IN THE COUNTRY OF MISSING PERSONS:

PAUL AUSTERS NARRATIVES OF TRAUMA

DEBRA SHOSTAK

Paul Austers recent novel, The Brooklyn Follies (2006), opens with a
stunning lineI was looking for a quiet place to dieand closes with a faintly
foreshadowed but still shocking reference to the brilliant blue sky under
which the protagonist walks in New York City on the morning of September
11, 2001 (1, 306). Austers framing of the novels action between moments of
personal and national trauma points to one of the abiding preoccupations of his
career. Best known for his narrative puzzles constructed around a postmodern
metaphysics of identity, as in his early New York Trilogy (1985-86), Auster
also takes his stories of ontological and epistemological uncertainty outside
the purely metaphysical realm within which the subject intuits his own
fundamental lack of presence. Often in such instances, Auster dramatizes lack
by way of narratives of missing persons, especially as seen from the point of
view of those left behind. At times, these narratives recount a personal lossof
a family member or loverand at others, they move within a national landscape,
providing in their missing figures metaphoric surrogates for an impersonal or
cultural lack. In both cases, however, Auster explores the possibility that loss
is a historical, and hence potentially narratable, condition. Such a premise
leaves open the potential for moving beyond loss, a potential that each novel
questions in its own way and that ultimately structures each narrative trajectory
according to the psychoanalytic pattern of acting-out and working-through
associated with the process of mourning.
Since a central absence shadows and directs Austers novels, they tend to
follow a narrative pattern of quest or detection in which the questing figure
generally the narrator or his surrogateseeks the missing person, either literally
or in the figurative terrain of knowledge and understanding. Consider, for
example, from early in his career, Austers search for the story of his father
in the memoir The Invention of Solitude (1982); the diegetic Paul Auster
Studies in the Novel, Volume 41, number 1 (Spring 2009). Copyright 2009 by the
University of North Texas. All rights to reproduction in any form reserved.

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attempting to comprehend Quinns obsessive pursuit of Peter Stillman, Sr., in

City of Glass (1985; rpt. in The New York Trilogy); and Anna Blumes quest for
her brother in In the Country of Last Things (1987). In subsequent novels, the
pattern is visible in Peter Aarons goal to reconstruct the story of his enigmatic
friend Benjamin Sachs in Leviathan (1992), David Zimmers scholarly pursuit
of the vanished silent film star Hector Mann in The Book of Illusions (2002),
and even Sidney Orrs desperate attempt to seek out and heal his fractured
subjectivity in Oracle Night (2003). In each case, the narrators desire to
erase an absence aims toward uncovering secretsand the fact of narration
both testifies to and enables the quest. Each quest stands for the narrators
confrontation with trauma. The inconclusiveness of each suggests that loss
is largely irremediable, the primary object of desire not just inaccessible, but
at times unrepresentable. Nevertheless, despite the intuition of existential
absence evident in The New York Trilogy, Auster demonstrates a surprising, if
modest, optimism. The narrators pursuing their objects engage in a therapeutic
process that brings them toward accepting loss, contingency, and thwarted
desire. Their narratives complete histories that record and embrace loss by
recovering the very possibility of the historical from the timeless stasis of the
traumatic condition. The histories they construct provisionally release them,
if not their objects of contemplation, from the past so as to live in an ongoing
present.
Austers work, and especially the relationship between his narrators and
the objects of their quests, is illuminated by central distinctions that Dominick
LaCapra has drawn from Freuds work. In Reflections on Trauma, Absence,
and Loss, LaCapra differentiates absence from loss, acting-out from workingthrough, mourning from melancholy. The distinction between the latter two
terms derives from Freuds account in Mourning and Melancholia (1917), with
the emphasis on the active work of mourning that allows one who has lost an
object to move beyond grief, as opposed to melancholia, which is characteristic
of an arrested process in which the depressed, self-berating, and traumatized
self, locked in compulsive repetition, is possessed by the pastand remains
narcissistically identified with the lost object (LaCapra 189). LaCapra argues
for a cross-correlation between the terms of two of these oppositional pairs:
mourning, he suggests, might be seen as a form of working-through
and melancholia, a form of acting-out (189; see also LaCapra History and
Memory after Auschwitz 44-45). In relation to the defining objects of desire,
LaCapra explains absence in its specialized sense as transhistorical. It is not
an event but rather an ontological condition and constitutive of existence.
Loss, however, is historical. Absence is existential, loss temporal. The
distinction is clarified by contrast to the historical connotations of loss itself:
about absence, LaCapra notes, one cannot lose what one never had (179). No
object exists to fill the desire stimulated by the perception of absence, which
is without origin or terminus. Because, however, with respect to loss or lack

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correlate conditionsthe object of desire is specified, it is possible to satisfy

such desire by recover[ing] the lost or lacking object or some substitute for it
(183).
In accounting for loss, LaCapra is also of course drawing on Freuds
presentation of the repetition compulsion in Beyond the Pleasure Principle
(1920). Freud famously described his grandsons fort/da game as an effort to
master grief over separation from his mother through repeated reenactments of
the loss of an object that served as a symbolic substitute for her. Eric Santner
usefully summarizes the homologies Freud underlined between the symptoms
of the trauma victim and the symbolic behavior of the child at play (147).
Calling the childs ritualized actions a fundamentally homeopathic procedure,
Santner notes that In the fort/da game it is the rhythmic manipulation of
signifiers and figures, objects and syllables instituting an absence, that serves
as the poison that cures. These signifiers are controlled symbolic doses of
absence and renunciation that help the child to survive (146). For both the
child and the trauma victim returning, in dream, to the site of shock, the
repetition compulsion enables, in the controlled context of symbolic behavior,
thereadiness to feel anxiety, absent during the initial shock or loss.Until
such anxiety has been recuperated and worked through, the loss will continue
to represent a past that refuses to go away (147).
The human need to exercise control over the unpredictability of loss
is of considerable significance, especially given Austers concern with the
chance nature of events. Austers work repeatedly evidences a fascination with
chancefigured variously as fortuitous coincidence or arbitrary fate. Not just in
The Music of Chance (1990), which makes the preoccupation obvious, but also
in much of the work running from The New York Trilogy through The Brooklyn
Follies, chance has featured as an engine of plot and an occasion for making
meaning. Indeed, the small collection of true stories in The Red Notebook
(2002) is devoted to nonfictional anecdotes and ruminations concerning the
mysteries of coincidence and Austers recognition of the human impulse to
ascribe motivation and significance to chance events. Especially in relation
to the unpredictable sources of trauma in accident and mischance, Austers
fiction shows its narrators attempting to control the randomness of event, if
not in the happening itself, then in their understanding of it. The fiction finally
suggests that the narrators must learn that contingency does not meanthat loss
simply happens. Only once they reconcile themselves to this knowledge can
they move beyond nostalgic, narcissistic melancholia to return to the historical
present.
Austers writing thus represents each narrators pursuit of his narrative
object as a confrontation with trauma. At times this object is structured as a
mise en abyme in the text, a mirror reflecting the narrator by means of a parallel
pursuit of a lost object. Auster allows for some important contrast, however,
between the narrator and the object of narration. The objects that Austers

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narrators pursue may be trapped within the repetition compulsion, endlessly

reenacting the trauma of their past, unable to move beyond the mode of actingout because they confuse loss with absence, confronting an absence of self or
other as a timeless condition rather than a historical product.1 The narrators
themselves, however, manage almost unwittingly to shift from melancholia
to mourning. They escape the repetitions of acting-out into the future-directed
mode of working-through. In seeking the other, they experience the historical
loss of their objects but not an internalized, transhistorical absence. When
they accept the contingency of experience and engage in the working-through
that permits them to gain distance on their own trauma, they make the past
past. Austers narrators find a provisional wholeness of self when they tell the
story of other absences that double their own but from which they can detach
themselves.
Austers early memoir, The Invention of Solitude (1982), offers a prototype
of this narrative pattern, since it clearly demarcates the distinction between
narrator and object. Austers father, Sam, bridges the two forms of missing
person: he is lost, in that his death is the motivation for Paul to write this
book, which is among other things an inquiry into the metaphysical absence
that seems to have characterized his condition both for himself and for his son.
Auster recalls his Earliest memory: his absence (20), which literally describes
the household while Sam was away at work but is also clearly figurative. Sam
Auster was the man who was not there: He never talked about himself,
never seemed to know there was anything he could talk about. It was as though
his inner life eluded even him (20). The first section of the book, Portrait of
an Invisible Man, is narrated in the first person, as Paul seeks to learn and to
tell the story of his father. Insofar as a memoir can be said to have a narrative
climax, the climax of Portrait of an Invisible Man occurs when Auster offers a
historical explanation for the existential absence he has perceived in his father.
This appears when he uncovers the suppressed story of the Auster familys
trauma: the nine-year-old Sam by chance witnessed his mother shooting and
killing his father. Auster does not argue the point explicitly, but it is clear that,
once restored to memory, this trauma offers a causal explanation for his fathers
not-thereness, his constitutive solitude. Trauma may be said, that is, to invent
solitude. Auster implies that Sam was never able, perhaps never tried, to work
through the incident and instead repeated its violence not materially but in his
detachment from all the normal objects of desire that subsequently presented
themselves to him. Austers own working-through comprises the telling of his
fathers story and also, in the second movement of the memoir, The Book of
Memory, guides the shift in perspective when he tells the story of his own
failure to be fully present as he, however unconsciously, reenacts his fathers
secret trauma.
The therapeutic value of this narration is conveyed by Austers choice of
a third-person narrator for The Book of Memory, which both replicates the

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detachment that he experienced as his fathers wounding of him and finally

enables a healthy distancing from trauma. In LaCapras words, he performs a
relation to [trauma] that simultaneously remembers and takes at least partial
leave of it (History and Memory 45). In this sense, the distinction between the
two parts of the narrativebetween the story of the father told by the I voice
and the fragmented, multi-dimensional, and diachronic story of the narrator,
Paul, displaced into the heis crucial. Sams story, once unearthed and
narrated in the Portrait, and including the presence of the youthful Paul, is
thoroughly historicaltwo parallel losses (each son loses his father) are made
coherent and even symmetrical, allowing for a kind of aesthetic and ethical
closure. Sam does not escape melancholia, but the narrating Paul has room
to do so, to differentiate himself from his object, as is evidenced in the final
lines of the Portrait. Auster concludes with the sweet and ferocious little
body (69) of his own sleeping son, Daniel. In doing so, he moves beyond
solitude toward the other, projecting a future in which Daniel reads these
pagesa record of the past now safely enclosed in its writing and available to
understanding.
The very form of the Book of Memory, however, tends to reintroduce
the transhistorical condition of absence as LaCapra defines it. The seemingly
random fragments of the Book imply that the gaps between them are
moments of the unspeakable and accidental that resist coherence. The first note
of the Portrait is inherently historical and open to contingency: One day
there is life.And then, suddenly, it happens there is death (5). The first note
of the Book, however, seems to establish a post-narrative, limitless condition
of lack that points only toward the past: It was. It will never be again (75).2
The third-person narrator, A., begins in a position dislocated from time, in
that His life no longer seemed to dwell in the present (76). Nevertheless, in
an austere room bearing no trace of his identity, he seeks out his own story of
trauma, which is, in its largest sense, his solitude. It is worth noting here that
some critics have justly accounted for the sense of a constitutive condition
of limitless absence conveyed by some of Austers representations in terms
of his position as a post-Holocaust writer (Fredman 30; see also Cohen).
And without summoning the Holocaust explicitly, Wesseling points out
Austers apocalyptic thinking in In the Country of Last Things (1987), aptly
concluding that the novel reformulate[s] the apocalyptic paradigm, which
normally works through toward an end, by turning the period of transition
proper to the middle into a permanent situation, so that there are no beginnings,
middles and endings anymore (503). Either context for describing what I have
called a post-narrative condition implies a subject unable to move beyond the
compulsive repetition of acting-out. My aim here, however, is to explore the
consequences for form and meaning of the concreterather than constitutive
and historically limited examples of trauma that appear in Austers mimetic
plots.

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This is why, to return to the Freudian scheme, memory is crucial as the

means both to bring back and to let go. No wonder Auster titles this section
The Book of Memory. He explains the narrative point of view as inextricable
from a psychological process: he speaks of himself as another in order to tell
the story of himself. He must make himself absent in order to find himself
there. And so he says A., even as he means to say I. For the story of memory
is the story of seeing (154; see also Memorys Escape 114). It is memory
that brings the narrating Auster as well as his narrative object, A., back from
absence to loss, from melancholia to mourning, since memory functions only
within a historical consciousness. If memory is the space in which a thing
happens for the second time (83), it is irrefutably temporal and thus the means
by which the subject can emerge from the unconscious, compulsive repetition
of acting-out the static past into the working-through that moves into and
through time: Memory, then, not so much as the past contained within us,
but as proof of our life in the present (138).3 Paradoxically, to free memory,
one must erase self-consciousness, which tends to contemplate only its own
absence: If a man is to be truly present among his surroundings, he must be
thinking not of himself, but of what he sees. He must forget himself in order to
be there (138). In turn, memory enables a vision that moves not only beyond
self-consciousness toward consciousness of othersMemory, therefore, not
simply as the resurrection of ones private past, but an immersion in the past of
others, which is to say: history (139)but also toward ongoing participation
in life itself: the moment we step into the space of memory, we walk into the
world (166). Paul must arrive at two insights: he must learn the history of the
lost other who is his father; and he must recognize that he has himself become
a lost object of desire, a missing person. Only then can he detach from the
repetition of that absence, accept his loss, and reconstitute a provisional self by
embracing the unpredictable present in the figure of his own son. The Book of
Memory closes by repeating its opening lines, but with an essential difference
that offers a commitment to time: It was. It will never be again. Remember
(172).
A number of Austers other works display the pattern of acting-out
and, at times, working-through that is visible in The Invention of Solitudes
representation of trauma, at once a psychological process and a template
for narrative form. The opening page of City of Glass, for example, hints
at the cause of the metaphysical black hole in which Quinn finds himself,
when it refers to the death of his wife and son. Quinns willingness to
surrender his identity in the pursuit of Stillman Junior and Senior seems a
compulsive repetition of the narratives initiatory loss, one that Quinn never
moves beyond. One might, indeed, argue that the motivation for the trilogy
is traumatic repetition itself, each of the subsequent novels (Ghosts and The
Locked Room) re-figuring and displacing into other characters the narrative
situation of Quinns self-entrapment and abortive effort to write himself out

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of the corner of trauma. In the Country of Last Things narrates Anna Blumes
futile quest for her missing brother within a dystopic, totalitarian civilization,
features of whose traumatic conditions for its citizens resemble the Nazi
Holocaust in its violence and arbitrariness. In Moon Palace (1989), Marco
Stanley Fogg finds his condition, like A.s in The Invention of Solitude, defined
by lossof his mother and surrogate fatherand by lack, since he has never
known his real father. Apparently by accident and unbeknownst to him, Fogg
begins a quest for the missing persons in his life, only to find eventually that in
reconstructing and re-membering his generational story of traumatic loss, he
is able to move into the present. Even the plot of the film Lulu on the Bridge
(1999) rather faithfully renders the psychoanalytic process of working through
trauma. A randomly fired bullet hits Izzy Maurer, this apparently initiatory
trauma belatedly revealed as an eleventh-hour repetition that causes his dying
consciousness to engage in an elaborate processsped up into the blink of
an eye and engineered by an imaginary figure of vengeance and therapyof
confrontation with repressed traumatic material. Memory thus releases Izzy
into his own death, the films final irony being that for him to live in the
present is actually to die. Travels in the Scriptorium (2007) rather explicitly
situates its protagonist, Mr. Blank, within the stasis of the traumatic condition,
lacking memory and thus a sense of his own identity. The exaggeratedly
reflexive plot comprises the recovery, or at least the reinventing, of a history
and hence some semblance of a self. The process occurs by way of the written
word, as characters invented over Mr. Blanks career as a novelist revisit him,
becoming quite literally embodied within the text. In replacing his memory
through his imaginative repetitions, Mr. Blanks writing offers to return him to
an engagement with the world that is at once ethical, temporal, and material,
as he relearns the names of objects around him. Finally, the most recent novel,
Man in the Dark (2008), likewise places its narrating writer-protagonist in the
arrested time of trauma, inventing fictions that simply repeat and displace the
violence he has known, as he lies in his darkened room. Only at the very end
of the narrative can he at last recover and retell the initiatory traumatic incident
and then, tentatively and provisionally, prepare in the closing pages of the
novel to move on, back into time.
Despite the pervasive recurrence in Austers work of the structuring
narrative I have outlined, I shall in the interests of economy limit the discussion
that remains to a more detailed reading of three of the novels. Leviathan
(1992), The Book of Illusions (2002), and Oracle Night (2003) display this
pattern vividly by connecting the confrontation with trauma to the occurrence
of violence in different contexts of twentieth-century American history. The
violence in Oracle Night is the most circumscribed, personal, and in some sense
non-ideological. Its mise en abyme structure offers several missing persons
inscribed, literally, within the act of writing, in a notebook that records the
return of the repressed. The novel addresses the possibility of recovering from

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a writers block that itself signifies absence, and engages the problem of time
explicitly. Leviathan and The Book of Illusions both expose the randomness
of the violence that is woven into the discourse of American freedom, seeing
in such violence the source of the trauma that endangers the very freedom it
purports to protect. The Book of Illusions figures the missing person in relation
to art, focusing on the transition from silent film to the talkies in the 1920s.
Leviathan does so in relation to political action, specifically civil disobedience,
in the latter part of the century.
Leviathan follows the attempts of the narrator Peter Aaron to piece together
the story of Benjamin Sachs, in order to preserve his friends identity after
Sachs blows himself up with a homemade bomb beside a road in Wisconsin.
Aarons purpose and the story he tells are built on paradox. [T]he least I can
do is explain who he was and give the true story (2), Aaron claims, only
to lead the reader to understand that neither aim is possible. Sachs has gone
literally missing for some time before his death. Aaron learns that Sachss
condition as a missing person is both intentional and existential, that he has
freely chosen to disappear in order to fulfill a destiny of absence he imagines,
contradictorily, as inevitable. Sachs wagers his life on the ideal of freedom, but
his consciousness is fundamentally historical, in a historicism deeply marked
by determinism. Resisting the notion that the principle of contingency governs
events, he proliferates strange historical connections so that he can turn
facts into metaphors, documented events into literary symbols, tropes that
pointed to some dark, complex pattern embedded in the real (26-27). Sachs
is driven thus because he insists on seeing that historical trauma has produced
his life and violence has framed it. Born on August 6, 1945, he calls himself
Americas first Hiroshima baby, the original bomb child (25), ironically
reversing the glory of bombs bursting in air at the origin of the American idea.
Sachss end as the anonymous Phantom of Liberty who crosses the continent
bombing replicas of the Statue of Liberty therefore seems fated. The narrative
of violence in which Sachs engages serves two distinct purposes, political
and personal. First, he represents anarchic politics under the banner of civil
disobedience so as to outline a history, what Aaron calls an archaeology of
the present (70), that might construct some semblance of meaningfulness out
of random acts of violence. Second, he devotes himself to a quixotic activism
to fill an empty self and recover a lost innocence he stubbornly associates with
American ideals.
Sachss view of the nuclear bomb implies how his personal trauma is
woven into historical trauma. Aaron writes: It [the bomb] was a central fact
of the world for him, an ultimate demarcation of the spirit, and in his view
it separated us from all other generations in history (27). The annihilating
fact of the bomb at Sachss origin sets off the chain reaction, as it were, that
leads him to conclude that America, failing its richest promises, exists in a
fallen state. For him, the originary trauma is American historys original sin.

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The bomb is unpredictable and inexplicable in relation to his idea of America.

Both the coincidence of his birth with the bomb and the bomb itself thus seem
accidental, in the sense according to which Cathy Caruth discusses traumatic
events as accidents, shocking and unexpected, hence not precisely grasped,
and associated in key representations of trauma, such as Freuds, with a story
of a falling body (Unclaimed 6-7).
Sachs compulsively repeats this traumatic fall in his own history until his
violent death seems inevitable. Willfully transforming facts into metaphors,
the young Ben, on a trip to the Statue of Liberty, intuits the ironic contradiction
between the visits homage to freedom and the chains that bind him when
his mother insists that he dress like a Fauntleroy (37, 36). Once up in the
Statue, she experiences an intense panic, a fear of falling exacerbated by the
very emptiness of the Statue, the pure nothingness all around (38). Sachs
concludes that freedom can be dangerous. If you dont watch out, it can kill
you (39). Sachs later affirms in the historical novel he writes that the liberty
signified by the Statue is hollow: titled The New Colossus, the novel is set at the
end of the nineteenth century, teems with historical figures, and is dedicated,
Aaron realizes, to the message that America has lost its way (43). Sachs
writes his novel out of the conviction that his fictional expression of anger
against the political hypocrisy of America can serve as a weapon to destroy
national myths (44). Politically, he is an innocent, a figure of prelapsarian
hope and harmony, his anger a function of his nostalgic belief that some golden
age might be recaptured in the civil state.
Auster tests Sachss innocence during the traumatic repetitions of his
adulthood. At a party on the 4th of July, celebrating the centenary of the Statue
of Libertyand in plain sight of the StatueSachs, driven by a desire he is
desperate to repress, falls four stories from a fire escape. It is the fall predicted
by his mothers anxiety, and it is his Fall, the epiphany of a metaphysical
absence borne of moral and political disillusionment, from which he never
fully recovers. For ten days after the accident, he does not speak, his silence a
methodof holding onto the horror of that night, to relive the moments of
his fall again and again (134). Sachss silence is symptomatic of his repetition
compulsion, expressing his inability to separate himself from the past. The
knowledge he cannot relinquish is the melancholics intuition that I was
already dead. I was a dead man falling through the air (131)as dead as
the ideal state that never was. Sachs engages in his compulsive acting-out in
relation to the proximate cause of his fall, the object of his lust that night,
Maria Turner. She is a photographer and performance artist who bases her
art on happenstance. Marias art begins with the consciousness of existential
absence that Sachs falls into; she intends one project concerning the unknown
owner of a lost address book to be a portrait in absentia, an outline drawn
around an empty space (74). Sachs reaches out to Maria after his accident,
Aaron recognizes, because Maria, the reigning spirit of chance (113)

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another phantom of libertyis the embodiment of his catastrophe who can

keep the symbol of his transformation constantly before his eyes and enable
him to repeat the experience again and againperhaps[to] master it (141).
Embodying chance and catastrophe, she facilitates the acting-out of the victim
of trauma.
Maria also offers the possibility that Sachs might master his trauma by
gaining distance from it; she tries to renew Sachss capacity to see himselfto
see that he has a selfwith the aid of her camera. Instead, however, he learns
the art of self-objectification. Every time Sachs posed for a picture, Aaron
writes, he was forced to impersonate himself, to play the game of pretending
to be who he was (145). Aaron misinterprets the results of Sachss acting-out
with Maria as working-through toward being what he impersonates; that this
is instead repetition without recovery becomes clear when Sachs responds to
the subsequent traumatic event in his life. Literally and figuratively lost in
the woods, he accidentally kills a man who has murdered another, a wholly
innocent victim. Sachs devotes the rest of his life to taking on the identity
of the man he murders, Dimaggio. Sachss apparent escape into otherness is
paradoxically a repetition in disguise: Dimaggio is in many respects Sachss
double, an intellectual so deeply engaged in radical environmental activism
that he becomes gratuitously violent, mirroring rather than correcting the
corruption of the culture he seeks to reject.
Sachss assumption of Dimaggios life, especially his violence, reenacts
his fall into a freedom that is at best false, at worst dangerous and ethically
compromised. It is also pitifully absurd; Sachs dies under the pseudonym
of the Phantom of Liberty, detonating replicas of the Statue of Liberty. The
culture machine appropriates his act of protest against America, as the Phantom
becomes the subject of editorials, political cartoons, T-shirts, and even a striptease act. Commodification swallows up the meaning of his protest. As in Luis
Buuels 1974 film, to whose title the phrase phantom of liberty alludes, the
phantom represents the principles of contingency and meaningless coincidence
that structure both narrative and life. In the context of Austers novel, one can
read the idea of the phantom in opposing ways, depending on ones point
of view: to Sachs, the phantom is a cunning ghost striking out on behalf of
freedom; to Aaron, the shade comes to represent the very insubstantiality of
liberty itself. When Sachs finally blows himself up, it is only to repeat the
trauma of the original fall forecast by the hollow Statue of Liberty. Sachs the
phantom dies embodying the very absence that his anarchic obsession was
designed to eliminate but simply repeated.
Sachss violent plan emerges from an innocence to which he is wholly
blind. He tells Aaron that, in choosing to carry out Dimaggios work, he has
found his unifying principle, the idea that would bring all the broken pieces
of myself together (256). In his desire for a unifying principle, Sachs betrays
the delusion that prevents him from working through his trauma. His striving

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for wholeness of self parallels his expectation that the American state can fulfill
the idealized vision of its rhetoric. But neither state has ever existed except
theoretically. He thus becomes the victim of unquenchable anxiety because no
object exists to fill the lackof wholeness or freedomthat he persistently feels
as a loss rather than an absence. Sachs commits the error LaCapra identifies
of conflating absence with loss, of believing that a fragmented self or the lack
of an ideal state is a historical condition, not a constitutive one, and hence
correctable.
Austers narrator counterposes Sachs, however. Aaron discerns that
Sachss access to and control over language represent his prelapsarian
consciousness: Words and things matched up for him, he asserts. For Aaron,
however, they are constantly breaking apart: Im shut off from my own
thoughts, trapped in a no-mans-land between feeling and articulation (55).
Aaron, that is, already embodies the traumatic fracturing of modernity, and
thus accurately asserts that Im the place where everything begins (57).
Aarons personal trauma occurs when he discovers by accident in his wifes
journal that she has never loved him, and he acts out his romantic and sexual
delusions with other women until the final repetition, when he conducts a futile
love affair with Sachss wife, Fanny. But Aaron recognizes that Fanny threw
herself at me in order to save me from myself (98), allowing him to work
through misplaced desire to prepare himself for the happy ending (115) of
his relationship with his second wife. That is, Aaron is at last able to locate an
object of desire, affirming his loss as historical and, hence, past. When he comes
to tell Sachss story, therefore, he is likewise capable of accepting that Sachs
remains a missing person, lost to the history he has constructed for himself.
In choosing to set Sachss story straight after his friends death has released
him from his vow of silence, Aaron tak[es] on the burden of that silence for
him (266). He has, however, also accepted Sachss absence impersonally, in
a process of mourning that returns him to the present: He was no longer just
my missing friend, he was a symptom of my ignorance about all things, an
emblem of the unknowable itself. His acceptance of the unknowable leads his
wife to name Aaron a Zen acolyte, a believer in the power of nothing (164).
To believe positively in such power is not to succumb to it.
Like Leviathan, The Book of Illusions traces the efforts of a narrator who
both doubles and reverses the traumatic story of the missing person who is his
subject. The Book of Illusions begins Everyone thought he was dead (1);
like Leviathan, it refers to the death of the man whom the narrator pursues,
delineating an absence into which the narrator is writing. If Sachs temporarily
engages in silence after his accident to mark his fall into apprehension of
transhistorical absencethe ideals of self and nation, which could not really
be lost because they were never fulfilledHector Mann, the object of the
scholar David Zimmers quest in The Book of Illusions, has dedicated both his
lifes work and his life itself to silence. As in Leviathan, the most important

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distinction between the narrator and his subject in The Book of Illusions lies
in the way each responds to trauma. Hector Mann gives himself over to the
melancholic nihilism of survivors guilt; his biographer, Zimmer, however,
works through loss toward a surprising stability.
Whereas Leviathan is set within the politics of post-1960s radicalism,
The Book of Illusions harks back to the silent film industry of the 1920s. The
novels references to American culture are less overt than in Leviathan, but they
are nevertheless traceable in Hectors Manns own history. Zimmer plausibly
reconstructs Hectors story from a jumble of fraudulent memories and
spurious anecdotes (84) as that of a Polish Jewish immigrant first to Argentina
and thence to New York. Hector becomes a silent film actor whose career is
threatened with the coming of talkies because of his strong Spanish accent. In
effect, his position as an immigrant allows him to be successful only insofar
as he remains silent or assimilates his speech to American English. Otherwise,
he must erase his historical identity to succeed in Hollywood, the emblem
of American visibility. The need for this erasure is made urgent once a gun
enters the theater of Hectors life during the traumatic experience that divides
his history, and him from himself. That trauma occurs when Brigid OFallon,
a woman with whom he has had an affair, jealously confronts Dolores Saint
John, the actress Hector is to marry; Dolores accidentally kills Brigid. As in
Leviathan, trauma enters the narrative in the shape of accident and mischance.
The appearance of guns is one of Austers structuring motifs in the novel;
this gunshot changes Hectors life utterly. He vanishes from Hollywood to
go into hiding as he seeks punishment for his complicity in Brigids death,
not from the law, but from the complete self-abnegation he takes upon
himself. He retreats into the silence signified and in a sense preordained by
his film career. Although Hector writes in his journal of the possibility of
redemptionIf I mean to save my life, then I have to come within an inch of
destroying it (154)he deludes himself, because he cannot stop short. Like
Sachs, he is unable to move beyond the acting-out of his trauma. Penitential,
he invites daily discovery when he goes incognito to work for Brigids father
and befriends her sister, Nora. Until Nora falls in love with him and he must
leave in order to avoid both exposure and, perhaps worse, self-fulfillment,
she serves as the focus of his repetition compulsion, enabling him to relive
his guilt constantly in relation to Noras uncanny resemblance to her sister:
Nora made life intolerable for him, Zimmer writes, and yet Nora was the
only thing he lived for (165). Like Sachs, Hector subsequently seeks selfobjectification, accepting a business partnership with a woman to engage in
sexual performances for select audiences. This travesty of Hectors calling as
an actor reaches its symbolic nadir when the partners perform repeatedly for
a judge, Hectors naked self-abasement a clear plea for punishment. When a
gun reenters the novel and Hector takes a bullet meant for another innocent
bystander during a bank robbery, the woman he has saved argues that the

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bullet absolves [him] (199) of his guilt. Instead, however, he simply projects
his traumatic reenactments back into his art, entering into a nihilistic project
of making movies under the condition that they will never be seen and will be
destroyed upon his death. He makes a pact with silence, that is, making his art
speak the death-wish implicit in all of his actions since the accident of Brigids
murder. Although the pact opens to him a kind of artistic freedom disallowed
by the commercial film industry, it is the freedom only of a confirmed absence.
Zimmer asks, If someone makes a movie and no one sees it, does the movie
exist or not? (207). Or, one might add, the moviemaker?
Auster structures the narrative not only around the appearance of guns
but also around Zimmers narration of two of Hectors films. The first, Mr.
Nobody, recounted early in the novel, is silent, and released before Hector
vanishes from Hollywood. Mr. Nobody represents Hectors prelapsarian vision.
A parable of absence reconfigured as a loss that can be restored, its closure
follows the conventions of comedy, offering both social and self-integration.
Hector, a successful businessman, is given a potion to make him invisible by
a man preparing to usurp his position and steal his business. Hector gains his
revenge, but only after choosing among the possibilities for good and evil that
his invisibility offers him. When he awakes to discover that he has returned to
presence, he does not recognize himself in the mirrorhe is a new man (52),
with a newfound ethical compass. That is, he has been renewed after working
through the trauma of disappearance, and his reward is to have returned to
him all the fruits of the American capitalist ethos: his business, his family,
and his wealth. Hector Manns own biography, however, is better represented
by the only example of his late, doomed films that Zimmer is able to view,
narrated near the end of the novel. The Inner Life of Martin Frost begins in
absence, silence, and Hectors reflexive allusion: his writer-protagonist arrives
at an empty house at Tierra del Sueo, the land of the dream, the name of the
ranch where Hector produces his later films. A muse, Claire, enables Martin
to write his storyto prepare to reenter the present after dallying in the land
of the dream, which is of course his art. When Claire begins to die, however,
as he draws his story to a close and will no longer be in need of her, Martin,
who has fallen in love with her, frantically burns the pages of his manuscript
to return her to life. Yet she is insubstantial, a figment and a metaphor. Martin
can only maintain an illusion of presence by refusing to go forward and accept
the losses of historical time. He chooses the land of the dream. The film ends
with images of time stoppedthe wind doesnt blow, leaves are still, and the
screen goes black (269). It is the no-time of traumatic repetition, Martin Frosts
commitment to being frozen in the irretrievable past. Martins bargain echoes
Hectors; he can only delude himself that he has recovered the lost object of
desire by retreating into silence, effectively emptying himself of desire.
If Hectors self-annihilation emerges, like Sachss, from a sense of loss
that he cannot accept as historical, his biographer, Zimmer, like Aaron, offers

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a competing vision, reversing Hectors pact and working through his own
trauma to break the silence that he shared with Hector. Zimmers historical
trauma is the loss of his wife and children in a plane crash, and like Hector, he
has engaged in the compulsive acting out of his trauma, taking on projects that
keep him working obsessively with the reminders of silence, loss, and death:
a study of Hectors films, a translation of Chateaubriands memoirs. Like
Hectors, Zimmers life is altered by the contingency represented by a gun,
but to opposite effect. When Alma Grund brandishes a gun at him to coerce
Zimmer into accompanying her to Hectors ranch, Zimmer, whose despair has
brought him to the point of insane indifference, feels exhilarated, free of [my]
self, free of [my] life, free of [my] death (109). Convinced that the gun is not
loaded, he wrests it from her, points it at his head, and tries to pull the trigger.
Although it turns out that the gun is loaded, the safety is on, so Zimmers
bravura performance is both more and less than it seems. Zimmer learns that
his sense of freedom when faced by the gun is itself an illusion; chance alone
determined whether he would live or die, just as it had his family. In accepting
the rule of accident, he distinguishes the permanence of absence for which
he was perpetually grieving from a historical loss from which he now almost
immediately begins to recover. His pursuit of Hectors final films, therefore,
becomes a process of working-through. His engagement in a revivifying
relationship with Alma suggests his movement toward recovery. His recovery
is fulfilled when, even after Almas tragic death, he chooses to write Hectors
story, exposing his secrets and, like Aaron with Sachs or Auster with his father,
releasing him from silence. Further, he hopes that Alma has secretly saved
Hectors films from destruction. That is, Zimmer wagers that Hectors films
havent been lost. Theyre only missing (321), which is to say that he is,
unlike Hector, able to conceive of silence as an historical artifact rather than
constitutive.
For both Zimmer and Aaron, the missing do remain missing, despite the
testaments of their narratives. The missing person in Oracle Night, however,
is more immediately figurative than in Leviathan and The Book of Illusions.
In this case, the protagonist, Sidney Orr, is both narrator and object of the
narration, the lost and the seeker. Auster accomplishes this conflation by
developing a reflexive trope of writing. Offered on several interpolated
narrative levels, Orrs embedded narratives displace the objects of desire into
characters operating under his (insecure) control. In the end, however, he
must confront traumatic loss out in the world beyond his own texts, where
violence functions, as for Zimmer and Aaron, as the return of the repressed.
Like Leviathan, Oracle Nights plot circulates around the trauma of a fall,
which likewise initiates a motif that not only echoes with the resonance of a
symbolic Fall but also stands for the compulsive repetitions of a traumatized
victims process of acting-out. Unlike the earlier novels, Oracle Night
suppresses the details of Sidney Orrs fall until very late in the narrative,

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with the effect that, for much of the novel, the trauma that he appears to be
reenacting is of indefinable origin, plausibly even of no historical source at
all. This effect allows the trauma to be suspended indeterminately between
absence and loss. Is Orrs illness, described at the very beginning of the novel,
somehow a constitutive feature of his identity, an artifact of an existential
malaise, perhaps as much mental as physical? Or is it an event and hence both
external and capable of being reassigned to the past from a static condition of
the present? The effects are further complicated by the fact that the account of
Orrs nearly fatal fall down the subway stairs appears solely in a passage of a
kind of writerly indirect discourse, when Auster ventriloquizes the narrative
that Orr writes as Sidney attempts to piece together the otherwise unexplained
fragments of his wifes behavior into a coherent, meaningful story. Since Orrs
story begins Imagine this, and then see what comes of it (212), it is possible
to believe that the fall down the subway stairs is itself inventeda symbolized
repetition of some other, unknown traumarather than having the status of an
originary fact at the diegetic level of the novel.
This hovering in undecidability, together with the slippage among narrative
levels, offers a context for Austers more pressing interest in the novel, which
concerns the relations among trauma, narrative, and the experience of time.
The missing person in Oracle Night is foremost the first-person narrator,
Sidney Orr himself. After his fall and his months in the hospital, as he explains
in the opening of the novel, I barely knew how to walk anymore, could barely
remember who I was supposed to be (1), and had trouble telling where my
body stopped and the rest of the world began (2). Since Orr has been a writer,
he carries out his search for himself, after the disintegration of his subjectivity,
in relation to storytelling. The blue Portuguese notebook he purchases at the
beginning of the narrativean object representative of writing itself, signifying
both enchantment and dangerbecomes the field on which he plays out his
traumatic narrative. In a novel whose mise en abyme structure comprises
multilayered doublings among concurrent and interpenetrating narratives, the
blue notebook is the site on which Orr most clearly performs his process of
acting-out.4 The stories that appear within his notebook, like the frame narrative
presenting Orrs own biography, raise two central questions: can an individual
work through trauma by telling stories? And can an individual respond to and
even control trauma by constructing a special relationship to time?
Orrs storytelling begins when he chooses to see whether, in his posttraumatic condition, he is capable of writing in the seductive blue notebook.
He turns to a story suggested to him by another writer, John Trause, a story
founded in repetition in that it reimagines a kernel of plot from Dashiell
Hammetts novel The Maltese Falcon. In some sense, even Orrs attraction to
Hammetts story may be seen as a compulsive repetition, since the emphases
in the Flitcraft episode echo his own experience of a traumatic fall. After nearly
being hit by a falling beam at a construction site, Hammetts Flitcraft decides to

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erase his historyto change his life at random in recognition of lifes inherent
randomness (Hammett 336; qtd. Oracle Night 60)only to make his new life
over in the image of the old one. He circles around, in a repetition rather than a
reinvention, suggesting that he has engaged with the fact that events do happen
but not with the nature of trauma itself: He adjusted himself to beams falling,
and then no more of them fell, and he adjusted himself to them not falling
(Hammett 336; qtd. Oracle Night 109). The Flitcraft episode thus emphasizes
several features of trauma seen in Austers earlier texts: the metaphor of
falling to refer to the traumatic event; the chance nature of traumatic events,
making them ungraspable because unexpected, as Caruth suggests, and thereby
not open to coherent insertion within a familiar narrative; the compulsion to
repeat; and the perception that trauma disrupts time, dividing experience into a
before-and-after condition that demands acknowledgement in ones behavior.
Orrs writing subsequently repeats these very elements. The story of the
editor Nick Bowen, the Flitcraft figure who barely escapes a falling limestone
gargoyle and who flees his lifeand wifeto Kansas City, is, like Flitcrafts
own story, ultimately marked by a failure to move from acting-out to workingthrough, signified by a truncated narrative rather than circularity. Bowens
story includes multiple doublings from Orrs lifefor example, the character
of Bowen is an inversion (17) of Orr, which is to say a reversed mirroring;
Rosa Leightmans attractiveness is that of Orrs wife, Grace; Orr and Graces
friend Trause, who serves a significant function in the frame tale, appears as a
young private (97) during World War II in the story Bowen hears from the
elderly cab driver, Ed Victory. It is Victory who gives Bowen the task that, in
a displaced form, offers the opportunity to plumb the repressed material of
trauma. Bowen descends into Victorys hidden fallout shelterconstituting his
symbolic fallto organize the telephone books with the names of the living
and the dead in Victorys quixotic Bureau of Historical Preservation. If,
as Victory suggests, after he witnessed the horrors of the Holocaust, he can
thereby construct a coherent history in this house of memory, he can prove
to myself that mankind isnt finished. The Bureau can thus manifest Victorys
victory over time, accomplishing his own working-through, and hence can not
just record memory but also serve as a shrine to the present (91).
Bowen stands to share vicariously in this process of working-through,
were it not that the task itself, and Bowens performance of it, partake of
absurdity rather than meaningfulness. Because Victorys project is to bring
order to randomness, which is not the same as uncovering meaning, his death
before the completion of the project suggests its conceptual failure to restore a
signifying temporality. Orrs tale about Bowen therefore moves toward stasis,
a moment of arrested time. Unlike Victory, Bowen has desired to forget, to
[cease] to exist (96) by erasing his past. Without a reckoning with his history,
he has no means of creating a present. The process of symbolization implied
by the potential displacement of Bowens trauma into Victorys appears to be

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of limited therapeutic efficacy, since symbolization allows for pure repetition.

Orrs story fails because the return of the repressed occurs without an earned
understanding of the repressed material. Indeed, Orr may be said to resist
working-through at the point at which he presents Bowen with no possibility of
acting toward a future. Bowens impasse, replicating Orrs, is captured in Orrs
loss of control over his story. Locking his character into the underground room,
Orr finds that he has no plausible way to free him. His only solution is to stop
time, which is effectively to rest at the moment of trauma itself. He has written
himself into a corner, rendering Bowen a permanently missing person. The
truncated temporality of the narrative allows neither Bowen nor Orr himself to
emerge from the locked room of repressed trauma into an ongoing present.
Auster uses several narrative devices to draw attention to the ways that the
mind may attempt to control temporal experience as a stay against traumatic
experience. In the structuring of his novel, for example, Auster provides a
strategy to deflect the essentially linear movement of time that might
otherwise, like the plot of the frame narrative itself, drive directly toward
violence. Numerous footnotes allow the narrating Sidney Orr to stop time,
if only brieflyto move into accounts that are temporally parallel, regressive,
or digressive. Auster also embeds a mirroring narrative within the story that
Orr writes that suggests how catastrophic loss might disrupt the experience
of time. The manuscript that Orr has Bowen carry with him to Kansas City,
Sylvia Maxwells Oracle Night, is a fable about time that Bowen discerns
is [speaking] intimately to him about his own present circumstances (61).
Maxwells novel concerns a wounded veteran of the First World War whose
blindness has rewarded him with the gift of prophecy (62) but whose
anguished knowledge about the events of the future causes him to commit
suicide. The fable inverts the symptomatic response to trauma, replacing a
fixated memory with a compulsive anticipation; rather than being caught in
repetitions of the past, Maxwells traumatic victim is lodged in the repeated
instances of future pain, unable to live in the present.
The desire for writing to take control of experience, thereby filling the
gaps of the missing with a linguistic object, is of central significance in
Austers inquiry in Oracle Night. After Orr discovers that his mentor Trause
has fancied the same Portuguese notebooks as he, Trause warns him that they
can also be cruel, and you have to watch out that you dont get lost in them
(45). Contrary to the now commonsense view of storytelling as therapeutic,
Auster suggests that the attempt to control experience by telling stories can
make one lost rather than found, an effect conveyed when Orr first writes in
the notebook. He becomes so absorbed in writingit is his start of the Flitcraft
rewritethat he seems actually to disappear; when Grace looks in his work
room, she does not see him. To lose himself in the act of writing is to evade
memory through metaphor and other displacements. Orr thus reenacts his
position as a missing person. In a sense, Auster offers the figure of the writer as
potentially analogous to the victim of trauma, because a writer enters a state

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of double consciousness,both a part of what was going on around [him] and

cut off from it (29).
It is only once Orr departs from the displacements of fiction, in his final
entry in the blue notebook, that, fulfilling the intentions if not the means of his
character Ed Victory, he constructs both a house of memory and a shrine
to the present. This is the entry where he tries to write himself directly into
the events of his own past, under the directive to Imagine thisan ironic
experiment in that he aims to apply his powers of invention to the facts and
persons of his life, under their own names, rather than to write a fiction that
would transform fact. Because Grace had become a blank to me (176) and
has thus taken on the aspect of the unpredictable, he must revisit the known
facts of their lives together and invent motivations that fill the gaps and explain
how it is that she has for him become a missing person. Orrs task requires
him to draw upon cues his narrative has already supplied but that he has not
noticed in the sense of seeing them within a context beyond his own limited
point of viewGraces rather hasty decision to marry him, for example, or her
ambivalence over her pregnancy. Such details have served as switch-points in
the narrative he wrote up to this pointthe story that we are in fact reading
marking potentially repressed material. He remembers these details in the blue
notebook, bringing them into the light of consciousness in the narrative he now
writes. Orr thus speculates that Grace had an anguished, ongoing affair with
Trause before she met Sidney, resumed when he was near death, and that she is
uncertain who has fathered the child she bears. This story is at last undisplaced
in his imaginative act from the catastrophes of his own life. It thus constitutes
Orrs working-through, his house of memory, which is fully realized when,
ascribing courage, generosity, and faithfulness to her, he imagines that She
wills herself to believe the baby is mine and puts her doubts behind her. He
decides, in turn, that as long as she continues to want to stay married to me,
I will never breathe a word to her about the story Ive just written in the blue
notebook. Orrs commitment to live by his own leap of pure faith marks his
reinsertion into the experience of temporality, made explicit when he asserts,
As long as Grace wants me, the past is of no importance (219). When Orr
thus takes leave of the past, he builds a shrine to the present. It is no surprise,
then, that he chooses to tear up the pages of the blue notebook, which has
represented only the traumatic repetitions of acting-out. 5
It is therefore fitting that when traumatic violence revisits Orr within the
frame tale of the present, he finds the resources to survive it. When Trauses
enraged, drug-addicted son, Jacob, beats Grace to the point that she loses the
child, he functions as the embodied return of the repressed. Jacob has been
a missing person who also fills the function of traumatic event. He takes the
form of the unexpected and uncontrolled, striking out from the past to attempt
to stop timefigured in the promise of the next generation. Orr can no more
stop his violent attack than he can contain him within a narrative of explicable

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action. Yet when, on the final pages of Oracle Night, Orr has a vision of
Grace in her hospital bed, the dead Trauses ashes strewn in Central Park, and
himself tearing up the pages of the blue notebook, he arrives at happiness
beyond consolation, beyond misery, beyond all the ugliness and beauty of the
world (243). He arrives, that is, at the real, the principle of accident, of the
uncontrollable present and its undecidable significance, and the justice of his
arrival is reflected in Austers choice to end the last sentence of the book with
the name of Orrs wife. In reentering the narrative that has not been composed
in the blue notebookthe one we hold in our handsOrr prepares to embrace
Grace, the grace that he has been able to imagine but not command, with a past
that cannot avert pain. This Grace/grace enables him to accept the real and to
recognize that he cannot, in writing or in life, control time. Grace is the object
of desire that can replace Orrs loss.
Austers focus in Oracle Night displays ambivalence about the act of
writing itself, and especially about imaginative writing. Orr must write himself
out of his writers block as a step toward recovery of a life in the present, but
he moves beyond the cycle of acting-out only once he rejects the customary
displacements of fiction-writing. Trause supports his claim that the blue
notebookthe figure for fiction-makingcan be cruel with a story of a French
writer who in a poem unwittingly predicts his daughters death. Discovering
that Words could kill.Words could alter reality, the poet renounces all
writing, choosing silence as a refusal to accept the power of the random
(221). Under Trauses tutelage, Orr accepts the poets reasoning. Yet the poet
has superstitiously remained wedded to the notion that he can control events,
in this case by his silence. Auster suggests that the cruelty of writing is not
that it makes things happenAuden had it rightbut merely that it gives form
to possibility. Orr must reconcile himself to the fact that the random is just
that, out of his control, regardless of his capacity to imagine. In this respect,
he must reject Trauses faith in the power of writingwhich is perhaps why
Auster sees fit to have Trause die before the novels denouement. Orr must
likewise in some sense reject the implications of the title Auster chooses for the
novel, named after Sylvia Maxwells manuscript, which draws attention to the
predictive possibilities of writing. To imagine accident and anguish that have
not happened offers two contrary possibilities: such an imaginative act might
either defer event by, as it were, getting there first, displacing loss somehow by
anticipating it; or it might set the stage for making the unthinkable thinkable.
Either way, to believe in such a principle exemplifies magical thinking, Auster
suggests. To believe thus is to remain narcissistically invested in the lost object.
To believe is to resist the reality of the random by remaining susceptible to the
notion that an event can be contained within a coherent narrative. Appearances
to the contrary, there is, in the end, no oracle that can alert one to impending
night. An oracle night is an illusion, like the magic power of a blue notebook.
Oracle Night would seem, then, to be a novel that turns its back on novelwriting. Indeed, trauma brings to light the buried ambivalence in Austers

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narrative project. Insofar as narration is repetition, it returns the repressed, again

and again. Just as Trause the writer gives birth to his narratives under an illusion
of power, he sired a monster (241), Jacob, who returns to wound Grace, in
an incident of violent acting-out. Insofar, however, as writing embraces the
incompleteness and undecidability of the haphazard real, refuses closure, and
accepts the compromised truths of its stories regardless of fact, it moves
out into the future in a gesture toward working-through. In this sense, Auster
echoes the insight implicit in Caruths question: Is the trauma the encounter
with death, or the ongoing experience of having survived it? She refers to the
double telling of narratives that ask this question, in an oscillation between
a crisis of death and the correlative crisis of life (Unclaimed 7).6 Because
Austers novels largely explore the crisis of life, via the post-traumatic activity
of narrating, Oracle Night answers its central questions this way: an individual
can work through trauma by telling stories, but only if he or she repudiates the
illusion of control over event and time.
The point appears in its clearest form, perhaps, at the end of Man in
the Dark, when August Brill quotes a line of verse from Rose Hawthorne,
Nathaniels daughter, whose biography his daughter is writing: As the weird
world rolls on (180). Brill has at last let go of the fiction-making meant to keep
his memories at bay, has told his secret biography of guilt to his granddaughter,
and has narrated the graphic story of a terrorized death that is at the heart
of his familys trauma. Hawthornes line is repeated three times on the last
page of the novel, sounding a choral note of resignation, remembrance, and
reconciliation that is also discernible in the concluding grace notes, as it were,
of Oracle Night. The narrator in the latter novel, like those in Leviathan and
The Book of Illusions, must reconstruct the story of his subject secondhand,
from fragments, hearsay, and invention. In the end, each must accept that the
object of desire remains both unrepresentable and irrecoverable, except by
way of a substitute, however modest and provisional, in which one is willing
to place ones faith. The loss that occurs in the past comes to stand for the
nostalgic loss of innocenceof a golden age or a country or a condition of
security that, Auster implies, never was. Trause, Sachs, and Hector Mann all
must die, it seems, because they are the figures who cling to an innocent vision
of their autonomy and their shaping place in history. Americaas an idea, as
a literal place, and as a figure for the inescapable consciousness of modernity
remains a country of missing persons. The history of trauma must be inscribed
around an unbridgeable gap. According to Auster, however, those who are able
to see the modest possibility that the weird world rolls onout of the past and
into a dim future, in stories that will never quite make sense or recover what
is lostwork through to accepting the crisis of life as a condition of narration.
Orr, Aaron, and Zimmer, like A. in The Invention of Solitude, like August Brill,
like Fanshawes best friend in The Locked Room, and like the Paul Auster
who bears witness to Quinns disappearance in City of Glass, all are left behind

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to mourn and to tell the talesto writeprecisely because they lack a bracing
vision of wholeness. Only they, in making the weirdness plain, can prompt the
world to roll on.
THE COLLEGE OF WOOSTER

NOTES
1
Perhaps the best example of such an object is Peter Stillman, Jr. in City of Glass (1985),
the first volume of The New York Trilogy. Traumatized by his abusive and solitary upbringing,
Stillman is trapped within repetitions of his trauma, which are exhibited in his bodily and
linguistic alienation. See Herzogenrath 33.
2
In arguing for a perceptible difference between the narratives of the two titled sections of
the book, I am departing somewhat from Dows account of the memoirs postmodern form as a
whole as diaristic and anecdotal and relying on found or cut-up life experiences (275).
To be sure, the Portrait is presented in fragments that imply an epistemology of indeterminacy,
but it seems ultimately more constrained around telling the story of the father and more strictly
teleological than the looser and more contingent wanderings structuring the Book of Memory.
3
On the crucial connection between trauma and the subjects disrupted experience of time,
see Caruth, Parting Words 49-50.
4
In this sense, Oracle Night resembles Flecks description of Leviathan: The entire text
would appear to be written under the banner of metonymy, figure of contiguity and contingency,
of displacement and difference (259). The endlessly replicating narrative of fragments is
metonymic, as is the unresolved process of acting-out; a narrative of working-through would be
structurally metaphoric: Negating the iron law of contingency, it opens up the realm of metaphor
and meaning; it takes two arbitrary points on a line and makes them make a circle (260).
5
Orrs act of tearing out notebook pages echoes Austers earlier work: whereas, at the
end of City of Glass Paul Auster preserves Quinns red notebook in an effort to recapture the
story of the lost Quinn, at the end of The Locked Room, which completes the New York Trilogy,
the narrator tears out the pages of Fanshawes notebook One by one (371). The compulsive
repetition of the scene of the notebook across Austers imaginative career suggests his paradoxical
commitment to and anxiety about the possibility that writing can fix a narrative truth, sealing
up the past and enabling one to move back into time. I wish to thank the anonymous reader at
Studies in the Novel for directing me toward this repetition in Austers work.
6
Caruth clarifies that oscillation as the movement between the story of the unbearable
nature of an event and the story of the unbearable nature of its survival (Unclaimed 7).

WORKS CITED
Auster, Paul. The Book of Illusions. New York: Henry Holt, 2002.
. The Brooklyn Follies. New York: Henry Holt, 2006.
. In the Country of Last Things. New York: Viking Penguin, 1987.
. The Invention of Solitude. New York: Penguin, 1982.
. Leviathan. New York: Penguin, 1992.
. Lulu on the Bridge. Screenwriter and Dir. Capitol Films, 1998.
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