“I Am The Ghost That You Haunt”: Paul Auster’s Final Novel

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Baumgartner
by Paul Auster
(Grove Press, 2023, 208 pp., $27.00)

Paul Auster spent his literary career asking questions he never answered, weaving and unweaving ideas and memories into ever-changing patterns, and toying with readers’ need for certainty. His work is deceptively simple, fun to read but built on foundations that crackle and shift and challenge while the author winks. He was almost impossibly erudite, and his work, particularly the fiction, incorporates allusions and philosophical concepts in obvious and subtle ways, enticing you to try to figure it out while refusing any easy answers. Reading Auster can be as intense an experience as you want it to be, from enjoying a light read of an interesting, well-written story to getting yourself tangled in questions of existence, identity, and meaning. Baumgartner, Paul Auster’s final novel, was published in November 2023, less than six months before the author’s death, written during his battle with lung cancer and with his full knowledge that it might be the last thing he finished. That it treats subjects dear to Auster’s heart like writing, memory, and grief should be no surprise; that it is his final treatment of those subjects gives it a special gravity to his readers.

Baumgartner is a short novel at just over 200 pages, and, as has been pointed out by several critics, is surprisingly unoriginal in its conceit given Auster’s usual experimental fireworks: it is a novel about a widowed, Jewish, aging academic confronting his mortality. If you just read the synopsis, you might assume it was a late Philip Roth novel you missed, and Auster leans into that in passages. There are several long sections in which our protagonist, Seymour (Sy) Baumgartner, remembers family history from Newark, New Jersey, that read just like Roth. Present, too, are sexual details about Baumgartner’s grief—folding his wife’s underwear obsessively, writing her pornographic letters and mailing them to the house, ordering books just to flirt with the UPS deliverywoman—that feel intensely Rothian. The nod to Roth continues in a sentence late in the novel, which also hints at Auster’s game here: Baumgartner, who is writing a satire, says he has to be careful in the writing, “for one false move will sabotage the deadly serious intentions hidden within the jokes” (186). No reader of Philip Roth—and Auster was one—could use the phrase “deadly serious” without summoning Roth and perhaps his most famous quote about his writing: “Sheer Playfulness and Deadly Seriousness are my closest friends.”

Roth’s old friends are no doubt at play here; Auster’s final novel both is and isn’t about a widowed academic, both is and isn’t comedy. On the surface, it tells the story of Sy Baumgartner, whose wife Anna, a translator and poet, died ten years ago in a freak accident at the beach. Their marriage was satisfying intellectually, emotionally, and sexually, and our protagonist has been suffering without it. The novel opens as he experiences a series of almost slapstick physical injuries and proceeds as he navigates the possibility and subsequent disappointment of a new love, the strangeness of retirement, the pleasure of new scholarly pursuits, and the excitement of a young doctoral student who plans to write her dissertation on Anna’s work, granting his beloved a sort of immortality. Reading the novel strictly on the level of its plot is entertaining and moving on its own. Auster is a beautiful writer, the character is engaging, and the novel’s subjects are universal. Still, without the deeper dive into those deadly serious and sheerly playful games Auster is crafting, it is a somewhat slight addition to the author’s oeuvre.

The more, however, we dig beneath the surface story of this widow and his only marginally successful attempts to move on from his grief, the more Auster’s usual genius for uncertainty and multiple meanings is revealed. Throughout the novel, Auster mentions several different academic pieces Baumgartner has completed or is working on, and they become keys to the author’s deadly serious games. Baumgartner is a scholar of phenomenology, the philosophical idea that our lived experiences, what we encounter in the world, are the source of meaning. He has worked, for much of his career, on “the phenomenology of reading,” also the title of a 1969 article by Georges Poulet, who describes the act of reading as being almost like being possessed by a ghost as one allows another’s consciousness to take over one’s mind. He goes on to describe the experience of reading as calling a work back into not only existence, but conscious existence, like summoning a ghost.

This relationship between reading and ghosts suggested by Baumgartner’s research subject is one that has been on Paul Auster’s mind for decades, most notably in “Ghosts,” the second novella of his landmark New York Trilogy, in which the writer in the story, Black, explicitly says that writers are ghosts, that “In some sense, a writer has no life of his own. Even when he’s there, he’s not really there” (209). Baumgartner, though, features consideration of an actual ghost when Sy dreams that he receives a phone call from his late wife Anna, where she explains that she is in “the Great Nowhere, a black space in which nothing is visible” (61). She is no longer embodied and so cannot feel or hear or want. She tells him to “Call her a What, if he likes, or a spirit, or an emanation of the vast, formless surround, or, quite simply, a monad that thinks, and when she thinks it sometimes happens that she can see the things she is imagining” (61). How can a phenomenologist imagine a ghost? As a disembodied spark of ongoing consciousness, perhaps. She goes on:

She can’t be sure of anything, she says, but she suspects that he is the one who is sustaining her through this incomprehensible afterlife, this paradoxical state of conscious non-existence, which must and will come to an end at some point, she feels, but as long as he is alive and still able to think about her, her consciousness will continue to be awakened and reawakened by his thoughts, to such an extent that she can sometimes go into his head and hear those thoughts and see what he is seeing through his eyes. (62)

She goes on to say that “the living and the dead are connected” and that when Baumgartner dies, she expects her consciousness to be “extinguished forever” (62).

Baumgartner finds comfort in this dream, though he does not actually believe that it happened or that Anna exists, even in the strange “conscious non-existence” she described. Just the experience of having heard her voice, having felt confirmation that she is still with him, is enough. Baumgartner considers that the dream held “not a scientific truth, perhaps, not a verifiable truth, but an emotional truth” (64). Anna’s ghost, then, is not real, but the effects of it are. Auster writes: “In the same way that a person can be transformed by the imaginary events recounted in a work of fiction, Baumgartner has been transformed by the story he told himself in the dream” (64). The ghost is just a story, but he needs that story, just as we all need stories. The experience described by Anna almost exactly mirrors the phenomenology of reading explained by Poulet; she sees things through Baumgartner’s eyes, experiences the world through him. Auster, as he did in “Ghosts” (and then again in Travels in the Scriptorium when Mr. Blank laments he has always felt like a ghost, and in In the Country of Last Things when despair is communicated in the language of ghosts, and in Invention of Solitude when he realizes the reciprocity of haunting and being haunted) is discussing the meaning of reading and writing through the metaphor of ghosts. But if Anna is “awakened and reawakened” when her husband thinks of her, doesn’t that make her the work, summoned into existence and awareness of existence when the reader reads her? If Sy is the one whose consciousness is taking over and supplying the story, the writer and thus the ghost, then Anna is the haunted, the reader—and obviously, as the deceased who is constantly on the mind of the living partner, she is also the ghost. Readers and writers are intertwined, Auster suggests, and not so easily distinguished from one another. Auster affirmed as much in a 2005 interview with Jonathan Lethem in The Believer: “The novel is really one of the only places in the world where two strangers can meet on terms of absolute intimacy. The reader and the writer make the book together. You as a reader enter the consciousness of another person, and in doing so I think you discover something about your own humanity, and it makes you feel more alive.” Sy Baumgartner has lost his other half and so is unmoored; readers and writers need each other to co-create meaning. Together they make meaning and one without the other is a broken thing, partial.

Indeed, this idea of having lost wholeness captivates Baumgartner: phantom limb syndrome gives him the language he needs to develop his theory of grief. Like an amputee still feels pain in the missing limb, the living feel the dead, or where they should be:

He thinks of mothers and fathers mourning their dead children, children mourning their dead parents, women mourning their dead husbands, men mourning their dead wives and how closely their suffering resembles the aftereffects of an amputation, for the missing leg or arm was once attached to a living body, and the missing person was once attached to another living person, and if you are the one who lives on, you will discover that the amputated part of you, the phantom part of you, can still be a source of profound, unholy pain. (55)

Baumgartner doesn’t actually believe in ghosts, but he can feel Anna there the same way your leg might ache and itch even after it is no longer attached. The connection between people who love each other on a certain level—specifically parents and children, spouses—is not really severable, he affirms, for “certain remedies can sometimes alleviate the symptoms, but there is no ultimate cure” (55). Auster, who had lost his granddaughter and his son and who knew he was likely soon to leave his wife a widow, does not try to whitewash grief: it’s real and it’s forever. As he said in a 2023 interview with Nicholas Wroe in The Guardian, “When someone who is central to your life dies, a part of you dies as well. It’s not simple, you never get over it.”

There are other games afoot in Baumgartner. The protagonist’s work on Kierkegaard’s pseudonyms winks at Auster’s famous insistence on including his own name and details about himself, only sometimes factual, in all his books, here present in the form of Sy’s maternal family, the Austers, and his trip to Eastern Europe to learn their Holocaust story—a passage Auster published elsewhere before assigning it to Baumgartner, and one wherein again the fundamental need for fiction is affirmed. Baumgartner’s satirical work is on embodied consciousness and compares the human to an automobile. The novel ends with a car accident from which the character emerges either dead or alive, either proving or disproving his long-held materialist belief; we are never to know which in the space of the novel and we leave Sy, as we leave Auster, on the precipice of finding out.

Still, of all the deadly serious games going on in Baumgartner, it is the relationship between reader and writer suggested by the widower and his wife’s ghost that I cannot shake and that operates most clearly as Auster’s parting message to us, his readers and thus his co-creators. In “Ghosts,” probably the most famous of his works to use the metaphor of the ghost and the haunted to discuss the reader-writer dynamic, there is an ominous tension between the two throughout that erupts into deadly violence. Here, there is only love, grief at the necessity of parting, and hope that the meaning we have made together remains, that as long as the readers are still reading, the writer is not entirely lost. It feels like a confirmation of his life’s work as well as a loving goodbye to his readers, who will not have to wait too long, it turns out, to reconnect with Auster on the page; Siri Hustvedt, Auster’s wife and perennial first reader, is writing a memoir about their marriage appropriately entitled Ghost Stories. Let the haunting continue.