Is Paul Auster's Ghost a Detective Novel

García Álvarez de Perea.1

Ana García Álvarez de Perea.

28.June.2001

Is Paul Auster´s Ghosts a detective novel?

Paul Auster is a North-American novelist with a very

heavy literary baggage; he has written poetry, essays and he

has translated several works from authors like Jacques Dupin,

Mallarmé and Sartre, this conveys depth to his work which

becomes very complex because of the use of different elements

of different literary genres. Paul Auster has already

written eight novels including Ghosts (1983) which was later

included in his Trilogy of New York.

With Ghosts, Paul Auster created a novel in which

several genres and styles are included and mixed, the purpose

of this meddling in the form of a detective novel is the

ground work for this paper. In it, I will try to clarify

several aspects of the novel in order to understand Paul

Auster´s purpose in it. To achieve this, I will deal with

certain features.

First of all, I will see the normal elements of

detective novels and those that Auster includes in this novel

and those which he does not. According to John Shipley in his

Dictionary of World Literary Terms, a detective story is a

narrative in which a specific problem is solved by the wit

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and energy of a detective, he also states that the form is

one of the narrowest in popular fiction, but that it also

admits an astonishing variety; according to John G. Cawelti,

a detective novel is a novel in which “ a conventional way of

defining and developing a particular kind of situation or

situations, a pattern of action or development of this

situation, a certain group of characters and the relations

between them, and a setting or type of setting appropriate to

the characters and action”. This is somewhat too fuzzy still,

so I will focus mainly on the four aspects Poe specified for

detective novels.

The first one is the situation, according to Poe the

novel should begin with an unsolved crime and move towards

the elucidation of the mystery, with the criminal and his

purposes known, to determine the means or to establish a

clear evidence for the criminal´s deed. There are two major

types of crime: murder and crimes associated with political

intrigue. According to William Aydelotte, normally the

detective usually has little real personal interest in the

crime he is investigating, and, for him, this is a

“fundamental architectonic principle of the formula”.

The second important feature is that of the pattern of

action, the detective story formula centres upon the

detective´s investigation and solution of the crime, there

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are six main phases in this pattern: the introduction of the

detective, the crime and the clues, the investigation, the

announcement of the solution, the explanation of the solution

and the denouément. The introduction of the detective is

normally made at the beginning and there is usually a show of

the detective´s competence so that the reader is able to see

from the beginning that the detective will be able to solve

the mystery at the end. The detective is presented in his

context, though this is not necessary. In most detective

novels the point of view of the narrator does not let us see

the workings of the mind of the detective and the description

of the crime usually follows the introduction of the

detective, the crime should be surrounded by clues and it

appears as insoluble, there is a parade of witnesses,

suspects and false solutions that make the process more

obscure.

The announcement of the solution is in the final

section in the pattern of the classical detective story and

involves the actual apprehension and confession of the

criminal.

The third aspect that Poe talks about is characters and

relationships, according to Poe, there are four main roles:

the victim, the criminal, the detective and those that are

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threatened by the crime but who are incapable of solving it.

Without these four roles, it is impossible to create a

detective story . The detective should be detached from

society and ordinary patterns of human society.

The fourth element is the setting, in these novels, we

find the detective isolated against the world outside, the

isolated is related to the gothic and the world is associated

to order. The back and forth from the setting and the office

of the detective are symbolic for chaos and order.

Now we will see the elements of detective novels that

are included or not in this novel. To start with, detective

novels are supposed to start with a given situation which is

the presence of a crime that has to be solved, in Auster´s

novel we do not find the crime, not only at the beginning,

the truth is that Blue, the protagonist of the book does not

know exactly what the problem to solve is and he imagines

possible “crimes” that he should be investigating, in the

first page of the novel, the narrator tells us: “Blue assumes

it´s a marriage case”(p. 162)just to tell us in the following

page that he was wrong, and he goes on elaborating plausible

causes for White´s need of a detective, in p.172, the

narrator tells us how Blue entertains himself in making up

stories; Blue imagines that White and Black are brothers and

that a large inheritance is at stake or also that they are

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both scientists and that they are about to discover

something, or even that it is a police or spies´ case. All

these stories are possible and, as long as the narrator or

White do not give us more information, they could be

realities, this is what Auster tries to pose, the fact that

reality is not only what it is, but that it could be anything

as long as it is possible, just as this novel could be a

detective novel.

Another important issue is that the detective should be

detached from the crime, that is, he should not be personally

involved in it, at the beginning, it is in this way, Blue

recognises he accepts the case for the money: “Blue needs the

work, and so he listens to White and doesn´t ask many

questions”. But when the work advances and Blue starts

discovering things about himself through the case, his

detachment is not so evident, when he has been in the case

for a year, the narrator advances us Blue´s thoughts which

project a different view of the case: “It seems perfectly

plausible to him that he is also being watched, observed by

another in the same way that he has been observing White”

(p.200), he even loses his girlfriend for the sake of the

case.

There is also a case in the novel in which a detective,

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Gold, which is presented as a positive figure-starting with

the colour chosen to name him- is precisely enhanced for his

closeness and personal interest in a case: “If it were

possible, he would like nothing better than to drop what he

is doing and try to help Gold. There aren´t enough men like

that, he thinks.” (p.169) This is a possible point where

Auster may be contesting the formula of the detective novel.

The pattern of action is the weakest point in this novel

if we look at it as a detective novel, according to Poe,

there are six main phases of the pattern. I will deal now

with those that are contested by Auster. The first phase is

contested in the first page of the novel and may hint to the

idea that Auster wants the reader to read this novel as a

normal novel but not belonging specifically to the detective

genre. The pattern in detective novels is that the

detective is presented in his context and that, at the

beginning of the novel, the author lets us see the “special

competence” of the detective, in order to let the reader see

that the novel is worth reading because we will be able to

appreciate an extraordinary work. If we turn to the first

page, this is specially reversed by Auster, Blue does not ask

many questions and at the end of the conversation he does not

have a clear idea of the problem he is supposed to solve, but

that does not pose a problem to him, all that the narrator

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tells us is: “To be fair to Blue, he finds it all a little

strange.”(p.161) From the beginning, the reader has the

impression that it is not a normal detective story, even

though these novels are presented in the cover as detective

novels, there is something special with them. The first

description of the detective is totally absent: “First of all

there is Blue”, the longest description is of a secondary

character, White and it is the only way in which Blue shows

his competence as a great detective but it is not

extraordinary: “Blue is no amateur in the art of disguise,

and it´s not difficult for him to see through this one”.

(p.162) Instead of letting the reader see the detective´s

competence, it seems that Auster wants to ridicule Blue by

giving a first impression of him as not competent enough even

to get a complete idea of what the case is going to be and

also enhancing his work as discovering the disguise which is

presented as not a specialist´s work but as a work that could

be done by anyone, this is a mockery of the detective

protagonist in this novel. The break of the formula and also

of our expectations is in page 162 the narrator tells us the

length of the case which is rather long: “It is February 3,

1947. Little does Blue know, of course, that the case will

go on for years.” Auster gives a very exact date of the

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beginning of the case and a very loose one for its end, this

makes the reader become more hesitant in what the case will

end up and if it will end up satisfactorily and even if we do

not find this element normally in detective novels it can

somehow help to increase the suspense.

Another important phase is that of the crime and the

clues; the crime is unknown, Blue does not know what mystery

he has to solve or even who is the one he should be

following. Blue hesitates between following the woman or

staying with his job near to Black in page 183 and, later on,

he hesitates if he should follow the supposed maker of the

crime or the person that has given him the case and follows

this one to the Post Office because he is lost within the

case:

“ The real problem boils down to identifying the

nature of the problem itself. To start with, who poses

the greater threat to him, White or Black? [...] Tale

Black, then. Until now he has been the entire case, the

apparent cause of all his troubles. But if White is

really out to get Blue and not Black, then perhaps Black

has nothing to do with it,[...] On the other hand, it

is also possible that Black is somehow working in league

with White and that together they have conspired to do

Blue in. [...]If so, what are they doing to him?

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Nothing very terrible finally- at least not in any

absolute sense”. (p. 201)

This paragraph is in the middle of the novel and has two

very striking issues; the first one is the fact that deals

with the detective novel, and it is that of the detective not

being aware, at this stage of the novel, of the real nature

of the case. The second one is that of the last statement,

especially, taking into account that he has lost his former

life with the loss in page 195 of his future wife.

The investigation is rather inexistent, there are nor

witnesses, nor suspects and the announcement of the solution

is lacking also due to the fact that there is not really a

solution even at the end of the novel.

Talking about what refers to the core of characters

normally present in this type of novels, we find that in this

one there are great black holes. To start with we do not

have a victim nor a criminal, or rather, the criminal is not

clearly accused of any crime and, therefore he is not what is

expected of a criminal. The clearest figure of those

proposed by Poe that we find in this novel is the detective,

Blue; though not presented as the typical private-eye,

conveys clearly what we expect of a detective especially at

the beginning when he is presented in his office and starting

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a new case, nevertheless his skills in the detective

profession are not so clear, he does follow the person he has

been paid to and he fills the reports he had contracted to

write, but he does not follow him in a very systematic way

and he even cheats in his reports in order to change what he

is living and keep the case moving. The fourth role, which

also lacks in this novel, is that of the people threatened by

the crime that go to the detective because they feel unable

to solve it, we only have White who does not give a hint that

he is nervous or preoccupied because of the case, what is

more, in this novel we do not find a group of people or a

society in which the criminal and the victim are included and

therefore there are not many people involved in the case just

Blue, White and Black and in an incidental way Blue´s

girlfriend.

The last important aspect we are going to deal with is

the setting; in classical detective novels, we find the

detective in his own setting, that is, his office which is

normally symbolic for order and the detective has to restore

the order that has been broken in the outside world. All

these things leads the reader to think of this novel as not

being of the detective genre, but the truth is that Auster

uses the detective genre as a frame to deal with other

elements more important to him such as the nature of writing,

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the nature of identity and its construction, representations

and constructions of reality, time and space, and others.

The elements included to frame the novel as a detective

novel are few but enough to create a solid framework in which

the novel is embedded. The most evident is the presence of

the private-eye, the case, the “legwork” in which Blue is

entangled. The most important features are given by these

facts and it is true that they frame all the novel because

the few things that happen are related to the case, the

leaving of his wife, the conversations with Black and the

disguises, the reading of the book by Thoreau, the opening of

the “locked room” in the final passage, and so on. Another

important element is the point of view of the narrator which

gives us all the workings of Blue´s mind, but not of Black´s

mind, in this sense I have the impression that both Blue and

Black, the doubles, are part of the book in a different way,

Black justifies his existence and his acts with the existence

of Blue, when Blue asks Black why he is there Black answers:

“To remind me of what I was supposed to be doing. 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”

(p.230) For me, it seems as if they were parts of the same

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person, the detective is in a way Blue because it is his job,

but it is Black who is in control of the situation, the one

that knows all the facts and he even tells Blue in one of his

conversations that he is a detective.

In this novel, Auster shows us the construction of an

identity, the fact that it is Black and not Blue who dies

leads me to think of Blue´s entrance in what I will call a

“parallel world”, that is, in order to know himself, Blue is

encommended this task and there are moments in which he shows

he feels as if something not natural was happening to him:

“Nearly every day he has been tempted to pick up the phone

and call her, thinking that perhaps a moment of real contact

would break the spell”. (p.173), this makes him think that he

is changing and as the narrator also tells us: “He has never

given much thought to the world inside him, and though he

always knew it was there, it has remained an unknown

quantity, unexplored and therefore dark, even to himself”

(p.171). Blue knows he is not in a normal state because he

wants to do things and he can not, he thinks words will be

able to break the spell he has said in page 173: “[...]some

luminous and extraordinary words that will bring him back to

the world of the living.”(p.187)

In this quest for his identity which is not provoked by

the protagonist but by the incidents that happen to him, as

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is typical in Auster´s novels, Blue needs to identify with

someone and does so with some characters throughout the

novel. The first one is Black, in page 164, we find Blue

writing that Black is writing, therefore the two main

characters are doing the same it is the first hint in the

novel of a double which will be clearly united at the end.

The second identification is that of the protagonist

with the boy that was murdered whose case Gold is treating,

his thoughts are: “It could have been me” (p.170). The

identification with Black grows stronger throughout the

novel, it is significant that in the quote above of page 171,

he sees himself as “dark”. Blue also feels well in the dark

as we can see in page 182: “There is something nice about

being in the dark, he discovers, something thrilling about

not knowing what is going to happen next”. The choice of the

name Black and the references to darkness do not seem a

coincidence to me, darkness unites the two characters.

There is a strong identification between the two main

characters from very early in the novel, in page 172, the

narrator tells 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.” And in page 188 there is a strong

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connection shown between the two of them: “For the closer he

feels to Black, the less he finds it necessary to think about

him. In other words, the more deeply entangled he becomes,

the freer he is. What bogs him is not involvement but

separation”.

The identification becomes stronger when it is not only

Black the double of Blue but when both are intermingled and

they become not doubles but one, this can be seen when Black

tells Blue in page 216:”Because he needs me, says Black,

still looking away. He needs my eyes looking at him”. It is

not only the narrator that draws parallelisms between the

main characters but also Black does. Also, when Blue goes to

Black´s appartment the narrator states: “[...]and suddenly,

there is no distance, the thing and the thought of the thing

are one and the same.” (p.218) This sentence is quite

revealing at this point, it draws a parallelism between the

thing and the character, Black, which is the thought, the

ghost-for he is the one to die, and Blue, who is the thing,

that still belongs to this world, that is why he does not

die. The last fragment involving the identity of Blue is

found near the end of the novel and the narrator lets the

reader see that Blue does not need Black anymore, this is in

page 226: ”For Blue at this point can no longer accept

Black´s existence, and therefore denies it.” Both are one,

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but Blue does not know, throughout the novel he learns about

himself, he has to kill Black when he sees himself mature for

Black is somehow an alter-ego of Blue and there can not be

two.

Nevertheless, Auster plays again with our expectatives

because the reader does not get a glimpse of the new

identity, for the reader Blue has not achieved his mission in

the novel, to solve the mystery. Auster uses the form of the

detective novel to create the quest for the solution of the

crime and then not giving the answer to the reader who at the

end does not even know the crime nor what the protagonist has

achieved.

Another important issue that Auster includes in this,

apparently simple, novel is that of the nature of writing,

through the writing of the reports Auster gives his account

of the nature of literature and writing. As soon as the

beginning of the novel in page 162, he equates literature and

history, he puts them at the same level in the sentence “Such

is the way of the world: one step at a time, one word and

then the next.” Blue has always felt that words are easy to

deal with, that they help him to understand the world, but

this changes when he enters in this “parallel world”, when he

has to write his first report he feels that “he can no longer

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depend on the old procedures” (p.175), then he feels that

“words do not necessarily work, that it is possible for them

to obscure the things they are trying to say.”

Auster is a master with irony, in page 202, when the

narrator tells us how Blue feels, he despises a book that in

which “There is no story, no plot, no action-nothing but a

man sitting alone in a room and writing a book” by which he

is describing this novel in which there is no story- at least

not coherent-, no plot and almost no action.

Space and time are also important in this novel, the

settings are reduced and the time seems to be stopped, it

seems as if it was the same trough all the novel, at the

beginning we find: “The place is New York, the time is the

present, and neither one will ever change.” (p.161), this may

be said to give universality to the text because the fact is

that time changes for it keeps moving on, nevertheless Black

seems to want to stop it and says at the end of the novel:

“It´s going to be the two of us together, just like always”.

Another important issue is language, there are few

descriptions and the syntax is usually not complex. In an

interview with Larry Mccaffery and Sinda Gregory, Auster

declared that his novels are not nor pretend to be detective

novels but that they are more similar to fairy tales, I find

that it is true to a certain extent, in what refers to

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language it is true, also in the introduction of the

characters as simple, straight characters and the naming of

the characters with colours adds up to this idea: Black is

bad; White is good-though we are not sure of this; Blue,

Green, Red, and the rest are ordinary characters; and Gold is

extraordinary. Language is very simple and the complexity of

the text relies in the difficulty to understand what happens.

When the narrator talks about this new form of writing

that Blue needs it makes me think of the new ways of writing

the postmodern authors propose and how this novel is “nothing

new under the sun” in the sense that Detective novels have

not been invented by Auster but, at the same time, they are

completely new, for they present completely modern themes and

ways of developing them. Auster with the help of the

detective genre, the fairy tales and the cinema among others

presents a new novel which is as the rest and completely

different, he subverts the tradition to pose important issues

in our modern world.

Works Cited

-Auster, Paul. Ghosts. The New York Trilogy. London:

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Penguin Books.1990.

-Cawelti, Jihn G. Adventure, Mystery and Romance.

London: The University of Chicago Press.1976.

-Mccaffery, Larry and Sinda Gregory. “Interview with

Paul Auster” Mississipi Review. Hattiesburg: The University

of Southern Mississipi. 1991 (volume 20, numbers 1&2)

-Shipley, Joseph T. Dictionary of World Literary Terms.

London: George Allen & Unwin. 1979

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Is Paul Auster's Ghost a Detective Novel

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