Natti

The Text is Suspect: The Author, the Detective and the Subjective in Auster’s City of Glass

The work of the postmodern writer has always been hard to define, as postmodernism is a difficult genre to define. One way of describing the postmodern author’s work, though, is by focusing on the writer’s relationship to the work created. This focus arises from one of the broad defining traits of the postmodern: to rethink all that has come before; to question it and put it to multiple tests to prove not only its worth but its relevance. From the author being aware of his work and, subsequently, from the work itself being aware of itself as work, the form of metafiction arises. It is in this kind of text, where the writing is extremely self-reflexive and questioning in its form, that more general questions about the nature of fiction may be asked. There are critics who suggest that self-awareness is confined to metafictional (and postmodern) literature, and rarely a feature of genre fiction. The detective genre, however, is one that has always been self-aware, always knowing that it is a detective story and it has, in classic detective fiction, had to abide by certain rules to succeed as detective fiction. Ronald Knox laid out these rules in his essay “A Detective Story Decalogue”, claiming, for example, that no information can be kept from the reader and that the “Watson” character must be slightly dimmer than the reader. One thing that Knox does not bring up in his short essay, however, is the role of the author in connection to his work.

Detective fiction is all about relationships. In the early stories of Edgar Allan Poe and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the relationships are those between the detective and the case and the detective and the sidekick. Later, in the work of an author like Agatha Christie, the relationships expand to include the connection between the detective and the suspects. In hard-boiled fiction the relationships that matter most are those between the detective and the femme-fatale (or other women present) and also the city in which the detective lives. Such relationships are central in the work of Dashiell Hammett, James M. Cain and Chester Himes.

In the last twenty years, with the birth of the metaphysical detective story, the most important relationship is that between the author and the text he has written. If postmodern literature is self-reflexive and detective fiction is about solving a case, then the postmodern detective story becomes a mystery not only about the detective figuring out what his purpose is in the text, but what his relationship to the author of the text is. Connected to the mystery is the author’s goal for this piece of fiction. In earlier detective fiction, the goal is finding the truth at the end of the mystery. However, in metaphysical detective stories, the search for the objective becomes a moot point, since these stories only end with another question, which, if solved, leads to another question. How the detective views the case is entirely subjective, as in earlier detective fiction, but now this subjective search yields no objective answer, but only the beginning of another subjective search. French author Alain Robbe-Grillet suggests “Objectivity in the ordinary sense of the word – total impersonality of observation – is all too obviously an illusion.” (Robbe-Grillet 18) In metaphysical detective fiction there are no objective answers in the text because objectivity is nonexistent. Consequently, authorial intent also becomes debatable, as the author sets out to create a world of boundaries, of rules, where the fiction can exist as truth. In metaphysical detective fiction the only intent that an author can have in a subjective text is the intent to have intent, but not the intent itself. Readers supply this reading of the intent, of the search for the missing objective while keeping in mind the author’s relationship to his work. Readers also keep in mind the history of detective fiction, a genre that critics have labeled overly structuralized. In other words, too prone to use the same plots. The metaphysical detective story subverts the structuralized plot, replacing answers with questions and making a very apparent bridge between the author and the detective, bringing detective fiction into a realm of fiction that it has not been part of before. This positive transgression can be seen best in Paul Auster’s The New York Trilogy, specifically in City of Glass.1

City of Glass tells a tale of mistaken and taken identities, where there is no real truth, no objective answers and every fact in the story is distorted, only visible on the surface, as if looking at a reflection in a pane of glass. The protagonist, Daniel Quinn, writes conventional detective fiction under the pseudonym William Wilson. Quinn receives three phone calls for someone looking for detective Paul Auster, and on the third call Quinn takes the case as Paul Auster. Quinn is hired by Peter and Virginia Stillman to protect them from Peter’s father, another Peter Stillman, who has recently been released from jail where he was incarcerated for abusing his son in a language experiment where the elder Stillman wished to discover the original language, untainted by the already set languages of the world. The younger Peter and Virginia fear that the elder Peter is now on a mission to kill them and Quinn’s job is to simply keep the elder man away from his son and daughter-in-law.

Quinn soon realizes that the case is not as cut and dry as it sounds. The elder Stillman is an old man who shambles about New York City on different paths, collecting lost items off the streets in an investigation on developing a new Tower of Babel. Quinn follows the man and speaks to him three times under three different names, loses track of him and goes in search of the real Paul Auster for assistance, assuming that Auster is indeed a detective. Auster is unable to help Quinn, as the “real” Auster in the text is a writer performing an investigation of his own on the authorship of Don Quixote. Quinn records all his investigations in a red notebook, which at the end of the story, when Quinn has failed, the narrator – a friend of the “real” Auster, uses to piece together the events of the tale and form the novel City of Glass.

The Authorial I

Before delving more into City of Glass, we must first understand what the authorial voice in postmodern and, subsequently, metaphysical detective fiction means. Auster wants the reader to keep the author in mind at all times, bridging the gap between fiction and reality. Auster’s inclusion of himself in the novel reminds us that this story is a book, not something that could happen in real life. John Barth, in his essay “The Self in Fiction, or ‘That Ain’t No Matter. That is Nothing’”, states in the context of discussing the self in fiction that he has three limits which he will stay within. He first states that critics should only consider the authorial self in fiction, “the self of the writer…participating in his or her own inventions.” (Barth 207) Secondly, that this consideration of the authorial self should then be limited to viewing that self in the aspect of “authorial self-consciousness, often manifested as narrative self-reflexiveness.” (Barth 207) Finally, that the consideration of the authorial voice should be limited solely to fiction. Barth then states that the authorial self appearing in an author’s text is nothing new. Whether it be a cameo or a large role, the appearance of the author in the text is something that has been done well before postmodernism. Postmodern writers tend to insert themselves directly into their own fictions. Jorge Luis Borges’s Borges is a perfect example, in the parable “Borges and I.” Modernists tend to place themselves in their fictions by means of an alter ego. Joyce’s Dedalus, Proust’s Marcel are a few of the examples that Barth uses. (Barth 208) The position of the author in relation to his text leads us all the way back to the original novel, Cervantes’s Don Quixote. In Quixote, the authorial voice tends to have a much greater appearance in the beginning of the second part of the novel, where Quixote learns that someone has written a story based on his life. The question posed in that novel is: who has written this story, if not Cervantes? Auster, in City of Glass, states:

“It’s quite simple. Cervantes, if you remember, goes to great lengths to convince the reader that he is not the author. The book, he says, was written in Arabic by Cid Hamete Benengeli. Cervantes describes how he discovered the manuscript by chance one day in the market at Toledo. He hires someone to translate it for him into Spanish, and thereafter he presents himself as no more than the editor of the translation. In fact, he cannot even vouch for the accuracy of the translation itself.”

“And yet he goes on to say,” Quinn added, “that Cid Hamete Benengeli’s is the only true version of Don Quixote’s story. All other versions are frauds, written by imposters. He makes a great point of insisting that everything in the book really happened in the world.” (CG 117)

Auster’s novel City of Glass poses this same question: who is the author of the text? In the novel, Auster, like Cervantes, goes to, as Auster himself put it, “great lengths,” to convince the reader that he is not the author of City of Glass. Auster, however, still wants the reader to remember that he is the author and that the story is a fiction. Unlike with earlier detective novels, where solving the case was all that mattered, metaphysical detective fiction wants readers to be thinking of the exigency of the work. Why are we being told this story at this time by this specific author? This adds a new area to discuss detective fiction in, one where we must analyze the author as much as the story that he is crafting. Auster still wants us to believe, however, that he is not the author. But as readers we cannot erase the knowledge that he wrote the novel. Complicating matters still further, it can be seen that Quinn and Auster have very similar lives, something that will be discussed later in this text.

The Authorial Eye

As it is presented in City of Glass, an unnamed narrator who is friends with Auster is the author of the text, transcribing what he can from Quinn’s red notebook. The novel has an abundance of author characters: Quinn, the elder Stillman, the “real” Auster and the narrator. Each of these characters are playing detective, trying to get to some sort of an answer in a world that yields none. Instead of authors who have omniscient power over their texts, each one of these men is at the level of the reader, facing the subjective realm of the text, with no real understanding of the world that they are living in. Each man finds himself transcribing his exploits of their various cases, and, as Madeline Sorapure says in her essay “The Detective and the Author”: “author-characters who take on the role of detective are forced to radically revise their understanding of authorship and detection.” (Sorapure 73) In other words, to understand the relationship between author and detective, the character must have a full understanding of who he is before he can hope to understand the other characters of the novel.

The first page of the novel illustrates this point by telling us that these characters are all faced with something they are not. The first line of City of Glass reads: “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.” (CG 1) The italics are my own, emphasizing the importance of the end of the sentence. “Someone he was not” plays a crucial role in the novel. Quinn is not the detective Auster, the real “Auster” is not a detective or the author of the text, the author of the text is not the true Auster, and so on. No one in the novel is who they are supposed to be. Even the elder Peter Stillman may not be the true Stillman.

When faced with finding Stillman in Grand Central Station, armed only with a photograph, Quinn sees someone who he thinks is Stillman but then sees, behind the old man, another man whose “face was the exact twin of Stillman’s.” (CG 68) Quinn, without any base of truth concerning which man is Stillman, must choose from his subjective point of view. It is this choice that puts the rest of the story into motion. Quinn is aware of this too, as the author notes, stating: “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.” (CG 68) Quinn almost follows the second Stillman, but then changes his mind, following the first man. In the traditional detective story, this problem of multiple Stillmans would not exist. The detective would be able to follow the one man and see how he fits into the case. Agatha Christie’s The ABC Murders is an example of this traditional story type. In the novel, a group of suspects in a series of murders are brought together so that Poirot, Christie’s detective, can root out the murderer. Each suspect is distinctively different from the next, the only commonality between them being suspicious actions. City of Glass erases the notion of rooting out the murderer or there being suspicious actions. Quinn knows who he is after from the start of the case and when faced with the multiple Stillmans, he has no way of knowing if one of them is acting suspiciously because he knows virtually nothing about Stillman, only what Peter and Virginia have told him. The choice of two Stillmans harkens back to the idea of “someone he was not.” One of these Stillmans is not the right Stillman, and, as Quinn later discovers, the Stillman he followed is completely different from the man that Peter and Virginia Stillman described him to be. Quinn makes his choice based on his subjective viewpoint of the situation, noting that “there was no way to know: not this, not anything.” (CG 68)

This is completely different than what classic detective fiction had set out to do: know everything about the case the detective is working on. Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes could deduce most facts of the case simply by meeting the person who required Holmes’s services. In City of Glass, Quinn knows absolutely nothing except what he has been told. Stefano Tani suggests that the difference between the classic detective story and that created by the postmodern writer is postmodernism’s lack of a center, “its refusal to posit a unifying system.” (Tani 39) Modernism had set out to create fictions where the principle goal was to discover a sense of self. Detective fiction reversed this emphasis with the detective searching out the “self” of the criminal. This search became problematic in postmodern detective fiction. The first reason for this is that in many postmodern detective stories (including City of Glass) there is no apparent crime. Instead of the detective setting out to discover who has committed the crime, he must first discover what the actual crime itself is. This creates, what Tani describes as, “an absence of finality, [of] a solution.” (Tani 40) If the detective is not aware of the case and has to deduce the clues to understanding the case, then there is no possible way that he can arrive at a perfectly objective conclusion, where there is no doubt involved. Tani considers postmodern detective fiction, what he calls the anti-detective novel, a transgression of classic detective fiction (Tani 40) Structures set in place by classic detective fiction are broken, while the detective, before solving the case, must solve himself. In doing so, the detective is creating a bridge between himself and the author. By knowing himself, the detective is aware of the author’s vision of the detective.

What also occurs when the detective has gains this knowledge is it becomes shared by the reader, causing the author to be more elusive in presenting information, which is to say that the author is going out of his way in hiding what truth their may be in the story. This sense of truth, the objective, is deliberately hidden by means of metafictional techniques (where the author knows he is crafting a detective story that is aware of itself as a detective story and does its best to remain unsolved) and by the use of deconstruction. This is where, in detective fiction, instead of a solution, there is a suspension of a solution. (Tani 41) The ending of City of Glass does suspend the solution, which happens because of the author of the text.

In City of Glass, the idea of the author (as mentioned before) is subject to debate. The author is an unnamed narrator who transcribes the tale from Quinn’s red notebook. Quinn is a false detective who is unaware of the true implications of the case, so what we are presented with are his interpretations of what is going on. Quinn is placed in an existential quest, searching for some kind of truth in a story where there is none.

This is the true goal of fiction, too: to tell a story. In City of Glass, this is all that the characters do, is tell stories. Quinn is trying to live out the type of adventure he writes about in his book, Peter and Virginia Stillman offer up the story of the elder Stillman, the elder Stillman tells Quinn how he created author Henry Dark to fool people into believing his theories, the “real” Auster tells Quinn the story of his beliefs concerning Don Quixote as well as filling in the gaps for Quinn later in the tale, and the narrator is telling us the story of Quinn. Each of these people are offering their own views on their own stories that may or may not be the truth to begin with. The objective, again, is missing. Each character is trying to get what they want from those who they are telling the story to. Peter and Virginia are trying to get Quinn to take the case, the “real” Auster is trying to get Quinn to believe his views on Quixote and Quinn and the narrator are both trying to justify the actions they took in solving and understanding their place in the text.

In postmodern fiction the search for truth does not often lead us outside of the world of fiction. As Auster says about Quinn’s love for detective fiction: “What interested him about the stories he wrote was not their relation to the world but their relation to other stories.” (CG 8) The entire New York Trilogy is concerned with this idea of intertextuality. But, in relation to the author and the detective in the story, what Auster is discussing is both the art of reading and writing a detective story. A piece of text where “there is nothing wasted, no sentence, no word that is not significant. And even if it is not significant, it has the potential to be so–which amounts to the same thing.” (CG 9) Each part of a detective story is indeed important, and, in Auster’s work, there is no difference. He is leading the reader through his labyrinthine text where “everything seen or said, even the slightest, most trivial thing, can bear a connection to the outcome of the story, [and] nothing must be overlooked. Everything becomes essence; the center of the book, shifts with each event that propels it forward. The center, then, is everywhere, and no circumference can be drawn until the book reaches its end.” (CG 9) So, the work of the detective is a mirror for the work of the reader in reading, in finding the circumference that entails the entire story. But, Auster is also describing the very nature of writing, something that both he and, no doubt, Quinn would see as being more important to the author of the story. Jeffery T. Nealon states this by saying: “The writer is the one who initially creates the disparate world of ruses and clues that is the mystery, but also the one who searches–perhaps more desperately than the reader–for its end, for ‘the idea that will pull all these things together and make sense of them.’ (Nealon 118) The reader of a detective story, at least in the classic version of the detective story, is ensured a logical ending that wraps the story up. What we find in the postmodern and metaphysical detective stories are endings that are characterized by questions rather than answers. This puts the reader in the place of the writer. Whereas the reader is usually present with a logical conclusion, when the reader is put in the place of the writer, no logical conclusion can be assured. This is the very nature of telling a story, of writing, beginning a journey through a character that may or may not lead anywhere. City of Glass addresses this very problem. At the end of the tale, Quinn is left without reason. The case is over, he has lost track of all the Stillmans, and he disappears. This is the same way that an author, or an authorial voice, can disappear during the act of writing.

Quinn, Auster, and Quixote

During the Don Quixote reference in City of Glass, when Quinn meets the “real” Auster, the first steps to understanding Auster’s role in relation to Quinn and the text become apparent. Auster tells Quinn:

“Don Quixote, in my view, was not really mad. He only pretended to be. In fact, he orchestrated the whole thing himself. Remember: throughout the book Don Quixote is preoccupied by the question of posterity. Again and again he wonders how accurately his chronicler will record his adventures. This implies knowledge on his part; he knows beforehand that his chronicler exists…It was Don Quixote who engineered the Benengeli quartet. And not only did he select the authors, it was probably he who translated the Arabic manuscript back into Spanish…Cervantes hiring Don Quixote to decipher the story of Don Quixote himself. (CG 119)

This is Auster attempting to convince the reader that the author of City of Glass is neither he nor Quinn, but some unnamed third author. The question of the author of the text being an unnamed narrator is never questioned in the text: it is a truth that the fiction sets up, a form of false objectivity. This person is telling the story, not Auster, not Quinn, but someone else entirely. Auster places a great deal of distance between himself and Quinn in City of Glass, in a way reminiscent of the distance between the two Borges’s in “Borges and I.” In that text, Borges observes another Borges, who “things happen to.” (246) But this other Borges is not the same as the author, even though they are indeed the same and left wondering who wrote the text. In City of Glass, the question of who wrote the text is not up for contention, because Auster plainly says that it is this unnamed narrator transcribing Quinn’s notebook. This gives us four levels between Quinn and the author Auster: Quinn meets the “real” Auster who is friends with the unnamed narrator who writes the story that has, outside the text, been written by the true Paul Auster. So, to figure out the relationship between Auster and Quinn and their relationship to the subjectivity of the work, we must return to the Quixote reference. It is in this quote, through Auster’s own logic in relation to the reference, that it can be said that Auster must indeed be both author and character, chronicling his own search for self. Even Daniel Quinn’s initials bring us back to the DQ of Don Quixote. The instances of Quinn meeting Auster also recall the beginning of the second book of Quixote where the protagonist of the tale meets the author. (Chén 40)

We must then look at the similarities between Auster and Quinn:

Quinn is the author of many mystery novels, all written under the pseudonym “William Wilson,” a name taken from a Poe story of the same name, in which William Wilson confronts another form of himself also known as William Wilson. (Poe 178)
Quinn was once the author of poetry, but put it aside after losing his wife and son, and now solely writes mystery novels. Auster is very similar. He was once the author of poems and was well known for his translations of French work, something he recounts in his memoirs The Red Notebook and The Art of Hunger.
Auster, like Quinn, did write under a pseudonym at one point, but, unlike Quinn, only did it once. The novel Squeeze Play was released under the name Paul Benjamin2 in 1984. Though, again, unlike Quinn, Auster did not lose his wife and child.
Quinn’s son was named Daniel, as is Auster’s, both fictionally in CG and in real life.
Later in the novel, Quinn “swung around to Varick Street, walking by number 6, where he had once lived.” (CG 127) This is the address where Auster wrote one of his memories in Invention of Solitude. (Bernstein 142)

In The Red Notebook, Auster recounts how he was called twice by someone looking for the Pinkerton Detective agency, and how if the person had called again, Auster would have tried to find out information on the case; the very set up for City of Glass. (RN 55-57) Auster later uses the idea of the Pinkerton Detective agency to draw himself back to Dashiell Hammett’s (who once worked for the Agency) The Maltese Falcon and the story of Flitcraft in his novel Oracle Night, where Auster’s character Sidney Orr sets out to tell his own version of the Flitcraft story and becomes lost in his own layered tale that he creates (ON 13-14), in the same way Quinn becomes lost in the layered tale Auster has created.

While the two men are indeed very similar, one similarity that particularly sticks out is their dual role as both detectives and authors of detective fiction. Auster writes in City of Glass:

The detective is one who looks, who listens, who moves through this morass of objects and events in search of the thought, the idea that will pull all these things together and make sense of them. In effect, the writer and the detective are interchangeable. The reader sees the world through the detective’s eyes, experiencing the proliferation of its details as if for the first time. He has to become awake to the things around him, as if they might speak to him, as if, because of the attentiveness he now brings to them, they might be able to carry a meaning other than the simple fact of their existence. Private eye. The term held a triple meaning for Quinn. Not only was it the letter “i,” standing for “investigator,” it was “I” in the upper case, the tiny life-bud buried in the body of the breathing self. At the same time, it was also the physical eye of the writer, the eye of the man who looks out from himself into the world and demands that the world reveal itself to him. (CG 9-10)

Neither Quinn nor Auster is a detective in the classic sense: someone who indeed works at a detective agency and solves the cases that are brought to his attention. Both men are the authors of detective fiction. Auster has written his Quinn and Quinn has written his character Max Work in his line of Wilson detective stories. This is something that is prevalent in The New York Trilogy: Auster’s detectives are not detectives at all: Quinn is a writer; the unnamed narrator in The Locked Room is the literary executor of the work of Fanshawe. Only Blue in Ghosts is a real detective, but he becomes lost when faced with a case where he is indeed spying upon himself the entire time. This amplifies Auster’s statement that “the writer and the detective are interchangeable,” (CG 9) because, for the reader, both visions of the world are the same. What the detective sees in the world is also what the author sees. The author is writing through the detective and the detective is seeing his world through the author. Even if an author claims that the fiction is not a representation of their views, the reader is still seeing these opposing views through the author.

When it comes to Auster’s work in City of Glass, though, the question of the authorial self in the text leads us to view the case that the detective and the author are trying to solve. In the case of the author, and to some extent the detective, the case is the search for self, the ability to see oneself in all truth, without restrictions. Such a statement is complex, however, because the very nature of storytelling and fiction relies on the fact that there is no such thing as truth, no objective. The ability for the detective to see the world through the eyes of the author is problematic because in this sense the detective should be omniscient. For the detective to be unaware of himself and his surroundings is to suggest that the author is also unaware of his surroundings. This is why the detective and the author are the same and both without any objective truth. To have that truth they would be able to piece together the case and themselves without any problem. But, with the issue of the subjective, neither the detective nor the author can see himself or the true meaning of the other. How a person (fictional or otherwise) views the world could be completely different than the way someone else views it. Truth, it would seem, is irrelevant to the telling of the story.

The irrelevance of truth has been an issue for mystery narratives ever since Oedipus wanted to know the truth behind his life and the riddles from the Oracle at Delphi, which governed his actions later in life. The story of Oedipus is the first analytic detective story, in which Oedipus realizes the key to the mystery he is involved in lies with himself. (Irwin 206) Likewise, in City of Glass, the key to the story lies within Quinn and his relationship to Auster.

In City of Glass, though, there is a medium between Quinn and the author Auster, and that is the narrator, who makes such statements as “there were moments when the text was difficult to decipher, but I have done my best with it and have refrained from any interpretation”, (CG 158) and “since this story is based entirely on facts, the author feels it is his duty not to overstep the bounds of the verifiable, to resist at all costs the perils of invention”. (CG 135) These statements fully imply the subjective being at play in the text. The need to tell the reader that there has been no “interpretation,” no “invention,” immediately causes the reader to question the validity of those statements. If there were no possibility of the text being false, then there would be no need for the narrator to bring it up. The narrator even states that Quinn’s own writing in the red notebook is “suspect.” (CG 134) So how is it that readers can trust the narrator, or even say that the narrator exists? If Quixote was the one translating the text to Cervantes, then it could be said that Auster is transcribing the red notebook for the reader, merely making reference to another Auster in the text to throw the reader off the trail that Auster is indeed writing the whole story and there is no other narrator. Then, by going even further into Auster’s claims on Quixote, if Quixote translates and takes part in the adventure, Quinn and Auster would have to be the same person. If there is no “interpretation” or “invention,” than the narrator would have had to be present at all the events to know that they are real, and if the narrator and Auster are indeed the same person then Auster would also have to be Quinn, narrating his own story. Moreover, if we look at the story on a metaphysical level, then there has been no mystery at all, but merely Auster writing about one. He has been giving his own subjective views on the world through multiple voices, fully aware that in fiction there can be no objective, no real truth, only lies and misguiding statements.

If there is no truth or objective in Auster’s metaphysical detective novel, then what is the case that the detective is trying to figure out, if any? The case itself is devoid of any third party interaction, which stems from there being no crime. The detective has no adversary to overcome, no archenemy except himself. This leads us back to the issue that the case in City of Glass is for Quinn to find himself, which is impossible since he is only a creation of the author. For Quinn to be aware of himself, to solve the case, he would have to have some foot on the ground of truth, which he never can. His actions are at the will of the author, as are his thoughts. He has no objective view or an objective to fulfill. He is a puppet on the strings of Auster’s authorial and subjective choices. The author, playing a much larger role in City of Glass than in earlier detective fiction, has much more sway over the events that occur, since they are not prone to stay within the confines of realism. Without these confines, then the subjective becomes absolute. The metaphysical detective fiction, especially City of Glass, pushes the boundaries of a normally very structuralized genre. Where the truth is what used to matter, we find in City of Glass that there can be no truth, merely reflections of a reality that the detective should be able to see, but cannot and, subsequently, has to continue staring at himself, knowing that the truth is out there, but unattainable, and everything is suspect.

Notes

1 The titles of Auster’s works will henceforth be known as CG (City of Glass), G (Ghosts), LR (The Locked Room), RN (The Red Notebook), ON (Oracle Night)

2 Benjamin is Auster’s middle name.

Bibliography

Auster, Paul. The Invention of Solitude. NY: Penguin Books, 1982.

–––––. The New York Trilogy. NY: Penguin Books, 1990.

–––––. Oracle Night. NY: Picador, 2003.

–––––. The Red Notebook. NY: New Directions, 2002.

Barone, Dennis. “Paul Auster and the Postmodern American Novel.” Beyond the Red Notebook: Essays on Paul Auster. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press,1995: 1-26.

Barth, John. “The Literature of Exhaustion.” The Friday Book. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1984: 62-76.

–––––. “The Self in Fiction, or, ‘That Ain’t No Matter. That is Nothing.” The Friday Book. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1984: 207-214.

Bernstein, Stephen. “‘The Question is the Story Itself:’ Postmodernism and Intertextuality in Auster’s New York Trilogy.” Detecting Texts: The Metaphysical Detective Story from Poe to Postmodernism. Pennsylvania: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999: 134-153.

Borges, Jorge Luis. “Borges and I.” Labyrinths. NY: New Directions, 1962: 246-247.

Chénetier, Marc. “Paul Auster’s Pseudonymous World.” Beyond the Red Notebook: Essays on Paul Auster. Philadelphia: University of Philadelphia Press,1995: 34-43.

Irwin, John T. the Mystery to a Solution: Poe, Borges, and the Analytic Detective Story. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1994.

Knox, Ronald A. “A Detective Story Decalogue.” The Art of the Mystery Story. Ed. Howard Haycraft. NY: Carrol and Gray, 1974. 194-196.

Nealon, Jeffery T. “Work of the Detective, Work of the Writer: Auster’s City of Glass.” Detecting Texts: The Metaphysical Detective Story from Poe to Postmodernism. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999: 117-133.

Poe, Edgar Allan. “William Wilson.” The Fall of the House of Usher and Other Writings. London: Penguin Books, 1967: 158-178.

Robbe-Grillet, Alain. “A Future for the Novel.” For a New Novel: Essays on Fiction. NY: Grove Press, Inc., 1965: 15-24

Sorapure, Madeline. “The Detective and the Author: City of Glass.” Beyond the Red Notebook: Essays on Paul Auster. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press,1995: 71-87.

Tani, Stefano. The Doomed Detective: The Contribution of the Detective Novel to Postmodern American and Italian Fiction. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1984.