mirrors of madness

7/31/2019 Mirrors of Madness

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Mirrors of Madness: Paul Auster's The New York Trilogy

Steven E. Alford

My true place in the world, it turned out, was somewhere beyond

myself, and if that place was inside me, it was also unlocatable.

This was the tiny hole between self and not-self, and for the first

time in my life I saw this nowhere as the exact center of the world.

The Locked Room

Introduction

Among the many puzzles in Paul Auster's remarkable The New

York Trilogy, a persistent one involves the identity of the

narrator(s) of these novels. In answering the question, "who

narrates these three stories?" I will demonstrate that thematically

the novels develop the problematic of self-identity. Along the way

I will show how questions of identity flow into questions abouttextuality, and undermine the ontologically distinct categories of

author, narrator, and reader. Thematically, The New York Trilogy

argues that the selfwithin the novels and withoutis a textual

construct, and subject to the difference and deferral inherent in

language. The novels enact a series of binary oppositions

between characters engaged in dramatic psychological and

physical confrontationthat demonstrates the impossibility of a

pure opposition between self and other. From within every

conflicted doubling a triad emerges, challenging our commonsense

notions of the self.

Previous scholars have examined The New York Trilogy from

different angles. Alison Russell linked the novels to Derrida's

analysis of polysemy and the problems such polysemy produces


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for our senses of identity and unity, and for the ability of language

to refer truthfully to the world. In addition, she briefly explored the

relation between The New York Trilogy and the romance (including

the detective story), as well as noting the connection between it

and travel literature. Norma Rowen's 1991 essay focusedexclusively on City of Glass, arguing that the novel concerns the

madness involved in the search for absolute knowledge,

symbolized in the book (among other ways) as Peter Stillman's

search for a prelapsarian language. While relying on their excellent

work, I am concerned here to explore the issue of the identity of

the narrator(s) of these stories.

The New York Trilogy is nominally a collection of detective storiesthat, within the generic constraints of detective fiction, engage in a

series of self-oriented metaphysical explorations.1 While these

tales could be characterized accurately as postmodern, in that they

employ a pop culture form to reflect on issues more profound than

"whodunit," postmodern detective fiction did not originate the

concern with metaphysical issues. Julian Symons offers some

examples of metaphysical detective fiction at virtually the

beginning of the genre. We can see, for example, a predecessor of

Auster's Daniel Quinn-William Wilson-Max Work triad in

Frederick Irving Anderson's Adventures of the Infallible Godahl

(1914): "Godahl, a criminal who always succeeds, is the creation

of a writer named Oliver Armiston. In one of the best stories the

two become confused in a Borgesian manner, as Armiston is duped

into using Godahl's talents to provide the means of committing an

actual crime" (83). And Maurice Leblanc's Arsne Lupin poses "in

the novel 813 (1910) ...as the Chef de la Suret for four years, and

arrests himself during the investigation" (84), echoing in fiction theexperiences of the real-life Vidocq, whose own Mmoires were

thought to be largely fictional (32). These latter dramas, that reveal

the border between lawfulness and criminality as nonexistent, echo

the erasure of the borders between one self and the other that we

find between Black and Blue in Ghosts, and between the narrator


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and Fanshawe in The Locked Room.

Closer to our own time, Dashiel Hammett's Continental Op isn't

innocent of a metaphysical flavor. As Steven Marcus has noted

[The detective] actively undertakes to deconstruct, decompose, and

thus demystify the fictionaland therefore falsereality created

by the characters, crooks or not, with whom he is involved. ... His

major effort is to make the fictions of others visible as fictions,

inventions, concealments, falsehoods, and mystifications. When a

fiction becomes visible as such, it begins to dissolve and disappear,

and presumably should reveal behind it the "real" reality that was

there all the time and that it was masking. Yet what happens inHammett is that what is revealed as "reality" is still a further

fiction-making activity ... Dashiell Hammett, the writer, is

continually doing the same thing as the Op and all the other

characters in the fiction he is creating. ...He is making a fiction (in

writing) in the real world; and this fiction, like the real world itself,

is coherent but not necessarily rational. What one both begins and

ends with, then, is a story, a narrative, a coherent yet questionable

account of the world. (xxi)

What Stephen Marcus is suggesting here about Hammett's text

could be asserted about Auster's works as well. Unlike Hammett,

however, Auster recognizes that while detective stories are

"coherent yet questionable," the same could be said about any

story about the world, including those nominally regarded as

nonfictional. And given that the "real" authors of stories are

themselves a part of the world, the making of the author, as well as

the narrator is the making of a fiction, both inside and outside thetext.2 Hence, in Auster's work, the solution to the mystery is not

the discovery of the criminal "other," but how the other is

implicated in the self-constitution of the investigator. In turn, just

as Dupin claims that detection involves "an identification of the

reasoner's intellect with that of his opponent" (qtd. in Auster 65),


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the author's intellect can be identified with that of his narrator. But

the connections between author, narrator, character (and the

character's relation with other characters, as well as the relation

between these entities and the reader) are not as simple as a string

of binary associations.

The names and interrelations of the narrators of the three books of

The New York Trilogy are complex and paradoxical. Characters'

names are twinned, characters are revealed to be imaginary beings

invented by other characters, characters appear in one book, only

to maintain their name, but switch to another identity, in another

book, and so forth. This makes for not only complexity, but

outright contradiction.

City of Glass

Told in the third person by an unnamed narrator, City of Glass

follows Daniel Quinn, who at the prompting of a wrong number,

impersonates Paul Auster of the Auster Detective Agency (who

seems to exist only in the imaginations of Virginia and Peter

Stillman, Junior, since Quinn fails to find him). The Paul Auster

Quinn does find is a Manhattan author, whose name is identical tothe "real" author ofThe New York Trilogy.3This Paul Auster tells

Quinn he is working on a book of essays, currently a piece about

Don Quixote, concerned "with the authorship of the book. Who

wrote it, and how it was written."4

Don Quixote claims the text was originally written in Arabic by

Cid Hamete Benengeli. Chancing on it in the Toledo market,

Cervantes arranged to have it translated, and then presentedhimself as the editor of the translation. Since Cid Hamete neither

appears in the novel, nor once claims to be present during

Quixote's exploits, the character Paul Auster argues that Cid

Hamete is actually a pastiche of four peoplethe illiterate Sancho

Panza and only witness to all Quixote's adventures, the barber and


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the priest (who transcribed Panza's dictated story), and Samson

Carrasco, the bachelor from Salamanca, who translated it into

Arabic. Cervantes then discovered the book, and had it translated

and published.

Why should these men go to such trouble? According to Auster, to

cure Don Quixote of his madness. "The idea was to hold a mirror

up to Don Quixote's madness, to record each of his absurd and

ludicrous delusions, so that when he finally read the book himself,

he would see the error of his ways" (118-119). But Auster adds one

last twist to his argument. Don Quixote was not mad, as his friends

thought. Since Quixote wonders repeatedly how accurately the

chronicler will record his adventurers, he must have chosen SanchoPanza and the three others to play the roles of his "saviors." Not

only that, Quixote probably translated the Arabic manuscript back

into Spanish. That is, Cervantes hired Quixote to translate

Quixote's own story.

Why, according to Auster, would anyone do anything so complex

and bizarre?

[Quixote] wanted to test the gullibility of his fellow men. Would itbe possible, he wondered, to stand up before the world and with

the utmost conviction spew out lies and nonsense? To say that

windmills were knights, that a barber's basin was a helmet, that

puppets were real people? ...In other words, to what extent would

people tolerate blasphemies if they gave them amusement? The

answer is obvious, isn't it? To any extent. The proof is that we still

read the book. (119-120)

As we shall see, The New York Trilogy holds a mirror up to our

own madnessthe assumption of our hermetic individuality.

City of Glass is told in third person. However, after the bulk of the

novel is rendered in third person, the final two pages shift to first


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person, when the narrator returns from a trip to Africa and calls his

friend, the writer Paul Auster. Auster has become obsessed with

Quinn (who himself was obsessed with the Stillmans), but has lost

track of him, and also cannot find Virginia Stillman. Auster and

the narrator visit Virginia Stillman's apartment, where Auster findsQuinn's red notebook, and gives it to the narrator for safekeeping.

The narrator then confesses that he has followed the red notebook

as closely as possible in telling his story, and has "refrained from

any interpretation" (158).

Like "editors" of previous fictions (The Sorrows of Young Werther

andNotes from Underground, for example), the confident

professions of editorial thoroughness and sincerity lack foundation.The narrator has never met Quinn, the subject of his story, and has

only two sources of information about him, Auster and the red

notebook. Auster's knowledge of his narratee, Quinn, actually

emerges only from Quinn's account, since the only time he and

Auster met was in Auster's apartment (and Quinn's account to

Auster may or may not have been distorted). Hence, the narrator's

only two sources are the hearsay of Auster and a text, Quinn's

notebook. The narrator has no direct experience of or information

about the story he tells.5

Returning to the character Auster's account of Quixote, we can

observe some parallels.6If we were to say provisionally that the

narrator is {Paul Auster} (bracketing, for now, his ontological

status),7 we could say that the story {Auster} tells has been

invented for him by some concerned friends, presumably a real-life

Quinn (who would parallel Sancho Panza) and the Stillmans (who

would parallel the other three friends). Presumably, {Auster} hasbeen having difficulty with his sanity, and his friends have

concocted City of Glass to hold up a mirror to his madness.

However, continuing to follow the lines of the Quixote argument,

we could argue as well that {Auster} has engineered the entire

enterprise, and chosen Quinn and the Stillmans as his "saviors," so


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that he could spew out lies and nonsense for people's amusement.

Hence, Paul Auster, the writer in City of Glass, is a character

invented by {Paul Auster}, narrator, the same way that the

character "Don Quixote" was engineered by Don Quixote.

Of course, Don Quixote never existed, but was invented by Miguel

de Cervantes Saavedra of Spain. By association, {Paul Auster}

never existed, but was an invention of the "real" Paul Auster, of

Manhattan.8 Hence, we have three Austers, not two: author,

narrator, and character, each ontologically distinct.

The twinning has uncovered a triad, which has its corollary in City

of Glass. Daniel Quinn, detective fiction writer, had taken on thepseudonym of William Wilson. "William Wilson, after all, was an

invention, and even though he had been born within Quinn

himself, he now led an independent life. Quinn treated him with

deference, at times even admiration, but he never went so far as to

believe that he and William Wilson were the same man" (5).

"William Wilson" has authored a series of books featuring a

private-eye narrator, Max Work. "Whereas William Wilson

remained an abstract figure for [Quinn], Work had increasingly

come to life. In the triad of selves that Quinn had become, Wilsonserved as a kind of ventriloquist, Quinn himself was the dummy,

and Work was the animated voice that gave purpose to the

enterprise" (6).

Note the surprising role assignment in this conceit. Ordinarily, we

would consider Quinn the ventriloquist, Wilson the dummy, and

the words of the dummy Work's story. As the audience, we would

then attend to the dummy's words, failing to notice Quinn movinghis lips, owing to our absorption in the tale. By this account,

however, Wilson is the ventriloquist and Quinn is the dummy. This

textual analogy suggests that Quinn exists only insofar as the

words he invents give him life.


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To tell the story that is City of Glass, {Auster's} only sources are a

text and one person's second-hand account. But in terms of self-

knowledge, what does Paul Auster, author, have to go on? In his

daily life, Paul Auster tells himself stories about himself (as we all

do, by engaging in interior dialogue), and others tell him storiesabout himself. He creates a text (whether it be The New York

Trilogy or his other works) and through that text gains self-

knowledge. But what kind of knowledge of self can one acquire by

inventing stories, which are, by definition, untrue?

Auster's trilogy dramatizes the assertion that the self can gain

knowledge only through language because, in a strict sense, the

self is language. Anthony Paul Kerby argues that other views ofthe self, such as the Cartesian, originate in three fundamental

misconceptions: a) "that there is a doer before the deed," that the `I'

causes narration, rather than being implied by it; b) that intentions

or thoughts exist prior to their linguistic expression; and c) that

"language has a certain neutrality or transparency with respect to

what is expressed" (65). On the contrary, "the self is a social and

linguistic construct, a nexus of meaning rather than an unchanging

entity" (34). One further misconception should be mentioned: that

our originary experience of the world occurs in perception. While

no one would question that we do have extra-linguistic bodily

experiences involving perception and sensation, the self, in its

genesis and self-understanding, is a construct.9

In the wake of Benveniste and Michel Foucault, such an insight

may approach a commonplace. However, when we ally the notion

of the linguistically constructed self with the Saussurean/Derridian

notion of language as a differing/deferring process, the real dramabegins. Two problems with self-knowledge arise.

First, if the self is a text, and if text's knowablity is endlessly

deferred, referring within the cognitive process only to other texts

(be they physical texts or other selves), then "true" self-knowledge


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is impossible. We understand our self as the locus of our identity

by telling ourselves stories, yet these stories' criterion of

correctness is not truth, but what we might call the adequacy of a

meaningful narrative sequence. Kerby explains, "this identity ...is

not the persistence of an entity, a thing (a substance, subject, ego),but is a meaning constituted by a relation of figure to ground or

part to whole. It is an identity in difference constituted by framing

the flux of particular experiences by a broader story" (46).

Second, having said that, we should recognize that once truth is

abandoned as the transcendental criterion of self-knowledge, we

find ourselves in a vertiginous intellectual space in which the

distinction between narrative and its traditional certifying element(truth, whether that term be understood as a Kantian adequatio or

in some other sense) collapses. In practical terms, if I assert that

"true" self-knowledge is impossible, what is the guarantor of the

truth of that statement? In discussing Lyotard, Lacoue-Labarthe,

and Foucault, Linda Hutcheon recognizes the implicit paradox of

such a position. "These [positions] are typically paradoxical; they

are the masterful denials of mastery, the cohesive attacks on

cohesion, the essentializing challenges to essences, that

characterize postmodern theory" (20). Hence, we must proceed to

the next step of the argument fully conscious of the paradox

involved: I am asserting the truth of an argument that assumes the

unavailability of a truth-based certification.

Each of Auster's stories features a character who awakens to the

ongoing deferral of the possibility of self-knowledge. {Auster}

cites Baudelaire: "Wherever I am not is the place where I am

myself" (132). In The Locked Room, the narrator suggests

We all want to be told stories, and we listen to them in the same

way we did when we were young. We imagine the real story inside

the words, and to do this we substitute ourselves for the person in

the story, pretending that we can understand him because we


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understand ourselves. This is a deception. We exist for ourselves,

perhaps, and at times we even have a glimmer of who we are, but

in the end we can never be sure, and as our lives go on, we become

more and more opaque to ourselves, more and more aware of our

own incoherence. No one can cross the boundary into another

forthe simple reason that no one can gain access to himself. (292)

The particular contribution ofThe New York Trilogy is that in each

story, we see the realization of the "substancelessness" of the self

in its psychological dimension.10 The characters and narrators of

these stories respond to their evolving insight into the "nature" of

their selves with fear, violence, and despair. Self-knowledge

becomes a narrative agon, a contest in which there can be nodeclared winner. Or, to put it another way, the loser is whoever

quits writing first.

One of the more interesting scenes in City of Glass has already

been alluded to, wherein {Auster} and Auster visit the Stillman's

apartment, only to find that Quinn has disappeared. Where is he?

Alison Russell notes: "In City of Glass, characters 'die' when their

signifiers are omitted from the printed page" (75). Quinn has

"died" since he filled up his red notebook with signifiers. When hecame to the last page, he himself came to an end.

Ghosts

Within the free realm of imaginative invention, an author's

characters can, of course, do anything the author wants, including

violating laws of logic and nature, in particular those involving

paradox and identity. Also, they can easily breach ontologicalcategories, as has already been shown with the three Paul Austers.

These thematic threads run through this trilogy. However, what

does the quandary of identity the characters' experience imply for

Paul Auster, the author ofThe New York Trilogy (or any writer, for

that matter)? His work suggests that no clear dividing line exists


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between the characters' predicament and his own, that he is beset

by the same paradoxical problems of identity in his "real" life. As

Blue says in Ghosts, "Writing is a solitary business. It takes over

your life. In some sense, a writer has no life of his own. Even when

he's there, he's not really there" (209). As we shall see, theseproblems will emerge for the readers of his texts as well.

In Ghosts, a certain detective Blue is hired by White to shadow

Black.11 The narrator says the location is unimportant, "let's say

Brooklyn Heights, for the sake of argument. Some quiet, rarely

traveled street not far from the bridgeOrange Street perhaps"

(163). Blue moves into the third floor of a four story brownstone to

shadow Black, who lives in a third floor apartment opposite. Blueis a detective self-conscious about his social role. He reads True

Detective and Stranger Than Fiction with devotion. Owing to a

peculiarity of his client, White, Blue is consigned to remain in his

room and write weekly reports, which he mails to White.

Observing Black, Blue notes that Black is composing a

manuscript. Hence, Blue spends his days writing a report about

someone who spends his days writing.12

For him, things aren't going well:

He feels like a man who has been condemned to sit in a room and

go on reading a book for the rest of his life. This is strange

enoughto be only half alive at best, seeing the world only

through words, living only through the lives of others. But if the

book were an interesting one, perhaps it wouldn't be so bad. He

could get caught up in the story, so to speak, and little by little

begin to forget himself. But this book offers him nothing. There isno story, no plot, no actionnothing but a man sitting alone in a

room and writing a book. That's all there is, Blue realizes, and he

no longer wants any part of it. But how to get out? How to get out

of the room that is the book that will go on being written for as

long as he stays in the room? (202)


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A series of events complicate Blue's life. He discovers his fiancee

is seeing another man. He tries to meet White in the post office,

but White eludes him. Black continues to scribble. Blue's anxiety

mounts. "It seems perfectly plausible to him that he is also being

watched, observed by another in the same way that he has beenobserving Black. If that is the case, then he has never been free.

From the very start he has been the man in the middle, thwarted in

front and hemmed in on the rear" (200). Like Quinn, the dummy,

whose words were generated by the ventriloquist, his narrator,

William Wilson, Blue's words are being generated by the person

controlling him, but that person is neither himself, nor White, but

Black. From the twinning of Blue and Black, Blue has uncovered a

triad, one beyond his control.

Like Quinn, who in his three meetings with Peter Stillman, Senior,

adopted the "disguises of Quinn, Henry Dark, and Peter Stillman,

Junior (88, 95, 100), Blue adopts a series of disguises to get closer

to his quarry, Black.13 Like Quinn, who visits Paul Auster, Blue

gathers the courage to take the next, "inevitable" step and confront

Black directly in his apartment. The narrator notes, "To enter

Black, then, was the equivalent of entering himself, and once

inside himself, he can no longer conceive of being anywhere else.

But this is precisely where Black is, even though Blue does not

know it" (88).

Black is not home, and Blue steals the papers on Black's desk

before returning to his apartment. With a creeping sense of horror,

Blue reads Black's papers, recognizing that they are nothing more

than Blue's own reports to White. Blue is both scared of and angry

with Black because he thinks that Black has somehow stolen hisfreedom and autonomy. The narrator comments, "For Blue at this

point can no longer accept Black's existence, and therefore he

denies it" (226).

Blue's error is an intellectual one with emotional consequences. As


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an individual, he thought he possessed the freedom one ordinarily

ascribes to individuals. As a detective, as a type of private

contractor, he thought he independently took the job of shadowing

Black, and in a sense he did. But he now realizes that his

metaphysical assumptions about his freedom, both personal andprofessional, were wrong. He responds with fear and projected

anger. He denies Black's existence. What he doesn't understand is

that "autonomy, freedom, and identity ...are not pregiven or a priori

characteristics but must be redefined within the context of the

person's appearance within the sociolinguistic arena" (Kerby 113-

114).

In his analysis of Derrida, Kerby further suggests that

If auto-affection is the possibility of subjectivity, this subjectivity

finds its release, its expression of itself, in acts of signification. The

feeling of subjectivity that we have more or less continually, ...is

quite simply the possibility of signification, of expression, what

might be called vouloir dire or a wanting and being able, in most

cases, to say or express. But this subjectivity does not know itself

outside the fulfillment of its desire to express. (77)

Blue's selfhood emerges as his Self in his "reports." But the reports

themselves are not a discrete product of an autonomous, isolated

self, but emerge as even feasible only through the possibility of the

other's existence. In denying Black's existence, Blue is denying his

own.14 For, "One cannot become `I' without an implicit reference

to another person, an auditor or narrateewhich may be the same

subject qua listener. `I' functions in contrast to `you' in much the

same way as `here' refers linguistically to `there' rather than anyfixed location" (Kerby 68). Hence, Blue's freedom, a consequence

of his self-understanding, is contingent on Black's existence.

A further level of Blue's misunderstanding involves his notion of

the "job," namely that one begins a job, carries it to an end, and


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moves on to the next. He assumes that the persistent element

linking one job to the other is his ongoing, Cartesian self, one

which remains apart and exempt from whatever "case" he is under

contract to pursue, in this instance, Black. Blue is, in this sense,

denying the historical and hermeneutical dimension of self-constitution. "Interpretation, like understanding, is a continuous

process with no precise starting point. ...interpretation has always

already started" (Kerby 44). Blue denies this "always-already"

underway aspect of self-understanding and, when he sees himself

mirrored in Black (or more precisely, mirrored in Black's text), he

responds violently.

Blue enters Black's apartment, and Black awaits him, masked andarmed with a revolver.15 Blue disarms Black and attacks him,

rendering him unconscious, possibly dead. Blue muses, "There

seems to be something [breathing], but he can't tell if it's coming

from Black or himself" (231). Blue returns to his apartment with

Black's manuscript, reads it, and leaves. The narrator explains,

"For now is the moment that Blue stands up from his chair, puts on

his hat, and walks through the door. And from this moment on, we

know nothing" (232).

Quinn ceased to exist when he completed the red notebook. Blue

ceased to exist when he completed reading Black's manuscript,

which, we are told, Blue already knew by heart. When the words

of the other ceased, the self ceased to exist. In Quinn's case his

other was himself, which he masked from himself by filling his red

notebook with observations about Stillman. In Blue's case his other

was himself, which he masked from himself by filling his pages

with observations about Black.

Who narrated Ghosts? I adduced the identity of the narrator in City

of Glass from the story of Don Quixote. However, ferreting out the

narrator ofGhosts is complicated by the difference in narrative

time between the two books. City of Glass occurs in the narrative


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present and, based on copyright and publication information, we

can date the narrative present of that book as the mid-Eighties.16

Ghosts, on the other hand, occurs approximately thirty-five to forty

years before City of Glass, beginning on 3 February 1947, with the

action continuing through midsummer of 1948 (203).17 Based onthe evidence in City of Glass, Daniel Quinn and {Auster}, the

narrator, are approximately the same age, and Quinn's age is given

as thirty-five (3). Hence, {Auster} would have been born around

the beginning of the narrative time of Ghosts.

Scouting ahead a bit, however, I note that the first-person narrator

ofThe Locked Room talks about having written both City of Glass

and Ghosts (346). Neither horn of this dilemma yields muchsatisfaction if we consider the world(s) of these stories to be

governed by empirical laws. If {Auster} narrated both books, then

he is either approximately thirty-five-years-old in City of Glass, or

a new born infant in Ghosts. Both contradictory possibilities have

equal textual evidence. But let's consider the passage in The

Locked Room immediately following his admission that he wrote

City of Glass and Ghosts: "These three stories are finally the same

story, but each one represents a different state in my awareness of

what it is about" (346). Given the paradox, given the imaginative

arbitrariness of proper name and geographic place assignments in

Ghosts (everyone's name is a color; the narrator confesses the

place names originate in narrative convenience), it seems

reasonable to assume that Ghosts'narrator is {Auster}, who is

establishing for himself an imaginative narrative space around the

time of his birth. This allows him to metaphorically explore the

complex issues of the relation of selfhood to language, but not as a

self reflecting on its own constitution (as in City of Glass), but asone reflecting on its origin.

Further support for this position can be gleaned from the final

paragraph, where a series of curious semantic shifts occur. The

paragraph is worth quoting in full.


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Where [Blue] goes after that is not important. For we must

remember that all this took place more than thirty years ago, back

in the days of our earliest childhood. Anything is possible,

therefore. I myself prefer to think that he went far away, boarding a

train that morning and going out West to start a new life. It is evenpossible that America was not the end of it. In my secret dreams, I

like to think of Blue booking passage on some ship and sailing to

China. Let it be China, then, and we'll leave it at that. For now is

the moment that Blue stands up from his chair, puts on his hat, and

walks through the door. And from this moment on, we know

nothing. (232)

Ghosts began in third person omniscient. Like City of Glass, itcloses with a shift into first person. But unlike City of Glass, the

narrator does not assume the role of another (albeit unnamed)

character. Instead, the reader is included along with the author,

using the first person plural: we must remember, our earliest

childhood.

At this point it becomes clear that the search for a narrator, the

search itself, has been swallowed up into the anti-metaphysical18

(or metaphysical detective) terms of the novel(s). Just as Bluecould not be Blue without including within himself Black, the

narrator cannot exist without our inclusion into him, and he into us.

"For in spying out at Black across the street, it is as though Blue

were looking into a mirror, and instead of merely watching

another, he finds that he is also watching himself" (20). Paul

Auster, author, establishes the sense of his identity by projecting

himself into the narrator, {Auster}, and holding the textual mirror

up to himself. With Ghosts, we can now understand that theidentity of the narrator lies in that ontologically indistinct realm of

textuality, a linguistic black hole in which our common sense

understanding of the proper separation of ontologically discrete

categoriesfiction, history, speculation, the empirical world of

common, personal identity, as well as the conventional distinctions


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between author, narrator, and charactercollapses. So, to answer

the question of who narrates Ghosts, we can reply: you, me, and

Paul Auster, all of whom are elided into an entity known, for the

convenience of the narrative, as the narrator, or in our (!) terms,

{Auster}.19

The Locked Room

We can answer the question about the narrator's identity in The

Locked Room right away. He is {Auster}, narrator ofCity of Glass

and Ghosts, so long as we understand both the terms "narrator" and

"author" as standing for what we might call a locus of textual

space, one which nominally includes you, me, and Paul Auster,author. (Note that in the course of our discussion, this additional

triad has been spawned. 20) We would do well to investigate this

pattern of triads emerging from binary oppositions, wherein the

self and other confrontation engenders a third entity.

Narrated in first person, The Locked Room opens in May, 1984,

with the disappearance of {Auster's} childhood friend, Fanshawe.

{Auster} is summoned by Sophie, Fanshawe's wife, and he learns

that Fanshawe has named {Auster} executor of his unpublishedliterary works, in the instance of Fanshawe's death or

disappearance. He accepts the job, and arranges for Fanshawe's

works to be published with a calculated schedule of publication

that, following wide acceptance of Fanshawe's first novel,

engenders both Fanshawe's literary fame, and fortune for both

Sophie and {Auster}. {Auster} and Sophie fall in love, and he

moves in with her and her child by Fanshawe. Fanshawe's works

make {Auster} and Sophie rich, and all seems to be going welluntil {Auster} receives a letter from Fanshawe, thanking him for

his help and claiming that Fanshawe will never contact him again.

{Auster} is intrigued, but more so when he contracts to write

Fanshawe's biography. He gains access to Fanshawe's childhood


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works from Fanshawe's mother, with whom he begins an affair. At

this point, for {Auster}, "everything had been reduced to a single

impulse: to find Fanshawe, to speak to Fanshawe, to confront

Fanshawe one last time" (317). He is confused: he wants to kill

Fanshawe, he wants Fanshawe to kill him; he wants to findFanshawe and then walk away from him.

Fanshawe's trail leads to France, and {Auster} locates him in a

Paris bar. Confronting him, however, Fanshawe says, "My name

isn't Fanshawe. It's Stillman. Peter Stillman" (349).

Fanshawe/Stillman leaves the bar and {Auster} follows him. They

have a bloody fight and Fanshawe/Stillman wins.

Three years pass. Sophie and {Auster} have a child, Paul. In the

spring of 1982, {Auster} receives a letter from Fanshawe, saying

they must meet in Boston.

Fanshawe, armed behind a door, confronts {Auster}. At this point,

a blizzard of twinning occurs: like Stillman, Fanshawe claims to

have been followed by a detective, Quinn; like Black, he says he

travelled in the West; like Quinn, he claims to have camped

outside Sophie's apartment for months, observing Sophie,{Auster}, and the child; Fanshawe uses the name Henry Dark in

his travels, and so forth. Fanshawe has lured {Auster} to give him

an explanation of why he left, and there {Auster} picks up a red

notebook, filled with text. Back in the New York train station,

{Auster} reads the notebook.

All the words were familiar to me, and yet they seemed to have

been put together strangely, as though their final purpose was tocancel each other out. I can think of no other way to express it.

Each sentence erased the sentence before it, each paragraph made

the next paragraph impossible. It is odd, then, that the feeling that

survives from this notebook is one of great lucidity. ... I came to

the last page just as the train was pulling out. (370-371)


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In her discussion of the postmodern novel, Linda Hutcheon has

argued that the self-other opposition is what we could call a

modernist moment along the way to postmodernism, a way-station

through which our thought must pass (and conceivably return) in

our understanding of postmodern texts. She writes, "The modernistconcept of a single and alienated otherness is challenged by the

postmodern questioning of binaries that conceal hierarchies

(self/other)" (61). Instead of binary oppositions, she suggests it is

more useful to think of difference, and the chaining movement of

signifiers (originating in Saussure's insights, and developed further

by Derrida) that describes not only the movement of meaning-

constitution within language, but self-constitution as well.

"Difference suggests multiplicity, heterogeneity, plurality, ratherthan binary opposition and exclusion" (61).

Whenever a binary, self-other opposition is erected (as is the case

in The New York Trilogy), it establishes a hierarchy which is both

arbitrary and illusory. When Blue imagines his control of his case,

or when {Auster} asserts control over Fanshawe through the

decision to write his biography, both characters employ the self-

other opposition, and privilege the self as the controlling origin of

the "job" (surveillance, writing) and of the discourse that

constitutes the larger tale. Along the way, however, confidence in

their autonomy is undermined, and they increasingly see

themselves as being controlled and, ultimately, constituted as

themselves by the other. This second movement, then privileges

the other, rather than the self. The consequence is projected anger

and violence: Blue assaults Black, {Auster} assaults

Fanshawe/Stillman, and {Auster} wants to engage in some sort of

violence toward Fanshawe toward the end of the novel, althoughhis confusion renders his exact aim unclear.21

The final pages ofThe Locked Room embody these arguments. The

character Fanshawe evolves from his oppositionary role as

{Auster's} other into an "Everycharacter," wherein his own


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experiences suggest that he is the "same" character as Quinn,

Stillman, Blue, Black, and Henry Dark.22 {Auster}, standing on

the train station platform, realizes that in the end, there is text, and

only text, and that each text (or, in this case, sentence or

paragraph) cancels out the previous one, establishing not the truthof identity, whether that be one's self-identity or the identity of the

other, but simply another text, an experiential description of the

differing/deferring movement of language.

I suggested earlier that our identity, far from originating within a

soul or mind, has its origin in text. But if, "reality only exists in

function of the discourse that articulates it" (Thiher 27), our

attempts at truth-making are doomed to irrelevance. Instead we areleft with the adequacy of a meaningful narrative sequence.23 In

discussing Nabokov, Allen Thiher argues,

Freud appears to be a quintessential modernist insofar as the

unconscious, with its storehouse of time past, can be compared to

the modernist domain of revelation, waiting to be seized in the

form of iconic symbols. By contrast Nabokov's self-conscious play

with ironic doubles exults in the arbitrary relations that obtain

between signs. There is, for Nabokov, no other discourse than thismanifest play of autonomous language. There is nothing beneath

this verbal surface. The novel's surface is all that the novel is: a

self-enclosed structure of self-mirrorings, offered as so many

language games, with only an occasional catastrophe to recall the

void that waits on the other side. (100)

This description could well be applied to Paul Auster's The New

York Trilogy.

Hence, in Auster's work we have moved from the modernist,

alienated fiction of the other, exemplified in Hammett and others

of the hard-boiled school, to a postmodern fiction of difference.24

In Michael Huhn's discussion of the hard-boiled novel, he argues


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that the contest between detective and criminal is one for control

over interpretation of the clues, a control over the text that defines

the reality of their linked situation:

The main difficulty of the reading process is occasioned by thecriminal's attempts to prevent the detective from deciphering the

true meaning of his text. This is, basically, a contest between an

author and a reader about the possession of meaning, each of them

wishing to secure it for himself. (The contest within the novel is

repeated on a higher level between the novelist and the actual

reader.) (456)

The detectives and searchers in Auster's fiction, by contrast, realizethat possession of meaning invariably lies in becoming one with

the other, the object of their surveillance or search. What they don't

realize, and what carries the main thematic weight of these texts, is

that they have failed to take the next step, the movement from the

violent confrontation of the self-other to the realization that both

figure in a larger whole, that of a set of texts, whose shifting

relations of difference and deferral form what we know as the

world.

Having reached the end, let us return to the beginning, and the

story of Don Quixote. Cervantes wrote a novel narrated by Cid

Hamete Benengeli about Don Quixote which is read by you and

me. Since Cid Hamete is ultimately a "fiction," we understand that

only Cervantes is "real." However, {Auster} argues that Quixote

wrote a novel narrated by his friends about Quixote which is read

by you and me. {Auster's} argument suggests that Cervantes is

generated by the text as much as the characters and that ultimately,he is Quixote. If this argument is itself a meaningful narrative

sequence, then the readers of Quixote are themselves Quixote,

insofar as their self-constitution is implicated in the texts they read.

The New York Trilogy is a work written by Paul Auster, narrated

by {Paul Auster} about, among other characters, Paul Auster,


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which is read by you and me. If this analysis ofThe New York

Trilogy parallels that of {Auster's} of Quixote, then we can close

best by echoing the words of {Auster's} child, Daniel: "Goodbye,

myself!"

NOTES

1. As Michael Holquist notes, the term "metaphysical detective

story" was coined by Howard Haycraft in his 1941 book, Murder

for Pleasure to describe G. K. Chesterton's work. (Holquist 154, n.

8) return1

2. Paul Auster (the real Paul Auster) has been a student of Jean

Paul Sartre's works and translated Sartre's Life/Positions. We owe

to Sartre's The Transcendence of the Ego the notion that "there is

no ego ìn' or `behind' consciousness. There is only an ego for

consciousness. The ego is òut there,' in the world, an object

among objects. consciousness is a great emptiness, a wind

blowing toward objects. Its whole reality is exhausted in intending

what is other. It is never `self-contained,' or container; it is always

òutside itself'" (Williams and Kirkpatrick 22). What distinguishes

Sartre and Auster in this respect is Auster's focus on language asconstitutive of the self and world, and the rendering problematic of

any notion of an originary intentionality, a la Husserl. Auster

rejects the autonomy of consciousness Sartre so ardently defends

(in The Transcendence of the Ego), and places in between self and

world (or other) language. This interposition problematizes the

notion of self-knowledge, since if everything is text, the notion of

autonomy (which would ground self-knowledge) is suspect.

return2

3. Of course, the author featuring himself as a character is not new,

and is an almost de rigueur trope for postmodern fiction. In this

context, Auster is echoing Cervantes, in which a certain Saavedra

is featured in the Captive story (1:42), as Robert Alter notes (17).


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Note also Alter's comments about Cervantes' Brechtean impulse:

"... Cervantes' principal means for [drawing the reader into the

narrative and then wrenching him away] is to split himself off into

a fictional alter ego, the Moorish chronicler who is supposedly the

true author of the history; Don Quixote himself is another kind ofsurrogate for the novelist, being prominent among the characters of

the novel as an author manqu, who is impelled to act out the

literary impulse in the world of deeds, to be at once the creator and

protagonist of his own fictions." (21) return3

4. Paul Auster, The New York Trilogy: City of Glass, Ghosts, The

Locked Room (New York: Penguin, 1985-86), 116. All subsequent

references will be to this combined edition of the novels. return4

5. Alison Russell's comment on the narrator ofThe Locked Room

is interesting in this context. "Unlike Quinn and Blue, the narrator

ofThe Locked Room has access only to the language, the

signifiers, of his counterpart, never to his physical presence" (79-

80). return5

In fact, Quinn, as this sentence seems to imply, doesn't narrate City

of Glass. The unnamed narrator, who is, as I will suggest {PaulAuster}, has no direct access to the character whose story he tells

either.

6. Here I would disagree with Alison Russell, when she says that

"This [Quxitoean] analysis, when applied to City of Glass, raises a

number of questions about the book's authorship, and results in

endless doublings and mirror images." (74) While, as I hope to

demonstrate, the linguistic quandaries the characters experienceimply a notion of selfhood in which the possibility for self-

knowledge is endlessly deferred, the doublings and mirror images

are themselves not "endless." One can take the Quixote model and

apply it to City of Glass (and other texts-within-the-text as well,

such as the film Out of the Past, featured in Ghosts) without the


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danger of an argumentative mise-en-abyme. return6

7. In subsequent references to the narrator, Paul Auster, I willadopt the convention of referring to him as {Auster}, to distinguish

him from Paul Auster, author, and Paul Auster, character. return7

8. As Robert Alter notes, however, "If the Quixote calls into

question the status of fictions and of itself as a fiction, it also

affirms a new sense of the autonomy of the artist who has

conceived it" (15). As we shall see, The New York Trilogy, far

from affirming the autonomy of the artist, calls into question his

very selfhood: its origin, constitution, and capacity for originary

linguistic intentionality. return8

9. "Perception" can be understood here in two senses, in the

scientific, biological sense of the activity of light on the eye, optic

nerve, and brain; and in the phenomenological sense of that which

is present to consciousness. The problems with grounding

experience in biological perception are well known. The problems

with phenomenology have been amply examined by JacquesDerrida, in his critique of presence. In this context, the problem

with phenomenology's account is phenomenology's grounding of

the investigation into Dasein's being in consciousness' (presumed)

interiority. return9

10. If we follow the lessons of the text, we would have to abandon

the notion of psychology as the investigation of some "interior,"

dimension of a single human subject, and instead focus on howself-construction occurs in the public, narrative arena in which

selves, both those of the "individual" and "others," are constructed.

return10

11. The studied arbitrariness of these names is emphasized in The

Locked Room, when the narrator describes his experiences as a


25/27

census taker involved in inventing families to fulfill his quota.

"When my imagination flagged, there were certain mechanical

devices to fall back on: the colors (Brown, White, Black, Green,

Gray, Blue)" (Auster 294). return11

12. Russell notes the continuity among the three stories: "Daniel

Quinn is a writer turned detective, Blue a detective turned writer,

and the narrator ofThe Locked Room a writer turned detective"

(79). return12

13. The similarity between Quinn and Blue is highlighted by

detail: when {Auster} opens the door to Quinn, Quinn finds "In his

right hand, fixed between his thumb and first two fingers, he heldan uncapped fountain pen, still poised in a writing position"

(Auster 111). When Blue, in his Fuller Brush Man disguise, visits

Black, Black is "standing in a doorway with an uncapped fountain

pen in his right hand, as thought interrupted in his work" (Auster

218). return13

14. In their final confrontation, Black says to Blue, "I've needed

you from the beginning to remind me of what I was supposed to

be doing. ... At least I know what I've been doing. I've had my jobto do, and I've done it. But you're nowhere, Blue. You've been lost

from the first day" (Auster 230). return14

15. This mask is the same one "White" wore in the post office

when Blue attempted to confront him, suggesting either that White

and Black are the same person, or that White has given his mask to

Black to wear. In either case, Blue's paranoia is justified. return15

16. Internal evidence, such as Mookie Wilson's tenure on the New

York Mets, also supports this assumption. return16

17. Having spent this much time on the Trilogy, I have reason to

believe that 3 February 1947 is author Paul Auster's birthdate.

return17


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18. As we will see below, preceding a term with "anti" establishes

a binary opposition that, within the developing argument, is

illegitimate. return18

19. We should keep in mind, however, that such insights are notequivalent to claims such as "People qua people are merely the

consequence of a grammatical reference simpliciter," or "The

world is a fiction," or "Everything is a text." Fiction qua fiction

relies for its understanding on the distinction, however imprecise,

between "reality" and "fiction." To conflate this important

distinction into a comprehensive claim about the fictionality of

persons or "reality" would be to empty the term of any meaning.

For a traditional and common sense discussion of such issues, seeCrittenden 158-174. return19

20. Like the binary oppositions, the number and type of triads are

dizzying, but here are a few to support the idea. City of Glass

Quinn talks about the three senses of the term "eye," in "private

eye": "investigator" "I" and "physical eye of the writer." Quinn had

a triad of selves: Quinn, Wilson, and Work. Stillman, Senior, had a

wife and child; Quinn had a wife and child; and Auster, the

character, has a wife and child. In Peter Stillman's book, TheGarden and the Tower: Early Visions of the New World, he refers

to the builders of the tower of Babel: those who wanted to dwell in

heaven, those who wanted to wage war against God, and those

who wanted to worship idols. Paul Auster occurs as author,

narrator and character. Quinn has three meetings with Stillman:

where Quinn is Quinn, Henry Dark, and Peter Stillman, Junior.

GhostsThe three primary characters are White, Blue, and Black.

Among the three books Black recurs as Walter J. Black, editor ofWalden, black Jackie Robinson, and Black as an arbitrary name.

Mr. White occurs in all three books, under differing auspices. Mr.

Green occurs in City of Glass, and, in The Locked Room, two

characters are called Green: Stuart Green, editor, and Roger Green,

Stuart's brother and the narrator's friend. Columbus is mentioned in


27/27

Peter Stillman's book, and New York's Columbus Square serves as

a meeting place in Ghosts, as does Boston's Columbus Square in

The Locked Room. In this inquiry I have uncovered two sets of

three: first, Paul Auster, author; the narrator {Auster}, and the

reader of the Trilogy. Second, myself as the author of this article,the text, and you, the reader. I'm confident more can be uncovered.

return20

21. And, in that final confrontation in The Locked Room, Fanshawe

himself (or someone we assume is Fanshawe, hidden behind a

door) threatens violence, again either toward {Auster} or toward

himself if {Auster} does not do his bidding. return21

22. And we learn in City of Glass that Henry Dark wasn't a "real"

person anyway, but one imagined by Peter Stillman, Senior, for the

purposes of his argument. return22

23. As Hutcheon observes, "Narrative is what translates knowing

into telling, and it is precisely this translation that obsesses

postmodern fiction" (121). return23

24. See Hutcheon, 62. return24

mirrors of madness

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