At the Core of Literature

I feel home here, but I am not sure if I really belong to this place – among letters, sounds, words and stories, amongonce upon a time and they lived happily ever after, among the strongest feelings that we as human experience, among Everyman and Everywoman ….

Paul Auster reminded me of why I had chosen literature, of my dreams and defeats with bookclubs, of the things that I couldn’t say, of why I had wanted to study literature, of my interest in details (and how important they are in analyzing and understanding fiction), of (im)possible PhDs. There are many things that I could say about this writer, passages that made me stop from reading so that I could write dozens of ideas on my tiny papers. There were moments when I felt the urge to take a pen and start writing myself. There were moments when he pissed me off, moments of suspense, moments of twists, moments when I felt that something was missing … The New York Trilogy is about writing, fiction in fiction, about characters that are partly conscious of their condition in their own fiction, about America and its myths, the Adamic myth, the Garden of Eden, its great thinkers that mold its beginnings (Hawthorne, Melville, Emerson, Thoreau),  satires, games of the mind, reality and fiction. When you finish reading this book, you want to start it all over again, to see the elements that you have missed, to understand this maze of words and images and actions …

“Every life is inexplicable, I kept telling myself. No matter how many facts are told, no matter how many details are given, the essential thing resists telling. To say that so and so was born here and went there, that he did this and did that, that he married this woman and had these children, that he lived, that he died, that he left behind these books or this battle or that bridge – none of that tells us very much. We all want to be told stories, and we listen to them in the same way we did when we were young. We imagine the real story inside the words, and to do this we substitute ourselves for the person in the story, pretending that we can understand him because we understand ourselves. This is a deception. We exist for ourselves, perhaps, and at times we even have a glimmer of who we are, but in the end we can never be sure, and as our lives go on, we become more and more opaque to ourselves, more and more aware of our own incoherence. No one can cross the boundary into another – for the simple reason that no one can gain access to himself.”(248-249, 3. The Locked Room)