Nothing to Go on - Paul Auster's City of Glass.pdf

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Nothing to Go on: Paul Auster's "City of Glass"Author(s): William G. Little and Paul AusterSource: Contemporary Literature, Vol. 38, No. 1 (Spring, 1997), pp. 133-163Published by: University of Wisconsin PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1208855 .Accessed: 22/07/2013 08:55

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W ILLIAM G. LITTLE

Nothing to Go On: Paul Auster's City of Glass

Nothing happens. And still, it is not nothing. Paul Auster, "White Spaces"

The poet is he who hears a language which makes nothing heard. Maurice Blanchot, The Space of Literature

n Paul Auster's The New York Trilogy nothing happens again and again. To say "nothing happens" in these detective stories is not to say that they are plotless, but rather to indicate that the plots are continually foiled-"foil 1: obs. to tread under

foot: trample 2: to spoil (a trail or scent) by crossing or retracing 3a: to prevent (a person) from attaining a desired end: keep from achiev- ing a goal b. to bring (as a scheme, an effort, an attack) to naught" (Webster's)-by a fugitive otherness resisting apprehension by the standard procedures of systematic interrogation, empirical analysis, and deductive logic. In these texts, the detective, who is also a writer, casts nets, transcribes events, and traces marks, but his calcu- lations and representations lead to no final illumination, no climac- tic discovery: "He had nothing, he knew nothing, he knew that he knew nothing" (City of Glass 159); "He has learned a thousand facts, but the only thing they have taught him is that he knows nothing" (Ghosts 59); "What I had done so far amounted to a mere fraction of nothing at all" (The Locked Room 20). While the goal of detection is to uncover the whole story, in Auster's work nothing, especially not nothing, is grasped in its "all." No case is closed. Appropriating,

Contemporary Literature XXXVIII, 1 0010-7484/97/0001-133 $1.50 ? 1997 by the Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System


134 * CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE

only to subvert, the teleological notion of progress toward "a desired end," each tale entails a search for meaning-a tail job- marked by repeated bewilderment, perpetual crossing (out) and retracing, interminable wandering.

The refrain of nothing in Auster's writing-a refrain pointing toward a darkness which refrains from coming to light or which only comes to light as darkness-is a response to a modern, secularized conception of experience as fractured, arbitrary, and incoherent. As the narrator in The Locked Room (1986) professes, "In the end, each life is no more than the sum of contingent facts, a chronicle of chance intersections, of flukes, of random events that divulge nothing but their own lack of purpose" (35). This sense of a lack of purpose-the feeling that nothing is sure or that nothing adds up- is not, however, cause for nihilistic despair. Instead, Auster's com- plex investment in nothing signals a deconstructive investigation into the repressive effects of any claim to be able to account for everything, to arrive at the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. Enacting one of Gregory Jay's definitions of the project of deconstruction, The New York Trilogy "investigates how truth oper- ates as the foreclosure of values, as the expropriation of wills and desires" (73). Auster appropriates the model of the detective's pursuit of the truth in order to illustrate how certain narratives de- signed to render modern experience totally coherent through the revelation or attainment of perfect knowledge-the fundamentalist narrative of Divine Will, the humanist narrative of the divine self, the literary critical narrative of divine Author-ity-are totalizing schemes whose operations depend upon the silencing of different values and the value of difference.

More specifically, I wish to argue that City of Glass (1985), the first installment in the trilogy, exposes the repressive nature of these powerfully seductive projects by critiquing two interrelated strategies for restoring a transcendent Real immune to the vicissitudes of "wills and desires." Depicting two ascetic investigators who undertake rituals of purgation and starvation, Auster writes a slender book in a spare style with an eye to demonstrating how the modern embrace of asceticism-as it appears in the minimalist prose of certain modernist writings and as it appears in the regimens of self- denial so prevalent in contemporary culture-expresses a will and a


LITTLE * 135

desire to purge difference from the text and from the self. While minimalist abstraction seeks to produce an autonomous text cleansed of impurities inherent in acts of representation, the individual who practices self-starvation seeks to produce an autonomous identity cleansed of impurities inherent in the act of consumption. The auster(e) detective writer and the auster(e) detective who writes are puritanical operatives undertaking a religiously inflected quest to uncover transcendent truth by eliminating waste from the body of the text and from the text of the body. They try to yield an immutable, decontextualized, value-free form by reducing their figures to nothing. In City of Glass, Auster works through these exorcis- ing exercises in order to point to a different kind of nothing, a nothing that makes a difference by refusing to be eliminated in the name of truth, thus keeping open other ways to read the clues, other leads on the case. When read in a culture where the identification of "true" values by various self-appointed guardians of virtue and cor- rectness results in the denial of difference and "the foreclosure of values," the novelist's declaration of artistic intent, delivered suc- cinctly in a poem entitled "Credo," appears all the more urgent:

To say nothing. To say: our very lives

depend on it. (Disappearances 113)

. 1 .

In Donald Barthelme's short story "Nothing: A Preliminary Ac- count," the author sets out to make a list of all the things that nothing is not, hoping, by a process of elimination, to arrive at what nothing is. At the same time, he realizes that any such investigation, no matter how methodical or thorough, is incapable of pin- pointing or nailing down nothing. Nothing, it turns out, is that which cannot be properly registered within any work, regardless of how encyclopedic: "nothing must be characterized in terms of its non-appearances, no-shows, incorrigible tardiness.... Nothing is not a nail" (248). Any account of nothing is inevitably preliminary or incomplete because nothing is the always improper name for that



which, in philosophical terms, resists being appropriated or appre- hended by thought. Always lying at the limit of absolute knowledge, nothing is wholly Other-a radical heterogeneity, an irreduc- ible difference, an unreclaimable remainder. Neither presence nor absence, neither being nor nonbeing, neither identity nor difference, neither inside nor outside, nothing is (yet is not) utter (yet unutterable) waste, that which cannot be treated or processed by the technologies of reason. As refuse refusing to be re-fused into the productive economy of the known, nothing remains the unname- able residue at the margins of any field of representation. In one of his several (un)accomplished approaches to nothing, Mark C. Tay- lor names this nondesignatable no-thing the "not": "Declining all nominations and eluding or resisting every oppositional structure constructed to repress it, the not entails an altarity more radical than any binary difference or dialectical other" (Nots 1-2).1 Nothing gives structure fits because it fits nowhere, or, as Barthelme's ever-failing list illustrates, nothing ties any system up in (k)nots.

To address and entertain the impossible task of inscribing nothing, Auster works in a genre whose form and content have been marked by a determination to negate nothing. As he indicates in City of Glass, the traditional detective novel is governed by a totalizing imperative; it invariably presumes a structure and a case in which nothing goes to waste since everything turns out to conform to a central, organizing logos or author-itative cause: "What he liked about these books was their sense of plenitude and economy. In the good mystery there is nothing wasted, no sentence, no word that is not significant .... nothing must be overlooked. Everything becomes essence" (14-15). Governed by the teleological formula of a clear beginning, middle, and end, the "good" book is a secular construct that nevertheless offers the reader the salvational promise of "plenitude" by being a utilitarian, waste-free work in which nothing must be overlooked. Like the Christian plot of history, the good mystery appears to be a master(ful) narrative in which both author and

1. Taylor's term "altarity," like Jacques Derrida's term differance, is yet another insuffi- cient name for a difference, or an alternative, that, like nothing, cannot be reduced to the same. The difference between altarity and differance, according to Taylor, is that altarity entertains the sacred aspect of such Otherness-it bears within it the term "altar"- while "the question of the religious ... is silent in the a of differance" (Altarity xxxiii).


LITTLE * 137

investigator are able to reassure us, by enacting what Taylor refers to as "the closure of the book" (Erring 73), that we are not wandering in a wilderness of ambiguous signs. Writer and detective close the book (on a case) by silencing the synchronic and diachronic play of difference(s) that make(s) signification possible. It thus makes sense that in City of Glass the writer-turned-detective Daniel Quinn binges on these closed books even though he is otherwise committed to recovering a state of wholeness through literal and figurative acts of purgation: "When he was in the right mood, he had little trouble reading ten or twelve of them in a row. It was a kind of hunger that took hold of him, a craving for a special food, and he would not stop until he had eaten his fill" (14).

In contrast to this "special food," Auster's postmodern potboil- ers are harder to digest because nothing works out in the end, or, rather, nothing works out through the loose ends of the texts' forever unfinished fabrics. Auster's refrain of nothing leaves the reader perpetually hungry by pointing toward that which inevitably gets excluded in the logocentric claim to comprehensive under- standing of self and world. Deviating from the straight and narrow form of the closed book, The New York Trilogy-despite being as- cribed a design that recalls the tripartite structure of Christian history-constitutes what Taylor calls "erring scripture" (Erring 170). While Auster's texts appear to follow the redemptive-bound script of the traditional detective novel, they are nevertheless errant versions stressing that subjects and signs are never single, straightforward, or self-evident but rather are always duplicitous, always (at least) double and deceptive. In City of Glass there are two operatives (or three if one counts the author)-Quinn and the theologian Peter Stillman-both of whom err by roaming the streets of New York on religious quests to establish the univocal presence of the paternal Word. Quinn seeks to "save Peter Still- man" (142) by establishing the identity and intention of Stillman's true father, also named Peter Stillman; Peter Stillman (the elder) seeks to save the world by reestablishing the self-negating clarity, the unerring intentionality, of "God's language."

Each quest in the trilogy entails ceaseless straying in part because the private eye is not a perfectly composed private "I." Auster's investigators are neither unique nor self-possessed. Never sure of


1 38 CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE

themselves, they are double-crossed from the beginning. Quinn writes under the pen name William Wilson (the eponymous character from Poe's tale of doubling) and then loses himself in the role of detective "Paul Auster." The narrator/writer in The Locked Room becomes obsessed with tracking down a man named Fanshawe (the eponymous character from Hawthorne's first novel), his "closest friend" from childhood, a "blood brother" and "twin" about whom the narrator says, "without him I would hardly know who I am" (7). Fanshawe has disappeared, leaving the narrator to assume his life-to marry his wife, to publish his writing, to write his biography-but the narrator still fails to organize a proper reunion with this other; Fanshawe appears at the end only as an absent presence, speaking through the crack of locked "double doors." Always self-divided and dis-integrated, always exiled from the ground of self-identical Being, always, in one sense, a missing person, Auster's private eye/I can only ever appear, like the detective in Ghosts, Black and Blue. As the narrator in The Locked Room puts it: "In general, lives seem to veer abruptly from one thing to another, to jostle and bump, to squirm. A person heads in one direction, turns sharply in mid-course, stalls, drifts, starts up again. Nothing is ever known, and inevitably we come to a place quite different from the one we set out for" (87). Nothing is ever known in Auster's writing because he works through the resistance to nothing which marks (a) traditional detective work charged with the imperatives of closure and disclosure in order to draw attention to the blindness that always accompanies the insight of a private eye/I.

But these narratives with nothing to them are also errant because the signs the sleuths stumble upon refuse to yield an a priori logic- "a coherence, an order, a source of motivation" (City of Glass 105). Governed by the fantasy of matching signifier to signified, clue to crime, the stereotypical gumshoe is confident that signs conform to a classical economy of representation. Language, far from being marked by errancy, is characterized by a glassy stillness:

His method is to stick to outward facts, describing events as though each word tallied exactly with the thing described, and to question the matter no further. Words are transparent for him, great windows that stand between him and the world.... Oh, there are moments when the glass


LITTLE ? 139

gets a trifle smudged ... but once he finds the right word, everything clears up.

(Ghosts 23-24)

Auster's speculations on detective work explore the faults in this method by investigating the cracks and splinters embedded in the panes of language. Like the other two texts in the trilogy, City of Glass is (de)composed of a discourse that is glassy in an altered sense of the term. In this novel, words, like identities, are unstable, fragile, chancy, glissant ("Slippery; [fig.] ticklish, delicate, hazard- ous" [Cassell's]). Always shifty, the glass of language is aleatory and aberrant, a place of displacement in which the profits of (a) work are forever deferred. While the work of the detective and the work of detective fiction are defined by the goal of leaving nothing to chance, Auster's useless work is marked by "the music of chance," an example being his glassy gloss on the name of his writer- detective: "'I see many possibilities for this word, this Quinn, this ... quintessence ... of quiddity. Quick, for example. And quill. And quack.... I like your name enormously, Mr. Quinn. It flies off in so many little directions at once'" (117). This quintessence of quiddity-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." In Auster's re- vision of the noir, the clue-seeking reader sees through a (magnify- ing) glass darkly.

The music of chance scored (scratched, cut, transcribed) in(to) Auster's sheets of glass answers Norman 0. Brown's plea: "Get the nothingness back into words. The aim is words with nothing to them; words that point beyond themselves rather than to themselves.... Empty words, corresponding to the void in things" (259). For Taylor, borrowing from M. M. Bakhtin, language with nothing to it is analogous to the grotesque body of the carnival par- ticipant. Marked by levity, it freely admits its own incompletion, open-endedness, and wastefulness.2 Like the bulging, gaping body

2. It is interesting to note that the concept of levity informs much of Auster's most recent novel, Mr. Vertigo (1994), a story about a young orphan trained in the art of levita- tion. A reminder of the unbearable lightness of being, Walt the Wonder Boy is a literally



of the Rabelaisian reveller, the language of nothing is irreducibly meaty. As the word made flesh, it subverts the conception of language as pure reflection, as a medium thin to the point of transpar- ency. Instead of conforming to the sober logic of monovalence, it violates the rules of propriety governing the proprietary subject and delights in the transgressive discharge of repressed meanings: "The body of the incarnate word marks the negation of the transcen- dence that is characteristic of God, self, and history" (Erring 168). Ceaselessly flowing, the language of nothing is always excessive and never full. Auster's improper texts insist upon the carnality of their medium, and, in so doing, they continually upset established hierarchies of organization or binary structures of sense-making (for example, identity/difference, utility/waste).3 In other words, such dissolution and equivocation undo the discrete eye/I of the reader by presenting a discursive scene always already contami- nated or turned inside out so that the plot can never be uncovered, the book can never be closed: "[There] were empty spaces for me, blanks in the picture, and no matter how successful I was in filling the other areas, doubts would remain, which meant that the work could never truly be finished" (The Locked Room 140).

* 2 .

First of all, there was the question of food. Paul Auster, City of Glass

Food, like language, is originally vested in the other, and traces of that otherness remain in every mouthful that one speaks-or chews. From the beginning one eats for the other, from the other, with the other: and for this

floating signifier who hovers in and over the void, refusing to be bound by the law of gravity, a law that defines being as a grounded presence. His remarkable routines are, above all, performances on the plane of nothing: "It wasn't a matter of first going up and then going out, it was a matter of going up and out at the same time, of launching myself in one smooth, uninterrupted gesture into the arms of the great ambient nothingness" (85).

3. Another example of Auster's carnivalesque collapsing of hierarchies is his decision to permit City of Glass to be adapted as a graphic novel. The metaphysical mystery story gets a mass-culture twist. See Neon Lit.: Paul Auster's City of Glass.


LITTLE ? 141

reason eating comes to represent the prototype of all transactions with the other, and food the prototype of every object of exchange.

Maud Ellmann, The Hunger Artists

Not "In the beginning was the Word," but rather first of all, or in the beginning, was the question of food. As the glassy prose of The New York Trilogy illustrates, language is never redeemed by the attendance ("and the Word was with God") or presence of an Author- God but rather is always already fallen, haunted by "empty spaces." Likewise, food, beginning with the forbidden fruit, calls attention, physiologically and symbolically, to the subject's empty spaces. Drawing upon eating's importance as a symbolic instance of "transactions with the other," Auster invokes images of self- starvation in several of his writings to critique logocentrism's ascetic insistence that difference be purged so that identity not remain in question. Nothing cannot be ventured without addressing the question of food, since consumption, as the ritual indulgences of carnival demonstrate, always bears "traces of that otherness" defiling the proper subject.

In Auster's work, writing and the refusal to eat are inextricably linked in ways deserving extended explanation. In an early essay entitled "The Art of Hunger," Auster valorizes the nameless and nomadic protagonist of Knut Hamsun's novel Hunger (1890), an as- piring writer who is "willing to risk everything for nothing," starving himself in isolation rather than relying upon any sustenance- alimentary, financial, social, spiritual-from existing economies or institutions. Refusing the physiological obligation to eat, "Ham- sun's character systematically unburdens himself of every belief in every system, and in the end, by means of the hunger he has inflicted upon himself, he arrives at nothing" (20). To arrive at nothing-which is not to arrive in the sense of reaching a terminus or finding a place-is to have rejected any promise of parousia, any guarantee of total satisfaction. Vagrant and vacuous, his pockets stuffed with unfinished manuscripts, the errant writer turns away from every course that promises to be (ful)filling. Hunger enacts a disgust with the concept of a finished book, with the notion of a proper subjectivity, and, ultimately, with the belief in God as transcendent presence. As Auster puts it: "In the end, the art of hunger


1 42 * CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE

can be described as an existential art. It is a way of looking death in the face, and by death I mean death as we live it today: without God, without hope of salvation. Death as the abrupt and absurd end of life" (20).

To live with hunger, to embrace, as a writer, what Auster calls "the aesthetics of hunger," is to confront the fact that experience and language are irremediably wanting, to admit, as hunger always reminds us, that life is constituted by lack and desire. Maud Ell- mann, in her study The Hunger Artists: Starving, Writing, and Impris- onment, describes the nature of this want in psychoanalytic terms by arguing that the desire for food, while indicative of the self's effort to secure the boundaries of a stable, independent identity by assimi- lating or devouring the world around it, is nevertheless also indicative of the self's forever expropriated, unwhole-some state, its inevi- table dependence upon, and penetration by, others:

it is by ingesting the external world that the subject establishes his body as his own, distinguishing its inside from its outside. If the subject is founded in gustation, though, this also means that his identity is constantly in jeopardy, because his need to incorporate the outside world exposes his fundamental incompleteness .... the catch is that the very need to eat reveals the "nothing" at the core of subjectivity.

(30)

Food is the toxic, yet tempting, agent of dissolution and disorder. Every swallow hollows out the subject striving for self-fulfillment. To give in to one's own cravings is to admit that identity, like language, is always haunted by difference. In Ellmann's words, "our bodies are composed of what we eat, and what we eat is always foreign to ourselves. Eating, then, confounds the limits between self and other" (56).

In this context, the refusal to eat can be understood as an individual commitment to take to the extreme the cultural "logic of distribution" defined by Julia Kristeva in Powers of Horror: An Es- say on Abjection.4 Self-starvation is a ritual in which everything

4. According to Kristeva, the "logic of distribution" that structures both society and subjectivity by setting up a formal system of oppositions-pure/impure, holy/defiling, et cetera-is nowhere more in evidence than in the prohibitions and divisions constructed with regard to food: "Food loathing is perhaps the most elementary and most archaic form of abjection" (2). Like the impossible memory of the mother's plenitude, which


LITTLE * 143

has become taboo; the subject seeks fulfillment by not allowing anything in, thereby aiming to repress "the 'nothing' at the core of subjectivity." Paradoxically, then, preferring not to eat may also be construed as a denial of hunger; it can be read, in fact, as a strategy for realizing perfect self-presence, a strategy Auster's hungry art calls into question. Ellmann terms this economy of self-domination "an economy of sacrifice" and finds it at work both in modernist aesthetics, where authors such as Yeats and Kafka depict the artist's search for "an implacable aesthetic that demands the decreation of the flesh" (59), and in the late twentieth-century preoccupation, particularly among women, with diet and abstinence, an obsession intimately bound up with a desire to transcend the weaknesses of the flesh and the imperatives of culture by going without, by seeking a "fast" track to the end: "there is something more eschatological at stake in self-starvation than the fashionable taste for slenderness or the equally fashionable ideology of 'self-control'" (16).

The logocentric impulse to isolate an exclusive, atemporal identity as well as an autonomous, well-wrought book-an impulse Auster continually works through in his approaches to nothing-is perhaps best described by Mark Anderson in an article entitled "An- orexia and Modernism, or How I Learned to Diet in All Directions." Anderson makes the compelling argument that certain modernist writers respond to the fragmentation, ephemerality, and contingency characterizing modern life by constructing texts that enact and portray a radically ascetic denial of the world. Tapping into a growing sense of spiritual decomposition, semiotic confusion, and personal alienation, these writers dramatize rejection of a world that appears inane, devoid of sense and sustenance: "When the self can no longer ingest and digest the world as food, can no longer turn the raw matter of sensation into abstract concepts, judgments, and generalizations, the subject is thrown back on itself for nourishment, becoming both brute matter and pure spirit" (31). Particular modernist authors-Anderson cites the writings of Kafka and Beck- ett as critical examples-represent this strategy of introversion and

Kristeva names "the hallucination of nothing" (42), food, which first issues from the mother, is a constant reminder of the fragility of every subject's integrity.


144 ? CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE

autophagy by producing minimalist texts which, like the bodies of anorexics, seek to embody a discarnate form ("pure spirit"), an "anti-body" purged of the world's contaminating corporeality, its phenomenal fat. And like the anorexic figure, the self-consuming work presents to the would-be aid or interpreter an unsettling, even haunting "cipher text," a spectacularly silent corpus ("brute matter") that resists being easily diagnosed or deciphered.

Anderson's identification of what he calls "textual anorexia" hinges upon the idea that modernist minimalism-like the nonrep- resentational painting of abstract expressionism and the dis- figured buildings of international-style architecture-articulates a disgust with conventional language. The hunger artists who prac- tice this craft of aversion inscribe upon their textual bodies a conviction that the signs of traditional discourse are corrupt, exhausted, and opaque, unable to operate as clear, redeeming forms of mediation between self and world. In order to "make it new," these writers try to spit out the old language as nutritionless and fattening, the discursive equivalent of empty calories. Adopting a revolution- ary aesthetic diet, they strive to fashion an increasingly attenuated text. The goal is to produce a "language-body" which, through its own restrictive and relentless regimen, gets rid of the flab that hangs upon language, body, and world: "Having rejected the notion of art as mediation of the world, the minimalist constitutes his own body as a second and alien self, as a 'world' that he can control, discipline, mold into an ideal" (36). The skeletal minimalist text is thus similar to the anorexic woman in that it undertakes the torturous task of saying something without speaking, of shaping a bodiless body. Just as the anorexic verges on physical collapse even as she approaches what she imagines to be "an ideal" figure, the emaciated narrative wastes away in the process of eliminating waste; it is always on the verge of breaking off, shutting down, or collapsing, a good example being the exhausted opening of Beck- ett's Endgame: "Finished, it's finished, nearly finished, it must be nearly finished."5 In this radically pared down play, characters who are ironically given the food names Hamm and Clov are stuck

5. An example of this exhausted opening is the first line of Auster's own vision of the future, entitled In the Country of Last Things, which begins, "These are the last things, she wrote."


LITTLE * 145

in a scene reduced to a "bare interior," a space-like an empty stomach-painfully contracted and forced to feed off itself, since it lacks relief from without in the form of organic, linguistic, or spiritual pabulum.

The discipline of self-deprivation governing these hollowed-out bodies and books also threatens to lead to a kind of interpretive collapse on the part of the reader. Texts such as Melville's "Bartleby, the Scrivener" and Kafka's The Metamorphosis-stories stuffed with images of inappetence and antipathy toward food in which the protagonists eventually starve to death-create what Anderson refers to as a "hermeneutical blockage," an explanatory impasse that makes it difficult for readers inside (Bartleby's lawyer, Gregor's family) and outside to digest or make sense of a form that insists on offering and incorporating nothing: "The text's literal nature refuses to be transformed by a transcendent, allegorical spirit, remains stuck in the throat, unassimilable, 'beyond interpretation'" (32). Refusing to participate in an exchange of food and language, these body-texts present a silent challenge to the social, financial, and interpretive exchanges defining modern bourgeois culture. But in becoming inane, they also admit a certain powerlessness in the face of these economies. Anorexia ravages the woman's frame; Bartleby expires in prison; Kafka's hunger artist dies alone in his cage.

While self-starvation can thus be understood as a resistance to specific historical forces, according to Anderson it should be understood principally as a desire to resist all comprehension, a desire to make the story and the subject so thin that they avoid the defiling effects of criticism and of time. Put another way, the obsession with purging the fleshy wor(l)d is a longing to return to a prelapsarian state of plenitude:

Anorexia and modernism both provide a countermyth to the story of Cre- ation, a subversively private and individual strategy for sneaking back into the garden of childhood. Ultimately they can be seen as particular forms of narcissism and masochism-strategies of self-denial and self- negation that seek to establish a primal unity uncontaminated by the "filth" of the other: sexual differentiation, social hierarchy and power relations, temporality and "history."

(37)



The commitment to emptiness promises a pure fullness of Being which cannot be re-presented by a dirty, carnal medium of contingency and loss.

Auster's work contains several examples of physiological and aesthetic rituals of asceticism undertaken in the hope of eliminating "the 'filth' of the other." In Moon Palace (1989), Marco Stanley Fogg, an orphan with a name steeped in allusion to the exploration and colonization of the "dark" other, begins his story by recounting how he nearly starves himself to death while a student at Columbia Uni- versity in the late sixties. Haunted by genealogical gaps and familial losses as well as by the political upheavals of the time, M. S. Fogg (foggy manuscript), as he styles himself, decides to turn his own body language into a perfectly blank text by secluding himself in his apartment, devouring and then selling (or purging) the books his uncle has bequeathed him, and then proceeding to watch his money and food run out. In a self-destructive attempt at "sneaking back into the garden of childhood," at regaining a centered wholeness, he takes refuge in Central Park after being evicted from his apartment, where, at one point, he draws upon a national fantasy of return to a pristine state of grace:

I suddenly began to dream of Indians. It was 350 years ago, and I saw myself following a group of half-naked men through the forests of Man- hattan. ... A soft wind poured through the foliage, muffling the foot- steps of the men, and I went on following them in silence, moving as nimbly as they did, with each step feeling that I was closer to understand- ing the spirit of the forest.

(70)

In one respect, Fogg's severities of self-consumption constitute a hunger strike, an act of individual withdrawal in symbolic protest against America's imperialist practices, its refusal to withdraw from Vietnam and its refusal to curtail investment in the space race: "I was an instrument of sabotage, I told myself, a loose part in the national machine, a misfit whose job was to gum up the works .... I was living proof that the system had failed, that the smug, overfed land of plenty was finally cracking apart" (61). However, his fast is, in another respect, a personal corollary to the public events swirling around him; he nearly cracks apart attempting to subdue difference


LITTLE * 147

in the name of a united state. Separated from the presence of a founding father, Fogg tries to overcome feelings of incompletion, ambiguity, and ache by subjugating the absences inscribed in his flesh: "I was trying to separate myself from my body, taking the long road around my dilemma by pretending it did not exist" (29).

In the novel In the Country of Last Things (1987), a bleak vision of late twentieth-century life transposed onto an unnamed, entropic setting in the near future, Auster pokes dark fun at the trendy rites of self-renunciation whose demands promise to release one from the problems of social decay, cultural barrenness, and spiritual tor- por. In a disintegrating domain where "food is a complicated business"-food shortages, food theft, and black market corrup- tion being the rule-some people attempt to overcome the neces- sity of scavenging in the streets, of erring in search of sustenance, by fasting: "It is also possible to become so good at not eating that eventually you can eat nothing at all" (3). Belief in the salvational work of self-denial reaches its apotheosis in "the Runners," a sect committed to suicide by racing through the streets until members collapse from exhaustion. Similarly to an anorexic, a Runner self- destructs in the effort to be liberated from the limitations of the body; the goal is to be redeemed from the ravages of hunger and history by sprinting to a life-in-death. As Auster's female narrator indicates:

I suppose it's a kind of religion.... Once you have been accepted, you must submit to the code of the group. This involves six to twelve months of communal living, a strict regimen of exercise and training, and a gradually reduced intake of food. By the time a member is ready to make his death run, he has simultaneously reached a point of ultimate strength and ultimate weakness. He can theoretically run forever, and at the same time his body has used up all its resources. This combination produces the desired result.

(12)

The aesthetic equivalent of this ecstatic self-erasure is the work done by a character named Ferdinand, a radically diminished version of the imperialist Spanish king who confines himself to a room where he creates exquisite, ever smaller renderings of the ship-in-a- bottle. A mumbling, marginalized, powerless old man disgusted by



the fact that the "country of last things" turns out to be something other than a utopia ("'It's all death out there'"), he has become obsessed with a hermetic medium to the point where he imagines assembling a figure so miniature as to be totally dis-figured, completely invisible: "'The smaller the better,' he said to me one night, bragging about his accomplishments as an artist. 'Some day I'll make a ship so small that no one can see it'" (55). In this minimalist fantasy, the desire to place nothing under glass is a desire to negate the glassy nothingness infecting language. To model such a spare text would be to rediscover a New World paradise.

Auster's political conviction that the minimalist aesthetic constitutes an inverted application of the imperialist economy of domination is most clearly spelled out in The Music of Chance (1990). In this novel, two American millionaires, Stone and Flower, imprison on their grounds two visitors, Nashe and Pozzi, whom they have cleaned out at poker. The "guests" are forced to pay off their gam- bling debt by rebuilding, in a meadow, the imported stone ruins of a fifteenth-century Irish castle. The stones are to be reassembled into the shape of a single, linear wall, an abstract artwork envisioned by Flower as "rising up like some enormous barrier against time" (86). While the wall's monumental blankness dis-figures the castle's Old World structure and context, the work of construction, overseen by an increasingly sinister foreman with the puritanical name of Calvin Murks, walls off Nashe and Pozzi from the outside world. Equally ominous is "the city of the World" being created by Stone in his mansion, an elaborate, miniaturized depiction of a utopian future. Unlike City of Glass, "the city of the World" offers a social vision of primal unity where, as Flower gushingly narrates, "the past and future come together, . . . good finally triumphs over evil" (79). What makes this exercise in minimalist megalomania frightening is that the totalizing impulse yields "a model of some bizarre, totalitar- ian world" (87). As the miniature scene of a prisoner being executed suggests, the dream of wholeness demands the extermination of difference: "the overriding mood was one of terror, of dark dreams sauntering down the avenues in broad daylight" (96). It makes sense, in this context, that the millionaires should eat like children, serving, before the game of poker, "a kiddie banquet... hamburger patties on white, untoasted buns, bottles of Coke with plas-


LITTLE * 149

tic straws sticking out of them, potato chips, corn on the cob, and a ketchup dispenser in the shape of a tomato" (88). Having won the lottery with a selection of prime numbers, "numbers that remain themselves for all eternity" (74), they imagine that they have walled themselves off from the division and multiplication marking tempo- ral being; they believe that they have snuck back into the garden of childhood. In Flower's words, "at times I feel that we've become immortal" (75).

?3 * 3

City of Glass looks like an incarnation of minimalist modernism. It is, on the surface, an austere text, a novel stripped of any stylistic ornamentation or excess, a bare-bones book. Like the glass curtain of the modernist skyscraper, to which the title makes allusion, Auster's slim volume would appear to embody, in its immateriality and abstraction, a desire to realize a perfectly formless Form, a pure language shed of the dumpy, disfiguring folds-the corrupt fleshiness-of figuration.6 However, whereas the disciples and de- scendants of the Bauhaus idealized their distilled, disembodied buildings as re-presentations of the Absolute and the Real, Auster adopts an ascetic modernist form only to scramble the logocentric values assumed by such dis-figuring designs. Fashioning an emaciated, minimalist text crammed with images of askesis, Auster mod- els a spectacularly self-obliterating script that still manages to entertain a play of difference and to bear witness to the repressiveness inherent in presuming the presence of an ethereal language, a fat- free system of signs.

Insofar as its body language simulates a case of textual anorexia, the novel hungers to achieve a negation of materiality and history. Ellmann makes clear that the refusal to eat is, in part, a determination to have nothing to do with the uncontrollable errancy under- writing words and world: "self-inflicted hunger is a struggle to release the body from all contexts, even from the context of embodiment itself. It de-historicizes, de-socializes, and even de-genders

6. For more on the dis-figuring principles of modernist architecture, see Mark C. Taylor's Disfiguring: Art, Architecture, Religion.



the body" (14). The narrative's ascetic aesthetic reflects this desire to construct a perfectly decontextualized text. Though the story does have a specific geographical and historical setting (New York City in the early 1980s), to the reader and to the detective the location frequently transforms into a kind of anti-topos, a place of absence. Framed as a traditional detective story, in which so often the mystery is solved upon disclosure of a hidden location, Auster's text repeatedly refuses hermeneutical and topographical orientation, yielding nothing in acts of narrative and environmental emptying out. When the detective, like a "good" reader, goes back, after his failure to wrap up the case, to the scene where his assignment began, he finds it "stripped bare ... the rooms now held nothing. Each one was identical to every other: a wooden floor and four white walls" (193). Likewise, the final image of the city is one in which the landscape threatens to white out, to be reduced to a blank (page): "The city was entirely white now, and the snow kept falling, as though it would never end" (202). Offering an inane domain or a starved space, City of Glass appears to provide only a hermeneutical blockage, an impenetrability that frustrates the reader's expecta- tions just as it haunts the detective's dreams: "In his dream, which he later forgot, he found himself alone in a room, firing a pistol into a bare white wall" (16).

But if the text does no more (or less) than "hold nothing" for the reader, it is not an idealized emptiness (dis)embodying a way out of time. As the previous passages illustrate, Auster uses the image of white to signify an anorexic text attenuating itself, by trying to go without the repast of representational language, in order to achieve a steady state of not signifying. Nevertheless, white otherwise appears, on several darkly humorous occasions, significantly con- nected with the consumption of food, the very stuff that reminds the self of its cavernous want, its inescapable carnality. Adulterated by its intermixture with the impurity of food, white re-presents something other than a waste-free figure. When Quinn enters a diner, after having assumed the identity of an other-the detective "Paul Auster"-he encounters "A tall Puerto Rican man in a white cardboard chef's hat" (60). The cook, a nonwhite in white, relates to Quinn a tale of errancy (while the latter eats a hamburger, "feeling with his tongue for stray bits of bone" [62]), recounting the eve-


LITTLE * 151

ning's Mets game in which a player named Kingman makes an error costing New York the game. When Quinn later attempts to get to the bottom of the mystery by seeking out the real detective Paul Auster, he looks him up in "the white pages" of the phone book, only to find that the name in the book belongs to an other, the writer "Paul Auster." This "Auster," after telling Quinn he knows nothing about the case, cooks both of them "omelettes, two of them, oozing on white plates" (150). Finally, when Quinn returns to his apartment after his unsuccessful stakeout, he is met by the new occu- pant, a woman "wearing a white nurse's uniform," who, shocked by his disheveled appearance, drops her grocery bag, from which "milk gurgle[s] in a white path toward the edge of the rug" (189).

Stray bits of bony text, these difficult-to-digest clues bear witness to the errant, broken play of experience: the error breaking open the game; the erroneous lead marking a point where the search for truth breaks down; the spilled milk, reminder of a home (the mother's breast, the primal nurse) from which we have always already broken away; the oozing yolks-"yolk 1. The yellow internal part of an egg, surrounded by the 'white' or albumen, and serving as nourishment for the young before it is hatched 2. fig. Centre; innermost part, 'core'; also, best part 3. Name for a gastropod mollusc of the genus Nerita, from the appearance of its shell 4. A rounded opaque or semi-opaque part occurring in window-glass; also, a pane of rough or thick glass" (OED)-sign of a center already dispersed or broken apart, of meaning always already broken up by the semi-opaque glass of language. In place of the empty plate of plenitude, a dish of broken eggs. Those are the breaks-repressed in the ascetic dream of utopian Oneness. Such stray scenes can be read as highly meta- phorical illustrations of the metaphoricity of all experience, of the fact that life is always borne elsewhere from the proper, carried away from the true. Like the clues that the narrator pursues in The Locked Room, Auster's white signs lead the reader to err: "the material expanded, grew in geometric surges, accumulating more and more associations, a chain of contacts that eventually took on a life of its own. It was an infinitely hungry organism, and in the end I saw that there was nothing to prevent it from becoming as large as the world itself" (131).

White is thus not simply the dis-figured figure of dis-figurement



but moreover an elusive, blinding figure with the unfathomable dimensions of a white whale. Not exclusively a primary color of integrity and unity, white is also the color of nothing, a color that deconstructs or shipwrecks the metaphysical longing for a unified origin or original union. Indeed, white shows up in the story as the sign of a duplicitous or impossible nonorigin.7 The younger Peter Stillman, victim of his father's monomaniacal experiment to discover a prelapsarian language of God, appears once in the story, white-haired and dressed all in white. Though he is in some respects the origin of the story-his phone call to Quinn sets the narrative in motion-he remains an apparitional return-of-the- repressed, an indeterminate "I" hovering at the limit of the private eye's vision: "As their eyes met, Quinn suddenly felt that Stillman had become invisible. He could see him sitting in the chair across from him, but at the same time it felt as though he was not there" (26). In his near-blinding whiteness, the son shadows forth Wal- lace Stevens's Snow Man: "Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is." His ghostly appearance and his stuttering tongue not only testify to the damaging effects of trying to recover absolute presence (of the Word) but also bear traces of a nonabsent absence that refuses to fit neatly within the binary structure presence/ absence: "But what does poor little Peter say? Nothing, nothing. Anymore" (28).

The first installment in Auster's trilogy, City of Glass subverts the notion of origin-ality from its outset. The story begins with a voice reaching Quinn through an untraceable knot of cables, speaking through an intricate "not": "It was a wrong number that started it, the telephone ringing three times in the dead of night, and the voice on the other end asking for someone he was not" (7). Placed from "the other end"-or the Other's end-the wrong number, or errant call, appears by chance, the result perhaps of crossed lines, and arrives at the protagonist's place only to dis-place him, only to mis-

7. In Ghosts, the detective, Blue, is hired by a man named White to spy on a man named Black. White sets the story in motion, recruits the detective-reader to track a case, follow a narrative, pursue an object; however, White is a conspicuously absent figure. Not only does he never reappear in the text, but even when he does appear at the beginning, he "is obviously not the man he appears to be" (9). White differs from himself by turning out perhaps to be Black. The Author-izing figure fades into Black and White, or, in other words, into writing.


LITTLE * 153

take him for an other, "someone he was not." The call is, in effect, an example of what Avital Ronell refers to as the "toxic invasions waged by the telephone" (10), toxic because, like the consumption of food, the telephone call represents a transaction with an other that constantly calls into question the address of a proper subject: "It [the telephone] destabilizes the identity of self and other, subject and thing, it abolishes the originariness of site; it undermines the authority of the Book and constantly menaces the existence of literature" (9). Auster's book thus opens (up) menacingly and playfully with a knotty call-a faulty connection-that announces the self as faulted or split even as it is made in the hope of locating a singular, independent subject, the private eye/I named "Paul Auster." It is a desperate critical effort, made by an other reader at the very moment the book is cracked (open), to establish a primal unity for the work by locating an original literary site, to reach the Author at a permanent address. But in this errant text, the author is never at home.

The novel's opening call of the Other is answered by a hunger artist of sorts, Daniel Quinn being a writer who undertakes a strategy of ascetic withdrawal and self-negation after suffering the death of his wife and son. Haunted by his losses, he adopts a regimen of radical renunciation in the effort to purge himself of the residues of desire and the imprints of memory-to white out his past-and thereby to recover an imaginary condition of wholeness. On the one hand, he starves himself of all social and professional interac- tion, severing personal contact with friends, agent, and publisher, disappearing completely behind his pseudonym, William Wilson. On the other hand, he tries to (a)void himself-to evacuate his own subjectivity or to attain "a salutary emptiness within" (8)-by turning himself over to the subject of his own writing, the narrator-hero Max Work:

If he lived now in the world at all, it was only at one remove, through the imaginary person of Max Work. His detective necessarily had to be real. The nature of the books demanded it. If Quinn had allowed himself to vanish, to withdraw into the confines of a strange and hermetic life, Work continued to live in the world of others, and the more Quinn seemed to vanish, the more persistent Work's presence in that world became.

(16)



Quinn's self-deprivation and isolation in pursuit of a purely atomistic ego-"the tiny life-bud buried in the body of the breath- ing self" (15)-is signified by his identification with a detective who lives up to his name, who is not someone other than he says he is. Though he does "live in the world of others," Max Work remains a tough egg, a "hard-boiled" dick, a tight-lipped loner whose ascetic dedication to his work always enables him, unlike the Mets' King- man, to be an error-free king's man, one able to put all the pieces back together again, to solve the crime, to make sure that nothing is left hanging.

Quinn is a hunger artist in that his longing for the immaculate integrity of personal and narrative (en)closure-his desire to embody and inscribe the exclusion of otherness-is a drive that gov- erns both writing and self-starvation. Viewed from one perspec- tive, writing and fasting are, according to Ellmann, attempts to transcend the somatic, to break the chains of corporeality: "writing is itself a form [of] starving inasmuch as both activities reduce the flesh to nothingness" (92). Writing and the refusal to eat are both undertaken in a quest for immortality, a struggle to release subjectivity from its bondage to the body by allowing it to be delivered elsewhere. Quinn's "work" actually turns him into a kind of secularized, modern-day martyr insofar as he seeks to make himself dead to the world by conforming to the rules of the conventional detective genre and by rewriting himself as ascetic hero. Geoffrey Gait Harpham, in his analysis of "ascetic linguistics," finds that early Christian ascetics, as much as they expressed a logocentric dread of writing's demonic duplicity, frequently turned to hagio- graphical writing in an effort to escape the glassiness of existence by devoting themselves to a purifying "science of imitation," an autobiographical duplication of the textualized lives of saints:

For the effect of mimesis is to displace and so stabilize the wandering subject, to humble human pretensions to autonomy by submitting life to the rules of grammar, rhetoric, and generic convention, including the constant interpolation of citations from Scripture. Textuality constitutes an ascesis, a deadening, a purging of materiality and mutability that antici- pates the release of the soul from the body at death. Hence for the early Christians textuality was closely linked with martyrdom, which lent a purpose and even ideality to the randomness of existence, as well as "re-


LITTLE * 155

peating" the death of Christ.... the unrelenting ambition of these people was precisely to eliminate the "hors-texte" from their existence, to become their own texts.

(14-15)

To "stabilize the wandering subject" is to put an end to errancy. Quinn, haunted by nothing outside the text, seeks to eliminate the de-composing effects of body and world by encrypting-burying and encoding-himself in the ideal work of an other (the Work of his pseudonymous self), reducing himself to the naught of a cipher by a process of encipherment.

This rigorous pursuit of what Ellmann calls the "dream of dis- embodiment"-the fantasy of a plenary emptiness-is re-created as a detective's classic pursuit of the economy of truth and as a writer's pursuit of the classical economy of representation when, paradoxically, Quinn finally decides to play along with the call of the Other by pretending to be Paul Auster, P.I. While he responds to the first call by negating it-"There's nothing I can do for you" (13)-he does not respond to the second call because he is "in the act of expelling a turd" when the telephone rings (17). The text clev- erly juxtaposes electronic and excremental currents (or technologi- cal and biological calls), the telephone, like the feces, a wasteful reminder of the self's holey status. Interrupted while emptying himself, Quinn is temporarily forced to confront the impossibility of eliminating all exchange and circulation, the impossibility of not accepting the charges and discharges which show identity to be irreparably incomplete. However, when he accepts the third call, he insists on mis-taking it as a call to Reason, responding to the request for the Auster Detective Agency by pretending to be a subject who embodies (or runs) a proper agency: "This is Auster speaking" (19). Taking the call in the name of the (novel's) father, Quinn seeks to repress all traces of nothing. By assuming the role of private eye/I, he seeks to re-present a transcendent, author-itative presence and to assume the absolute intentionality of paternal speech, but this dissemblance, as his new work unravels, only provides a further gloss on his already duplicitous identity.

The hunger artist's dissembling resurrection as detective is nothing other than an effort to redeem the self from the errancy of exis-



tence. Quinn abandons his (Max) work as fiction writer for a sleuth's seemingly even more self-deadening work as disembodied observer and faithful transcriber of the facts. This new "ob- jective" writing seems to hold out a means of realizing perfect purgation; it promises a way of "discarding the slack and embellishing the gist" (Ghosts 24), a way of eliminating those shreds and traces that-not capable of being properly identified, placed in evidence, and submitted to a court of law-point toward nothing. To achieve this transcendent state of purity, Quinn begins his task of making notes on the case by cleaning off his desk and stripping off his clothes. In other words, he takes his redemptive-bound work to the max, literally ridding himself of the extinguished, the expecto- rated, the extraneous:

He cleared the debris from the surface-dead matches, cigarette butts, eddies of ash, spent ink cartridges, a few coins, ticket stubs, doodles, a dirty handkerchief-and put the red notebook in the center. Then he drew the shades in the room, took off all his clothes, and sat down at the desk. He had never done this before, but it somehow seemed appropriate to be naked at this moment. He sat there for twenty or thirty seconds, trying not to move, trying not to do anything but breathe.

(63)

This purification rite, like the writing of minimalist modernism, is an attempt to recollect the centered presence of Being by fashioning a language and a body that have eliminated errancy or that will "not move." The goal in creating such still-life figures is to exorcise nothing, to sweep away the waste that lies forever at the limit of any system, challenging its productivity and integrity: the useless residues (dead matches, spent cartridges) that resist proper employ- ment; the loose change (a few coins) that remains uninvested in a proper economy; the signs of leakage (dirty handkerchief) that com- promise the proper subject; the idle marginalia (doodles) that de- form the frame of the proper book.

As it turns out, however, Quinn's case initially has him always on the move. He is assigned a tail job which forces him to circulate around New York pursuing a man who may or may not be the Still- man he is assigned to watch. In one of the many doublings in the novel, Stillman "himself" appears as a figure obsessed with elimi-


LITTLE * 157

nating waste, wandering around the city in an effort to undo, in his words, the "serious error" of errant language. Like the modernist minimalist, he links his lament about the corrupt nature of the sign-its inability to represent properly-to a lament about the fractured, disunited state of modern existence. For him, the contemporary American landscape, epitomized by New York, is a scene of cultural decay, environmental degradation, personal isolation, and spiritual anomie, the kind of wasteland that T. S. Eliot, in "Ger- ontion," calls "a wilderness of mirrors," a city of glass:

The brokenness is everywhere, the disarray is universal. You have only to open your eyes to see it. The broken people, the broken things, the broken thoughts. The whole city is a junk heap. It suits my purpose admira- bly. I find the streets an endless source of material, an inexhaustible store- house of shattered things.

(122-23)

The world, as well as the language used to apprehend it, is shivered, riven, dis-integrated, like the fallen figure of Humpty Dumpty. To overcome modernity's cracked condition, to, in his words, "put the egg back together again" (128), Stillman acts as a deranged recycler, hoping to rid language of its difference while ridding the streets of detritus. Both poet and litter patrol, both scrivener and scavenger, he picks up valueless items and restores their "original" value by assigning them proper names in a red notebook:

Each day I go out with my bag and collect objects that seem worthy of investigation. My samples now number in the hundreds-from the chipped to the smashed, from the dented to the squashed, from the pul- verized to the putrid. ... I invent new words that will correspond to the things.

(123)

One of the king's men, Stillman collects rubbish in a linguistic and theological quest to re-collect a transcendental signified. His waste management program seeks to "make it new" by re-membering a uniform Form, a perfectly intact egg.

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. Quinn wants to believe his move-



ments constitute a teleological quest, the solution (to the mystery) promising salvation by re-creating the original scene (of paradise): "By coming to the end, perhaps he could intuit the beginning" (110). Yet his case is cracked from the beginning, not only because the private eye is always partially occluded, the "I" always having its dark side or blind spot, but also because the figure of Stillman is marked by duplicity from the moment Quinn lays eyes on him. Determined to locate an essential truth behind the shifty signs in the city of glass, Quinn plans on starting his tail at the center station-Grand Central-only to see two nearly identical Peter Still- mans get off the train. Confronted with this radical cleft at the origin, Quinn has (nothing other than) nothing to go on: "There was nothing he could do now that would not be a mistake. 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" (90). The detective, or the writer, is bound to miss the mark. Like Melville's famous copyist, Quinn is a tracer of duplicates, one whose attempts to re-create the original are doomed to failure: "Then, suddenly, with great clarity and precision, [Quinn] saw Bar- tleby's window and the blank brick wall before him" (84).

For both Quinn and Stillman, as for Bartleby, the most dramatic measure undertaken to cure the dis-ease caused by the duplicity of signification and subjectivity is to fast. Trying to live up to his name-to insure a centered stillness of meaning and identity- Stillman undertakes an experiment in askesis, locking up his son in a room for nine years with the hope that, taken out of circulation, he will learn to speak an "original language of innocence" (76). Sub- stantiating Ellmann's claim that "writing and starvation are impli- cated in imprisonment" (95), Stillman starves his son of contact with the outside world, isolating him from the (d)rifts of words in order to recover the abiding, unbroken Word. The father takes literally logocentrism's claim that the glassiness of language is negated when there exists the constant presence of a paternal figure, a speaking subject who acts as what Jacques Derrida calls "the father of his speech." Stillman strives to repress the waywardness of writing by embodying an author-ity who prevents his logos from going astray. As Derrida puts it: "Logos is a son, then, a son that would be de- stroyed in his very presence without the present attendance of his


LITTLE * 159

father.... Without his father, he would be nothing but, in fact, writing" (77). Nothing but the nothingness of writing, Peter Still- man the younger is buried alive at the paternal address in what really amounts to an act of self-starvation (not least because father and son share the same name), since fasting can be read, in psychoanalytic terms, as the subject's symbolic attempt to seal off (by shutting the "trap") the way out for an other who has been enclosed in the crypt of the self through a cannibalistic fantasy of incorporation. As Ellmann puts it, "starving also keeps the other in and fortifies the stronghold of the ego, lest the ghosts within the self should break out of their tomb" (95). It makes sense, in this context, that Auster's writing "begins" with the ghostly voice of the son who has broken free from the father's repressive presence and who now seeks pro- tection from this ravenous figure.

For Quinn, haunted by the awareness that he has always already slipped up, the last-ditch attempt to protect his client and save his case is to undertake an around-the-clock watch on the Stillman residence, an impossible exercise in vigilance which requires him to eliminate the distraction of food, since leaving even for fast food entails a lapse in surveillance-an absence from his post-that only a total fast can prevent:

His ambition was to eat as little as possible, and in this way to stave off his hunger. In the best of all worlds, he might have been able to approach absolute zero, but he did not want to be overly ambitious in his present circumstances. Rather, he kept the total fast in his mind as an ideal, a state of perfection he could aspire to but never achieve. He did not want to starve himself to death-and he reminded himself of this every day-he simply wanted to leave himself free to think of the things that truly con- cerned him.

(175)

The total fast. The fast for totality. Quinn's determination to leave nothing to chance in the pursuit of a positive I.D. precipitates the "crisis of gender" that Mark Anderson sees marking both modernism and anorexia. As a result of his ascetic stakeout-after having observed nothing for months amid the garbage of an alley-Quinn has, like Bartleby, removed himself from every form of circulation. Having abandoned the traditional trappings of male power and



prestige, having wasted himself, he emerges as a figure with no profession, no office, no home. He has become, in effect, a hapless dick, greeted with "irritation" by the author/father "Paul Auster" upon his return.

In the end, Quinn returns to the place where the case seemed to begin-the younger Peter Stillman's residence-but with a difference. On these now evacuated premises, he gradually lets go of his ascetic commitment to a final solution and to pure Being-"he real- ized that Max Work was dead" (195-96)-and experiences a rebirth different from his earlier reincarnation as "Paul Auster." Stripping himself naked again, he comes to embrace the dissemination and displacement that make language glassy. Having taken to writing in the red notebook about something other than the case, he begins to acknowledge the errancy of his representations: "He felt that his words had been severed from him, that now they were a part of the world at large, as real and specific as a stone, or a lake, or a flower" (200). And it is when he relinquishes his pursuit of a transcendent signified that he receives, in the form of trays of food appearing from nowhere or out of nothing, the unfathomable grace of an unfigurable Other: "There was a tray of food beside him on the floor, the dishes steaming with what looked like a roast beef dinner. Quinn accepted this fact without protest" (196). Unlike Bartleby, who, when read one way, represents the transcendentalist figure of self-reliance longing "to establish a primal unity uncontaminated by the 'filth' of the other," Quinn ultimately prefers to eat. Instead of trying to withdraw from writing's dead letters by starving himself, he withdraws into writing's dead letters and breaks his fast.

However, Quinn turns out to be Bartleby's double in more than one way. Gregory Jay has argued that Bartleby's withdrawal from the practices of copying and eating force the narrator-lawyer to try to justify his (legal) authority in expelling the anti-body from the system. Refusing incorporation of any kind, yet stubbornly lodged in the chambers of the "firm," Bartleby "solicits" the law, drawing attention to the limitations of the lawyer's customary assumptions: "The lawyer exhausts every conventional strategy available to him as a historical subject, only to find that Bartleby cannot be confined by any of their premises. As a writer, his primary motivation is to build a narrative structure that will both contain Bartleby's errancy


LITTLE * 161

and justify his own behavior toward it. Melville makes his failure on each count evident" (26). Neither properly within nor without the premises of the law (in literal terms, he occupies the office but won't work), Bartleby tries to get the lawyer to see otherwise by revealing nothing. As the lawyer remarks at the outset, "Bartleby was one of those beings of whom nothing is ascertainable" (13); or, as Bartleby asserts when the lawyer comes to visit him in the Tombs: "I want nothing to say to you" (43).

Like Bartleby, Quinn solicits his readers to think otherwise. While Bartleby admits "I like to be stationary" (41), and Quinn longs to be a still man, they both embody an errancy that resists being held easily accountable by the conventional assumptions of the reading subject. Quinn's disappearance at the end of the novel dramatizes a process of slipping away (from himself and from the reader) that he has been enacting all along. Never properly within or without the lawful premises of the traditional detective story, Quinn finally van- ishes from the Stillman premises, and from the premise of being a still man, but leaves behind a trace of himself-the red notebook- through which he reappears as an elusive trace. While the notebook is claimed, by the narrator who suddenly appears at the end, as the original manuscript upon which the novel is based, the narrator admits that the novel "is only half the story" (202). Just as Bartleby does with the lawyer, Quinn leaves the reader with nothing to go on.

City of Glass turns up nothing besides the truth. In so doing, it is a profoundly ethical text. The virtue of a text with nothing to it lies in calling us on to the case and then forcing us to reassess, in the face of stubborn darkness, our methods of bringing "the truth" to light. The text challenges us to ruminate, in the absence of any indisput- able, uncontaminated evidence, upon our own position(s) as readers. Unable to fulfill the role of detached, masterful private eye, unable to make the proper arrest of meaning, we are left to chew over the grounds of our involvement in the case. Upon what premise(s) did we begin our investigation? Why have we failed to follow certain leads? What are the repercussions of the report(s) we have filed? For what solution are we hungering?

Indiana University



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Issue Table of ContentsContemporary Literature, Vol. 38, No. 1 (Spring, 1997), pp. 1-214Front MatterAn Interview with Sharon Doubiago [pp. 1 - 43]Poetic Positionings: Stephen Dobyns and Lyn Hejinian in Cultural Context [pp. 44 - 77]"Kick[ing] the Perpendiculars Outa Right Anglos": Edward Dorn's Multiculturalism [pp. 78 - 105]Howe Not to Erase(Her): A Poetics of Posterity in Susan Howe's "Melville's Marginalia" [pp. 106 - 132]Nothing to Go on: Paul Auster's "City of Glass" [pp. 133 - 163]A Certain Hermeneutic Slant: Sublime Allegories in Contemporary English Fiction [pp. 164 - 184]ReviewsThe Austerized Version [pp. 185 - 197]Omnicriticism [pp. 198 - 204]Tropics of Candor: V. S. Naipaul [pp. 205 - 212]

Back Matter [pp. 213 - 214]

Nothing to Go on - Paul Auster's City of Glass.pdf

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