Death of the Author: Paul Auster

We pay tribute to Paul Auster with a piece from 2005 where Stewart Gardiner considers how death in Auster’s work helped him deal with grief

Cervantes piles up story upon story within the pages of Don Quixote, the boundaries of reality blurred and made essentially redundant. After all the beautifully crafted explorations into what it means to read and to be read, the final note is one of profound banality: returning from his adventures, Don Quixote admits the dangers of reading too much into what are, after all, fictions. Having grasped his own mortality, he gets down to the act of death itself.

The work of Paul Auster similarly explores the power of stories and their inherent danger. However, his explorations begin at the point where Cervantes signs off: with the death of the father. Don Quixote has no wife or children to whom he can bequeath his wisdom; but in a figurative sense he has given birth to his own story. Auster confesses that Don Quixote is his favourite book, that it has been a source of continued inspiration: his latest novel, Oracle Night, contains a father figure in John Trause, whose death becomes a (re)generative act for the novel’s writer-narrator. He borrows from Cervantes the idea that our lives are built upon a series of interwoven stories, many of which come down to the same essential questions circling around life and death.

We all have stories that shape us. The story that springs to mind for me is the death of my father. Auster himself wrote his first book-length prose work, The Invention of Solitude, almost immediately after his father died. Up until then, he was a poet, essayist and translator. Death transformed him into a novelist.

I read my first Paul Auster novel the year following my own great loss. His words resonated deep within me, filling the gaps not with answers, but with pertinent questions. Many of his stories begin after the dissipation of a family (City of Glass, The Book of Illusions, The Music of Chance); the protagonists struggle through a subsequent loss of self before arriving at the knowledge of what it means to go on living. Auster’s narrators, like Don Quixote, expose themselves through acts that threaten to annihilate them. But where they go from there is not the closure allowed by Cervantes.

The death of a loved one in Auster often leads to a reprieve of sorts: a small inheritance that gets the characters off the ground. The author received money from his father’s death, and so did I. Having gone through similar experiences as Auster is one thing, however; what matters is how his words colour my experience. He has offered me clarity of indirectness, belief through the power of stories. Slowly ridding myself of the trappings following my father’s death, I could have been a character travelling through Auster’s dangerous fictional terrain; the boundaries of my reality were effectively made redundant. I was Fogg in Moon Palace, standing on the western shores of America, ready to light out for the unknown territories of my life.

This article originally appeared in issue 5 of Plan B magazine (April/May 2005)