Paul Auster's Leviathan and the End of American Liberty

This morning I was about to finish the second novel I’ve read from Paul Auster, and I must admit that I was afraid that it would disappoint me as the previous one (City of Glass) did. Not that City of Glass (1985) is a bad novel. I enjoyed it a lot and I think it’s terrific. But the ending just blew it off. Today I want to make a short comment on Leviathan (1992). Not only is the beginning really grasping, but so is the ending

The book’s title is already curious. Leviathan is a Biblical monster, especially prominent in the books of Job, and Jonah, but it’s also the title of Thomas Hobbes’ groundbreaking political treatise of 1651. This should be kept in mind because, even though the main plot seems to have barely any relation to the origin of the name leviathan, it becomes the word around which Auster brings together various notions that are originally separate.

Auster’s Laviathan is a story told by a novelist called Peter Aaron, who recounts his friendship with another writer, Benjamin Sachs, who at the book’s very beginning is accidently killed by a bomb in a deserted road in northern Wisconsin. The entire novel is, then, the explanation of how and why Ben Sachs died that way. The story goes around how they met their respective wives, their respective divorces, their respective lovers, and the respective coincidences that entangle most of their relations, and so forth. It would be a quite conventional story if it weren’t because the reader knows that the main character ends up blowing himself when the bomb he was building detonates by accident. And the shadow of this horrible death is cast all over the novel. You just want to know why he ends up like that, and, in the meantime, many interesting things happen, basically because Paul Auster is an outstanding storyteller.

Sachs’ first book is called The Big Colossus, and the name is a very important detail that the perspicacious reader will not overpass. First, it’s a reference to the Statue of Liberty (which plays a major role in the story), given that it’s a huge statue at the entrance of an important sea port, just as the Colossus of Rhodes was back in the times. And second, because at the moment of his death, Sachs had left an unfinished novel he wanted to call Leviathan. Both are names of gargantuan-size beings, which means Auster is implying a relation between both names. Thanks to this we can grasp the Freudian aspect of Auster’s character buildup. For example, by the middle of the novel Sachs starts becoming more and more depressed as he becomes conscious of his insignificance in the world. He had been in jail (where he wrote his first novel) for opposing conscription during the Vietnam War. He was a man of ideals; left-wing ideals. And as the Reagan era moves forward (the story takes place mostly during the 80’s), with patriotic Americanism and chauvinism reigning everywhere in the political environment, men like Sachs become less prominent, and ultimately ignored. There is a point of the story in which Sachs hides himself in a bookstore and finds his novel, The Big Colossus, piled among other irrelevant titles completely forgotten, for the humiliating price of five bucks. This was the turning point where he decided that he wanted to be a radical activist and stops writing, which is the main decision that led to his death. The immense emptiness he feels makes him leave his adorable wife and drop from the world, and it was due to his ego being absolutely hammered by his surroundings. This is the book’s psychological dimension.

But the richness of Leviathan spreads to mystical and symbolic levels. There is a traumatic episode in Sachs childhood that took place when he was visiting with his mother the Statue of Liberty. Inside the statue, his mom had a panic attack that became a painful memory that might have been the unconscious motive for targeting years later smaller replicas of the statue all over the United States. A very famous passage of Jonah (1:17) says: “But the LORD provided a great fish to swallow Jonah, and Jonah was inside the fish three days and three nights.” The “big fish” is a translation of the Hebrew word “dag,” which is also traditionally translated as “leviathan”. In few words, Auster makes the episode inside the Statue of Liberty analogous to the Biblical episode in Jonah 1:17, where the statue plays both the role of a monstrous creature as well as the hero’s savior. This leads to my final interpretation.

All of this is set on a political background that never takes the front stage until the novel’s final moments, when Sachs drops writing and becomes a radical anarchist. In his rather insane quest to fight the government, he finds himself fighting a gigantic monster, which is the same symbolic image Hobbes makes of the modern state in his Leviathan of 1651. But the Statue of Liberty, as Auster explicitly mentions, is not a controversial symbol like the American flag. Everyone agrees with the ideas it represents, whether they be real or fantastic. But when Sachs sets on this personal mission to destroy this national symbol all around the U.S., he is making the point that what his country used to stand for, liberty, is being destroyed. It doesn't exist anymore. It has been swallowed by the leviathan state, if you wish. The statue itself, the one in Liberty Island in New York City, was a monstrous structure that had swallowed him in his childhood. Its external appearance and immensity only hides a inside shallowness. Hence the main question Auster’s book presents: Has American liberty being swallowed by the monstrous Federal Government?

The conclusion of the book is particularly pessimistic. But as my usual readers might be aware of, I like that.