“S
pace is for us an existential and cultural dominant.” So concludes Fredric Jameson, having described postmodernism’s dependence on a“supplement of spatiality” that results from its depletion of history and consequent exaggeration of the present (365). Indeed, recent years have seen an increasing interest in the politics of place, the cultural function of geography, and the reassertion of the importance of space in any cultural study. The territory of these arguments is marked out in diverse areas in the work of people like Michel Foucault, Gaston Bachelard, David Harvey, Edward Soja, Doreen Massey, Fredric Jameson, Pierre Bourdieu, and Michel de Certeau. However, the most significant development of this “spatial turn”
in recent theory is Henri Lefebvre’s The Production of Space (1991), in which he rigorously argues that space is the key component in the analysis of economic production. As a consequence, one can no longer practice a historical analysis without taking account of the politics of spatialization embedded within the production process. Geography, place, space, locale, location—such terms form one of the lexicons gaining ascendancy within cultural analysis.
Lefebvre explores the “production of space,” maintaining that space is produced and reproduced, thus representing the site and outcome of social, political, and economic struggles. Arguing that new modes of production
From Beyond the Red Notebook: Essays on Paul Auster, edited by Dennis Barone. © 1995 by the University of Pennsylvania Press.
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exist in concomitant relation to new conditions of space, Lefebvre deconstructs the illusions of the naturalness and transparency of space and erects a typology of spatialities. The postmodern novel’s deliberate foregrounding of the discourses of the sensual and the analytic, of private memory and public representation, of personal
“lived” experience and “official” public constructions, parallels this “new geography” by showing how spatial constructions are created and used as markers of human memory and of social values in a world of rapid flux and change.
Lefebvre’s conception of space as something that is “felt” as much as
“known” or analyzed, leads to the emergence of two sorts of space. One is the empirical rational space or place perceived as a void to be filled up. The other is what might be termed “affective space,” a space that is charged with emotional and mythical meanings, community symbolism, and historical significances. Space does not have an autonomous, objectively separate existence from subjects. Rather, as Henri Lefebvre has argued in The Production of Space, space is produced by the material forms of production. Consequently, Lefebvre conceives of the city as “a space of differences.” His crucial distinction lies between a social space constituted by the activity of everyday life and an abstract space laid down by the actions of the state and the economic institutions of capital. The reproduction of social relations of capitalism is therefore accomplished as a constant struggle between these different modes of reproducing space.
It is increasingly being noted that Paul Auster’s fiction frequently touches upon the postmodern preoccupations of subjectivity, sexuality, sublimity, and silence. However, In the Country of Last Things foregrounds Auster’s engagement with an additional postmodernist “S”
word—spatiality. As the novel gradually overlays discourses about spatial control and control by space, the complex complicity of these apparently different concerns emerges. Much of Auster’s fiction pivots on spatial loci, on the actions of individuals within locked rooms, isolated garrets, enclosed spaces, circumscribed areas, and the effects of closure and openness on human consciousness: how a change in society’s modes of production changes social conceptions of space and how, in turn, space constructs, and is constructed by, individual consciousness. A good deal of Auster’s “Book of Memory” in The Invention of Solitude, for example, meditates upon the effects of being cut off and isolated from the world by one’s spatial circumstances, like the recurrent image of Jonah being trapped within the belly of a whale (for example, see The Invention of Solitude, 89, 99–100, 124–126, 131, 157–159,
162–164). In the Country of Last Things explores, in particular, the urban space in a putative apocalyptic future, and the manner in which it is occupied,
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inhabited, and experienced both phenomenologically and emotionally, by individuals and communities. Through the personal letter of the narrator- protagonist Anna Blume, reporting her bewildering and disorientating experiences in the city while searching for her lost brother, In the Country of Last Things constantly confronts one with the intersection of private and public spaces, as her urban experience allows public space to become the stage for private experiences, and private spaces to be unfolded onto public spaces.
David Harvey’s discussion of space as a characteristic of post- modernism points out how Michel Foucault conceives of space as the site of social constriction and occasionally the site of processes of liberatory potential: “The body exists in space and must either submit to authority (through, for example, incarceration or surveillance in an organised space) or carve out particular spaces of resistance and freedom
—‘heterotopias’—from an otherwise repressive world” (213). Harvey goes on to describe how Michel de Certeau argues, contrary to the Foucauldian concept of a “technological system of a coherent and totalizing space,” that this is substituted daily by a “‘pedestrian rhetoric’ of trajectories that have ‘a mythical structure’ understood as ‘a story jerry-built out of elements taken from common sayings, an allusive and fragmentary story whose gaps mesh with the social practices it symbolises’” (214). De Certeau, like Auster, is not unconcerned with the way in which order is transmitted into a repressive technology, but rather seeks to excavate those surreptitious forms created by the marginal, dispersed, tactical, and makeshift creativity of groups or individuals already caught in the nets of “discipline.” “Spaces” are more easily liberated than Foucault imagines. Paradoxically, the challenge to the domination of space becomes the invention of new spaces. Within the despotic social and political climate of the city, Anna Blume’s letter demonstrates—as political resistors have continually shown during the twentieth century—that the most radical and expansive political gesture against the totalitarian attempt to dominate spatiality is the challenge provided by the creative and imaginative space of the human body. In this respect, Paul Auster’s novel is a spatial cartography that explores the manner
in which human history is subject to various structures and forms of power that traverse the body and the world, break it down, shape it, and rearrange it—yet always fail to conquer it.
Auster’s essay concerning Charles Reznikoff”s representation of the city, “The Decisive Moment,” might be instructive here: “It seems no accident that most of Reznikoff ’s poems are rooted in the city. For only in the modern city can the one who sees remain unseen, take his stand in space
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and yet remain transparent” ( A rt of Hunger 39). Auster’s novel, like
Reznikoff ’s poetry, is engaged with the “strange and transitory beauties of the urban landscape” (40). Anna Blume’s experience of coming to terms with an otherness, in exile in a foreign land, is exactly reminiscent of Auster’s description of Reznikoff ’s work: “It is exile, and a way of coming to terms with exile that somehow, for better or worse, manages to leave the condition
of exile intact. Reznikoff was not only an outsider by temperament, nurturing those aspects of himself that would tend to maintain his sense of isolation, he was also born into a state of otherness, and as a Jew, as the son of immigrant jews in America, whatever idea of community he had was always ethnic rather than national” (42). Anna Blume discovers herself to be a constant outsider, looking in on this life in the city, which she always appears
to treat as a temporary nightmare until she can find leer brother. Perhaps not accidentally, Blume also crucially announces her Jewish identity during her meeting with the rabbi in the National Library. Displaced into the turmoil
of the city, as someone who “had grown up in another place” (In the Country of Last Things 106), Anna Blume’s ontological, epistemological, and ethnic positions coalesce in her Judaic roots. Amongst Auster’s important extended reflections on Judaic roots and culture, is this quotation from Marina Tsvetaeva in The Invention of Solitude: “In this most Christian of worlds / All poets are Jews” (95). This persistent exiled consciousness of the writer and the Jew is reiterated by the rabbi, who impresses upon Blume a most “startling” comment: “Every Jew, he said, believes that he belongs to the last generation of Jews. We are always at the end, always standing on the brink
of the last moment, and why should we expect things to be any different now?” (Country 112). Having lived as if she is the only person left in the world, Blume’s meetings with the rabbi reestablish some glimmer of her former self-identity, as she gradually experiences the protective order of the patriarch:
It was strange what had come over me in the presence of this man, but the more I talked to him, the more I sounded like a child. Perhaps he reminded me of how things had been when I was very young, back in the dark ages when I still believed in what fathers and teachers said to me. I can’t say for sure, but the fact was that I felt on solid ground with him, and I knew that he was someone I could trust. (96)
Although the rabbi’s allusions to persecutions of the Jewish population in the city echo less savory periods of European history, it is precisely the
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communal aspect of the rabbi and his disciples that steady Blume at this point of near collapse. The absent father is a persistent theme in Auster’s writing, but here is a familiar, solid patriarchal foundation and ethnic security she never experienced in the ever-shifting social sands outside the library, where
a sense of communal space is at best a vestige shored up by desperation, and at worst nonexistent.
Since we cannot live outside representations of space, and there is no clear dividing line between an authentic place and one that may have been constructed along the way, Anna Blume tends to be always negotiating various locales in the city, continuously working to make sense of and articulate both place and event. People are shown to be never simply fixed within a locale, but are active, space-producing bricoleurs. Living in complex, contradictory places, one differentiates the pull of events and places. We feel the pull of specific constructions of space or place, and in many ways, are involved in reproducing them on a daily basis; but we can nevertheless alter a vision of strict interpellation with the recognition that discourses are negotiated.
Michel de Certeau has written about the way in which the city is constituted by the “raw material” of “walkers, Wandersmänner, whose bodies follow the cursives and strokes of an urban ‘text’ they write without reading” (124). Auster’s sense of the city is similar: many passages are given over to the patterns traced through the city by Blume’s walks.
Preeminently, walking assumes the imperative of self-preservation: “One step and then another step and then another: that is the golden rule”
(Country 24). However, just as Reznikoff ’s poetry was built upon the fundamental experience of walking through a city, gauging the topographical and emotional by traversing the landscape on foot, so Anna Blume derives her intimate knowledge of the city from her perambulatory experiences: “The streets of the city are everywhere, and no two streets are the same. I put one foot in front of the other, and then the other foot in front of the first, and then hope I can do it again. Nothing more than that” (Country 2). Gradually Blume’s journeys assume an epistemological importance, walking being analogous to traveling from one thought to another. Auster’s texts constantly fold into one another, and in “The Book of Memory,” Auster stresses his conception of the mind’s “wanderings” as a walking through a city:
just as one step will inevitably lead one to the next step, so it is that one thought inevitably follows from the previous thought ...
and so on, and in this way, if we were to try to make an image of this process in our minds, a network of paths begins to be drawn, as in the image of the human bloodstream (heart, arteries, veins,
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capillaries), or as in the image of a map (of city streets, for example, preferably a large city, or even of roads, as in the gas station maps of roads that stretch, bisect, and meander across a continent), so 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 this journey is no more or less than the steps we have taken. (The Invention of Solitude 122)
Journeys are equivalent to mental movements, and walking becomes an actualization of cognition itself. In his poem “White Spaces” Auster seeks
“to think of motion not merely as a function of the body but as an extension of the mind” (Disappearances 104). He continues on this subject of space, physical movement and mental thought:
I remain in the room in which I am writing this. I put one foot in front of the other. I put one word in front of the other, and for each step I take I add another word, as if for each word to be spoken there was another space to be crossed, a distance to be filled by my body as it moves through this space. It is a journey through space, even if I get nowhere, even if I end up in the same place I started. It is a journey through space, as if into many cities and out of them, as if across deserts, as if to the edge of some imaginary ocean, where each thought drowns in the relentless waves of the real. (107)
Within a single room, the writer can experience “the infinite possibilities of a limited space” (The Invention of Solitude 89). Words shape and extend mental and physical spaces. In Auster’s novel, the spaces of the city, Blume’s mind, and the textuality implode into a space of representation.
What emerges in the novel In the Country of Last Things is akin to Lefebvre’s argument concerning the dialectical interaction between the space of representation and representational spaces. How is the relation between place and being to be understood? As separate spheres? As interdependencies? As shaped entirely by the forcefulness of the absolute ego? As shaped entirely by the materiality of place? Place as a specific demarcation of space is crucial to the establishment of social order.
As Anna Blume gradually discovers, to challenge what that place might be is to challenge something fundamental in the social order.
The city is constantly described as being in a state of perpetual contingency, impermanence, ephemerality, and transience by Anna Blume:
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“Slowly and steadily, the city seems to be consuming itself, even as it remains” (Country 21–22). When Blume first arrives, it is like “entering an invisible world, a place where only blind people lived” (18). There is no clear sense of how the city has arrived at such a state of decrepitude or collapse, why it is cordoned off, or why it is a no-go zone. It appears in an indefinite future and as an indefinite space, marked by the typicality of New York City and also the indeterminacy of all contemporary urban constructions.1 It is merely a space, a condition in which the author explores, observes, and represents certain states of social behavior. As such a zone, it has similarities with Brian McHale’s sense that postmodern fiction constructs spaces that allow for experiments, opening up new ontological existences “in a kind of between-worlds space—a zone” (Postmodern Fiction 43–58). The city is just such a place and nonplace, in which people are completely indifferent to reality, knowing no logic or negotiation or causality or contradiction, wholly given over as they are to the instinctual play of the desires and the search for survival: The novel’s apocalyptic title suggests a world that is disappearing, and there is an incomprehensibility about this knowledge, seemingly lying beyond the limits of the imagination: “I don’t expect you to understand. You have seen none of this, and even if you tried, you could not imagine it. A house is there one day, and the next day it is gone” (Country 1). The city’s organic cycle is repeatedly perplexing and confusing:
For nothing is really itself anymore. There are pieces of this and pieces of that, but none of it fits together.... At a certain point, things disintegrate into muck, or dust, or scraps, and what you have is something new, some particle or agglomeration of matter that cannot be identified. It is a clump, a mote, a fragment of the world that has no place: a cipher of it-ness. As an object hunter, you must rescue things before they reach this state of absolute decay.... Everything falls apart, but not every part of every thing,
at least not at the same time. The job is to zero in on these little islands of intactness, to imagine them joined to other such islands, and those islands to still others, and thus to create new archipelagoes of matter. (35–36)
Life is a process of constructing order out of chaos, an idea that much preoccupies Stillman senior in City of Glass in The New York Trilogy, with his collection of oddments from the streets of Manhattan. Yet what interests Blume is that a change in one’s material circumstances in life in turn alters the value accorded to refuse and rubbish. One person’s waste is another
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person’s treasure. In this constant cycle of decomposition and recomposition, the city is represented as a “metonymic site, a zone of spatial contiguity, interdependence, and circulation” (Postmodern Fiction 190). Garbage collectors need to look at the world in a new fashion, to think metonymically, where the part forms a new yet different whole. The destruction, collapse and resurrection of identity are crucial factors in the transience of the city, where this new metonymical arrangement causes alternative spatial arrangements to emerge.
Amidst this physical decay, the city inverts one’s conventional ideas about life: “It turns your thoughts inside out. It makes you want to live, and at the same time it tries to take your life away from you. There is no escape from this. Either you do or you don’t. And if you do, you can’t be sure of doing it the next time. And if you don’t, you never will again” (Country 2).
Life in the city is one of black-and-white situations; yet paradoxically, as a
Life in the city is one of black-and-white situations; yet paradoxically, as a