Paul Auster’s ''In the Country of Last Things'': an interpretation

‘We all speak our own language of ghosts.’

I wish to spend a few words on Paul Austers In the Country of Last Things. Although I usually do not read modern (relatively recent) literature, this novel is the second of Auster’s work I devoured, the first being the New-York Trilogy. What I find amusing and fascinating, is his combination of postmodern playfulness, flirts with philosophy, and quirky realism. To me, the texts are an invitation for analysis. In what follows, however, I will not provide an analysis of In the Country of Last Things, because I do not intend to scrutinise the text. Instead, I will touch upon some aspects I think are central issues within the story and contribute to its literary character.

Introduction

First a sketch of the situation. The novel takes the shape of a long letter, written by a young woman named Anna Blume. In it, the reader is introduced to an anonymous, dystopian environment simply called ‘the city’. Anna went there by boat in an attempt to find her missing brother William, who was a journalist sent to this nameless country. The city is apparently nothing but a faint shadow of a society that collapsed and disintegrated during the past twelve years or so, which began with uprisings and what is generally referred to as ‘the troubles’ (perhaps taken from the Northern Irish Troubles).

The city is a ruined wasteland where people scramble for survival. It goes without saying that there is theft, sexual abuse, disease, the expelling of religious groups, hunger and even murder in this hellhole where people are forced to do anything it takes in order to survive another day. In a society where nothing is maintained any longer, buildings collapse, streets erode, and institutions fail, and so the reader is faced with a society that suffers deeply from corruption, purges, gang violence, homelessness, misinformation and many years of immense political instability.

It really is a world without a future. Welcome to a world in which desolation and misery are everywhere, but where absolutely nothing of it is unfamiliar to the world of the reader.

Philosophy of language

One could argue that one of the flaws in the book is it being abstract and vague. The reader is left in the dark on matters such as the identification of the country, and the origin and development of the troubles. Yet I think all this is entirely beside the point.

When Auster turns to philosophy to dwell upon for literary kicks ‘n fun, it is the philosophy of language. He did this in Moonpalace and the New-York Trilogy, but in a somewhat superficial way. Whenever Anna ponders about more or less philosophical questions in In the Country of Last Things, it also is philosophy of language. This time it nonetheless is really part of the fabric of the narrative.

It already begins with the simple fact that both the country and the city remain anonymous. They don’t bear names. The title refers to both a material and an immaterial aspect. First, the ‘last things’ are the streets, houses and countless objects that fill our daily lives. With everything being in bad repair, a building block can be there one day, and gone the next. As the production of all the western clutter stopped, everything first becomes valuable, next priceless and rare, and finally a thing of the past. This is where the second aspect comes in, because the title also refers to memories. These range from one’s own biography to the words for objects. As Anna Blume remarks, the objects one by one disappear, and subsequently their names will also disappear.

This is, I believe, the very reason why the country and city have no name. Because society collapsed and everything falls apart, the old denominations do not apply anymore. Language would then only mask reality: that there is no country anymore.

This touches upon something fundamental, which is the relationship between words and objects. First of all, the disintegration and falling apart of things is observed by Anna, and she says that for this reason ‘nothing is really itself anymore’. When Anna tries to find a way out of the city in the harbour, she finds that all ships have long been gone and a new government started the Sea Wall Project to protect the population from some immanent threat (I leave it to the reader’s imagination to find present day parallels). She asks an official whether there still are airplanes to travel abroad, but the official does not recognise the word ‘airplane’ and warns Anna not to spread silly stories, because the government does not like it. Now twelve years are not merely enough to make an entire population forget an airplane, but that is not the point. The point is that words are useless when there is nothing they refer to. Language has to mirror reality, and therefore must adapt to new circumstances, but in addition so does our recollection of the past. The author here seems to suggest that memory and language are inextricably linked.

This becomes acute when Anna ends up in the large city library and lives there for many months with her new lover. She observes that the word library is hardly applicable anymore, since thousands of books are now missing, and many more are strewn around or put on random shelves. A library needs order in order to be a library, and chaos ends all that. Moreover, the scholars who live there use books as fuel to stay warm during the harsh winter. No-one can blame them, but they are thus actively and consciously destroying their cultural heritage, as if a whole society is saying that the past has become irrelevant, since there is no future either. All they have, is the present, which demands all their attention and is hardly more than a monotonous sequence of identical days, or a prolonged state of lethargy at best (I refer to Anna’s lover Ferdinand who aimed for precisely that after losing her in the chaos). In other words, who cares about history, sociology or philosophy and remembering them when they are starving to death? Who wants to remember destruction anyway? ‘Memory is a trap’, Anna remarks early on.

The questions of meaning and definition meet the question of identity (next paragraph) explicitly when Anna and Ferdinand find each other again after their unfortunate separation caused by the destruction of the library. There, he was writing a book about the city and its recent history, which took all his time and money for collecting the data. After he lost Anna and his book went up in flames, ‘everything lost definition to him’. In other words, the author suggests a person needs two things in life, which are something to do (a cause, a purpose) and someone to love.

Identity

The whole words-objects discussion therefore borders on another theme that is essential in the novel. This is identity, also present in the New-York Trilogy and Moonpalace, but in a less postmodernist kind of way. What heritage is to a society, memory is to an individual. The person who truly forgets, in some way loses a tiny bit of his identity. This is what the city does to an individual. The disarray and suffering strip the person from his individuality, first external, then internal. For example, I already hinted at the innumerable poor and homeless. Who, in our daily lives, differentiates between them? In point of fact we live in a virtual society, where we are partially defined by our image, social network, career, the prestige that comes with it, the money on our bank account, and the objects we collect, assuming that all this in some respect reflects who we truly are. Once hell broke loose with the Troubles, all that became less relevant as time went by. Eventually, all the poor and homeless in the city are equal to a large degree. At least they are to the government.

The second remark to be made concerns the internal aspect. It is not that there is total anarchy in the city – it is not –, but a great deal of social order is gone, and coming by becomes increasingly difficult. This has a profound impact on how people behave. It removes the pretences and social refinements, and shows what people are actually capable of. Calamity brings out both the worst and the best human kind has to offer, but in this, human conduct is reduced to basic, almost instinctive types of behaviour.

On the negative end the reader therefore comes across atrocities, such as a human slaughterhouse Anna barely manages to escape from after being misled by no less than a pedant scholar. Talking about pretences. The fact that this scholar who set the trap is an ethnologist brings to mind cannibalism in certain indigenous tribes.

On the positive end there are great acts of generosity, trust and love. Sex is only one of many ways in which Anna manages to feel like a normal woman again. Nowhere, however, is Anna portrayed as a naive altruist. On the contrary, it are several unofficial tiny social contracts (as I simply choose to call them) she commits to with new found friends in order to stay alive. These new contracts are doing what a government should have done. It is through these contracts that the anonymous human being becomes more and ascertains the identity of friend, partner and spouse, which proves crucial for survival and for feeling like an individual again.

Again, it is in the library that Anna’s identity becomes clearer for the reader when she meets a group of Jews. It is here that we get to know Anna’s surname and Jewish descent. Implicitly, perhaps, the author also suggests that religion might serve to construct and preserve identity. The Jews are friendly, stay together, and accept whatever destiny lays ahead. It is for this reason, that a new government expels (or eliminates) such religious groups.

Also, in the latter part of the novel Ferdinand, now working in a shelter, is asked to pretend to be a doctor, in order to give people hope. The mere doctor’s coat and attitude make it easier to help making people feel better. The identity of a doctor is an illusion, but real enough for the desperate.

The third and final example is that of Boris Stepanovich, who is interesting precisely because he eludes all attempts to grasp his true personality. In order to survive, he plays multiple roles to get things done and changes his stories whenever necessary. All of them are just as real or unreal (Auster’s flirtations with postmodernism). He might therefore seem unreliable, but in fact he is loyal, kind and generous towards Anna and her friends. He also adds to the theme of the virtual mentioned above, since he is the one responsible for selling housewares from Woburn House, a sanctuary, to provide it with cash. In order to do this successfully, he fabricates stories to add value to the objects he puts up for sale. The teacup is not just a teacup, but one used by Russian nobility Boris used to know: ‘Treat it gently, my friend. You are holding my memories in your hand.’ Needless to say, value, especially in this capitalistic context, is entirely virtual. And so is identity. ‘The whole point was that they functioned as symbols of wealth and power. […] you were not just getting a vase, you were getting an entire world to go along with it.’

The government

Governments – or should I say political elite? – come and go, but always seem to be wholly occupied with their own interests. The authorities are nowhere to be found when someone needs warmth and hope, but immediately come knocking on the door when a body of a relative is buried in the garden, because that is illegal, since bodies are valuable fuel for the remaining factories.

The authorities are nowhere to be found when someone needs protection, but was capable of constructing a wall around the city, the Meddler’s Rampard. It supposedly protects against foreign invasions (fake news in order to support policy?), but as with North Korea, or Berlin during the Cold War, the real question is whether a wall keeps people out or precisely the opposite. When you need a wall to keep someone in, it is a clear sign the life you designed failed completely. When the city is drained, the elite are no longer elite of something, and there are no bodies to provide fuel. A cold and cruel logic that is based on self-deceit.

Woburn House is in this context what NGO’s are to us. It provides a haven for the poor and desperate to recover. In other words, it does exactly what the government should be doing. Cynicism is never far away, though, as Anna learns that Woburn House’s reputation became such that people assume it is some sort of paradise, only to be disappointed once they get in. Moreover, the temporary leisure has the side-effect of making some guests lose their mind when they have to face the brutal reality outside again. The helpless will never be self-suppliant. Anna entertains the thought that it may be better not to help anyone anymore. Impossible ethical question: ‘What is better – to help large numbers of people a little bit or small numbers of people a lot?’ Here a remark is also made that refers back to the question of identity: ‘We all take things for granted, and […] it doesn’t take long for us to think of them as an integral part of ourselves’.

Children as a symbol

What happens when society collapses? We know what intense damage war can do to a country in just four to five years, but what would be the result after twelve years? What happens in the novel is a very slow demise. It took seven more years before the last film was shown in a cinema, for example. There is no total anarchy, but there is a lack of compassion. Someone says that children are no longer born in the city for many years, and although the cause remains unclear, that does not matter. We can take this as a symbol.

Anna, who keeps believing in a better future, meets the journalist Ferdinand in the library, the two fall in love, and she becomes pregnant. After being lured into what turns out to be a slaughterhouse, she runs to the nearest window and jumps out of it without a second thought. It was her will to survive, the same will that causes the entire city to drag along, that made her do this. Although she survived, it also meant she lost her child, a cruel irony.

Maybe baby’s should not be born in a world without much affection, and that is the price man has to pay for his incapability to remain human in the fullest sense: ethical, because he has choice; conscious, because he has thought; compassionate, because the individual is vulnerable; cherishing the past, because he has memory.

One of the last things to go out the window is probably humanity itself. Early on in the novel Anna ponders: ‘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.’ What happens when the individual is stripped from his familiar world with familiar objects, the things he took for granted, stripped from his identity, his purpose, his inherited language? What becomes of the characters in the novel remains a mystery, because the letter stops at the day they will try to leave the city. As she writes: ‘Anything is possible, and that is almost the same as nothing, almost the same as being born into a world that has never existed before’.