In an excellent article focussing largely on Auster's first prose text, the autobiographical The Invention of Solitude (1982), Stephen Fredman claims that the image of the “the room of the book,” described as “a place where life and writing meet in an unstable, creative, and sometimes dangerous encounter,” facilitates engagement with three important issues throughout Auster's work: the relation of prose to poetry, a parthenogenic fantasy of masculine creativity, and Holocaust imagery.Footnote ¹ For Fredman, one dangerous consequence of the encounter between life and writing is illustrated by a corollary of the fantasy of masculine creativity in The Invention of Solitude: the erasure and silencing of women's voices. Auster's encounter with a prostitute is representative of the way in which Fredman believes women are portrayed in this text: Fredman states that “The woman's role … is ‘effaced’ (that is, she is rendered faceless) and … she becomes mute.”Footnote ² But this perceived effacement of women's agency and voices is contradicted by the considerable importance Fredman attributes to one female in particular in The Invention of Solitude, Anne Frank. Indeed, Fredman argues that Anne Frank functions as a figure for both specifically Jewish, and universal, post-Holocaust existence. He suggests, for instance, that it is “as if the condition of hiding imposed on Anne Frank by the threat of the Holocaust had now become the condition of being in the world,” and, “In a figurative sense all Jews after the war grew up within this shadow.”Footnote ³ In this article, Auster's references to Anne Frank in The Invention of Solitude will be examined in order to account for the contradiction in Fredman's argument. It will be claimed that Fredman's explanation for the effacement of women's voices is misplaced, and that he underestimates the importance of considering Auster's text as autobiography. Auster's invocations of Anne Frank bring two of those major concerns cited by Fredman – masculine creativity and Holocaust imagery – into close proximity, and complicate those concerns via the representation of female identity in the text, which Fredman rightly notes is troubling. Not only this, but Auster's invocations of Anne Frank should be explored because they partake in what Dennis Barone identifies as the “synthesis of postmodern themes and premodern questions” vital throughout Auster's oeuvre, and which much criticism of Auster can be understood as exploring.Footnote ⁴ The contradiction exposed by Fredman's analysis implies that this “synthesis” may not be as successfully achieved as Barone suggests – at least, not in The Invention of Solitude.

The Invention of Solitude takes as its central subject the death of Auster's father in 1979. The text is divided into two parts. In the first, “Portrait of an Invisible Man,” Auster undertakes a biographer's role, attempting to record and explain his father's character despite the fact that his father's defining quality was a refusal to be known. Auster also describes his own grief in the immediacy of his father's death. The second section, “The Book of Memory,” explores memory and the act of writing. Focussing more on Auster, this section is nevertheless narrated in the third-person voice, with Auster depicted as a protagonist called A. All references to Anne Frank in the text occur within this second section. Fredman notes that Auster's visit in 1980 to the building in Amsterdam in which Frank lived (in hiding, from 1942 to 1944) supplies the “originary moment” for “The Book of Memory.”Footnote ⁵ A. recalls that in this house he was moved to tears: “Not sobbing, as might happen in response to a deep inner pain, but crying without sound, the tears streaming down his cheeks, as if purely in response to the world.”Footnote ⁶ At this juncture, when A. is moved to tears, the aims of both sections of the text coalesce. The visit to the house where Anne Frank lived not only stimulates the writing of the “Book of Memory” but allows Auster/A. to explore, record and come to terms with his grief over his father's death.

It is difficult for Auster to feel close to his father in life, or write about him after his death, because of his father's unknowability, caused by his solitary nature. This solitude constitutes a patrimony with which Auster must negotiate; indeed, John D. Barbour argues, “In his memoir Auster tries to ‘invent’ or redefine solitude in a more positive way than his father's example left him.”Footnote ⁷ It is by inventing a new way of existing in solitude, then, that Auster attempts to be different to his father. In “Portrait of an Invisible Man,” Auster claims that one effect of his father's solitude is that “the domain of the other was unreal to him” (16), suggesting that the way in which A. encounters “the domain of the other” is one means by which he can mark his difference from his father. Anne Frank's Amsterdam room represents one domain of the other. A.'s tears reveal that his solitude (illustrated in the situation of writing, the “room of the book”), unlike his father's solitude, connects him to others. The domain of the other is not unreal to A. The visit to Anne Frank's room thus marks the beginning of the invention of solitude. A. claims that his tears do not come from a deep inner pain, but of course they do; he grieves for his father. His reluctance to admit personal reasons for his emotional response is puzzling, especially as that response is recalled within an autobiographical text, which might be expected to foreground personal experience, honestly, however problematic the notion of autobiographical truth may be. It is the central contention of this article that A.'s resistance to grounding his response to Anne Frank's house in the personal (the autobiographical, even) is critical to understanding the contradiction in Fredman's argument (women are “effaced” in The Invention of Solitude, yet Anne Frank is very important).

If Anne Frank's room represents the “domain of the other,” then Frank herself can be considered in terms of the role of the other according to the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas. For Levinas, Western metaphysics reveals a totalizing (mastering) impulse to reduce the other to the same; that is, to understand the other in terms of the values of Western culture. Levinas calls for an “ethics of ethics” resisting this totalizing impulse:

The face-to-face encounter calls an individual to be responsible both for that other and for himself (use of the male pronoun here is deliberate and will be discussed later). For Levinas the claims of the “other” (not the desires of the self) must take precedence in ethical relationships. In The Invention of Solitude, Auster's father refuses to acknowledge the claims of the other, although this refusal would still be classed by Levinas as a response to the other, if unethical (because of its abdication of responsibility). One explanation for A.'s reluctance to classify his tears as “deep inner pain” (personal pain) may be that in order to distinguish between himself and his father, he must show that he desires to form relationships with the other and acknowledges the claims of the other; this might entail suppressing personal grief. However, in The Invention of Solitude, A.'s encounter with Anne Frank enables him to confront the claims of the other and to work through his grief. A.'s construction of himself as other to his father constitutes a strategy by which he attempts to cope with his father's death, and A. constructs himself as other to his father by engaging in an act of self-representation in which he is constructed as responsive to others. A.'s grief therefore affects his responses to others at all times. It influences his selection of, and meditations on, particular memories. A.'s encounters with Anne Frank (in Amsterdam, in memory, in the process of writing “The Book of Memory”) are central to the dual objectives of mourning his father and constructing himself as other to his father.

Anne Frank's role as a Levinasian “other” is illustrated in A.'s description of the room in which she wrote her diary:

In this passage Anne Frank is invoked in order to suggest and foreclose a number of face-to-face encounters. The irony that windows of a room where Anne Frank worked overlook those of a house where Descartes lived, where children now live, allows A. to ponder ethical questions pertaining to causes and legacies of the Holocaust. What does the Enlightenment philosophical tradition to which Descartes belonged have to do with the Holocaust? If Adorno and Horkheimer are correct in arguing that the Holocaust represents an extreme result of Enlightenment aims in modernity, then that philosophical tradition has much to do with the Holocaust.Footnote ⁹ And what can children growing up after the Holocaust learn from what happened to Anne Frank? If Fredman is correct to suggest that Anne Frank writing, in hiding, in her room, functions in Auster's text as an archetype of Jewish and universal identity in the post-Holocaust era, then there is much to learn from Anne Frank; this is demonstrated in the simple fact that her life and posthumous reputation enables A. to pose these questions.

Ultimately, though, the connections A. makes between Anne Frank and Descartes, and between the children and Anne Frank, are notable for their tenuousness. These are not literal face-to-face encounters. They are only hypothesized by A., grounded on his observations of the world around him, confirming Levinas's claim that “Already of itself ethics is an ‘optics.’ ”Footnote ¹⁰ The connections A. makes are offered for consideration to readers of The Invention of Solitude, who, like the children whose toys lie in the garden, belong to post-Holocaust generations. The connections A. makes are founded upon chance and coincidence (such as the proximity of the houses and their notable inhabitants), and Auster's preoccupation with both is well documented.Footnote ¹¹ The encounters A. hypothesizes involving Anne Frank allow him to explore not only specific ethical questions about the Holocaust, but the ethical implications of constructing the face-to-face encounters themselves. Does it matter that the building where Anne Frank lived looked out onto a building where Descartes lived? In The Invention of Solitude, the answer is yes and no. A. continues: “To imagine Anne Frank, for example, had she lived on after the war, reading Descartes’ Meditations as a university student in Amsterdam. To imagine a solitude so crushing, so unconsolable, that one stops breathing for hundreds of years” (87). Sue Vice notes that novels which represent the Holocaust often use the technique of foreshadowing (she uses Michael André Bernstein's terminology), in which a unidirectional view of history causes actions of characters in the historical past to be judged in light of a future outcome (in this case, the Holocaust) which is presented as inevitable, despite the fact that characters could not have known that outcome.Footnote ¹² Although Auster's text is not fictional, A.'s consideration of the Descartes and Anne Frank buildings involves foreshadowing. Vice notes that such foreshadowings often rely upon fatalism, an overdetermined sense that the Holocaust is inevitable. The connections A. makes are therefore predicated upon the totalization Levinas finds so problematic, despite the fact that raising questions about causes and effects of the Holocaust, as A. does, is surely worthwhile. Also, imagining Anne Frank at university could be understood as sideshadowing, meaning that A. presents an alternative to the known historical outcome (Frank's death in Bergen-Belsen). If foreshadowing involves a problematic fatalism, perhaps this instance of sideshadowing is less complicit in a totalizing perspective, since, by imagining an alternative history for Anne Frank, it arguably diminishes the overdetermined framework within which the Holocaust is often discussed. Yet that alternative future for Anne Frank counters historical fact, and is problematic. Clearly, A.'s invocations of Anne Frank implicate him within difficult (and familiar) ethical issues in relation to representing the Holocaust.Footnote ¹³ But how do A.'s invocations of Anne Frank relate to his father's death? Why is A. reluctant to acknowledge that his tears in her room are caused by personal pain? To answer these questions, it is important to consider the importance of children in the text, and in relation to Fredman and Barbour's readings.

A.'s preoccupation with the toys outside the house in which Frank lived is indicative of his concern with children in this text. This concern is caused by the fact that A. is a father. Fredman and Barbour both argue that it is through A.'s relationship with his child, Daniel, that he seeks consolation for his father's death. Although they explain that process of finding consolation in different ways, for both critics consolation is found in the story of Pinocchio, which A. and Daniel read together:

For Fredman, this is a fantasy of masculine creativity, like Auster's encounter with the prostitute. In this fantasy there is no room – or no room needed – for female identity or the feminine, supporting Fredman's theory that women are “effaced” in the text. Indeed, Fredman argues that A.'s devotion to his son and the exclusion of women's voices are linked: A.'s preoccupation with his son is at least partly stimulated by, and a means of dealing with, his feelings about Daniel's mother. The absence of women's voices in the text can therefore be read as an expression of repressed anger over the dissolution of A.'s marriage.Footnote ¹⁴ For Barbour, consolation is found in the redefinition of solitude: Auster attempts to offer his son a positive model of solitude (such as the solitude entailed in acts of reading, thinking, and writing), one differing from that bequeathed to Auster from his father. Both Fredman and Barbour's readings display anxieties caused by the ways A. constructs categories of “other” and “same.” Fredman is uneasy about what he sees as the effacing of women in the text. Barbour notes that “it is not at all clear how Daniel will react to Paul Auster's aloneness and his rhythm of intimacy and detachment,” and that the ending of the text “raises the question of whether Auster will do a better job than did his father at nurturing his son's capacity for solitude and the invention, creativity, and imagination that he hopes it can foster, while also being intimate, connected, and affirming.”Footnote ¹⁵ Barbour's remarks suggest that A. may lack a sufficient sense of Daniel as an individual, who should be considered in terms other than how he can provide solace for A.'s bereavement.

A.'s practice of seeking consolation by means of his relationship with his son certainly seems to incorporate the son into a totalizing model, grounded upon masculine identity, in which the roles of “father” and “son” can be occupied by the same individual (A. is both father and son) and individuals can be substituted for each other in these roles (sometimes Daniel is the “son,” sometimes it is A.). However, both Fredman and Barbour pay insufficient attention to the fact that in The Invention of Solitude Auster uses not only his son, but also Anne Frank as a means of consolation. In fact, use of Anne Frank as consolatory device precedes and supersedes A.'s use of his son. Acknowledgement of this facilitates an alternative reading of the text and a means of considering Fredman and Barbour's anxieties.

Fredman argues that A. understands Anne Frank primarily as a child, “thus placing her into the genealogical chain of father and children, rather than opening up for her occupation the closed space of the feminine.”Footnote ¹⁶ This does not tell the full story. A. associates Frank with “women” elsewhere in the text:

Here, Frank occupies the space of the feminine. In this context, it is worth noting that Auster's encounter with a prostitute takes place in the “back room” of a Manhattan bar, possibly an analogous allusion to the room where Frank lived in hiding, and suggesting that Frank functions in the text as the prostitute does; as the means to fulfilment of a masculine literary creativity, the generation of “The Book of Memory.” Frank functions as muse, a role she occupies in the work of other male American writers, and in line with long-established patriarchal constructions of the female as “other.”Footnote ¹⁷

The point is that A. does not always efface Anne Frank's gendered identity, and he does not always – or only – consider her a child. Contrary to Fredman's claim that women are rendered “faceless,” A. invokes Frank's gendered identity when it suits him – usually, this involves writing her into patriarchal constructions of the “feminine.” While it can be confidently claimed that Auster invokes Frank in relation to chance and coincidence, and in order to imagine face-to-face encounters which are supposed to resist a totalizing logic, his invocations of her also betray that totalizing logic. It is unclear whether encountering the other as other ever happens in The Invention of Solitude. In Auster's text, what often happens is a reduction of the other to the same, revealed by A.'s reading of the Pinocchio story with regard to his relationship with his son, and the problematic portrayal of female identity in the text, problems echoed in Levinas's model of ethics. Luce Irigaray's assessment that “the feminine other is left without her own specific face” in Levinas's work, causing his philosophy to be “radically short of ethics,” seems pertinent here.Footnote ¹⁸ But if Frank is constructed as “other” when her gender identity is invoked, something more complicated happens when considering the ways her status as child, and her Jewish identity, are invoked. This is to say that the difficulties of assessing Frank's role in Auster's text are caused by the multiple frameworks within which “same” and “other” are constructed, and the difficulties involved in distinguishing between these frameworks, and distinguishing same from other within those frameworks. This is a problem not only in Auster's text but in Levinas's theory of an “ethics of ethics,” which may be deficient in defining precisely what is meant by “the other.”

Anne Frank is predominantly invoked as a means of considering the suffering of children. In particular, she is invoked in relation to media accounts of suffering children in Cambodia. A. quotes an engineer who describes the children as having a “Belsen-like appearance” and immediately notes, “And yes, that is the place where Anne Frank died” (168). A. confesses,

If the suffering of children (of whom Anne Frank is representative here) marks a moment of crisis from which it is unclear how A. will proceed, it is also the words of a child, Anne Frank, which provide consolation. A. quotes from a cautiously optimistic passage in Anne Frank's diary:

But immediately after quoting Frank's words, A. expresses reluctance about relying on them:

A. seeks consolation in Frank's text, but is aware that using it for this purpose might be facile. It is obviously problematic to invoke an individual who perished as the result of a genocidal programme, the planned extermination of European Jews by the Nazi regime, as an optimistic emblem of faith in humanity. Yet this is exactly how Frank is understood by many people, despite the fact that the Holocaust is often invoked as the extreme example of the results of a totalizing logic. One of the epigraphs to Levinas's Otherwise than Being states, in French, that the text is dedicated to Holocaust victims and “the millions on millions of all confessions and all nations, victims of the same hatred of the other man, the same anti-Semitism.”Footnote ¹⁹ While this confirms Robert Eaglestone's sense that “It is the Holocaust that leads to the ‘doublenesses’ and aporias characteristic of ‘postmodern thought,’ which are themselves prefigured in the work of Levinas,”Footnote ²⁰ at least two problems are raised here: is it not the case that “anti-Semitism” functions in Levinas's epigraph in a totalizing manner, reducing all forms of prejudice by containing them within the word “anti-Semitism”? And is it not problematic to argue that the Holocaust functions as a kind of first cause of “postmodernist thought,” as Eaglestone appears to?

All of these difficult issues underpin A.'s uncertainty about how to respond to Frank's text. As with his discussion of the Amsterdam house, invoking Anne Frank's words implicates A. within many ethical conundrums – how appropriate is it to identify with Anne Frank? Does allowing her words to have resonance for one's personal experience entail an ethically problematic reduction of her to the “same”? While these are complicated issues which, like those raised by A.'s considerations about Anne Frank's house, are germane to Levinas's philosophy and to representations of the Holocaust, they are also central to A.'s personal bereavement. It is highly likely that the suffering child A. is thinking about, but does not name in these meditations, is his father. In “Portrait of an Invisible Man” it is revealed that Auster's grandfather (his father's father) was shot and killed by his wife, Auster's grandmother. Auster's father was a probable witness to the event. It is strongly suggested that Auster's father's solitude is caused by this childhood trauma – ”A boy cannot live through this kind of thing without being affected by it as a man” (38). At various points in his article, Fredman notes that as a writer, Frank functions as a figure for Auster himself. As a child, she is also a figure for his son and for all suffering children, as a symbol of Jewish identity, and as a figure for Jewish and non-Jewish authorship and existence in the post-Holocaust era. But Fredman does not consider the cumulative effect of making Anne Frank represent all these things. Most crucially, he does not note that far from illustrating A.'s “inability to imagine regeneration through the feminine,” first and foremost, Anne Frank is a figure for Auster's father – but his father as a suffering child. Fredman claims that “casting aside the feminine as a source of regeneration, A. turns to the hope that the son can rescue the father.”Footnote ²¹ But this is not what happens. Anne Frank rescues the writer, Auster, by providing him with a means of grieving for his father.

When Auster cries in Frank's room, he cries over his father's death. The traumatic life of Anne Frank (Anne Frank as a suffering child) is arguably something which Auster can access in a more immediate sense than his father's childhood trauma. This might seem an extraordinary claim. However, Auster's father's solitary nature has made it difficult for his son to feel close to him. Also, Frank's trauma and death is well known, well documented and memorialized (in her diary, in biographies, by the conversion of the house where she lived into a museum) in a way in which Auster's father's childhood trauma is not. Auster only finds out about his grandfather's murder by chance, and via unreliable newspaper accounts of events. In addition to the important fact that, like Auster's father, she is a suffering child, Frank's Jewishness has resonance for Auster, given his own American Jewish identity. Not only this, but it is hinted in “Portrait of an Invisible Man” that A. understands his grandfather's murder to be partially explained by domestic tensions within an immigrant family struggling to assimilate in early twentieth-century America, and by anti-Semitism in the community in which his grandparents lived in poverty (38, 48, 51). Anne Frank, then, offers Auster proximity to a traumatic experience, and a means of expressing his grief over his father without foregrounding the fact that he does so – something he resists because he is trying to be other than his father. Of course, this means that A. risks appropriating Anne Frank in problematic ways.

The question of how Anne Frank should be represented has been contentious (and often constructed as an ethical question) ever since a Broadway adaptation of her diary was first produced in America in 1955. Following the play's production, controversy grew about the fact that Frank's Jewishness was downplayed in favour of a “universal” or “Americanized” portrayal which emphasized the sentimental at the expense of historical fact.Footnote ²² The universalizing appropriation of Anne Frank casts her as redemptive symbol of the suffering of all. Of course, this is exactly how Anne Frank functions for A. As an American Jewish writer, A. can invoke Anne Frank as a symbol with personal relevance and wider significance. She functions as both other and same. A.'s tears in Frank's house are reminiscent of sentimental audience responses to the Broadway play. His tears thus associate him with mass or popular culture, patriarchal constructions of the “feminine” (as emotive, sentimental), and the personal – all of which he is at pains to construct as “other” to himself in the text (an act which ironically reveals him to be complicit in the totalizing processes he is simultaneously attempting to avoid). The desire to avoid confronting the ambivalences involved in this complex situation constitute another reason why A. resists acknowledging that his tears are caused by inner pain. While ostensibly grieving over Frank, and allowing Frank to stand as representative of the suffering of others (especially children), A. has transformed his father not merely into the “other,” but into someone else, someone represented as being as responsive to others as his father is unresponsive – Anne Frank.

Further confirmation of this is offered by consideration of one more way in which Frank is invoked in the text. A. expresses a desire to show photographs, especially those of children. He quotes Frank evaluating a photo of herself: “This is a photo that shows me as I should always like to look. Then I would surely have a chance to go to Hollywood. But now, unfortunately, I usually look different” (103). Here Frank imagines a future in America, as an actress (putting on different faces? imagining herself as other?). Ironically, this involves accommodation within the very same popular culture in which there was such a controversial representation of her after her death (noting this irony involves foreshadowing). Her comment about looking different refers to the fact that living conditions in the Annexe have altered her appearance, and has disturbing implications given that her “difference” (her Jewishness) causes her death. Fascinatingly, this specific quotation is not cited in the list of “References” concluding The Invention of Solitude, although Frank's diary is cited elsewhere. Just as Frank's face is ultimately absent – because the photos are not presented within the text, A. only expresses a desire to show them – neither is her comment given concrete reference. It is as if A. both does and does not want to locate Frank inside (or outside, for that matter) the “room of the book.” Or it is as if A. is acknowledging that there is no single reference – or any reference – for her. This discussion might reveal nothing more than the fact that any act of reading involves the search for meaning and significance, as reliant upon chance and coincidence as the enterprise A. engages in. However, the issues of reference and effacement raised by that absent citation enable consideration of The Invention of Solitude as autobiography.