the visible world around him. As if to point the reader in the right direction, Auster describes the detective in the opening pages of City of Glass as "the one who looks...who moves through the morass of objects and events in search of the thought, the idea that will pull all these things together and make sense of them" (NYT 8). Considering the similarities between the tasks of the poet and the detective, Quinn's own pun on the term "private eye" takes on new significance, echoing as it does Auster's use of the eye as an image of the poet himself. It is "the eye of the man who looks out from himself into the world and demands that the world reveal itself to him" (NYT 8f). Indeed, Quinn's duties as a private eye consist primarily of watching Stillman's movements and then writing about them, and he sets down with meticulous care even the least detail he sees. His success as a detective thus hinges on "seeing the thing and writing about it in the same fluid gesture" (NYT 63), a particular difficulty also experienced by Marco Fogg when he describes his surroundings for the blind Effing in Moon Palace. In order to succeed in this, however, Fogg must train himself to look at the world in exactly the same terms as Blume does, that is, as if he were "discovering it for the first time" (MP 122). All of these instances, however, can be seen as transpositions of Auster's poetics and his fascination with Ponge as someone for whom "there was no division between the work of writing and the work of seeing" (GW 138). This notion appears, too, in The Locked Room, in which Fanshawe's poetry is described as having narrowed "the distance between seeing and writing...the two acts now almost identical, part of a single unbroken gesture" (NYT 277).

<34> Just as important as the poet's ability to see, however, is his state of constant readiness. Because he "cannot walk out into the street with the expectation of writing a poem," the poet "must constantly be looking at the world, constantly doing the work that will lead to a poem, even if no poem comes of it" (GW 217). What Auster identifies as the principle of Reznikoff's work in the passage quoted above also seems to inform his own poetry, in which "the eye / does not will / what enters it: it must always refuse / to refuse" (GW 36). Because she lives in the City of Destruction, Anna Blume's very life depends on such vigilance, the "constant watchfulness" of an "object hunter" on the search for things and materials that can be rescued from the wasteland of the city. It is only her inner readiness which saves her from disaster, as she is but a novice at object-hunting, and only able to find anything at all by chance, "for it takes years of living in the city to get to that point" (CLT 35). All the same, Blume must finally learn the disastrous results of "a single second when your attention flags...and then everything gets lost, all your work is suddenly wiped out" (CLT 82). Through the same process of embodiment by which Blume finds herself an object hunter in the Country of Last Things, what would merely cost the poet effort in a single piece of writing may prove to be a fatal mistake in the City of Destruction, where the injunctions of poetry are injunctions of survival. Indeed, the city's streets are a dangerous place, filled with rubble and barricaded by tollists, all of which constantly requires Anna to use utmost cunning in negotiating the streets, the only place she can earn her living: "Bit by bit, the city robs you of certainty. There can never be any fixed path, and you can survive only if nothing is necessary to you" (CLT 6).

<35> Again, the reader finds the detectives Quinn and Blue troubled by the same injunctions as Anna Blume. Both realize that if their "tail-jobs" are to have any meaning, their watchfulness must also be constant: "it would not take much...for the entire picture to change," and a "single moment's inattention" (NYT 143) may destroy all of their efforts. Consequently, they must always remain wide awake and on their toes, "taking it all in, ready for anything" (NYT 152). In this respect, as in most others, the traces of Auster's poetics are strongest in his early works of fiction. Yet, Benjamin Sachs in Leviathan has achieved a state of readiness similar to that called for by Auster's poetics. For Sachs, "the wall between work and idleness" has crumbled to such a degree that he is constantly doing the work of a writer: "In spite of appearances, there was hardly a moment when he wasn't on the job" (L 41).

<36> Adding the obligation of not being seen -- in what Auster refers to as the Reznikoff equation in "The Decisive Moment" -- weds seeing to invisibility: "In order to see, the poet must make himself invisible. He must disappear, efface himself in anonymity" (GW 214). It is one of the most characteristic qualities of the poet's domain is that it allows this vanishing act, "for only in the modern city can the one who sees remain unseen, take his stand in space and yet remain transparent" (GW 214). Auster's vision of the poet, finally, is of someone who has disappeared, "a solitary wanderer, as man in the crowd, as faceless scribe" (GW 217). Auster's own poetry frequently returns to this notion of an escape from "the burden / of eyes" (GW 17) into a nowhere of invisibility, "till nowhere, blooming / in the prison of your mouth, becomes / wherever you are" (GW 28). The advice to disappear into a nowhere of her own making is also given to Blume by Isabel, who counsels her never to "think about anything" (CLT 57) in the streets. In order to do her work as poet/object-hunter, Blume must "melt into the streets and pretend [her] body doesn't exist" (CLT 57). In fact, Blume must constantly worry about being seen, and if her worries -- escaping the ever-present threats of rape and murder -- do not, at first sight, resemble those of Auster's poetics, that is only because they have been made physical, just as the necessity of seeing or finding objects on the streets has been transposed into a literal struggle for life.

<37> By and large, the art of disappearing seems to be something that Auster's characters have mastered rather well. Like Quinn or Blume, most of them disappear at some point or other in their stories, though their reasons are not always spelled out as clearly as Anna Blume's. As it is, everything the reader encounters in her narrative is both itself and something else, is a parable, an embodiment of the poetic process. For Anna to stumble in the streets is to stumble in the wording of a poem, and for her to fail in her hunt for objects is to fail in doing the work that will lead to a poem. To a lesser extent, all of Auster's writing embodies at least aspects of his poetics and the analysis provided here will hopefully serve as a point of departure for more specific studies of individual works on the one hand and of intertextual phenomena relating to processes of embodiment on the other.

Notes

[1] Bordieu in his Outline of a Theory of Practice understands the concepts of interiority and exteriority as constituted through processes of interiorization of exteriority and exteriorization of interiority, respectively. My use of these concepts in this paper follows Bordieu's theory of social practice. [^]

[2] In Kristeva's view, intertext opens up an always changing but stable-enough space that allows for the transposition of meanings from one signifying system into another. See also de Certeau's for a reading of the city as a similar site of production of semiotic and social meaning. [^]

[3] For a closer analysis of the relationship between author, detective, and reader in Auster's fiction, see also Sorapure. [^]

[4] The instability of language and signs in general in Auster's work has to be seen in connection with the notion of a pre-lapsarian language and the Fall of Man. For a discussion of these issues in Auster's writing, see below. [^]

[5] In his essay on Auster's poetry, Finkelstein provides a survey of some aspects of Auster's poetics. [^]

[6] While Ferdinand de Saussure is generally credited with having been the first to describe language in similar terms, Michail Bakhtin's work of the twenties, though published only much later, already posited that the "speaker is not the biblical Adam" (Marxism, 93) in the sense deplored by Stillman, Sr. [^]

[7] For an analysis of the detective's search for the lost tongue of Adam in the works of Auster, see also Rowen. [^]

[8] In linguistic terms, Blume describes the breakdown of what Saussure called "la langue" or the social part of language; it is essentially a collective constraint accepted for the sake of successful communication and social interaction. [^]

[9] For Auster's own theoretical discussion of this concept in Reznikoff's writing, see Ground Work, 211-226. [^]

[10] Tsvetayeva, as quoted in Ground Work (189). Unfortunately, Auster did not provide references for his quotes in many of his essays, and the editions of his collected essays in either Ground Work or The Art of Hunger do not amend this. [^]

[11] Obviously, Auster also makes use of the ambiguity of the "eye" as the "I" of his poetry in order to explore and delineate postmodern shifting subjectivities. [^]

[12] For a reading of the city as the post-modern American poet's pre-text, see Oates. See also Helen Vendler's study of Lowell's poetry as an exemplary reading of the poet's encounter with the city. [^]

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