Book Review: The Brooklyn Follies

Studies in the Novel

Paul Auster's recent novel, The Brooklyn Follies (2006), opens with a stunning line-"I was looking for a quiet place to die"-and 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). Auster's framing of the novel's 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 loss-of a family member or lover-and at others, they move within a national landscape, providing in their missing fi gures 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 Auster's novels, they tend to follow a narrative pattern of quest or detection in which the questing fi gure- generally the narrator or his surrogate-seeks the missing person, either literally or in the fi gurative terrain of knowledge and understanding. Consider, for example, from early in his career, Auster's search for the story of his father in the memoir The Invention of Solitude (1982); the diegetic "Paul Auster" attempting to comprehend Quinn's obsessive pursuit of Peter Stillman, Sr., in City of Glass (1985; rpt. in The New York Trilogy); and Anna Blume's quest for her brother in In the Country of Last Things (1987). In subsequent novels, the pattern is visible in Peter Aaron's goal to reconstruct the story of his enigmatic friend Benjamin Sachs in Leviathan (1992), David Zimmer's scholarly pursuit of the vanished silent fi lm star Hector Mann in The Book of Illusions (2002), and even Sidney Orr's desperate attempt to seek out and heal his fractured subjectivity in Oracle Night (2003). In each case, the narrator's desire to erase an absence aims toward uncovering secrets-and the fact of narration both testifi es to and enables the quest. Each quest stands for the narrator's 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.

Auster's 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 Freud's work. In "Refl ections 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 Freud's 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 past?and remains narcissistically identifi ed 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 defi ning 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 clarifi ed 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 fi ll the desire stimulated by the perception of absence, which is without origin or terminus. Because, however, with respect to loss or lack- correlate conditions-"the object of desire is specifi ed," 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 Freud's presentation of the repetition compulsion in Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920). Freud famously described his grandson's 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 child's ritualized actions a "fundamentally homeopathic procedure," Santner notes that "In the fort/da game it is the rhythmic manipulation of signifi ers and fi gures, objects and syllables instituting an absence, that serves as the poison that cures. These signifi ers 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, the?readiness 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 signifi cance, especially given Auster's concern with the chance nature of events. Auster's work repeatedly evidences a fascination with chance-fi gured 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 nonfi ctional anecdotes and ruminations concerning the mysteries of coincidence and Auster's recognition of the human impulse to ascribe motivation and signifi cance to chance events. Especially in relation to the unpredictable sources of trauma in accident and mischance, Auster's fi ction shows its narrators attempting to control the randomness of event, if not in the happening itself, then in their understanding of it. The fi ction fi nally suggests that the narrators must learn that contingency does not mean-that loss simply happens. Only once they reconcile themselves to this knowledge can they move beyond nostalgic, narcissistic melancholia to return to the historical present.

Auster's writing thus represents each narrator's 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 refl ecting 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 Auster's 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. Auster's narrators fi nd a provisional wholeness of self when they tell the story of other absences that double their own but from which they can detach themselves.

Auster's early memoir, The Invention of Solitude (1982), offers a prototype of this narrative pattern, since it clearly demarcates the distinction between narrator and object. Auster's 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 fi gurative. 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 fi rst section of the book, "Portrait of an Invisible Man," is narrated in the fi rst 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 family's 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 father's 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. Auster's own working-through comprises the telling of his father's 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 father's secret trauma.

The therapeutic value of this narration is conveyed by Auster's choice of a third-person narrator for "The Book of Memory," which both replicates the detachment that he experienced as his father's wounding of him and fi nally enables a healthy distancing from trauma. In LaCapra's 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 narrative-between 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 "he"-is crucial. Sam's story, once unearthed and narrated in the "Portrait," and including the presence of the youthful Paul, is thoroughly historical-two 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 fi nal 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 pages-a 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 defi nes 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 fi rst 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 fi rst 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 Auster's 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 Auster's 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 concrete-rather than constitutive- and historically limited examples of trauma that appear in Auster's mimetic plots.

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 fi nd 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 "Memory's 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 others-"Memory, therefore, not simply as the resurrection of one's 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 fi gure 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 Auster's other works display the pattern of acting-out and, at times, working-through that is visible in The Invention of Solitude's 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 fi nds himself, when it refers to the death of his wife and son. Quinn's willingness to surrender his identity in the pursuit of Stillman Junior and Senior seems a compulsive repetition of the narrative's 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-fi guring and displacing into other characters the narrative situation of Quinn's self-entrapment and abortive effort to "write" himself out of the corner of trauma. In the Country of Last Things narrates Anna Blume's 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 fi nds his condition, like A.'s in The Invention of Solitude, defi ned by loss-of his mother and surrogate father-and 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 fi nd 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 fi lm Lulu on the Bridge (1999) rather faithfully renders the psychoanalytic process of working through trauma. A randomly fi red 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 process-sped up into the blink of an eye and engineered by an imaginary fi gure of vengeance and therapy-of confrontation with repressed traumatic material. Memory thus releases Izzy into his own death, the fi lm's fi nal 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 refl exive 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. Blank's career as a novelist revisit him, becoming quite literally embodied within the text. In replacing his memory through his imaginative repetitions, Mr. Blank's 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 fi ctions 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 Auster's 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 a writer's block that itself signifi es 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 fi gures the missing person in relation to art, focusing on the transition from silent fi lm to the talkies in the 1920s. Leviathan does so in relation to political action, specifi cally 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 friend's identity after Sachs blows himself up with a homemade bomb beside a road in Wisconsin. Aaron's 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 Sachs's condition as a missing person is both intentional and existential, that he has freely chosen to disappear in order to fulfi ll 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 "'America's fi rst Hiroshima baby,' 'the original bomb child'" (25), ironically reversing the glory of bombs bursting in air at the origin of the American idea. Sachs's 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 fi ll an empty self and recover a lost innocence he stubbornly associates with American ideals.

Sachs's 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 Sachs's 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 history's original sin. 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 Freud's, 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 visit's 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 don't watch out, it can kill you'" (39). Sachs later affi rms in the historical novel he writes that the liberty signifi ed by the Statue is hollow: titled The New Colossus, the novel is set at the end of the nineteenth century, teems with historical fi gures, 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 fi ctional 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 fi gure 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 Sachs's innocence during the traumatic repetitions of his adulthood. At a party on the 4th of July, celebrating the centenary of the Statue of Liberty-and in plain sight of the Statue-Sachs, driven by a desire he is desperate to repress, falls four stories from a fi re escape. It is the fall predicted by his mother's 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 "method?of holding onto the horror of that night," to "relive the moments of his fall again and again" (134). Sachs's silence is symptomatic of his repetition compulsion, expressing his inability to separate himself from the past. The knowledge he cannot relinquish is the melancholic's 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. Maria's 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)- another phantom of liberty-is "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 again?perhaps?[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 Sachs's capacity to see himself-to see that he has a self-with the aid of her camera. Instead, however, he learns the art of self-objectifi cation. "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 Sachs's 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 fi guratively 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. Sachs's apparent escape into otherness is paradoxically a repetition in disguise: Dimaggio is in many respects Sachs's 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.

Sachs's assumption of Dimaggio's 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. Commodifi cation swallows up the meaning of his protest. As in Luis Buñuel's 1974 fi lm, 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 Auster's novel, one can read the idea of the phantom in opposing ways, depending on one's 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 fi nally 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.

Sachs's violent plan emerges from an innocence to which he is wholly blind. He tells Aaron that, in choosing to carry out Dimaggio's 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 for wholeness of self parallels his expectation that the American state can fulfi ll 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 fi ll the lack-of wholeness or freedom-that he persistently feels as a loss rather than an absence. Sachs commits the error LaCapra identifi es of confl ating 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.

Auster's narrator counterposes Sachs, however. Aaron discerns that Sachs's 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": "I'm shut off from my own thoughts, trapped in a no-man's-land between feeling and articulation" (55). Aaron, that is, already embodies the traumatic fracturing of modernity, and thus accurately asserts that "I'm the place where everything begins" (57). Aaron's personal trauma occurs when he discovers by accident in his wife's journal that she has never loved him, and he acts out his romantic and sexual delusions with other women until the fi nal repetition, when he conducts a futile love affair with Sachs's 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, affi rming his loss as historical and, hence, past. When he comes to tell Sachs's 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 Sachs's story straight after his friend's 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 Sachs's 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 absence-the ideals of self and nation, which could not really be lost because they were never fulfi lled-Hector Mann, the object of the scholar David Zimmer's quest in The Book of Illusions, has dedicated both his life's work and his life itself to silence. As in Leviathan, the most important 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 survivor's 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 fi lm industry of the 1920s. The novel's references to American culture are less overt than in Leviathan, but they are nevertheless traceable in Hector's Mann's own history. Zimmer plausibly reconstructs Hector's story from a "jumble of fraudulent memories and spurious anecdotes" (84) as that of a Polish Jewish immigrant fi rst to Argentina and thence to New York. Hector becomes a silent fi lm 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 Hector's life during the traumatic experience that divides his history, and him from himself. That trauma occurs when Brigid O'Fallon, 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 Auster's structuring motifs in the novel; this gunshot changes Hector's life utterly. He vanishes from Hollywood to go into hiding as he seeks punishment for his complicity in Brigid's death, not from the law, but from the complete self-abnegation he takes upon himself. He retreats into the silence signifi ed and in a sense preordained by his fi lm career. Although Hector writes in his journal of the possibility of redemption-"If 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 Brigid's 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-fulfi llment, she serves as the focus of his repetition compulsion, enabling him to relive his guilt constantly in relation to Nora's 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 selfobjectifi cation, accepting a business partnership with a woman to engage in sexual performances for select audiences. This travesty of Hector's calling as an actor reaches its symbolic nadir when the partners perform repeatedly for a judge, Hector's 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 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 Brigid's murder. Although the pact opens to him a kind of artistic freedom disallowed by the commercial fi lm industry, it is the freedom only of a confi rmed 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 Zimmer's narration of two of Hector's fi lms. The fi rst, Mr. Nobody, recounted early in the novel, is silent, and released before Hector vanishes from Hollywood. Mr. Nobody represents Hector's prelapsarian vision. A parable of absence reconfi gured 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 mirror-he 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 Mann's own biography, however, is better represented by the only example of his late, doomed fi lms that Zimmer is able to view, narrated near the end of the novel. The Inner Life of Martin Frost begins in absence, silence, and Hector's refl exive allusion: his writer-protagonist arrives at an empty house at Tierra del Sueño, the "land of the dream," the name of the ranch where Hector produces his later fi lms. A muse, Claire, enables Martin to write his story-to 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 fi gment 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 fi lm ends with images of time stopped-the wind doesn't blow, leaves are still, and the screen goes black (269). It is the no-time of traumatic repetition, Martin Frost's commitment to being frozen in the irretrievable past. Martin's bargain echoes Hector's; he can only delude himself that he has recovered the lost object of desire by retreating into silence, effectively emptying himself of desire.

If Hector's self-annihilation emerges, like Sachs's, from a sense of loss that he cannot accept as historical, his biographer, Zimmer, like Aaron, offers a competing vision, reversing Hector's pact and working through his own trauma to break the silence that he shared with Hector. Zimmer's 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 Hector's fi lms, a translation of Chateaubriand's memoirs. Like Hector's, Zimmer's 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 Hector's 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 Zimmer's 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 Hector's fi nal fi lms, therefore, becomes a process of working-through. His engagement in a revivifying relationship with Alma suggests his movement toward recovery. His recovery is fulfi lled when, even after Alma's tragic death, he chooses to write Hector's 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 Hector's fi lms from destruction. That is, Zimmer wagers that "Hector's fi lms haven't been lost. They're 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 fi gurative 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 confl ation by developing a refl exive trope of writing. Offered on several interpolated narrative levels, Orr's 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 Night's 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 victim's process of acting-out. Unlike the earlier novels, Oracle Night suppresses the details of Sidney Orr's fall until very late in the narrative, with the effect that, for much of the novel, the trauma that he appears to be reenacting is of indefi nable origin, plausibly even of no historical source at all. This effect allows the trauma to be suspended indeterminately between absence and loss. Is Orr's 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 Orr's 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 wife's behavior into a coherent, meaningful story. Since Orr's 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 invented-a symbolized repetition of some other, unknown trauma-rather 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 Auster's 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 fi rst-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 narrative-an object representative of writing itself, signifying both enchantment and danger-becomes the fi eld 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 Orr's 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?

Orr's 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 Hammett's novel The Maltese Falcon. In some sense, even Orr's attraction to Hammett's 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, Hammett's Flitcraft decides to erase his history-to "change his life at random" in recognition of life's 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 Auster's 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 one's behavior.

Orr's writing subsequently repeats these very elements. The story of the editor Nick Bowen, the Flitcraft fi gure who barely escapes a falling limestone gargoyle and who fl ees his life-and wife-to Kansas City, is, like Flitcraft's own story, ultimately marked by a failure to move from acting-out to workingthrough, signifi ed by a truncated narrative rather than circularity. Bowen's story includes multiple doublings from Orr's life-for example, the character of Bowen is an "inversion" (17) of Orr, which is to say a reversed mirroring; Rosa Leightman's attractiveness is that of Orr's wife, Grace; Orr and Grace's friend Trause, who serves a signifi cant 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 Victory's hidden fallout shelter-constituting his symbolic "fall"-to organize the telephone books with the "names of the living and the dead" in Victory's 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 isn't fi nished." The Bureau can thus manifest Victory's 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 Bowen's performance of it, partake of absurdity rather than meaningfulness. Because Victory's 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. Orr's 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 Bowen's trauma into Victory's appears to be of limited therapeutic effi cacy, since symbolization allows for pure repetition. Orr's 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. Bowen's impasse, replicating Orr's, is captured in Orr's loss of control over his story. Locking his character into the underground room, Orr fi nds 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 defl ect 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 briefl y-to 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 Maxwell's Oracle Night, is a "fable about time" that Bowen discerns is "[speaking] intimately to him about his own present circumstances" (61). Maxwell's 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 fi xated memory with a compulsive anticipation; rather than being caught in repetitions of the past, Maxwell's 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 fi lling the gaps of the missing with a linguistic object, is of central signifi cance in Auster's 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 don't 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 fi rst writes in the notebook. He becomes so absorbed in writing-it is his start of the Flitcraft rewrite-that 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 fi gure of the writer as potentially analogous to the victim of trauma, because a writer enters "a state 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 fi ction, in his fi nal entry in the blue notebook, that, fulfi lling 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 this"-an 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 fi ction 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 fi ll the gaps and explain how it is that she has for him become a missing person. Orr's 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 view-Grace's 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 point-the 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 Orr's 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 I've just written in the blue notebook." Orr's 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 fi tting that when traumatic violence revisits Orr within the frame tale of the present, he fi nds the resources to survive it. When Trause's 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 fi lls the function of traumatic event. He takes the form of the unexpected and uncontrolled, striking out from the past to attempt to stop time-fi gured 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 action. Yet when, on the fi nal pages of Oracle Night, Orr has a vision of Grace in her hospital bed, the dead Trause's 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 signifi cance, and the justice of his arrival is refl ected in Auster's choice to end the last sentence of the book with the name of Orr's wife. In reentering the narrative that has not been composed in the blue notebook-the one we hold in our hands-Orr 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 Orr's loss.

Auster's focus in Oracle Night displays ambivalence about the act of writing itself, and especially about imaginative writing. Orr must write himself out of his writer's 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 fi ction-writing. Trause supports his claim that the blue notebook-the fi gure for fi ction-making-can be cruel with a story of a French writer who in a poem unwittingly predicts his daughter's 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 Trause's tutelage, Orr accepts the poet's 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 happen-Auden had it right-but 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 Trause's faith in the power of writing-which is perhaps why Auster sees fi t to have Trause die before the novel's denouement. Orr must likewise in some sense reject the implications of the title Auster chooses for the novel, named after Sylvia Maxwell's 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 fi rst, 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 exemplifi es 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 Auster's 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 Caruth's 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 Auster's 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, Nathaniel's daughter, whose biography his daughter is writing: "As the weird world rolls on" (180). Brill has at last let go of the fi ction-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 family's trauma. Hawthorne's 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 one's faith. The loss that occurs in the past comes to stand for the nostalgic loss of innocence-of 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 fi gures who cling to an innocent vision of their autonomy and their shaping place in history. "America"-as an idea, as a literal place, and as a fi gure 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 on-out of the past and into a dim future, in stories that will never quite make sense or recover what is lost-work 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 Fanshawe's best friend in The Locked Room, and like the "Paul Auster" who bears witness to Quinn's disappearance in City of Glass, all are left behind to mourn and to tell the tales-to write-precisely because they lack a bracing vision of wholeness. Only they, in making the weirdness plain, can prompt the world to roll on.

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