A museum of one’s own: The journey of the eye/I in Paul Auster’s The Invention of Solitude

Abstract

This paper aims to examine the ways in which Paul Auster rewrites the topos of the visit to a museum in The Invention of Solitude (1982).Whereas “Portrait of an Invisible Man” contains the reproduction of a photograph (a family portrait), “The Book of Memory” plays with images in absentia and relies on the reader’s memories of a few famous figurative paintings, in the context of a reflexion on absence and substance. This is particularly striking in two passages respectively devoted to Vermeer’s Woman in Blue (Rijksmuseum) and Van Gogh’s Bedroom (Amsterdam Van Gogh Museum) (p. 140-143). In both cases Auster’s narrator first quotes an authoritative commentary (written by a critic / provided by Van Gogh himself in a letter to his brother Theo), then qualifies or challenges this first description in keeping with his own central motif of the room. The hybrid text thus offers a twofold exploration, subverting ekphrasis by juxtaposing two distinct metapictorial comments and redefining the painting’s mimetic quality and its effect on its viewer (significantly Van Gogh’s painting is no longer perceived as a still-life but as a self-portrait, while the room becomes “the substance of solitude”).For the narrator who, somewhat narcissistically, earlier refers to Van Gogh’s paintings as “an image of his adolescence, a translation of his deepest feelings of that period”, reappropriating these images is part of a journey into the self and relates to the general program of the book, “the invention of solitude”.