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MFS Modern Fiction Studies, Volume 52 number 3, Fall 2006. Copyright © for the Purdue Research Foundation by the Johns Hopkins University Press. All rights to reproduction in any form reserved.

public personae and the

private i: de-compositional

ontology in paul auster's

the new york trilogy

Scott A. Dimovitz

Let everything fall away, and then let's see what there is. Perhaps that is the most interesting question of all: to see what happens when there is nothing, and whether or not we will survive that too.

—Paul Auster, In the Country of Last Things

Unless the dog-narrated Timbuktu deconstructed the author-function in a posthuman episteme, Paul Auster's work of the last decade bears little resemblance to his earlier works' complicated explorations of language and identity—explorations that usually get Auster labeled postmodern. Auster's postmodern credentials arise primarily from the first work of fiction published under his own name, The New York Trilogy (1987), comprised of three separately-published novels: City of Glass, Ghosts, and The Locked Room. Eager to find fictional corollaries to the Continental theories imported throughout the 1970s, American postmodern critics quickly adopted Auster's early works as manifestations of one form or another of postmodern and poststructuralist theories. In light of his subsequent fiction, however, this construction of a postmodern Auster seems premature, even if traces of these theories echo throughout the texts, and these later

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novels invite a reinvestigation as to how theory functions in Auster's work in the first place.

In this essay I will argue that Auster's works deploy the argu-ments and concerns of postmodern theories not in a desire to validate those theories, but in an effort to generate a creative space outside of those theories' logical conclusions. More specifically, I propose that The New York Trilogy enacts a philosophical and aesthetic refu-tation of the art of Samuel Beckett, the main influence on Auster's writings in the 1970s, and one of the main factors, he claimed, that prevented him from writing fiction.1 Finally, I will suggest that rather than exploiting traditional detective fiction to stage epistemologi-cal problems, The New York Trilogy in reality exploits the already exhausted antidetective genre to explore dimensions of ontology, ultimately reaffirming a metaphysical system in which chance over-rides all questions of postmodern indeterminacy.

In the early 1970s, two influential studies by Michael Holquist and William V. Spanos claimed that a certain form of abortive de-tective fiction most clearly highlighted the thematic concerns of postmodernism. Spanos called this genre the "anti-detective story" (Spanos 154; Holquist 135), a concept that Stefano Tani more fully developed in his 1984 study The Doomed Detective. These theorists argued that in the tradition established by Edgar Alan Poe and de-veloped by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Raymond Chandler, and others, detective fiction stages fundamentally epistemological problems. A person commits a crime. The crime must be solved. An investigator serves as master interpreter, and he reconstructs the crime by sift-ing through evidence, using inductive logic to re-present the event. Ideally, this leads to a kind of Scooby-Doo moment ("I would have got away with it if it weren't for those meddling kids"), in which the criminal validates the correct interpretation through confession, for nothing would darken a mystery like the possibility that our society convicted an innocent man.

Described in this way, detective fiction obviously has clear metafictional implications, playing as it does on such notions as evaluating evidence, plotting, and reading a person's character. As the detective sifts evidence to reveal a single unified meaning of an event and to discover the criminal, the reader sifts through textual evidence to reveal a single unified meaning of the text and discover the authorial intent.2 Ultimately, no matter how much the detective may construct or find himself as an outsider to the society he protects, he remains to the end a defender of the social order as he eliminates all uncertainty and chaos.

In contrast, the postwar, postmodern antidetective fictions of writers such as Robbe-Grillet and Borges use these conventions to

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challenge the genre's very philosophical foundations. These texts highlight dispersal over accumulation, indeterminacy over conclu-sion. Not only might there not be a single event or crime, no crime or criminal may exist at all. Congruently, this style metafictionally implies that the text of the real has no ultimate, stable meaning. In-terpretation always mediates reality. The fiction exposes the detective as just as motivated a reader as any other, not a master interpreter. The amount of choices of evidence reaches information entropy, in which selection becomes impossible because of the proliferation of nonhierarchic or falsely hierarchic information.

The epistemological questions to keep in mind when examining Auster's fiction in terms of postmodern antidetective fiction are: What is the status of evidence throughout the text? Is evidence always mediated? If it is always mediated, can there never be provisional meaning? Is truth asymptotic or indeterminate? If evidence is not always mediated, what are the conditions for knowledge? Is there an event? Is there a noumenal reality to phenomenal perception?

Beginning with Alison Russell's 1990 article, "Deconstructing The New York Trilogy: Paul Auster's Anti-Detective Fiction," most critics read The New York Trilogy as manifesting one form or another of this antidetective fiction label.3 Russell's article most exhaustively and compellingly reads The New York Trilogy from an earnest poststructur-alist paradigm. Like many articles of its type, it quickly moves from an exercise in a variety of reading "amenable to the deconstructive prin-ciples of Jacques Derrida" (71) to one that claims Derridean priority over the text: "City of Glass illustrates Derridean dissemination" (75). Russell's argument moves so quickly and forcefully from "amenable" to "illustration" that by the end of her article it sounds as though the novel served no other function but to literalize Derridean theory: "By denying conventional expectations of fiction—linear movement, realistic representation, and closure—Auster's novels also deconstruct logocentrism, a primary subject of Derrida's subversions. . . . In each volume, the detective searches for 'presence': an ultimate referent or foundation outside the play of language itself" (71–2).

Russell's article is probably the most cited text from this per-spective, and several critical pieces have viewed Auster's novels of detection with the antidetective lens.4 This approach makes sense, as even a quick first reading of The New York Trilogy suggests. The Trilogy's constant meditation on heavy-hitter ontological and epis-temological questions makes it read at times like a postmodernism primer. Long sections of the elder Peter Stillman's attempt to find a prelapsarian language by way of locking his infant son in a room do, in fact, read retrospectively like Derrida for Dummies, and indeed City of Glass would seem particularly "amenable" to seeing Derrida in action.

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More than Derrida's work, however, these scenes in City of Glass seem lifted straight out of Surprised by Sin, Stanley Fish's 1967 study of Milton's Paradise Lost.5 At the time of Fish's writing, Milton stud-ies roughly divided into two major camps. The first was the "pious" school from Addison to C. S. Lewis that took Milton at his word. The second was the "perverse" school that claimed, as Blake first did in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, that Milton wrote with liberty about the Devil because he was "of the Devil's party without knowing it" (353). Fish transformed Milton studies and sidestepped these readings by proposing that "Milton's method is to re-create in the mind of the reader (which is, finally, the poem's scene) the drama of the Fall, to make him fall again exactly as Adam did and with Adam's troubled clarity, that is to say, 'not deceived'" (1). Milton accomplishes this re-creation, Fish argues, by using words that signify in multiple ways, the negative denotation only possible after the fall, thereby implicating the reader in the negative reading. Polysemy becomes in this reading a direct function of the fallen state of humankind. Milton shows no anxiety about this, however, for he wants his work to recreate this fallenness in the reader, not to wish for or strive nostalgically for a prelapsarian form of language.

This desire for a prelapsarian language structures The New York Trilogy's entire background. In the first novel, City of Glass, detec-tive fiction writer Daniel Quinn mistakenly receives a call for the Paul Auster detective agency from Peter Stillman, a young man whose father locked him in a room from age three to twelve in an attempt to discover if this would lead to the ur-language. For subterranean reasons, Quinn impersonates Auster and takes the case, monitoring the elder Stillman, just released from prison for his crime and whom the younger Stillman fears will try to kill him.

During the course of his background research, Quinn reads the elder Stillman's dissertation, The Garden and the Tower: Early Vi-sions of the New World, which Stillman divided into two parts: "The Myth of Paradise" and "The Myth of Babel." The first section of the dissertation treats the view of America as a second Garden of Eden by New World explorers from Columbus to Raleigh, while the second section concerns the problem of language in its fallen state as pre-sented in Milton: "Stillman also dwelled on the paradox of the word 'cleave,' which means both 'to join together' and 'to break apart,' thus embodying two equal and opposite significations, which in turn embodies a view of language that Stillman found to be present in all of Milton's work" (52). This passage demonstrates why poststruc-turalist interpretations make sense, as the passage almost exactly reflects both the Derridean critique of the notion of a transcendental signified that would ground language and the Derridean attempt

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to demonstrate that all texts and conceptual knowledge ultimately reach an aporia in which one word implies both its signified and its repressed opposite.

Quinn's summary of the elder Stillman continues with a synopsis of what would become the origin of his anxiety: "A thing and its name were interchangeable. After the fall, this was no longer true. Names became detached from things; words devolved into a collection of arbitrary signs; language had been severed from God. The story of the Garden, therefore, records not only the fall of man, but the fall of language" (52). To make his case, Stillman quotes one Henry Dark, whom Stillman claimed served as Milton's secretary. Dark argued in a tract called The New Babel that since the fall also ushered in a fall of language, by finding the original prelapsarian language, we might thereby undo the fall of man: "Therefore, Dark contended, it would indeed be possible for man to speak the original language of innocence and to recover, whole and unbroken, the truth within himself" (57). This passage remarkably rehearses all the anxieties of modernist nostalgia via Lyotard, as the elder Stillman replicates seventeenth-century Baconian anxieties over language's slippery signification, where a single signifier does not equate with a single referent or signified.

The reader perhaps shows no surprise when learning that Stillman invented Henry Dark to justify his own desire. The novel most clearly resembles the Derridean argument against a quest for presence by dramatizing the violent effects of the elder Stillman's desire to find the prelapsarian language by isolating his son from all external contact. The younger Stillman apparently suffers as some kind of autistic, speaking in what he believes is transcendent signi-fication: "In the dark I speak God's language and no one can hear me" (25). Using the darkness of the room to link linguistically with the false Henry Dark, the novel implies that if a primal language of God exists—which the novel never really believes—that language would remain completely solipsistic, incommunicable, and probably not meaningful at all.

Stillman's regular speech consists primarily of short declarative and telegraphed sentences, marked by quick repetitions, infantile constructions, and a tendency towards paradox and negation: "I am Peter Stillman. That is not my real name" (21). The fact that Stillman can speak at all might mimetically seem like a bit of a stretch, but the novel cheats by having the younger Stillman locked away after his first access to language. "Of course, Peter knew some people words," the younger Stillman tells Quinn. "That could not be helped. But the father thought maybe Peter would forget them" (24). Either way, the novel does not validate a worldview in which the elder Stillman

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could ever realize his pursuits. No prelapsarian language exists in which signifier sticks to signified. Words always miss the thing they signify, and meaning, therefore, always scurries about in a process of deferral and dissemination.

The novel would appear to reinforce this deconstructive read-ing by another key epistemological scene, which comes later as Quinn follows the elder Stillman on his apparently random walks around Manhattan. By the fourth day, Quinn begins recording each of Stillman's steps, trying to fix the flux of sensa with the written word. On the thirteenth day, Quinn maps Stillman's steps, finally coming to believe that Stillman's apparently arbitrary paths in fact spell letters. The novel depicts three of these "letters," O-W-E. After mapping the rest, Quinn thinks these letters form part of the phrase "THE TOWER OF BABEL" (85). Two immediate problems emerge for even the credulous reader. First, we only see the maps of O-W-E. Second, judging from the "W" example, which the reader would be hard-pressed to make look like a "W" to the exclusion of other pos-sibilities (at least "H," "K," and "X" seem possible), the rest becomes a matter of highly problematic speculation.

The poststructuralist reading, therefore, places Quinn in the po-sition of the reader, and all detection thereby becomes a subset of the desire to find a single stable meaning. We can now position ourselves to put on our postmodernist hats and say some form or another of: "The meaning of the novel is the impossibility of meaning-making"; "It is about its own (and the world's) indeterminacy"; or, if feeling particularly frisky, "The text deconstructs phallogocentrism."6 Or as the voices in Quinn's head taunt: "He had seen them only because he had wanted to see them. And even if the diagrams did form letters, it was only a fluke. Stillman had nothing to do with it. It was all an accident, a hoax he had perpetrated on himself" (86).

Even with this quote, however, the novel begins a conceptual equation that continues through most of Auster's works between three terms that undermine this postmodern reading: "chance," "accident," and "falling." Each word derives from the same root as our word for chance, cadere (to fall). Auster himself bristles at the notion that chance dominates his works, yet clearly chance as a concept takes on a centrality of focus beyond most others in his works.7 The nar-rator of City of Glass even goes so far as to claim that Quinn would later come to believe "that nothing was real except chance" (3). The works' obsessive meditations on chance are not, as some have sug-gested, specifically related to pure indeterminacy, contingency, and freedom. In fact, Auster has been criticized by several commentators for continually staging narrative events more improbably than the most deterministic eighteenth-century novel. Scenes seem to unravel

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under an architectonic system so vast as to preclude any possibility of free will or even mere probability. As Eric Wirth notes, in Auster's fiction, "'Chance' is recognized by its air of the inevitable" (175; see also Bruckner 29). Indeed, Austerian chance seems to do nothing but close off options.

In The New York Trilogy chance and accidental events are a function of some external system or force. As Quinn tracks the elder Stillman at Grand Central, he sees two men who could be his target. Panicking, Quinn thinks of his situation in terms that apparently reflect a worldview of indeterminacy: "Whatever choice he made—and he had to make a choice—would be arbitrary, a submission to chance. Uncertainty would haunt him to the end" (68). For William G. Little, this scene perfectly confirms the kind of reading that suggests that the identities of the two potential Stillmans are interchangeable: "Con-fronted with this radical cleft at the origin, Quinn has (nothing other than) nothing to go on. . . . The detective, or the writer, is bound to miss the mark" (158). But the point of this scene is that he does not miss the mark. By opening himself up to contingency, an Austerian character inevitably loops back into a system of correspondences that will take the character where he needed to go. Yet who determined this need, and to what end? The novel implies a transcendent structure, a series of correspondences that will undermine pure metaphysical contingency and give meaning to an otherwise meaningless existence, yet it refuses to name it as such.

By the end of City of Glass, Quinn sits alone in the dark in the younger Stillman's room, writing in the red notebook while an unseen figure provides food for him. Ostensibly, this scene implies that Quinn regresses and becomes identified with the younger Stillman's infancy and early childhood. At this point, the unnamed narrative voice, claim-ing a former friendship with Auster-the-character, steps in to assert authority. The voice tells the reader that he or she returned from a trip to Africa, whereupon he or she reconstructed Quinn's life from the remnants of the red notebook and from what Auster-the-char-acter told him: "There were moments when the text was difficult to decipher, but I have done my best with it and have refrained from any interpretation. The red notebook, of course, is only half the story, as any sensitive reader will understand" (158). The narrator's assertion of narrative veridicality ironically recalls Marco Polo's Travels, which Quinn cites earlier in the text: "We will set down things seen as seen, things heard as heard, so that our book may be an accurate record, free from any sort of fabrication. And all those who read this book or hear it may do so with full confidence, because it contains nothing but the truth" (7). The heavy irony, of course, is that the stories in Marco Polo's thirteenth-century book, translated into English as The Travels

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of Marco Polo have been called into question since their publication to the point that it became known as Il Milione, meaning either "the Million Stories" or "the Million Lies," depending on the account.

The novel reinforces the unreliable narrator several times, not least of which in the narrator's claims to have reconstructed this narrative merely from the red notebook and Auster-the-character's account. This is clearly false, as the narrator has access to informa-tion that Quinn himself did not know: "In his dream, which he later forgot, he found himself alone in a room, firing a pistol into a bare white wall" (10; emphasis added); "In his dream, which he later forgot, he found himself in the town dump of his childhood, sifting through a mountain of rubbish" (87; emphasis added). How could this narrator who invents nothing represent dreams that the subject did not himself remember? What remains at the end of City of Glass is a narrator who, the text implies, is no more reliable than Marco Polo himself, thereby making Quinn as fanciful a creature as Marco Polo's giant birds that drop elephants to break their bones so the birds could eat them.

But to what end? Does the text merely imply that the story is the unreliable account of kooky Quinn's quixotic quest for quiddity? This postmodernist reading would place the text directly in the tradition of Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49 with all of the attendant incredulity toward metanarratives.8 The novel plays further with the genre by having Quinn trying to trace not a man who commits a crime, but one who might commit a crime in the future. This alteration perfectly reflects Auster's Barthesean view that the reader ultimately gener-ates textual meaning (see Art 282). If S. S. Van Dine equates the detective's investigation of the crime with the reader's investigation of the meaning of the text, then a crime that has not been committed yet would have to be generated out of the interaction between the detective/reader and the criminal/text. As we shall see, therefore, rather than becoming a critique of the reader who tries to find the meaning of the text, thereby correlatively critiquing those who try to look for transcendent meanings in the world, Quinn's constructions in the end are confirmed as the truest form of meaning-making. And beyond that—and here is where Auster's works clearly leave the postmodern camp—this meaning-making aspect does not reflect a philosophical solipsism or mere textual play à la Derrida and Barthes, but rather it reflects the road to the essential nature of being, both microcosmically and macrocosmically.

The crux of this essentialism rests not in Auster's epistemological speculations, but in his ontological analyses. Detection functions not so much as an issue of defining the terms of knowledge, but rather as an issue of defining the structures of subjectivity. And these structures

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may in fact be common to all humans—the sine qua non of being. By the end of the text, according to the postmodern antidetective read-ing, Quinn's desire for solid truths leads him to a regressive climax, in which he writes himself into sheer textuality, demonstrating how subjectivity is ultimately fractured, partial, and textual. As Alison Rus-sell argues from this position: "Quinn literally vanishes from the text when he runs out of space in his red notebook, seemingly imploding into the text of City of Glass: 'It was as though he had melted into the walls of the city'" (75). Richard Swope reinforces this argument, claiming that "once he runs out of pages, once he quits writing, Quinn apparently ceases to exist" (220), and Marc Chenetier goes so far as to say that Auster is driven by the conviction that "outside the Other, there is no definition of the self" (38).

Even in Russell's quote, however, the crucial phrase is "as though," for Quinn has not melted or ceased to exist. He has only disappeared. This motif of disappearance to others serves as a recurring theme in Auster's works, as the title of his 1988 poetry collection, Disappearances, reflects. It occurs as early as his 1982 pseudonymous novel, Squeeze Play, where protagonist Max Klein reminds us, "We get so used to seeing only parts of people, the parts we come into contact with, that it's almost as if they cease to exist as soon as they're out of sight" (408). Klein carefully asserts that disappearance only gives this illusion of non-existence, for it is almost as if they cease to exist, not that they do. The text implies that our knowledge of the other does not construct the other as such, but rather only forms one ontological aspect out of others. City of Glass reinforces this theme when the narrator claims that the red notebook defines "only half the story." In good existentialist fashion, being in relationship to others can only ever define one half of the story: being for itself serves as the other half. Quinn drops from the narrative, true, yet even here he disappears and loses his identity when the text runs out for others.9

This focus on ontological problematics becomes far more obvi-ous when the reader considers the entirety of the Trilogy rather than isolating and focusing solely on the epistemological set pieces in City of Glass. By the third novel, The Locked Room, the postmodern read-ing begins to break down as the unnamed narrator finally claims to have authored both previous texts: "The entire story comes down to what happened at the end, and without that end inside me now, I could not have started this book. The same holds for the two books that came before it, City of Glass and Ghosts. These three stories are finally the same story, but each one represents a different stage in my awareness of what it is about" (346). The fact that this narrator has knowledge of the preceding texts while the other authors claim

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no such authority supports the legitimization of his authorship of the previous works.10 The narrator does not merely claim that they relate thematically, he claims that they are the same story. This implies an equivalence of characterization and thematic development, each aspect informing the others and modifying our awareness of the final interpretation of the third novel. Yet the possibility also exists that the texts are distinct, as the awareness "stage" assertion claims: the stories are the same, but their manner of telling and interpretation may differ.

If City of Glass functions primarily as an allegory for The Locked Room as the narrator states, then there are three primary ways to establish parallels between the characters. First, as Daniel Quinn is a writer who takes on aspects of a private investigator to track an elusive character who ultimately slips from him, so too does the writer/nar-rator of The Locked Room track his old friend, Fanshawe, an elusive character who ultimately slips from him: Quinn = narrator; Stillman = Fanshawe. Aside from the quest/investigation motif, however, this interpretation would seem to reach a dead end. The Locked Room's narrator does not end up alone in a room, writing into a red notebook, missing his target, or replicating any other plot device.

The second possibility relates to the first, but this time, while Fanshawe correlates to the elder Stillman, Quinn is the same char-acter, but in a slightly modified and peripheral role: Stillman = Fan-shawe; Quinn = Quinn; narrator = narrator. This interpretation is supported by Fanshawe's narrative at the end of the novel, in which he recounts how the private detective Quinn tracked him, finding him twice: "He disappeared, you know. I couldn't find a trace of him" (362). The fact that the narrator could not find a trace of Quinn would link him with the narrative voice in City of Glass. While this would support my contention that the importance of Quinn's disap-pearance is not that he disappeared but that his being disappeared for others at the moment of textual limitation, the theory does not have any legs after that.

The more probable interpretation maps the characters with the assumption that the narrative voice tells the truth that he has au-thored all three texts. This places the narrator of The Locked Room in the position of the unreliable narrator of City of Glass, Quinn in the position of Fanshawe. A subtle linguistic linkage places Quinn's writing in relation to Fanshawe's youthful writings to his sister. As Quinn fol-lows Stillman around the city, he perfects a manner of writing in which he places the red notebook on his hip "as an artist holds his palette" (76): "For Quinn was now able to divide his attention almost equally between Stillman and his writing, glancing up at the one, now down at the other, seeing the thing and writing about it in the same fluid

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gesture" (76–77; emphasis added). Compare this "same fluid gesture" with Fanshawe's development. While writing letters to his sister in his early adulthood, Fanshawe begins to close the gap between action and expression, referent and signifier: "By now, Fanshawe's eye has become incredibly sharp, and one senses a new availability of words inside him, as though the distance between seeing and writing had been narrowed, the two acts almost now identical, part of a single, unbroken gesture" (327; emphasis added). Both Quinn and Fanshawe learn expression as a direct function of observation. Interestingly, this is the exact opposite development for Ghosts' Blue, who learns while writing his report of another still man, Black, that "words do not necessarily work, that it is possible for them to obscure the things they are trying to say" (176).

As the narrator of City of Glass attempted to reconstruct Quinn's life from the remnants of a red notebook, so too does the narrator of The Locked Room attempt to reconstruct Fanshawe's life via his red notebook. Both characters camp outside an apartment to watch someone (Quinn watches the younger Stillman, Fanshawe watches the narrator). Both characters end their textual lives alone in a room, with only a red notebook as legacy. At first glance, mapped this way, it would seem that the narrator correlates with the younger Stillman, and there might be a connotation here. But the primary identification for the narrator of The Locked Room seems to be with the narrator of City of Glass, even though that narrator is much more thinly drawn.

I have been careful to refer consistently to the Stillmans as "the elder Stillman" and "the younger Stillman," since the text carefully avoids using the terms "Sr." and "Jr." Quinn refers at one moment to "Stillman senior" (48), yet this does not have the same effect. The text implies that the characters are interchangeable as linguistic constructs, and the Stillmans collapse identities predicated upon the identification of father and son. Restating the plot in these terms highlights the similarity between City of Glass and the second novel, Ghosts: "Peter Stillman, dressed all in white, requests that Quinn discover Peter Stillman and watch him so that Peter Stillman is not destroyed. But Peter Stillman disappears, and so does Peter Stillman." Similarly, in Ghosts, White requests that Blue discover Black (who is actually White), so that White/Black's existence can be validated. We might chart the similarities like so:

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Laid out in this schematic manner, the novels' similar narrative structure becomes obvious, and the Locked Room's narrator's claim of narrative similarity becomes clearer. But the question remains: If Quinn watches the elder Stillman, who or what does Fanshawe watch and why?

I will come back to this crucial question, which first depends on an analysis of the larger philosophical positions informing these texts. Answering Blue's question, "And me—what was I there for? Comic relief?" Black/White answers: "No, Blue, I've needed you from the beginning. . . . Every time I looked up, you were there, watching me, following me, always in sight, boring into me with your eyes. You were the whole world to me, Blue, and I turned you into my death" (230). This repeating ontological motif of identity as a function of the other's gaze arises from Auster's Sartrean misreading of Lacan, a misreading that becomes obvious in some of Auster's interviews.11 In the following discussion with Larry McCaffery and Sinda Gregory, for example, Auster's casual mention of Lacan misleads the reader who hopes to gain insight from authorial intent:

The infant feeding at the mother's breast looks up into the mother's eyes and sees her looking at him, and from that experience of being seen, the baby begins to learn that he is separate from his mother, that he is a person in his own right. We literally acquire a self from this process. Lacan calls it the "mirror-stage," which strikes me as a beauti-ful way of putting it. Self-consciousness in adulthood is merely an extension of those early experiences. It's no longer the mother who's looking at us then—we're looking at ourselves. (Art 315)

The difficulty in this passage, of course, is that it is simply wrong. Lacan's notion of the mirror stage does not assert that the subject develops self-consciousness through the mother's gaze; it says, in fact, exactly the opposite. Lacan conceptualized the mirror stage as the origin of the imaginary order—a sense of self as a unified gestalt outside primary consciousness that arises after the child separates from the mother (and depending on which Lacan period you are reading, possibly because the child separates). And further, this self-consciousness is a méconnaissance, a "misrecognition," that obfuscates the real, fragmented (castrated) subject position, which arises concurrently in the symbolic order instilled by language (the symbolic father).

This is not a technical quibble, for Auster's misreading (delib-erate or otherwise) problematizes all of the imagery arising in the texts. Rather than revealing himself to be a card-carrying Lacanian,

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Auster actually conflates Freud's and Klein's ego-psychology account of human development—the mother-child dyad in mutual gaze, lead-ing to a provisionally-stable ego—with Sartre's analysis of le regard. Usually translated as "the look" but using the same term as Lacan's "the gaze," Sartre's le regard suggests that the look of the other constitutes the subject as an object among other objects, thereby delimiting subjectivity and creating what Sartre calls the reflective cogito—the "I" ego of the Cartesian cogito ergo sum. For Auster, who unmistakably locates his work in this tradition, this concept functions under a commonsensical rubric: self-consciousness (a consciousness of and for itself).

In order to see oneself, one needs an other who watches and objectifies the self. As the younger Stillman says to Quinn: "And your eyes look at me. Yes, yes. I can see them. That is very good. Thank you" (21). This other forces consciousness itself into an object of consciousness, and identity comes into being for itself. The positive aspect of this movement is that this being-for-others as an origin of being-for-itself actually generates ontology (if ontology is understood as the logos of being). Selfhood could not exist in isolation. The nega-tive aspect of this move arises from the fact that the objectified self is no longer being-in-the-world, and the acting self is no longer the "I" that acts: "I turned you into my death," as Black states.

This selfhood through others, rooted in the mutual gaze between mother and child, later becomes generalized to the private eye. The pun is deliberate, and the novel constantly plays with this pun on the private eye, the detective, and the private I, the self-consciousness that both creates and annihilates the world. Auster's favorite phrase for this concept derives from Rimbaud's "Je est un autre": "'I' is an other" (Rimbaud 304). The I that watches the self is never quite symmetrical with the self that acts. Auster discussed this ontological distinction in relation to the second half of The Invention of Solitude, in which "Je est un autre" inspired him to write about himself in the third person: "I had to objectify myself in order to explore my own subjectivity . . . . The moment I think about the fact that I'm saying 'I,' I'm actually saying 'he.' It's the mirror of self-consciousness, a way of watching yourself think" (Art 318–19). This structure informs an entire ontological parable operating throughout The New York Trilogy. Doubles proliferate repeatedly not to disseminate the no-tion of subjectivity, but rather to underscore the notion that these characters each reflect different ontological dimensions of the self. The "private eye," whether Quinn, Blue, or Fanshawe, is the "pri-vate I" of subjectivity. The object of these I's is consciousness of the world—consciousness without a notion of selfhood.

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This conflation of psychoanalysis and existentialism mediates several clear analyses of subjectivity throughout The New York Tril-ogy and the majority of Auster's other works. Three major ontologi-cal dimensions operate, each of which is offered as the origin of the others at one point or another: consciousness, subjectivity-for-itself, and subjectivity-for-others. Auster constantly works the boundaries between these aspects, always trying to reduce subjectivity to its low-est common denominator to see what remains outside of subjectivity as defined through the very other that instills subjectivity in the first place. In a similar way, the protagonists of Auster's 1980s works—City of Glass's Daniel Quinn, Moon Palace's Marco Stanley Fogg, In the Country of Last Things' Anna Blume—slowly divest themselves of external objects and others as a means of self-definition.

This theme of the importance of the divestiture of the external comes from Samuel Beckett, among others. Writing of Beckett's fic-tion in 1975, Auster described Beckett as a writer "who begins with little, ends with even less. The movement in each of his works is toward a kind of unburdening by which he leads us to the limits of experience—to a place where aesthetic and moral judgments become inseparable" (Art 87). As In the Country of Last Things' Anna Blume proposes this investigation, "Let everything fall away, and then let's see what there is. Perhaps that is the most interesting question of all: to see what happens when there is nothing, and whether or not we will survive that too" (29). Tim Woods claims about this passage that "One is left with a clear description of social determinism at work, and a clear demolition of any remnants of human essentialism" ("Looking" 125). This misses the point exactly. Causality operates in Auster, but the causality, like that of the existentialists, moves from efficient causality, obsessed with origins and foundational systems, to teleological causality, in which the subject projects a state of being into which he or she wants to arrive.

Auster's texts obsessively symbolize this divestiture as the state of hunger—the state of being without the contingent. Hunger perfectly addresses both the goals and the limitations of this worldview, for food is not contingent in the abstract, but only in the particular. Hu-mans need food abstractly, though perhaps not that particular piece of bread. The goal of the hunger artist might be to exist without the contingent, but it really transforms the desire to approach a state of being inhuman. Writing of Knut Hamsun's Hunger in 1970, Auster summarized his reading in terms that directly ally both Hamsun and himself with the existentialist tradition:

In the end, the art of hunger can be described as an ex-istential art. It is a way of looking death in the face, and by death I mean death as we live it today: without God,

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without hope of salvation. . . . I do not believe that we have come any farther than this. . . . Hamsun's character systematically unburdens himself of every belief system, and in the end, by means of the hunger he has inflicted upon himself, he arrives at nothing. There is nothing to keep him going—and yet he keeps on going. He walks straight into the twentieth century. (Art 20)

For the Auster of 1970, twentieth-century art is existential art. The art of hunger invites the individual to incorporate death within her consciousness so that mori no longer needs memento, because the only authentic state of existence is one wherein a "brief moment of Pascalian terror has been transformed into a permanent condition" (Art 13). This passage also includes a side-reference to the closing words of Beckett's Unnamable, the third volume in Three Novels, in which the unnamed consciousness declares, "you must go on, I can't go on, I'll go on" (414). In Auster's works, therefore, ontology always vacillates between consciousness, subjectivity-for-others, and subjectivity-for-itself. Each aspect interrogates the other dimensions. No aspect takes a hierarchical priority over the others. Auster's work does not enact the postmodernist undermining of the bourgeois lib-eral humanist subject as such. Rather, Auster engages in the older existentialist analysis of the dimensions of selfhood, independent of social institutions.

These dimensions of selfhood project into different characters as aspects of being—very often, Auster's own history. Here we might get our final clue as to what exactly Fanshawe discovered before he quit writing altogether. In fact, I would finally like to suggest that The New York Trilogy may serve as a parable of how Auster, early in his life, came to perfect his craft by observing the world around him until seeing and writing became equal to him, a "single, unbroken gesture" as it was for Quinn and Fanshawe. Auster found this momentary connection in his early poetry. As Quinn followed the elder Stillman, who believed in the ability to reconstruct the prelapsarian language, Auster of the 1970s followed poets whom he believed could reconcile the fallen state of language and identity. As Roberta Rubenstein has suggestively pointed out: "Auster's article on Charles Reznikoff . . . explicitly connects poetry and the attempt to rediscover the prelapsar-ian language. In the fallen world, Auster suggests, only through the practice of poetry can this language be regained even momentarily" (16). Auster's poetry attempts this reforging in an earnest way, but The New York Trilogy would suggest that Beckett's proto-postmodern nihilism kept creeping back in. The more he looked at reality, the more it broke apart, so that the thing investigated began to resemble conceptual knowledge in a deconstructive episteme, in which the thing and its opposite implicate one another.

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This perspective led to a compositional dead-end, to the con-clusion of Beckett's The Unnamable, forever writing oneself into the solipsistic corner—a room with no view in which writing's hermetic unwriting, the Beckettian de-composition, forces the writer to under-mine every paragraph, sentence, and word that came before it. As Auster described Jabès's The Book of Questions in 1976: "Like the narrator in Beckett's The Unnamable, who is cursed by 'the inability to speak [and] the inability to be silent,' Jabès's narrative goes nowhere but around and around itself" (Art 111). To escape this condition, the Trilogy implies, a writer needs an other. Not in the Lacanian sense of the self's definition deriving completely from the symbolic order, but rather in the Sartrean sense that the self would have no being without the other to force consciousness into consciousness for-itself. In this sense, shame, the fallenness of Adam and Eve, founds the first precondition of subjectivity.12

If Quinn terminates his textual life in a locked room, writing into a red notebook that will serve as his story for us (ultimately the Beckettian image of sheer solipsism), then The Locked Room finally serves as a forceful rejection of that worldview.13 Similarly, Fanshawe also ends his textual life in the bounds of a locked room, behind a pair of double doors. Like Beckett's Unnamable, where each sentence contradicts the one the came before, Fanshawe's red notebook's sen-tences functioned so that "each paragraph made the next paragraph impossible," and the narrator describes the notebook itself in terms that are uncannily familiar in postmodern aesthetics:

It is as if Fanshawe knew that his final work had to subvert every expectation I had for it. . . . He had answered the question by asking another question, and therefore every-thing remained open, unfinished, to be started again. . . . And yet, underneath this confusion, I felt there was some-thing too willed, something too perfect, as though in the end the only thing he had really wanted was to fail—even to the point of failing himself. . . . One by one, I tore the pages from the notebook, crumpled them in my hand, and dropped them into a trash bin on the platform. I came to the last page just as the train was pulling out. (370–71)

As Stephen Bernstein cleverly points out, Fanshawe shares Quinn's postmodern fragmentation of subjectivity through a number of tex-tual equations: "In City of Glass Quinn had eventually 'arrived in a neverland of fragments' (113); now the narrator of The Locked Room makes a similar journey, in a narrative where Neverland and Blackouts are both titles of Fanshawe's novels" (93–94). But Bernstein stops short of pointing out the differences that undermine his reading of the text as a "postmodern sublimity" (99).

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At the end of The Locked Room, the red notebook is outside the double doors in the hall, underneath a set of stairs. The narrator takes the text with him, true, but he unwrites the text by physically removing it, page by page. Russell claims that the "red notebook illustrates Derrida's writing 'sous rature'—writing under erasure, a ceaseless undoing and preserving of meaning" (82). If the red note-book functions in this way, however, it is only as critique. The Locked Room allegorizes a fascination with and final rejection of Beckett's postmodern aesthetics—the proto-Derridean sous rature that contrib-utes to our postmodern world. In the world of The New York Trilogy, postmodernism functions as byproduct, not as cause.

Written into a solipsistic container, spewing words to the city or writing texts that have no point but their own subversion, The New York Trilogy suggests that the Beckettian narrative ultimately serves no purpose but its own defeat. Perhaps it is no surprise that no other Auster novel after The New York Trilogy carries the same mysteriously problematic and extensively antimimetic structure. The Locked Room allowed Auster to disengage with these otherwise intractable narratological problems, perhaps as a method to bypass them finally. As Auster told Joseph Malia, the "deeper" he got into his own work, "the less engaging theoretical problems" became (Art 283). By enacting and rejecting the Beckettian paternal influence, the fiction was able to move to the far more realistic, if still somewhat symbolic prose that composes the rest of Auster's corpus. Auster's antipostmodern project almost inadvertently writes back against the critical discourses written by his contemporaries, and he manages to negate postmodernism by way of a critique of its foundational moments. Of course, Beckett takes priority, and his works served as the inspirational basis for the postmodern theorists who would come after him, turning art into theory. Though he misread Lacan, claims he never read a word of Derrida, and was only apparently familiar with structuralist-era Barthes, Auster nevertheless effects a critique of those theorists by his rejection of their inspirations.

Notes

1. Auster himself suggested in an interview with Joseph Malia that Beckett served as a sort of Oedipal precursor in the Harold Bloom sense, preventing Auster from writing as "the influence of Beckett was so strong that I couldn't see my way beyond it" (Art 275). This is no psychoanalytic stretch, as Auster himself goes so far as to link Beckett directly to a paternal figure, such as these comments he made to Michel Contat in 1996: "I think all my father figures are dead. . . . I think I looked up to Beckett in a way, even though he was not

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someone I was close to personally. We met a couple of times, cor-responded a little bit, but he was certainly a paternal figure for me" ("Manuscript" 186–87).

2. As John Zilcosky discusses in one of the finest essays on Auster to date, Tzvetan Todorov, in "The Typology of Detective Fiction," quotes the detective novelist S. S. Van Dine, who in 1928 drew the clearest analogy between detective fiction and reading: "author : reader = criminal : detective" (Todorov 49; Zilcosky 195).

3. See for example Norma Rowen, who also draws parallels to Tani (224). William Lavender states plainly that "City of Glass, then, is a deconstruction" (220) and Madeleine Sorapure coins a somewhat awkward neologism, "meta-anti-detective," to describe City of Glass (73).

4. Chris Tysh goes so far as to as to claim that the mixing of genres, for which Jacques Derrida militated in "The Law of the Genre" (202–29), places Auster's literary productions squarely within the pomo camp. . . . Whether the author strongly resists the postmodern label . . . or not doesn't change the fact that Auster's books flaunt a fan of is-sues and textual strategies we've come to associate with postmodern logic (intertextuality, critique of origins, mise-en-abyme structures, to name just a few) (46).

5. Placing the temporal frame of these passages' composition is not so easy. Auster later claimed in somewhat disavowing rhetoric that he devised many of City of Glass's major set pieces in the late 1960s or early 1970s: "The crazy speech about Don Quixote, the maps of Stillman's footsteps, the crackpot theories about America and the Tower of Babel—all that was cooked up when I was still in my early twenties" (Art 299). If we believe Auster, the origin of these plot devices occurs some time after Fish's study, right around the time that Auster was working on his Master of Arts degree in Renaissance literature at Columbia University, and it would be almost impossible to specialize in Renaissance literature and not know of the debates surrounding this issue.

6. Rubenstein states that "Auster's reworking of the detective story as a quest for the definitive language finally tells us that it is not the correct and final text of reality but a text about the text that is the most appropriate one for the postmodern world" (233). And William G. Little offers: "Quinn's tracing of Stillman is also a search for a transcendental signified, a quest for a 'still' point or immutable Real beyond the glassy contingency of experience" (157).

7. As Auster defended himself to McCaffery and Gregory: "Chance? Destiny? Or simple mathematics, an example of probability theory at work? It doesn't matter what you call it. Life is full of such events. And yet there are critics who would fault a writer for using that epi-sode in a novel" (Art 290).

8. William G. Little, in one of the most earnestly playful deconstructive readings after Russell, suggests that "This quintessence of quid-

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dity—the essence of the essential (a tautology) or the essence of a trifle (a paradox). The series of associative glissades never cuts to the quick; it denies transparent access to a transcendent signified, or, in Quinn's case, to a private 'I'" (139). He also notes the similar-ity to the modernist forms, but denies they signify similarly, in good postmodern form (149).

9. This motif continues into Ghosts, where after Blue knocks Black to the ground, the narrator concludes: "For now is the moment that Blue stands up from his chair, puts on his hat, and walks out the door. And from this moment on, we know nothing" (232). Steven E. Alford incompletely reads this to mean, "When the words of the other ceased, the self ceased to exist" ("Mirrors" 25).

10. While several critics have noted this claim, most ignore what this may mean for the overall interpretation of the Trilogy. Two of the finest, from very different perspectives than mine, are Rubenstein (255) and Alford, who not only points it out, but tries to peel back many of the possible narrative layers (26–27).

11. In a footnote of Alford's essay, he underscores Auster's connections to Sartre, although he draws a sharper distinction between their theories than I would be willing to see:

Paul Auster (the real Paul Auster) has been a student of Jean Paul Sartre's works and translated Sartre's Life/Positions . . . . What distinguishes Sartre and Auster in this respect is Auster's focus on language as constitutive of the self and world, and the rendering problematic of any notion of an originary intentional-ity, a la Husserl. Auster rejects the autonomy of consciousness Sartre so ardently defends . . . and places in between self and world (or other) language. This interposition problematizes the notion of self-knowledge, because if everything is text, the notion of autonomy (which would ground self-knowledge) is suspect. (30–31)

12. Auster himself suggests that Quinn functions as a version of Auster in an alternate universe—the universe up to Auster's life in the early 1980s. As he told McCaffery and Gregory: "I tried to imagine what would have happened to me if I hadn't met [his wife Siri Hustvedt], and what I came up with was Quinn" (Art 313). Indeed, Quinn and Auster parallel one another everywhere throughout the novel. Quinn was a poet, who wrote a potboiler, Suicide Squeeze under the pseud-onym William Wilson; in the 1970s, Auster was a poet who wrote a potboiler, Squeeze Play under the pseudonym Paul Benjamin. Quinn lost his wife and child (through death) about five years before the novel's beginning, leaving him to go further and further inside himself, culminating finally in an investigation of a patriarch who disappears. Auster lost his wife and child (through divorce) about five years before the novel's beginning, leaving him alone, "in a kind of limbo" (Art 312), culminating finally in an investigation of his father who passed away (The Invention of Solitude). Quinn knows the exact moment

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of his own origin: "his mother had once told him that he had been conceived on her wedding night. This fact had always appealed to him—being able to pinpoint the first moment of his existence" (12); similarly, Auster knows that he was conceived on his parents' appar-ently passionless wedding night, although he does not seem nearly as pleased: "I think of it sometimes: how I was conceived in that Niagara Falls resort for honeymooners. Not that it matters where it happened. But the thought of what must have been a passionless embrace, a blind, dutiful groping between chilly hotel sheets, has never failed to humble me into an awareness of my own contingency" (Invention 18).

13. In a letter to Dennis Barone, Auster vehemently repudiated Quinn and critics' tendency to equate Quinn's position with his own worldview. Critics, Auster protested, "confuse the thoughts and statements of the characters in my books with my own beliefs. . . . Just because Quinn thinks these things doesn't mean I do. As far as I was concerned, Quinn's approach to writing was an example of his alienation—his terrible distress and sadness as a man" (14).

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———. "Interview with Joseph Malia." Auster, Art 274–86.———. "Interview with Larry McCaffery and Sinda Gregory." Auster, Art

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Fish, Stanley. Surprised by Sin: The Reader in Paradise Lost. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1988.

Holquist, Michael. "Whodunit and Other Questions: Metaphysical Detec-tive Stories in Post-War Fiction." New Literary History 3.1 (1971): 135–56.

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