The human being is a masterpiece

The human being is a masterpiece. Whose? Its own. 

Paul Auster's 4321 is a masterpiece. It encompasses everything. Nothing is left out: life, death, God, books, parenthood, love, "dear, dirty, devouring New York, the capital of human faces, the horizontal Babel of human tongues", roller coaster, racism, identity, feminism, stories, friendship, sexual discovery and experimentation, freedom, war, politics et al. It is so comprehensive and all-encompassing that one feels petty and exposed. 

At first glance, 4321 is a Bildungsroman, i.e. the boyhood of Archie Ferguson (the son of Stanley Ferguson, a self-made man, and of Rose Adler, a determined woman who both transgresses the confinements of being a woman in the 1960s America and takes pleasure and comfort in them) and his transformation into a man. 

The novel starts with the (his)story of Ferguson's grandfather, a Belarusian migrant who travelled on foot from his native city of Mink "with one hundred rubles sewn into the lining of his jacket" to Hamburg "and then booked passage on a ship called the Empress of China, which crossed the Atlantic in rough winter storms and sailed into New York Harbour on the first day of the twentieth century".  

This is how the story of Archie Ferguson begins. With the image of the nineteen-year-old Isaac Reznikoff, Archie's determined or desperate immigrant grandfather, who seeks good fortune in a hostile land, with its hostile language and hostile people. To adapt means to give up:

The man [a fellow Russian Jew] said to him: Forget the name Reznikoff. It won't do you any good here. You need an American name for your new life in America, something with a good American ring to it. [...] Tell them you're Rockefeller, the man said. You can't go wrong with that. An hour passed, then another hour, and by the time the nineteen-year-old Reznikoff sat down to be questioned by the immigration official, he had forgotten the name the man had told him to give. Your name? the official asked. Slapping his head in frustration, the weary immigrant blurted out in Yiddish, Ikh hob fargessen (I've forgotten)! And so it was that Isaac Reznikoff began his new life in America as Ichabod Ferguson. 

As for any other immigrant in the promised land of America, life is hard, and he eventually gives up not only his identity, but his life too, as he "met an early, unexpected death at the age of forty-two - gunned down in a holdup at the leather-goods warehouse in Chicago where he had been employed as a night watchman". 

One life ends and another one commences. His story - the starting point of Archie's family - alongside the premature birth of the protagonist ("A light, misty snow was falling from the sky. How still everything seemed at that moment, she said to herself, as if nothing in the world were moving but the snow. [...]  Thus Ferguson was born, and for the several seconds after he emerged from his mother's body, he was the youngest human being on the face of the earth") lie at the core of the novel(s). 

From this moment onwards, Paul Auster transgresses the boundaries of traditional narrative form and advances four alternative destinies for his protagonist. These four distinct versions of Archie have common elements, i.e. his family, his talent and fondness for words and writing, Amy, his struggle with God and to grasp the meaning of life and the socio-political turmoil of the 1960s. Yet everything else (life, death, sexuality, college, parents, love, friendships) happens differently.  

At some point in the story, the protagonist sees (his) life as a series of concentric circles - the outer circle was the war in Vietnam - the second circle represented "the Disunited States of America" and all the social turmoil - the third circle was New York, "a laboratory filled with examples of the aforementioned social currents that Ferguson could perceive directly with his own eyes rather than through the filter of written words or published images" - the fourth circle was the Columbia University and the student uprising of 1968 - and the fifth circle was the individual:

each individual person in any one of the four other circles, but in Ferguson’s case the individuals who counted most were the ones he knew personally, above all the friends he shared his life with at Columbia, and above all those others, of course, the individual of individuals, the dot at the center of the smallest of the five circles, the person who was himself. 

Five realms, five separate realities, but each one was connected to the others, which meant that when something happened in the outer circle (the war), its effects could be felt throughout America, New York, Columbia, and every last dot in the inner circle of private, individual lives. 

Likewise, the four alternative destinies of Archibald Ferguson become concentric circles when, towards the end of the novel, we learn that 4321 is, in fact, Archie's novel. He is both protagonist and writer; Adam and God; creation and creator: 

he would invent three other versions of himself and tell their stories along with his own story (more or less his own story, since he too would become a fictionalized version of himself), and write a book about four identical but different people with the same name: Ferguson. 

[...] Only one thing was certain. One by one, the imaginary Fergusons would die, just as Artie Federman had died, but only after he had learned to love them as if they were real, only after the thought of seeing them die had become unbearable to him, and then he would be alone with himself again, the last man standing. Hence the title of the book: 4 3 2 1.

Stories within stories. Four concentric circles. Four novels into one meta novel. 

The genius of Paul Auster resides in controlling language and portraying crowds of people. Hence, in proposing a "parable about human destiny". All four destinies, while intricately constructed and built on specific socio-political contexts, rise above religion, race, history and everything mundane, and depict the quality of being human, h u m a n n e s s. 

Thusly, 4321, in its greatness and scrutiny, pinpoints the paradoxical character of humanity and celebrates the ceaseless story of life with the "never-ending Bore War against the Pains of Human Existence". Life in all its shapes, colours and pains: "God was nowhere [...] but life was everywhere, and death was everywhere". 

The books we read, the movies we watch (Yann Arthus-Bertrand - Human), the stories we hear, the people we (unexpectedly) meet - they all teach us that the human being is a paradox. An intricate labyrinthine conglomeration of raw feelings, instincts, uncontrolled reactions and emotions. 

The human being is a masterpiece. Whose? Its own. 

* * *

The irony is that I am writing these lines about the splendor of life and humanity in the midst of a war. 

Our hearts are crying. We are speechless and we simply cannot stomach the absurdity and obscenity of it all. Sufferance divides and brings people together. It highlights and destroys the humanness in us all. War is a disease. A far worse pandemic than Covid-19. 

"People die, and the world goes on, and whatever we can do to help each other out, well, that's what we do, isn't it?"