La trilogie newyorkaise de Paul Auster

J’ai lu quelque part (je ne sais plus où ni quand) que la Trilogie newyorkaise, qui regroupe les trois romans de Paul Auster mettant en scène le « détective » Quinn, portait sur New-York. Elle se passe en effet (pour autant que quelque chose s’y passe) à New-York, mais en fait, mais elle ne parle que de l’écriture sous toutes ses formes (ou déguisements) : collecte de données, inspiration, recherche, révision, hésitation et même blocage, le fameux writer’s block qui se traduit parfois par l’angoisse de la page blanche, et parfois autrement… (Même si le premier roman, City of Glass, parle aussi de New-York – et des États-Unis en général – d’une façon inoubliable – l’image de la Tour de Babel y est portée à un niveau que je ne me souviens pas d’avoir jamais vu/perçu ailleurs. Mais il s’agit encore de langage.) La citation qui suit, extraite de The Locked Room, le meilleur selon moi de ces textes, en parle de façon directe mais elle trace aussi, me semble-t-il, le canevas du projet de la Trilogie.   

Le narrateur (Auster?) est en train de préparer les textes de Fanshawe (ses propres textes?) pour publication…

[With] checks suddenly arriving from one thing or another, all money problems evaporated. Like everything else that seemed to e happening, this was a new experience for me. For the past eight or nine years, my life had been a constant scrambling act, a frantic lunge from one paltry article to the next, and I had considered myself lucky whenever I could see ahead for more than a month or two. Care was embedded inside me; it was part of my blood, my corpuscles, and I hardly knew what it was to breathe without wondering if I could afford to pay the gas bill. Now, for the fist time since I had gone out on my own, I realized that I didn’t have to think about these things anymore. One morning, as I sat at my desk struggling over the final sentence of an article, groping for a phrase that was not there, it gradually dawned on me that I had been given a second chance. I could dive this up and start again. I no longer had to write articles. I could move on to other things, begin to do the work I had always wanted to do. This was my chance to save myself, and I decided that I’d be a fool not to take it.

More weeks passed. I went into my room every morning, but nothing happened. Theorectically, I felt inspired, and whenever I was not working, my head was filled with ideas. But each time I sat down to put something on paper, my thoughts seemed to vanish. Word died the moment I lifted my pen. I started a number of projects, but nothing really took hold, and one by one I dropped them. I looked for excuses to explain why I couldn’t get going. That was no problem, and before long I had come up with a whole litany : the adjustment to married life, the responsibilities or fatherhood, my news workroom (which seemed too cramped), the old habit of writing for a deadline, Sophie’s body, the sudden windfall – everything. For several days, I even toyed with the idea of writing a detective novel, but then I got struck with the plot and couldn’t fit all the pieces together. Il let my mind drift without purpose, hoping to persuade myself that idleness was proof of gathering strength, a sign that something was about to happen. For more than a month, the only thing I did was copy out passages from books. One of them from Spinoza, I tacked onto may wall: “And when he dreams he does not want to write, he does not have the power to dream he wants to write; and when he dreams he wants to write, he does not have the power to dream he doesn’t want to write.”

It’s possible that I would have worked my way out of this slump. Whether it was a permanent condition or a passing phase is still unclear for me. My gut feeling is that for a time I was truly lost, floundering desperately inside myself, but I do not think this means my case was hopeless. Things were happening to me. I was living through great changes, and it was still too early to tell where they were going to lead. Then, unexpectedly, a solution presented itself. If that is too favorable a word, I will call it a compromise.

Et c’est ainsi que le narrateur (Auster?) décide d’écrire une biographie de Fanshawe (son double plus jeune?)... Et ce devrait être, souligne l’éditeur, un livre extraordinaire « égal à Fanshawe lui-même ». La trilogie?