Little Dramas and Disasters

Many things have happened this past week, but I seem to lack the energy to write about them right now. So here's an essay I wrote a couple of weeks ago on one of my favorite books, Paul Auster's In the Country of Last Things.

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"You have to laugh, but it don’t come from the heart," said Marguerite Simon, one of the people quoted in a recent Time Magazine feature on New Orleans three months after the Hurricane Katrina devastation. Simon is one of the survivors who insist on staying in "the city that care forgot"—a city where bodies are still being excavated, where looters raid houses in broad daylight, where it is not uncommon to know a neighbor who has hung himself, and whose officials are still unsure whether to rebuild or raze it to the ground.

The article was accompanied by photographs: of clean-up workers wearing masks to protect themselves from the stench of death and garbage, of stark living rooms with mold creeping up the walls, and of residents hunching over piles of rubbish on the sidewalk. They seem to support the text that calls the city "a world where nothing is salvageable, not even the mildewed wedding pictures."

A continent and an ocean away from the wreckage, I turned the pages and was reminded of a similar, though fictional, place: the unnamed city in Paul Auster’s In the Country of Last Things. In this 1987 novel (which he began as a college student but shelved for many years because it was "too ambitious"), Auster depicts a dystopian society on the verge of crumbling upon itself, though as narrator and protagonist Anna Blume points out, "What strikes me as off is not that everything is falling apart, but that so much continues to be there. It takes a long time for a world to vanish, much longer than you would think. Lives continue to be lived, and each one of us remains the witness of his own little drama."

And there are dramas, little and large, aplenty here. Like the protagonists in Auster’s other novels (in his more famous detective stories in The New York Trilogy, for example), 19-year-old Anna Blume is spurred on by a mystery: what has happened to her brother William, a journalist who has gone missing since he was sent to report on the city months ago? On a quest to find him, she travels to the unnamed country by ship and goes to his last known address, only to discover the entire census zone burned down due to an epidemic scare.

From then on, her quest becomes one of survival amidst the cruelties and kindnesses of chance—for her life, like many others, is just "the sum of manifold contingencies" with an "essential randomness in [its] design: this then that, and because of that, this." Anna becomes, among other things (and this reads like a list of war horrors or telenovela twists): a scavenger, a vagrant, a life-saver, an adopted daughter, a victim of sexual harassment, an evicted resident, a library refugee, a scholar’s live-in lover, a book burner, an expectant mother, a slaughterhouse escapee, a grieving patient, and a social worker who helps others live better, if only for a few days. How ironic that in a world where people are too easily objectified and discarded, it is perhaps Anna’s earlier scavenging/object-hunting philosophy that helps her deal with people more humanely:

"As an object hunter, you must rescue things before they reach this state of absolute decay…. The job is to zero in on these little islands of intactness, to imagine them joined to other such islands, and those islands to still others, and thus to create new archipelagoes of matter. You must salvage the salvageable and learn to ignore the rest. The trick is to do it as fast as you can."

All the while she casts a wary eye at the city and its other inhabitants: toll collectors who demand money or sex from passersby; renegade grocers who sell bottles of piss pretending to be beer; phantom landlords and housebreakers; and suicidal people who leap off buildings, who run in groups and drop dead in the streets, who end up at euthanasia clinics, or who sign up at assassination clubs and wait to be murdered. There are people who believe inclement weather is punishment for bad thoughts or behavior, and hence, smile constantly or prostrate themselves on the ground, even as Anna matter-of-factly observes, "The rain makes no distinctions. At one time or another, it falls on everyone, and when it falls, everyone is equal to everyone else."

Social inequality, however, is another matter, though not really emphasized in the novel. Most have accepted that only the wealthy have enough glots to afford wine, and that only policemen and public officials enjoy comfortable housing and other privileges. It is the death-truck workers (those that haul corpses from the streets), the officials most often seen, who become the targets of people’s stones. In Auster’s novel, politics is a rumor, and faceless governments come and go leaving people whispering: about labor camps, about the sea wall to protect the city against invasion, about laws that endanger the lives of religious groups and journalists. Most of the time though it is the little details that people worry about—disposing of their shit (as plumbing is nonexistent), buying real food, and finding newspapers to stuff their clothes with—"for there are no politics in the city as such. The people are too hungry, too distracted, too much at odds with each other for that."

What I love about this novel (aside from the precise prose and the worldview that accepts coincidences as normal) is Auster’s portrayal of people struggling to remain hopeful—or at the very least, curious—in a harrowing world where every day could be disastrous. Anna says, "Perhaps that is the most interesting question of all: to see what happens when there is nothing, and whether or not we will survive that too." And people have as many methods for survival as they do for death. Samuel Farr, William’s fellow journalist, works on his book obsessively, hoping the information he’s collected about the city will matter to the outside world someday. Victoria Woburn runs the shelter her father started, that lets people stay for ten days at a time, advising Anna that "broken hearts are sometimes mended by work." Boris Stepanovich sells curios to Resurrection Agents with such aplomb that "when you bought an antique vase from [him], you were not just getting a vase, you were getting an entire world to go along with it." Even villainous Ferdinand has a tender side, making miniature ships in glass bottles that "make you want to shrink yourself down to the size of a pin, and then climb aboard and sail away…"

Perhaps the key to Anna Blume’s survival is also the key to this novel, which is propelled more by voice than by plot devices. The entire narrative, told in retrospect, is actually a letter Anna scribbles in a blue notebook to an unnamed "you"—a childhood friend back home who loves her. She writes despite her disjointed thoughts and the possibility of failure: "I don’t believe there is any way this letter can reach you. It’s like calling out into the blankness, like screaming into a vast and terrible blankness." And yet like many writers, Anna faces the tyranny of the blank page with persistence, recognizing that the act of writing involves both a personal release and a responsibility to the reader: "Perhaps it comes down to this. I am writing to you because you know nothing. Because you are far away from me and know nothing." This, of course, does not guarantee her physical salvation (there is no guarantee for the journalists and literary writers of this country either)—even at the end of the novel when she plans to escape with her friends, her future is uncertain at best, and unlikely at worst.

When she writes in the last paragraph that "the only thing I ask for now is the chance to live one more day," I believe she echoes the sentiments of all of us, even those who have not recently experienced catastrophes. I would ask for another thing: that we get the chance to tell our stories, and listen to those of others. For in the end, disasters are overcome by people who have the will to survive, which is also the will and the willingness to tell the stories that will live and outlive us all.