Barbelith Underground > Books, Criticism & Writing > Paul Auster: Travels In The Scriptorium

If such a thing matters to you, this thread contains *SPOILERS*.

After The Book Of Illusions, Oracle Night (his most devastating and satisfying so far) and Brooklyn Follies, which were all lengthy and comparatively narrative-driven, Auster returns with a slim, overtly metaphysical and, at first read, less enjoyable entry. So far the critiques I've been able to glean have been unfavourable and dismissive of it as a major work.

Many critics have lost patience with what they sometimes perceive as Auster's displays of postmodern trickery. I, for one, welcome a return to his metaphysical concerns, though this book does suffer by comparison to his earlier work.
Killian Fox for the Observer.

[...]hasn't this existential parlour game been going on so long that most people have long since ceased to care?

The most dispiriting aspect of this retreat to an unidentified room is that it feels like a backward step from Auster's last novel, The Brooklyn Follies, which signalled a welcome intent to get out more.
Alfred Hickling for The Guardian

Is this an old manuscript that has lain unregarded in a desk drawer for the last twenty-odd years? Internal evidence would suggest not. Does it signal a reversion to old interests, marking The Brooklyn Follies out as an anomaly? But in a succession of works going back at least to Mr Vertigo (1994), it is Travels in the Scriptorium that appears the more anomalous. Are there, then, two writers, humanist and postmodernist, co-existing in Paul Auster? Perhaps. Certainly this brief tale can be read as a private exorcism never really intended for publication.
Paul Kincaid for Strange Horizons

All authorial concern is limited to the relationship between this new story and Auster’s old stories, so that Travels in the Scriptorium calls to mind a Christmas special, with all the old guest stars flown in.
Deborah Friedell for Timesonline

I disagree that this isn't a major work or that it is too slim. Size, in this case, doesn't matter, intent and meaning do. It's a story about a man called Mr. Blank because he can't remember who and where he is, and what he is doing in the room where the story takes place; is he kept there against his will? Frail and haunted by ghosts and guilt, he tries to make sense of his surroundings and the people who call or visit him. In the room, there is a table with four piles of paper and a stack of photographs on it. He reads one of the piles, a report by a man held prisoner in a room, with no hopes of getting out other than to write and muse about what brought him to his situation. The visitors Mr. Blank interacts with in the main story are characters who all have appeared in Austers other books. He receives a call from James P. Flood (from The Locked Room, a character mentioned in passing as being from one of Fanshawes unpublished novels, Neverland), who makes an appointment for a later meeting. Anna Blume (the protagonist of In The Country Of Last Things, now aged and, she states, widower of David Zimmer (himself a minor character in Moon Palace and protagonist of The Book Of Illusions)), who feeds him breakfast and three colored pills as part of a treatment, she says, washes, jerks him off and dresses him in white for a purported meeting with Peter Stillman Junior (the son of the crazed Sr. from City Of Glass). A visit from Flood, who implores Mr. Blank to elaborate on the fleeting mention of him in The Locked Room. A call (and subsequent visit) from doctor Samuel Farr (In The Country Of Last Things, married to Anna Blume - I can't remember his fate in that book), who asks Mr. Blank to finish the story, not report (i.e. "not real"), he is reading, which was written by John Trause (a writer friend of the protagonist from Oracle Night, Trause anagram for Auster), and invent a resolution for the unfinished story. Before Mr. Blank can finish the story, they are interrupted by Sophie (The Locked Room, Fanshawes ex, later wife of the story's unnamed protagonist) who brings him lunch. And after he leaves, he continues with and edits the story he has told, this time for himself, and reaches a bleak conclusion. Daniel Quinn (City of Glass, The Locked Room, In The Country of Last Things and Mr. Vertigo), lawyer for mr. Blank, visits him next -- here Mr. Blank tells a joke delivered by Marco Fogg (protagonist of Moon Palace) the day before -- and tells Mr. Blank of the charges made against him; he shows him four photographs of one of Mr. Blank's victims, Benjamin Sachs (Leviathan, protagonist Peter Aaron's friend), that show his fate in that book. After having been served many clues by his visitors, he now understands what he is charged with. Finally, Mr. Blank finds another manuscript, titled Travels In The Scriptorium (itself a title of a movie in The Book Of Illusions) written by N.R. Fanshawe, where the beginning of the actual book is written in the pages Mr. Blank reads -- he throws it away in a fit and with the realization that he has been turned into a character in a book. The book then shifts to the author inside the book, Fanshawe, musing over what to do to him next, with the knowledge that the next day Mr. Blank's experiences will be pretty much the same as in the book.

It seems insular written out in detail like this and although this might be, it's not solely navel gazing Paul Auster is playing out in the book. They're there to show, simultaneously, the depth of reading one can perform and a confirmation of the themes recurrent in most of his books.

1) Identity Crisis. Mr. Blank doesn't remember who he is, until he is served enough fragments by his visitors to piece together the puzzle that is the book. Crucially, while Mr. Blank is Paul Auster as a character written by one of his characters, who was written by an unnamed protagonist in The Locked Room, that was written by Paul Auster, what Auster does is not merely place himself inside a book or his characters from book to book. They have the same names but they're not exactly the same. At the beginning of the book, Mr. Blank shows Anna Blume a photograph of her from In The Country Of Last Things:

If your name is Anna, Mr. Blank says, his voice quivering with emotion, then who is this? Her name is Anna, too, isn't it?
Yes, the woman says, studying the portrait closely, as if remembering something with equal but opposite feelings of revulsion and nostalgia. This is Anna. I'm Anna, too.

Why not simply say "that's me?" Because the characters who travel from book to book are not the same, however informed of each other they might be. "What interested him about the stories he wrote was not their relation to the world but their relation to other stories" (COG). Stress *relation*, meaning of the same, yet not the same. How else to explain why the incongruity of Mr. Blank's beloved Anna having aged and doctor Samuel Farr not, when we know they are both from the same book. Just because Auster placed himself in the COG narrative and has played with variations of his own name in other books - Trause, Peter Aaron, etcetera - doesn't mean they are the same. The characters inform each other, just as the physical author informs them and they him. I can elucidate further on this point with the case of Daniel Quinn, if need be.

2) Physical deterioration. This point is often paired with point the one. Characters who have barely survived an ordeal or starvation. Mr. Blank is incapable of tending for himself and is of an indeterminate age (he could be anywhere from 60 to 100, the book states). Malfunctioning physicality and a fragmented mind. examples: Daniel Quinn in COG, Anna Blume in ITCOLT, Sydney Orr in Oracle Night, Nathan Glass in Brooklyn Follies. Basically, they usually overcome their ordeals by chance (unexpected money, friends, recovery) or by burying themselves in work (writing). Mr. Blank might not have become physically sound by book's end but his story is, basically, that of a child with only the barest trappings of an identity maturing into himself. Rocking on the chair by the desk transports him into memories of riding on a wooden horse as a child (where his imagination transported him into journeys perceived as real); being washed by Anna Blume makes him "fall into a trance of languid submission"; when he discovers that the chair by the desk can turn in circles he forgets what it was that he wanted to do, "exulting instead in this hitherto unknown property of the chair"; and later still, when he discovers that the chair has wheels "the fact that the chair can move about the room is of potentially great therapeutic value [to him]"; at a point, his white, thin nylon socks enable him to skate around the room on the smooth floor and this transports him back into an adolescent memory of ice skating with a girl. He goes from sensation to sensation, discovery to discovery, until his memory of who he is and why he is in the room become clear to him.

3) Contradictions. The book starts by stating that there is a camera on the ceiling that takes photos of him every second.

[...]our only task is to study the pictures as attentively as we can and refrain from drawing any premature conclusions, cautions the, at first, invisible author Fanshawe, attesting that we are looking at Mr. Blank from the outside. However, not long after that sentence, the text moves into inside the mind of the subject, causing a contradiction to occur and alarm the reader. This is an internal device, whereas before, Auster would question the assumptions and memories of characters - and of the readers - with contradictory stories and recollections of the same situation (I don't have examples at hand but I remember this happening in The Locked Room and Leviathan, say). It means that the characters and the readers can never be sure of anything. Mysteries are rarely solved satisfactorily. Uncertainty.

4) Stories within stories. In the New York Trilogy, COG and Ghosts are stories written by the unnamed protagonist in The Locked Room, in order to deal with Fanshawes disappearance - the author within the novella assumes the identity of Fanshawe by marrying his ex, adopting his daughter and overseeing the publication of his unpublished novels - and his eventual, sole reemergence and communiqué with the unnamed protagonist through the door of a locked room. Allusions to other stories by other authors crop up; the authorship of Don Quixote in COG - "Auster" claims that there are several authors in the book, and the namesake of the real author of Don Quixote is the instigator of the COG novella, the call to "Paul Auster, the detective" that Daniel Quinn answers happened because Michael (Miguel) Saavedra (= Cervantes) gave Daniel Quinn's number to the Stillman couple. The story within the story of Scriptorium begins by echoing Mr. Blank's predicament but then it spins off tangenially, however, it keeps on informing the main story, while the main story informs the secondary story.

5) Authorship.

6) Words. And their broken, fragmented nature. How we can only approximate what we think with words that never really mean the same as we think they do. Inside the room of the book, Mr. Blank's confiment, there are strips of white tape on every object with their fundamental names written in block letters, LAMP for lamp, WALL for wall and so on. Midway through, something strange happens: every strip of tape have been rearranged so that the descriptions no longer match the objects.

[...][Mr. Blank] always took great pains to write up his reports on their activities in a language that would not betray the truth of what they saw and thought and felt at each step along the way. It will not do, then, to call a chair a desk, or a desk a lamp.

He has to rearrange the chaotic into something that resembles order, that's why he undertakes the laborious task of putting the appropriate labels on the matching objects. When it becomes clear that Fanshawe has written Mr. Blank into existence, this mystery and impossibility becomes clear: Fanshawe, by thinking and typing the turn of events, this obstacle, makes it happen because he knows it annoys Mr. Blank.

Words meaning multiple things. The treatment Mr. Blank is undergoing attains a secondary meaning during Samuel Farr's visit. About Trause's early work, the story that Mr. Blank is reading:

I don't understand. Why not let me see the rest of it?
Because it's part of the treatment, Mr. Blank. We didn't put all those papers on the desk just to amuse you. They're here for a purporse.

Because he has to, Mr. Blank resolves the story told in the manner of a treatment, as noted earlier in this post.

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What the book is about so far is a dreamlike narrative, a symbolic and philosophical investigation into how every character in a book is a part of him, Mr. Blank (a textual representation of Paul Auster) and, a new for Auster, how the characters of every book he's done, in return, make him up as a man and author. These characters, stories, sustain his and his family's livelyhood. In the imaginary realm, in the act of reading one of his books, the readers animate the words and characters into life, striking a relationship with the book that is unique to the reader. "Without even knowing it, I enter the lives of strangers, and for as long as they have my book in their hands, my words are the only reality that exists for them", explains Peter Aaron. The books are Austers and not his, which is to mean, when the books are published or read, they are no longer exclusively his. The internal vs. the external. No matter to what degree the saying 'the characters write themselves' is true in the case of Auster - the conjuring up from nothing or the self - he is nevertheless accountable for the imaginary destinies that live outside of him. And these imaginary destinies, some of whom didn't fare terribly well (as in the case of Sachs), are holding him accountable for theirs.

It will never end. For Mr. Blank is one of us now, and struggle though he might to understand his predicament, he will always be lost. I believe I speak for all his charges when I say he is getting what he deserves -- no more, no less.

If he is saying that, he is also saying more, something most critics have not catched on to. The story within the story I take as a contemporary critique of America. But more later.

It is no less insular than City Of Glass and as with it, part of the fun lies in constructing and reconstructing the book and the ideas put forth into something that resembles a semi-coherent analysis; there are a multiple of ways to read the book like, again, COG.

5) Authorship (cont'd). In almost every book, Auster is preoccupied with authorship. The act, fact, or occupation of writing, and Source or origin, as of a book or idea, as the American Heritage Dictionary concisely describes it.

The book writes itself as the reader reads along. The camera is in place, through which the writer observes Mr. Blank and relates the facts to the reader. As I explained before, the incongruity between the plea of not making any judgements before all the facts are presented on the table about what the author is describing to the reader on the situation at hand is quickly challenged once the author shifts into the subject's inner thoughts. The other incongruity is that sounds are described, that is, until this situation is rectified (/edited) after the fact with the mention of a microphone that records every sound described in the book. During the telephone call from James P. Flood, when Mr. Blank complains that he has nothing to wear, Flood asks him to look in the closet. Even though he is confined in a relatively small room, he doesn't find it. Maybe he can't find it because of his memory loss and it therefore doesn't exist for him, but when he wonders about the existence of the closet not once or twice, but thrice, throughout the book, it can be explained away with the fact that the author doesn't bother to write this detail into the book -- even after Anna Blume has taken the white clothes out of the closet at a moment where Mr. Blank is distracted by something else. Mr. Blank also wonders about whether or not the door is locked; when someone enters a room, he is coincidentally/intentionally distracted by something else and he never finds out if he is kept in there against his will until the ending. This uncertainty is also cultivated transparently by the author inside the book.

The story within the story that I've intentionally left out until now, the meat of the story as I find it, is told in the first person form. It's a story that Mr. Blank initially believes to be true until Samuel Farr tells him otherwise.

I want to know if you've finished the story, [Samuel Farr] calmly answers.
Story? What story is that?
The one you've been reading. The story about the Confederation.
I didn't know it was a story. It sounds more like a report, like something that really happened.
It's make-believe, Mr. Blank. A work of fiction.

Sigmund Graf is held prisoner by a corrupt Colonel, De Vega, in the small town of Ultima, near the border of the Alien Territories, accused of being a traitor to the Confederation. He has been beaten by soldiers, fed malnutritious food and denied human contact. Worst of all, even though there is a window in the room, he can't reach it to look outside (this causes Mr. Blank to stop reading and investigate if he can look outside the window; he can't). After the beatings and 40 days of solitude, he is given blank papers and a pencil to write down what brought this misery upon him, an act he understands to be cruel; either this has been done to implicate him in something bigger than himself, or the Colonel has allowed this as an advanced form of torture and personal amusement. Nevertheless, he can't do anything but write about who he is and what has happened. During one of his travels for the Bureau of Internal Affairs - a field coordinator and researcher - a cholera epidemic breaks out in the capital where he lives. Months after, when he is finished with his assignment and the epidemic under control, he returns to find his wife and daughter missing. He does everything humanly possible to discover their fate but nobody in the capital knows anything. There is a period of heavy drinking and selfdestructive behaviour, and a mysterious instance of an opportunist telling him that he knows what happened to his family (Graf beats him up), but eventually, he buries himself in work and rejoins the land of the living. One day, he is summoned by the Minister of the capital, Joubert, who asks Graf to travel into the Alien Territories where the Primitives live, in order to investigate if the reports of a man having travelled into the Alien Territories with an army of a hundred men of idealists and with the intent to cause an insurrection against the western provinces is true. Because the man in question is Ernesto Land, former friend of Graf and presumed dead in the epidemic, and with Graf's knowledge of the Alien Territories, he obliges. On the long way to the garrison of Ultima, he is haunted by the possible reappearance of Land and of the fate of his wife and daughter. Land and Graf's wife were childhood friends and presumed husband-and-wife-to-be, having both grown up in the same region. Because Land married someone else (which ended not too long after), Graf was free to court her and they eventually married. He suspects and imagines that maybe Land has run off with his family, and if he has, Graf promises to himself, he will kill him. But then, he can't quite believe that someone he knew to be as patriotic as Land could betray the Confederation.

The story ends here. Farr has arrived to urge Mr. Blank on to finish the story and he explains that it is an early story by Trause. Blank remarks, dissatisfied as he is with the story, that it is obviously a story of 19th century America dressed up in other, foreign names and that the Primitives stand for the Indians. He continues:

When Graf arrives in the garrison of Ultima, he is denied access to the Alien Territories by the Colonel (because he is on the plot against the western provinces with Land) but he attains confirmation that Land has been sighted in the garrison after his supposed death. Why is De vega in on the plot?

He is loyal [to the Confederation]. And so is Ernesto Land with his hundred troops in the Alien Territories.
I don't follow.
The Confederation is a fragile, newly formed state composed of previously independent colonies and principalities, and in order to hold this tenuous union together, what better way than to unite the people than to invent a common enemy and start a war? In this case, they've chosen the Primitives. Land is a double agent who's been sent into the Territories to stir up rebellion amongst the tribes there. Not so different from what we did to the Indians after the Civil War.

After a month of enforced solitude in the garrison with no way in into the Territories, Graf crosses the border (How[...]? I don't know, probably a bribe of some sort[...]) by horse. He journeys to a tribe he has stayed with before in his travels, pre-border, only to find them all murdered (Who was responsible? Was it Land and his men? Patience, doctor, a thing like this can't be rushed. We're talking about brutality and death, the murder of the innocent[...].). On the way to another tribe in the region, he comes across one of Land's men near-dead due to starvation; everyone is dead, raves the man, they never had a chance, and he dies.

Mr. Blank and Farr are interrupted by Sophie, there with Mr. Blank's lunch. After he and she leaves, he continues - aloud - to himself:

Let's back up a little bit. I think I went too fast before, jumped to too many hasty conclusions.

He rewrites and edits the story. The Primitives are now the Djiin (Mr. Blank detests the former word). And De Vega isn't in on the plot, Land has just bribed him for entrance into the Territories. And out of the possible denouements, there has to be third possibility, a third out, one the readers haven't anticipated, says Mr. Blank. He discards the personal, unresolved matter regarding the wife and the daughter, they died in the epidemic (Poor Graf, of course, but if you want to tell a good story, you can't show any pity).

An idea to resolve the story enters his head, electrifies him: we go back to before Graf finds the tribe and he still encounters the raving soldier, but instead of the massacred tribe, it's the 115 idealists. Unbeknownst to Graf, they've been slaughtered by another western army who have made it look like that one of the Djiin tribes are responsible. Back in Ultima, he is imprisoned, beaten, tortured and after a period of solitude, he is given the means to describe what he saw. Having completed it, he is released. His story, edited of course, is printed in every newspaper, which causes a clamour in the western provinces to invade the Territories. Understanding now his role in the tapestry of events, he resigns from his job and goes home to kill himself. End of story. Finità la commedia, states mr. Blank.

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