“It is better to try something and fail than to try nothing and succeed. The result may be the same, but you won’t be. We always grow more through defeats than victories.” – Søren Kierkegaard
Paul Auster is considered to be one of the most important American novelists of the current era. His works have been translated into many languages, and some of them were turned into cinematic scripts, comic stories, and plays. Some of his words and texts were also quoted and turned into lyrics for musical songs. Despite the general detective theme in Auster’s novels and narrative works, he weaves together the novel’s worlds and characters in a way that shows his influence by a number of American writers before him, such as Edgar Allan Poe, Samuel Beckett, and Nathaniel Hawthorne.
Auster’s novels often feature recurring themes and elements that reflect aspects of his own life and identity. For example, the absent father, the loss of money, and references to American history are common motifs in his work. Sometimes, coincidence may play a role in his novels, such as a character encountering the same writer across multiple novels, as seen in The New York Trilogy. In this article, however, I aim to provide a reading of one of Auster’s shorter works, In the Country of Last Things. In this novel, the main character searches for her brother in a collapsed city where life appears to be defined by terror and loss – the loss of virtually everything. Thus, imbued with anxiety, the main character says: “The essential thing is not to become injured. For habits are deadly. Even if it is for the hundredth time, you must encounter each thing as if you have never known it before. No matter how many times, it must always be the first time. This is next to impossible, I realize, but it is an absolute rule.”
In the Country of Last Things
Auster wrote his novel, In the Country of Last Things, as if it were a long letter written by the main character. This letter was kept in a notebook, and it appears from the way it was written that the author of the letter does not live in the same city in which the events take place, nor does he suffer from the same circumstances. You find that the main character may stop her narration until she describes the environment again and again, as if she is trying to dispel the reader’s assumptions and build with him a more accurate perception of the city and the details of life in it. For example, she would write: “You must understand how it is with me now. I move. I breathe what air is given me. I eat as little as I can. No matter what anyone says, the only thing that counts is staying on your feet.”
On the one hand, the city in which these events take place is suffering from an economic collapse, followed by the collapse of daily life that humanity knows today, and anxiety is the general theme of living in that city where nothing is stable, and nothing remains as it is. “In spite of what you would suppose, the facts are not reversible. Just because you are able to get in, that does not mean you will be able to get out. Entrances do not become exits, and there is nothing to guarantee that the door you walked through a moment ago will still be there when you turn around to look for it again. That is how it works in the city. Every time you think you know the answer to a question, you discover that the question makes no sense.”
This state of anxiety is not, of course, limited to entrances and doors, it even includes the basics of life such as food, security, and housing. Thinking about food, for example, only leads to trouble, as the main character states in her letter: “By wanting less, you are content with less, and the less you need, the better off you are. That is what the city does to you. It turns your thoughts inside out. It makes you want to live, and at the same time it tries to take your life away from you.” Those who refuse to surrender to reality and roam the streets in search of scraps of food for long hours risk their security and physical safety. Moreover, those who find scraps of food rush animally, tearing the food apart with their fingers, and you find them eating without ever filling their stomachs:
“As it turns out, food is a complicated business, and unless you learn to accept what is given to you, you will never be at peace with yourself. Shortages are frequent, and a food that has given you pleasure one day will more than likely be gone the next.”
This city did not reach this state overnight, rather, it began with an economic collapse that shook its foundations. Decent jobs were no longer available to everyone in the city. “The essential thing is to survive,” the main character says in her letter. “If you mean to last here, you must have a way of earning money, and yet there are few jobs left in the old sense of the word.” It is not possible for a person to obtain a government job, such as working as a clerk, an usher, or an employee in a transfer center, without a close personal knowledge of who can mediate for him and support him to obtain this job, and this matter is not limited to government jobs, even illegal jobs all over the city. That is why the most common job in the city is sweeping; “This is the job for people with no job, and my guess is that a good ten to twenty percent of the population is engaged in it,” the letter says.
Saving some money is also considered impossible, “and if you do, that usually means you are depriving yourself of something essential: food, for example.” Thus, the city’s residents find themselves between spending everything they have in order to obtain the basics, or going hungry in order to save some money, which necessarily leads to a lack of the physical energy necessary to carry out work. “You see the problem. The harder you work, the weaker you become; the weaker you are, the more draining the work.”
As for housing, “Fully half the people are homeless, and they have absolutely nowhere to go,” which makes walking around the city dangerous and may lead to sudden disputes and quarrels, if you accidentally step on someone’s foot, or exceed the boundaries of his area that he seized from the street, wandering the streets has become an unsettling process: “Your eyes must be constantly open, looking up, looking down, looking ahead, looking behind, on the watch for other bodies, on your guard against the unforeseeable. To collide with someone can be fatal.” As for those who still own their homes, they are constantly at risk of losing them by force, and it is rare to find among the people of the city someone who has not lost their home as a result of a heavily armed group storming, in addition to the fact that “Most buildings are not owned by anyone, and therefore you have no rights as a tenant: no lease, no legal leg to stand on if something goes against you.”
Death in More Than One Way
Under these circumstances, death remains the greatest presence in this city. Those with compassionate hearts die early, and always in their sleep. “For a month or two they walk around with a strange smile on their face, and a weird glow of otherness hovers around them, as if they have already begun to disappear.” Perhaps this is the kindest death in the country of last things, and in light of the difficult circumstances that the collapsed city is experiencing, the conditions are perfect for the birth of the ugliest things in others, and for more than one way to die in this city.
There is, for example, a suicide jump from the roofs of tall buildings, or the Last Leap, as it is known in the city, “these, too, have been transformed into a kind of public ritual,” and it is the most common death on the other hand. The main character also mentioned three other deaths, like euthanasia clinics where you drift aimlessly into sleep and never wake up. However, this method also seems expensive, and the best alternative is to join assassination clubs, “and these have been growing in popularity.” The club makes all the necessary arrangements to assassinate the customer for a modest financial fee, “and everything about his death remains a mystery to him: the date, the place, the method to be used, the identity of his assassin.”
The most horrific and most tragic way to die was “a sect of people who run through the streets as fast as they can, flailing their arms wildly about them, punching the air, screaming at the top of their lungs,” until they collapsed one by one from exhaustion. “The point is to die as quickly as possible, to drive yourself so hard that your heart cannot stand it.” It seems that the runners do this in groups in order to encourage each other to continue the gruesome death, which can also kill everyone who stands in the group’s way.
Given the large number of deaths in the collapsed city, the issue of bodies, for example, has become one of the practical problems. People “don’t die here as they did in the old days, quietly expiring in their beds or in the clean sanctuary of a hospital ward.” They die anywhere, often in the streets. Due to the great scarcity of resources, the majority of bodies are left naked after others loot them and rob them of their belongings until the time comes for the sweepers to pick them up. “First to go are the shoes, for these are in great demand and very hard to find. The pockets are next to attract attention.” And of course, all pieces of clothing are not safe from looting.
There is no doubt that the living conditions in the world that Paul Auster created in his novel seem impossible, but despite that, people find their own way to adapt to those conditions and cling to life as much as possible. Auster may be famous for being a detective novelist, in whose worlds the characters search to decipher a mystery, such as the country’s last heroine searching for her brother in a dilapidated city, but I believe that Auster’s mysteries lie in the genius of his narrative and his description of the emotions and turmoil of his fictional characters. Auster says that the worst thing in life is that our reactions are predictable, not only by others, but also by ourselves. As Auster says in a press interview: I tend to see humans as a group of spectra. There are different parts of us that appear and express us at different times. We are not the same in all circumstances, and each of us is different people in different circumstances. We are not coherent, logical, or consistent with one specific image of ourselves. Rather, we are constantly contradicting ourselves. We may try to be consistent, but that is impossible. Man has many spectrums, and therefore the narrow and limited concept of personality does not do it justice, because it imprisons it within a specific framework with specific manifestations. I am convinced that most of us, and I include myself in this statement, do not understand ourselves well, but we are even a mystery to ourselves before we are a mystery to others.
Man, in general, is a being who adapts to his surroundings, and his efforts to improve his living conditions do not fade, no matter what those circumstances are: “The remarkable thing was how quickly everyone adapted to the material comforts,” and some may even feel entitled to those comforts sometimes if they were accustomed to them in their days, as she writes. The main character even continues: “Perhaps that is not as strange as it seems. We all take things for granted, and when it comes to such basic things as food and shelter, things that are probably ours by natural right, then it doesn’t take long for us to think of them as an integral part of ourselves.”
Between Memory and Forgetting
There is no doubt that Auster was able to create a capsule of anxiety and dread in all these circumstances, so the basic plot revolves around the young woman’s adventure in a city that is completely new to her, even in its natural laws and various human interactions, “The city was new for me back then, and I always seemed to be lost,” she writes in her long letter, and it is not just the anxiety of moving to a new city, but this city is also slowly disappearing, “Slowly and steadily, the city seems to be consuming itself, even as it remains. There is no way to explain it. I can only record, I cannot pretend to understand. “
On the other hand, it is very common in a general state of panic such as the one we find in the country of last things, for a person’s thoughts to be limited to the present, and to what he finds in his days in material form, or as the main character expresses it: “For a long time I tried not to remember anything. By confining my thoughts to the present, I was better able to manage, better able to avoid the sulks. Memory is the great trap,” and anxiety plays a role in creating a mental barrier that stifles a person’s thoughts: “I was so miserable that my mind seemed to stop working.” The dread that Auster depicts does not merely paralyze thought, it is also able to erase names from memory. As we find in the following text when the main character meets a secondary character:
“I said, but in the meantime how does one get out of here? Oh no, he said, shaking his head, that’s impossible. Ships aren’t allowed to come in anymore—and if nothing comes in, nothing can go out. What about an airplane? I said. What’s an airplane? he asked, smiling at me in a puzzled sort of way, as though I had just told a joke he didn’t understand. An airplane, I said. A machine that flies through the air and carries people from one place to another. That’s ridiculous, he said, giving me a suspicious kind of look. There’s no such thing. It’s impossible. Don’t you remember? I asked. I don’t know what you’re talking about, he said. You could get into trouble for spreading that kind of nonsense. The government doesn’t like it when people make up stories. It’s bad for morale.”
Thus, things are erased from human life in the country of last things, and their meanings disappear from collective memory, and necessarily from dictionaries, if there are dictionaries in that country. “How can you talk to someone about airplanes, for example, if that person doesn’t know what an airplane is?” The main character writes in her letter, “It is a slow but ineluctable process of erasure. Words tend to last a bit longer than things, but eventually they fade too, along with the pictures they once evoked.” In the end, language is alive and interacts with people and their daily ways of life, and just as things are destined to disappear and be replaced by others, such as communications booths that have been replaced today by mobile phones, days will not last until all booths disappear from the streets, and people forget their name after that.
This is what appears to the main character at first like a huge false conspiracy or a general complicity to forget: “It’s not that people make a point of lying to you, it’s just that where the past is concerned, the truth tends to get obscured rather quickly.” Just as history is written by the victors, in the country of last things, nothingness triumphs and oblivion spreads until the city disappears completely, leaving no room for hope on earth. “when you find that you have given up hoping even for the possibility of hope, you tend to fill the empty spaces with dreams, little childlike thoughts and stories to keep yourself going.” Childish dreams in the country of last things are the language of mortality, “Considering what we have to look forward to, it is pleasant to dream of these absurdities,” or the language of ghosts as it has been described:
“All this belongs to the language of ghosts. There are many other possible kinds of talks in this language. Most of them begin when one person says to another: I wish. What they wish for might be anything at all, as long as it is something that cannot happen. I wish the sun would never set. I wish money would grow in my pockets. I wish the city would be like it was in the old days. You get the idea. Absurd and infantile things, with no meaning and no reality. In general, people hold to the belief that however bad things were yesterday, they were better than things are today.”
The Good Life in the Country of Last Things
The Italian philosopher Umberto Eco said in his talk about memory that we are our memories, meaning that the amnesiac no longer becomes himself, for example, but rather becomes a new, different person. In the country of last things, “Everyone is prone to forgetfulness, even under the most favorable conditions,” Auster wrote, “in a place like this, with so much actually disappearing from the physical world, you can imagine how many things are forgotten all the time.” In the end, the problem does not lie in forgetting itself, or in the differences in the things they forget. What one person forgets may remain as a memory for another, and this is evident in several situations faced by the main character.
In general, language, for Auster, is nothing more than a tool, the tool we use to describe the world in order to understand it, as the main character stated when she wrote this lengthy letter as an attempt to understand. Although language is a means of understanding the world around us, it is also limited in one way or another, with its vocabulary and terminology. At least if we exclude its misuse, or as Auster says in his interview with journalist Jumana Haddad: For me, language is just a tool, not the world itself. It is the only tool we have to understand the world, but it is not synonymous with the world. Rather, it is in the form of what it deprives us of. Language simplifies, classifies, and systematizes, that is, it restricts. The world of our perceptions is so complex, and countless things flow into us at one moment, that every situation, condition, or feeling we experience must be beyond the reach of words. We try to question the world with language and ourselves, but in my opinion, it is just an approach or a guess.
Narrative works may not have any significant material value, as they did not save a child from starvation or a sick person from his illness, as Auster expresses in his speech on the occasion of being awarded the Asturias Prize for Literature in 2006: “the making of art is what distinguishes us from all other creatures who inhabit this planet, that it is, essentially, what defines us as human beings. To do something for the pure pleasure and beauty of doing it. Think of the effort involved, the long hours of practice and discipline required to become an accomplished pianist or dancer.”
There is no doubt that Auster himself excelled in writing In the Country of Last Things, which establishes him as one of the most prominent contemporary novelists and artists. As he says in his aforementioned speech: “Fiction, however, exists in a somewhat different realm from the other arts. Its medium is language, and language is something we share with others.” Auster starts from the fact that, as human beings, from a young age, and specifically from the time we begin to communicate with others, we have a curious hunger to hear stories, and this hunger does not fade even with hearing stories, despite the differences in our methods of satisfying this hunger and the means that we prefer over others. Auster wrote in his letters to J. M. Coetzee:
“There is no question that games have a strong narrative component. We follow the twists and turns of the combat in order to learn the final outcome. But no, it is not quite like reading a book—at least not the kinds of books you and I try to write. But perhaps it’s more closely related to genre literature. Think of thrillers or detective novels, for example, which are always the same book, endlessly repeated, thousands of subtle variations on the same story, and nevertheless the public has an insatiable hunger for these novels. As if each one were the reenactment of a ritual.”
References:
- Paul Auster (1993), In the Country of Last Things.
- Jumānah Ḥaddād (2007), ṣuḥbat luṣūṣ al-nār, Lebanon, Dār al-Nahār.
- Badr al-Samārī (2013), Ḥadīth al-riwāʼīyīn, Saudi Arabia, Dār Athar.
- Paul Auster, J. M. Coetzee (2013), Here and Now: Letters.
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