Acting, Thinking, and Telling: Anna Blume's Dilemma in Paul Auster's In the Country of Last Things

The Problem of Action

Let us begin with some confusion. Anna Blume, the protagonist and primary narrator of Paul Auster's In the Country of Last Things (1987), has travelled to a strange and insulated country to find her missing brother, yet his destiny remains a total mystery throughout the novel. The city where Anna has arrived is governed not just by contingency but by an extreme randomness. Things, ways, houses, rules, even words disappear without warning. In this context, Anna says something rather odd and perplexing:

Faced with the most ordinary occurrence, you no longer know how to act, and because you cannot act, you find yourself unable to think. The brain is a muddle. All around you one change follows another, each day produces a new upheaval, the old assumptions are so much air and emptiness.

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In what follows, I shall situate Anna's dilemma in the context of political thought; then I shall discuss the genre of Anna's narrative and compare it to alternatives such as dystopia, journal, and testimony. As fictional testimony, the work has a number of connections with Primo Levi's factual account of Auschwitz. But rather than suggesting any single context for the novel, I ponder the possibility of reading it as a hybrid image of twentieth-century history.

I see a key to Anna Blume's dilemma in the intimate relationship between narrative, action, and thinking —in particular, the way Paul Ricoeur (1984) has discussed the theme under the title of "semantics of action" in his theory of triple layers of narrative mimesis. Following Ricoeur, I suggest that the capacity to act depends both on a cognitive capacity to analyse action and the world in terms of stories, and the emotionally vital possibility of recounting traumatic experiences in narrative form. Not quite incidentally, the novel portrays the figures of a narrative social worker and a narrative doctor as the last possible helpers of the inhabitants of the doomed city.

Anna Blume's account of her dilemma blatantly contradicts the Platonic heritage of the order of things, according to which thought always precedes action, and the quality of thought affects the attributes of action. Plato's key actor was nothing less than a philosopher-ruler, a ruler who would be, above all, a philosopher (see Coleman 2000: 81-114). But the privileging of thought over action belongs not only to the distant past. "No one could deny the international impact of John Rawls's A Theory of Justice (1971), which almost single-handedly revived normative political philosophy and the contractualist tradition of political thought," writes Cécile Laborde (2002: 133). Rawls, indeed, has often been celebrated as the initiator of the new rise of political thought in the 1970s. Action does not profile in his theory. His version of political philosophy is all about the goals, the ideals that characterize a good policy.

In discussing the Stoics' influence on Western political thought, Frank Ankersmit accentuates the strong connectedness of action and thought in Stoicism: "the parallelism and sometimes identity of the order of thought and that of practical and ethical action. . . . The Stoa required of human beings a 'logical life'" (1996: 32). Since 1800, Ankersmit argues, the dethronement of monarchs and the period of revolutions multiplied the number of possible actors and ended the former unity of thought and action. A political party is one significant formation in this process, because it "at least to a certain extent still embodies the unity of thought and action" (36). But that is meagre solace. Max Weber points to a new divide between action and premeditation by maintaining that "the eventual outcome of political action frequently, indeed regularly, stands in a quite inadequate, even paradoxical relation to its original, intended meaning and purpose (Sinn)" (Weber 1994: 355). For Weber, there is not and cannot be any unequivocal ethical ground for political action.

Action seems thus to gain more and more independence from and relevance for thought. This is obvious in Hannah Arendt's idea of action as taking the initiative...