From Low Road to High Road: The Spatial Recontextualisation of Memory in Paul Auster’s Twenty-first Century Fiction

Abstract

<p>This article examines the US author Paul Auster’s twenty-first century fiction and traces that ephemeral moment, when encounters with and movements in places bring back forgotten memories, sometimes unwanted, through the body. The urban and other places through which Auster’s often unhappy and self-destructive characters move surprise them by making them re-live situations they would rather forget. These places form what Arnold H. Modell calls a “metonymic trigger” that activates a bodily memory, a process of recall and response, where the past and the present suddenly become indistinguishable. As such, memories are not echoes or representations of past events, but experiences in the here and now, and Auster’s literary fiction delicately articulates these experiences and captures the sense of immediacy and movement that accompanies memories and the processes of remembering. Memories are, however, also inextricably linked with imagination. Auster’s characters often find solace in imagined places, and the repeated encounters with these places soften the blow of encountering real ones. Gradually, the characters move from triggered body memories to a remembering that creates a distance between the trigger and the response. The powers of imagination, then, entangled with and emerging from bodily memories, seem essential in recontextualising the painful memories into something more manageable.<br></p>