Mapping Authorship: Overhead
Cartography in Paul Auster’s City of Glass
Lindsey Michael Banco
University of Saskatchewan
“We are in the epoch of simultaneity: we are in the epoch of juxtaposition, the epoch of
the near and far, of the side-by-side, of the dispersed.”
-Michel Foucault, “Of Other Spaces” (22)
“[W]e all have maps in our heads”
-Richard Helgerson, “The Folly of Maps and Modernity” (243)
In 1994, nearly ten years after the publication of Paul Auster’s postmodern detective novel City of Glass, Avon Books released Neon Lit: Paul Auster’s City of Glass, a
graphic novel adaptation. Another ten years later, in 2004, Picador published a new
version of the graphic novel with an introduction by Art Spiegelman, who, in discussing the challenges of adapting Auster’s novel, calls City of Glass “a surprisingly
nonvisual work” (n.p.). The contrast between Spiegelman’s pronouncement and the
rather insistent attempts over the last twenty years to represent the work pictorially
suggests that one of the novel’s more general concerns, the postmodern difficulties
associated with reading the world and constructing identity based on those readings,
is a problem rooted in the relationship between the visual and the nonvisual. More
specifically, the novel’s interest in the visual strategies of mapping points to how the
cartographic impulse, the desire to create maps, both alleviates these postmodern
problems and further complicates them through the visual perspective necessary for
satisfying such an impulse in the first place. Mapping this novel, and mapping in
this novel, is attempted repeatedly, yet the “surprisingly nonvisual” aspects of City
of Glass remind us that cartographic representation and the ways in which it metaphorizes authorship are always incomplete and contingent. My intention here is to
Canadian Review of Comparative Literature / Revue Canadienne de Littérature Comparée
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explore how the commonly assumed visual perspective from which such mapping
takes place—the overhead view—both solves and further mystifies the mysteries of
this postmodern detective novel.1
The novel features Peter Stillman Sr., a former theology professor, walking the
streets of New York City with a rather conservative aim in mind. Inspired by the
biblical tale of the Tower of Babel, which initially posits one language for humanity
in which words correspond naturally and stably to things, he wishes to recuperate
prelapsarian language and re-join signifier to signified. To do so, he walks in such
a way that his footsteps spell out the words “THE TOWER OF BABEL” in letters
the size of city blocks. Stillman believes that this sort of performative utterance will
confer god-like “author-ity” upon himself and render language transparent. But like
his previous attempt to restore fallen language by locking his son in a room for nine
years in the hopes that the son will begin speaking the language of God, Stillman’s
“writing” is represented as a preposterous form of atavistic authorship doomed to
382 failure. The protagonist of the novel, Daniel Quinn, mistaken for a detective, struggles at first to make sense of Stillman’s project but eventually achieves a breakthrough
when he abstracts himself to an imaginary vantage point high above the city, looking down, which allows him to “see” the words Stillman spells out. I argue that in
addition to criticizing Stillman’s experiment with linguistic transparency Auster also
criticizes Quinn’s bird’s-eye-view cartography for producing what Michel de Certeau
calls a “fiction of knowledge” (92), a text that claims to be able to, but in fact cannot,
apprehend transcendent meaning in a malleable, uncertain, poststructuralist world.
The perspective Quinn employs is key to his cartographic project of making the city
legible, but it is ultimately the cause of his failure because the overhead view produces
knowledge riven by illusion, elision, and misperception.
Though criticism of Auster is extensive, and though it adeptly explicates the folly of
Stillman’s understanding of language, Auster’s take on the common visual perspective necessary for Quinn’s enlightening cartography has been, as it were, overlooked.
In spite of Stephen Fredman’s claim that Auster “creates characters whose driving
concerns are epistemological” (par. 13), most critics have not fully confronted the
epistemology Quinn uses to produce his maps. Carl D. Malmgren, for example,
makes a generic distinction with important implications for the understanding of
space when he argues that City of Glass is a work of “detective fiction,” as opposed
to “mystery fiction.” The latter, he says, usually takes place in smaller, more domestically-oriented spaces and, with its heavier investment in closure, usually “unfolds
in a pre-Saussurian world in which the relation between signifiers and signifieds is
not arbitrary, not subject to the play of différance” (184). “Detective fiction,” on the
other hand, is usually set in larger, more polyvalent urban locales more conducive to
exploring contingent truths and multiple meanings. Such a definition, however, does
not explain why the vantage point Quinn adopts to “read” Stillman transparentlythe panoptic view from high above the streets looking down-is itself undone by the
plurality of signification. Similarly, Pascale-Anne Brault notes that Quinn’s fate rep-
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licates “the destructive consequences of a utopian theory of land and language” (229)
-suffered first by Stillman-when he, Quinn, writes down Stillman’s movements in
order to “reproduc[e] on paper the itinerary of the suspect from street to street” (232).
Like Malmgren, though, Brault does not discuss the specific implications of Quinn
projecting his imagination into an aerial space above the city in order to translate
his textual itinerary into pictorial maps and produce his theory of landscape. The
overhead perspective that purports to grant omniscience as it facilitates such translation has a significant amount of metaphorical capital as well, and in that capacity,
its workings are often taken for granted. Jeffrey T. Nealon, for example, uses such a
metaphor when writing about the acts of interpretation that make up much of the
novel: Quinn, a writer of detective fiction, creates a protagonist whose “ability to lift
himself out of the uncertainty that is the writer/detective’s plight gives purpose to the
entire enterprise of writing” (93; my italics). Why is it, though, that the metaphorical
or literal position above a problem is assumed to carry such epistemological power?
In spite of that power, why does most criticism of urban space in general examine 383
not the consequences of looking down at the streets from the tops of tall buildings
but rather the tropological effects of looking up, seemingly in awe, at that privileged
vantage point at the top of those buildings? “[S]elfhood,” claims Martha Banta in her
discussion of the famous city, “seems wiped out by the act of looking at New York’s
skyline” (44). But Paul Auster, whom Banta does not mention in her article, suggests
that selfhood is put equally at risk by the act of looking down at the streets from atop
the skyline. Accounting for the perspective Quinn employs while making his maps is
important not only because, as Tim Woods points out, “geography, topography, and
subjectivity are intricately interrelated” (115), but also because the overhead perspective has fallen out of sight in the analyses of a novel that is at once curiously nonvisual
(according to Art Spiegelman) yet constantly demanding visualization.
The danger of Peter Stillman Sr.’s quest for transparent language is evident. Having
published a rather neurotic academic tome called The Garden and the Tower: Early
Visions of the New World, which theorizes the possibility of recovering prelapsarian
language in America, Stillman is convinced of the feasibility of such a project. When
his first attempt-locking up his son-meets with predictably disastrous results,
Stillman returns to New York to try again. Lamenting the fact that “things have
broken apart, shattered, collapsed into chaos” and that “we speak falsely, distorting
the very thing we are trying to represent” (93), Stillman vows to re-author language,
“to make language answer our needs” (98). To accomplish this task, he wanders the
streets, spelling out his talismanic phrase, but also collecting and renaming garbage,
activities that eventually prove no different from the mad endeavors of the derelicts
and street people Quinn encounters. In finally acquiescing to the impossibility of
finding what William G. Little calls “a ‘still’ point or immutable Real beyond the
glassy contingency of experience” (157), Stillman hurls himself off the Brooklyn
Bridge. Auster’s depiction of Stillman’s project, with its profoundly nihilistic outcome, underscores the hopelessness of restoring language. Stillman’s authorship is
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clearly incongruent with a poststructuralist world, but Quinn’s subsequent authorship-based on the process of reading text and producing an interpretation-is
equally subject to Auster’s critique. The act of interpretation, as poststructuralists
have pointed out, is itself a form of authorship, but one that the overhead perspective
in City of Glass reveals to be beholden to many of the same assumptions about transparency and correspondence that structure Peter Stillman’s madness.
Michel De Certeau’s influential essay “Walking in the City” advances a theory in
which text and subjectivity are produced by moving through space, a theory that
terms such movement “practice,” and practice is how Stillman attempts to “heal”
language in a fallen world. “The ordinary practitioners of the city,” writes de Certeau,
“live ‘down below,’ below the thresholds at which visibility begins. They walk-an elementary form of this experience of the city; they are walkers, Wandersmänner, whose
bodies follow the thicks and thins of an urban ‘text’ they write without being able to
read it” (93). By walking, the pedestrians of a city practice it into textual existence:
384 “Their intertwined paths give their shape to spaces. They weave places together. In
that respect, pedestrian movements form one of these ‘real systems whose existence
in fact makes up the city’” (97). Walking, de Certeau tells us, must also take place in
time, meaning that the city is made up of lived experiences, of historicized existence.
Movement through time, then, produces what Bryan Reynolds and Joseph Fitzpatrick
call “subjective territories” (72), ideological and disciplinary spheres that are both
textualized by individuals and constitute the subjectivities of those individuals.
Stillman’s strolls through New York are examples of de Certeau’s urban practice. His footsteps, like those of his fellow pedestrians, make the space of New York
comprehensible, but comprehensibility, the novel warns, can easily shade into the
desire to see signifiers joined transcendentally to signifieds. As Quinn discovers that
Stillman’s footsteps are tracing out the phrase “THE TOWER OF BABEL” on the
grid-like streets of the city, he realizes that the phrase is made of “letters inscribed
into the earth itself, as though they were trying to say something that could no
longer be understood” (85). Stillman is trying to say what is unsayable in a broken
(i.e. poststructuralist) world by evoking God’s language, by practicing logocentrism.
But Stillman’s text only exists in time. “[L]ike drawing a picture in the air with your
finger” (85-86), the act of walking/writing the giant letters means that they will
disappear from their author’s sight as he moves along, an apparent literalization of
Derridean writing-under-erasure that, despite Stillman’s intentions, is inevitably
deconstructive.
While Quinn, who himself writes detective novels under a pseudonym, follows
Stillman through the streets with an awareness of the vagaries of postmodern
authorship, his goal of deciphering Stillman’s activities itself falls back upon some
of Stillman’s pre-Saussurian assumptions. Known for his extensive translation of
French poetry, Paul Auster is accustomed to following the footsteps of other writers in an effort to gain access to their “subjective territories,” but he is fully aware
that such an act, as Fredman puts it, “is a profoundly intimate form of relationship,
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in which the translator finds identities melting, mingling, or repelling one another”
(par. 25). Auster acknowledges the suppleness of identity, of course-and Quinn, with
his knowledge of the vicissitudes of pseudonymity, does as well-so the overhead
perspective Quinn finally adopts, as this essay argues, inevitably dooms his project.
Quinn-whose first name evokes the biblical Daniel, a dream-reader, an interpreter2
-takes it upon himself to make sense of Stillman’s peregrinations. Eager “to believe
that all [Stillman’s] steps were actually to some purpose” (74), Quinn hits upon the
idea of taking detailed written notes of his quarry’s activities in order to represent
more clearly what he does. In following Stillman and recording his actions, Quinn’s
notes reproduce practice and hence represent time. On Stillman, Quinn produces
elliptical but thorough notes: “Picks up pencil in middle of block. Examines, hesitates, puts in bag…Buys sandwich in deli…Sits on bench in park and reads through
red notebook” (80; Auster’s ellipses). Almost immediately, though, the problems associated with mimetic writing surface: “walking and writing were not easily compatible
activities…In the beginning he made many mistakes. It was especially difficult to 385
write without looking at the page, and he often discovered that he had written two or
even three lines on top of each other, producing a jumbled, illegible palimpsest” (76).
Quinn’s authorship begins, as he makes notes of Stillman’s perambulations, by performing a type of historiographic textual production. His notes both reflect the rigors
of physically moving through the city and dramatize the fact that writing involves
following in the footsteps of others, often repeatedly and sometimes incoherently.
As such, reproducing Stillman’s practice does not initially lead to comprehensibility,
and the fact that Quinn purchased his pen from a deaf-mute seems to problematize
conventional communication from the outset.
Quinn eventually stumbles upon the idea, though, of abstracting himself to an
overhead viewpoint. Like de Certeau literally looking down from the top of the
World Trade Center in “Walking in the City,” Quinn, “[f]or no particular reason
that he was aware of” (80), imagines an overhead map of the area in which Stillman
walked and traces the letters formed by the path of his footsteps.3 As Quinn steps
back to draw the map, he elevates himself imaginatively into the position of the
voyeur-god and removes time from the equation. He abstracts practice in order to
“write” Stillman omnisciently, to perform what Reynolds and Fitzpatrick call the
“cartographically implemented subjectification of the individual” (72). This imaginary position high above the city allows him to look down “at the page,” but in doing
so, he produces dehistoricized pictographs that render Stillman’s practice timeless.
No longer engaged in ongoing motion, Stillman has been stilled, his footsteps fixed
on the grid, and this apparent breakthrough allows Quinn to decipher the phrase and
make sense of Stillman’s world. Quinn’s cartographic impulse apparently repairs the
break between signifier and signified.
There is, it seems, something quintessentially “American” about Quinn’s urban
mapmaking and the overhead perspective he adopts. The skyscraper, which prompts
de Certeau’s theories of practice and inspires Quinn’s idea, is a distinctly American
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invention, what John Newcomb calls “the central visual symbol of capitalist society” (98). Similarly, Thomas A.P. van Leeuwen, in The Skyward Trend of Thought: The
Metaphysics of the American Skyscraper (1988), asserts that “the monolithic tower
could also be interpreted as being representative of Darwinistic/Spencerian virtues
such as self-reliance and individualism, which [are] highly esteemed in American
popular ethics” (100) at the turn of the twentieth century when skyscrapers rose
to prominence. In evocatively and explicitly linking skyscrapers to America itself,
Stephen Crane notes that the buildings are “emblematic of a nation forcing its regal
head into the clouds” (293). Though apparently central to the national narrative
and to American mythology, skyscrapers also obviously play a role specifically in
urban identity. In Delirious New York (1978), Rem Koolhaas thinks of skyscrapers
as the Rosetta Stone necessary for deciphering what Thomas Pynchon has called
“hieroglyphic streets” (181), and van Leeuwen proposes the phenomenon of “skyward thinking”: the notion that American mythology and epistemology are deeply
386 indebted to the process of moving and looking heaven-ward, a notion that profoundly
influences everything from modern urban architecture to the explosion of aviation
in the early part of the twentieth century to the very existence of cities as we know
them.4 Urban theorists like van Leeuwen also point to expansionist frontiersmanship
within the larger American mythos as the root of the desire to control space in the
city, to address, in Mark McGurl’s words, “the urge to see the earth arrayed beneath
[oneself] in imperial, totalized perspective” (420). Skyscrapers illustrate the need to
survey the open spaces of America and to dominate those spaces by specularizing
them.
Seeing the landscape-especially the urban landscape-from a god’s-eye view generates a new hermeneutic, but at the same time, skywardness contains the suggestion
of hubris-the attempt to usurp God-against which the biblical story of the Tower
of Babel cautions.5 Nedra Reynolds is among those who explore the incongruous
effects the skyscraper has on perception. One of the most significant consequences of
being above a city, Reynolds argues, is that such a position appears to compress space.
Buildings and landmarks seem closer together than they actually are. Citing the concept of space-time compression in David Harvey’s The Condition of Postmodernity
(1990), Reynolds points out that perceptions of proximity and the illusion of compressed time lead to perceptions of cultural similarity; from above, the eye’s ability to
sweep quickly over vast stretches of urban landscape suggests that we are physically
able (and culturally entitled) to cover these distances as quickly and as effortlessly.6
The skyscraper perspective and space-time compression create the illusion that space
is unmediated, that it is represented to us as transparent and mimetic, and that it is
homogenously accessible. Space-time compression, as Harvey points out, also facilitates marginalization. The top of a skyscraper, both materially and mythologically,
is a privileged spot. Looking down on the city from above dehumanizes the city. It
reduces the people in the city to ants-to a so-called lower plane of existence-or else
it erases them altogether in one quick, depopulating elevator ride. It also abstracts
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urban space. As Graham Clarke notes, “The city becomes a panorama (and spectacle) of geometrics and tonal patterns…[I]t exists as mythic spectacle rather than as
human environment” (25). In replacing isolation with connectedness, the skyscraper
perspective, as Auster’s Daniel Quinn suggests, actually threatens the cohesion and
the coherence of the street.
Quinn’s sometimes illegible writing and his obscure motivations hint at these
problems that make his cartographic epistemology atavistic. In their brilliant analysis of de Certeau, Bryan Reynolds and Joseph Fitzpatrick outline additional problems
inherent in the all-seeing, god-like point of view, problems that I perceive as beginning
to manifest themselves in Quinn’s maps and that end up forming an important part
of Auster’s critique of conventional notions of authorship. Reynolds and Fitzpatrick
begin by comparing the overhead view with which de Certeau opens his essay to the
Foucauldian powers of panopticism. Michel Foucault’s notion of discipline through
observation is well-trodden territory, so suffice it to serve as a reminder that Jeremy
Bentham’s prison panopticon, from which Foucault derives panopticism, owes its 387
potency to a centralized observation tower elevated above the inmates.7 While the
panoptic prison tower does afford a privileged view of the inmates, Foucault takes
care to point out that the omniscience it appears to provide, while more or less functional, is illusory. Not every inmate will be under constant surveillance, but the
possibility of being seen at any time supposedly prompts self-surveillance and selfdiscipline. “[S]urveillance is permanent in its effects,” Foucault writes in Discipline
and Punish, “even if it is discontinuous in its action” (201). The panopticon, like the
view from the top of a skyscraper, can offer a wealth of authoritative information
but often at the cost of other types of misrepresentation. In other words, while the
panopticon can bring distant and disparate elements into apparent proximity-thus
enabling commanding surveillance or, perhaps in a less sinister vein, some productive collisions of meaning-its perspective is nonetheless founded on the illusion that
a system “appears to be ruled by the law of ‘place’” (Reynolds and Fitzpatrick 71)
instead of by the law of practiced “space.” The voyeur-god created by an imaginary
overhead view must, as Foucault notes, immobilize what it sees and elide spatial
and societal differences, and thus it has dehumanizing and dehistoricizing effects
on the city it observes. It stills the motion of practice and obscures individuals. The
people in the street fall beneath its threshold of visibility, and their practice (so vital
to making space comprehensible) disappears. In an article on Auster’s The New York
Trilogy (1990), of which City of Glass constitutes the first part, Steven E. Alford notes
that fixed and depopulated “places” become scenes of signification “only through a
misapprehension of the missing human element in mapped representations of space”
(613).
Cartography, in striving for objective, mimetic representation, attempts to depict
space transparently, but the idea that maps are ideologically inflected is well understood. As Bruno Bosteels points out, “map-historians have unmasked apparently
value-neutral cartographic representations to uncover instead a series of ideologi-
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cally and historically determined conventions and constraints” (118-9), some of
which involve this problematic overhead view. Because the overhead view obliterates
practice, a map presents itself as a constant, as timeless, and often with no indication
of human presence at all. Yet the importance of human practice to maps comes to
the fore when Reynolds and Fitzpatrick provide the example of rocks in a stream. If
one cartographer sees no use for the rocks, he will not draw them on the map, but if
another cartographer interprets them as stepping stones to get across the stream, he
will draw them in. The uses to which a location can be put-how individuals practice
the space-affect how a map looks despite the map’s apparent erasure of the human
presence. A view from hundreds of feet above the city will therefore abstract urban
practice instead of rendering it concrete. As Alford observes, “The map rationalizes
and deracinates space in order to master it” (627). Maps have not, however, always
been dehistoricized. Early maps-the maps of medieval pilgrims, for instance-were
often more pictorial and less geometrical in their efforts to illustrate events along
388 the journeys that produced them. These more narrative “deep maps” (to re-literalize
William Least Heat-Moon’s metaphor8), do render the lived experiences that define
practiced space, but they also recognize that maps cannot be disembodied from their
mapmakers and cannot account for all points simultaneously as they often attempt to
do in contemporary urbanography. Thinking about maps deconstructively weakens,
in the words of Graham Huggan, “the claim to coherence of cartographic discourse
by revealing that the exemplary structuralist activity involved in the production of
the map…traces back to a ‘point of presence’ whose stability cannot be guaranteed”
(119). Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari also wrote about the slippery nature of maps:
“The map is open and connectable in all of its dimensions; it is detachable, reversible,
susceptible to constant modification. It can be torn, reversed, adapted to any kind of
mounting, reworked by an individual, group, or social formation. It can be drawn
on the wall, conceived of as a work of art, constructed as a political action or as a
meditation” (12). A map’s flexibility (in several senses of the word), and the “writerly”
qualities of the city (to use Roland Barthes’ term), therefore problematize the comprehension of urban space and make it increasingly difficult to pin down.
Quinn’s cartographic strategy, however, appears to work at first. Perhaps because,
as Reynolds and Fitzpatrick point out, the cartographic perspective does not necessarily erase all practice-it can be “the privileging, over time, of a chosen few”
(80)-Quinn is able to decipher Stillman’s “THE TOWER OF BABEL” phrase.
The “chosen few” practices, in this case, are Stillman’s attempts to restore signifiers to signifieds by tracing out giant letters in the streets. This practice, which can
be frozen in pictographs, is congruent with logocentrism. Stillman’s act of writing
hopes to reestablish prelapsarian language and therefore come to signify timelessly
and transparently. Quinn, furthermore, can interpret the pictographs because he
shares some of Stillman’s assumptions about authorship. By fixing Stillman’s text
into work, to follow in Barthes’ footsteps again, Quinn believes he can achieve the
“resolutely monistic” (“From Work to Text” 160) authorial identity that ostensibly
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ends the deferral of meaning and solidifies Stillman’s wandering into legible pictographs. Omitting the ghostly traces left by the city’s inhabitants as they go about
their daily business-what de Certeau calls “practice”-makes the “author-ization” of
meaning possible. Quinn’s belief in the omniscience of authorship becomes apparent when, waiting in Grand Central Station, he encounters a girl reading one of his
novels (published under the pseudonym William Wilson) and is offended “that she
should be casually skimming the pages that had cost him so much effort” (64).9 His
annoyance at her assertion that “It’s just a book” (65) reflects his romantic notions of
authorship and the power he believes is conferred by authorial practices. The apparent solidity of these notions of authorship and the perceived effectiveness with which
Quinn initially reads Stillman’s actions are predicated upon a false transparency that
ultimately and inevitably threatens Quinn’s own identity with erasure.
As Stefano Tani points out, postmodern detective fiction such as City of Glass is
in part about the confrontation “between the detective’s mind and his sense of identity” (76). From his initiation into the mystery of Peter Stillman based on a case of 389
mistaken identity to his eventual awareness of a text’s resistance to closure, Quinn’s
identity remains in flux as he explores notions of authorship. In addition to the personal stake he has in his work, of which we see evidence in his interaction with the
girl in Grand Central Station, Quinn identifies strongly with his own fiction. He does
keep his authorial pseudonym at arm’s length-“he never went so far as to believe that
he and William Wilson were the same man” (5)-but “Wilson’s” protagonist, Max
Work, “increasingly [came] to life” (6) and increasingly “allowed Quinn to pass from
himself into Work” (7). In the Barthesian pun on the word “Work,” the conventionality of Quinn’s notions of authorship becomes clear: the work is what results from an
author fixing text, and authorial identity becomes stabilized through the work. As
Jeffrey T. Nealon notes, “Quinn’s passing from himself into Work allows his writing to pass from the literally limitless realm of composition (where confusion reigns
because anything and everything is possible and meaningful) into the limited realm
of work” (94). For Quinn, passing into “Work”-albeit obliquely through William
Wilson-indicates a product-oriented approach to writing, an approach that “closes
on a signified” (“From Work to Text” 158), that produces a “resolutely monistic” (160)
authorial identity, and that ostensibly ends the deferral of meaning. Quinn’s concept
of authorship is also based on conventional notions of individual identity; depicting
Quinn’s musings on his new-found occupation, Auster writes: “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” (9-10). Quinn’s view of authorship (predicated on the humanist “life-bud”
around which the world organizes itself), however, quickly runs aground on the fact
that he has “stopped thinking of himself as real” (10). The contradictions inherent
in Quinn’s notions of authorial identity come together in a phrase that appears to
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endorse Derridean textuality but that also reveals Quinn’s faith in conventional closure: “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 has come
to its end” (9). Quinn grants that the center of a text is everywhere (and therefore
nowhere), but he also endorses the possibility that text can ultimately be closed. The
act of closing a text, as Quinn discovers, generates the same problems as overhead
cartography; an authoritative text, like a map, also results in an inchoate identity.
For instance, when Quinn visits the Columbia library, a preeminent repository of
(closed) works (as opposed to open texts), he feels “as though he had been allowed
to enter some crypt of oblivion” (50). The potentially endless deferral of meaning
foreclosed by textual enshrinement, here signaled by the library, in fact results in
nothingness, in the death of identity.
Quinn’s progression (or, rather, his regression) from taking notes on Stillman’s
walking in the city to looking out from a centered position and drawing maps from
390 above reflects the opposing notions of authorship fighting it out within him. His
palimpsestic notes form a decentered text that accounts (though with problems of
decipherability) for Stillman’s actions in time, but the maps revert to notions of imaginary authorial omniscience and freeze the traces of Stillman’s practice. Stepping
up into the position of the voyeur-god and stilling Stillman turns practiced “space”
into (ostensibly) fixed “place” and thereby enables the spurious form of omniscience
Quinn needs to figure out Stillman’s actions. Stillman’s steps, in other words, become
“compressed” into timeless individual characters that Quinn believes (falsely, it
turns out) he can read transparently. The overhead view, in other words, produces
an illusory omniscience that attempts to “read” the vital palimpsest of the streets
as timeless and straightforwardly mimetic language. The hubris of this position has
important implications for understanding text. De Certeau, writing about Icarus,
says: “His elevation transfigures him into a voyeur. It puts him at a distance. It transforms the bewitching world by which one was ‘possessed’ into a text that lies before
one’s eyes” (92). In other words, the hermeneutics of mapping, the interpretive power
granted by the elevated overhead perspective, abolish the “bewitching world” in
favor of the imposition of depopulating and dehistoricizing interpretation. Following
poststructuralist and Derridean turns away from the possibilities of transcendental signification and towards the endless play of language, Auster’s work, then, uses
the overhead perspective to caution against repositing logocentrism-in the form of
authoritative authorship-as an antidote to indeterminacy.
Just as Icarus fell, so too is this hermeneutics of mapping doomed. Jacques Derrida’s
assertion that “the absence of a transcendental signified extends the domain and play
of signification infinitely” (280) means that Auster’s representation of the efforts
to contain that signification-in both Peter Stillman’s walking and Daniel Quinn’s
cartographic detecting-is, literally, a graphic warning against the folly of seeking
Adamic language. Quinn’s cartography is just as detrimental to identity as Stillman’s
obsession with prelapsarian language. Towards the end of the novel, Quinn’s obses-
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sive writing in the red notebook, his endless attempt to bestow order on Stillman’s
actions through the production of text, leaves him on an absurd vigil in a grubby
alley watching a long-abandoned apartment. He is homeless, sleepless, starving,
living in trash, and when the pages of the notebook run out, he is ultimately annihilated into the non-space of the Derridean hors-texte, to “wherever he may have
disappeared” (158). Quinn takes the imaginary (and impossible) position of an allseeing god looking down on the streets of New York in an attempt to fix the endless
play of signification and to overcome the apparently fragmented and restricted perspective he obtains at street level, but the novel ultimately dramatizes his failure.
His abstracted position attempts to solidify errancy, divagation, and wandering into
stable and fixed meaning, but the overhead perspective only substitutes one set of
disorienting epistemological limitations for another, and as the novel ends, Quinn
finds himself in the same position as Stillman’s son: in a dark room with “no longer…
any interest in himself” (156).
His identity fades away because he is unable to write, and he is unable to write 391
because he feels “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” (156). He
has rediscovered prelapsarian language where words correspond to things, but he no
longer has a subjectivity from which he can deploy it. He manages to absent himself
to a place where there are “no city blocks to mark the stages of his progress” (143),
where he is free of the textual grid, but just as the imaginary view from above the
city “solved” the mystery of Peter Stillman by settling on transcendentally signified
meaning, Quinn, now a transient living on the street, finds himself looking up at
that place of omniscient voyeurism with the intent of settling on its meaning. Like
Barthes’ soothsayer in S/Z (1974) who closes off a piece of the sky within which to
create signification (14), Quinn
spent many hours looking up at the sky. From his position at the back of the alley,
wedged in between the bin and the wall, there were few other things to see…Clouds
complicated the picture, and Quinn spent many afternoons studying them, trying to
learn their ways, seeing if he could not predict what would happen to them. He became
familiar with the cirrus, the cumulus, the stratus, the nimbus, and all of their various
combinations…These all had to be investigated, measured, and deciphered. (140)
He has returned to that well-known place in the street from which one looks up in
bafflement at the skyscrapers and beyond and tries to decipher their meaning within
the urban text. Quinn gives in to the “lust to be a viewpoint and nothing more” (de
Certeau 92), and while his gazing at the clouds may be an interesting imaginative
exercise, it is ultimately futile. It is an effort to fix meaning upon a realm that is permanently in motion. Looking down on the city led to an obsessive fascination with a
mystery that was no longer worth solving since Stillman had committed suicide, and
in looking up at that authorial place in the sky, Quinn knows that he has hit bottom.
His subjectivity is demolished, and he is unable to deploy language. Writing in the
notebook initially helps confer (a detective’s) identity upon Quinn by joining signifier
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and signified, but Auster suggests that it is in fact practice that generates meaning:
Quinn’s identity evaporates when he runs out of notebook pages, and his attempt at
authorship ends in dereliction and self-annihilation on the same order as Stillman’s
suicidal leap off the Brooklyn Bridge. The novel’s representation of authorial authority reveals that the preoccupation with “absolute knowledge and final solutions is,
therefore, a form of madness” (Rowen 232).10
In cautioning against the folly of authorial omniscience, Auster playfully waits
until the last two pages of City of Glass to make his readers aware that the story
has been narrated by a friend of the Paul Auster who appears as a character in the
novel. The end of City of Glass informs us that the friend found Quinn’s scribblings
and “followed the red notebook” (158) as closely as he could while constructing his
narration, in much the same way Quinn traced Stillman through the streets of New
York. The narrator acknowledges the contingencies involved in translating the notebook into the tale, admitting inevitable inaccuracies and telling us that Quinn’s “text
392 was difficult to decipher” (158). The narrator has, of course, failed to “decipher” the
text fully, thus denying us closure and allowing the trilogy to continue on into its
subsequent novels, Ghosts (1986) and The Locked Room (1986). The narrating “I” that
appears at the end of City of Glass takes pains to distance himself from the kind of
pretense to authentication that Quinn finds in his copy of Marco Polo’s Travels: “We
will set down things seen as seen, things heard as heard, so that our book may be
an accurate record, free from any sort of fabrication. And all who read this book or
hear it may do so with full confidence, because it contains nothing but the truth” (7).
Auster’s narrator realizes that such authentication is impossible because such transparent correspondence between world and text is unattainable, and because the red
notebook “is only half the story” (158). Auster’s narrator refrains from rising above
the action to take the god’s-eye view, choosing instead to maintain his subjectivity
by accepting the endless play of signification. We cannot trust him any more than we
can trust Quinn or Stillman, but by refusing the charade of authenticity in a linguistically fallen world, the narrator allows the novel to divest itself of the deception of
authorial omniscience and thereby expose some of the assumptions about authorship
that the pursuit of “truth” conceals.
With this poststructural awareness, Auster undercuts the power and attractiveness of authorial omniscience, as well as at the metaphors of elevation with which it
is characterized. Reeling from his initial discovery that Stillman is writing letters in
the streets of the city, for instance, Quinn notes that the last two letters his subject
is to write are “E” and “L.” As a result, “Quinn’s mind dispersed. He arrived in a
neverland of fragments, a place of wordless things and thingless words. Then, struggling through his torpor one last time, he told himself that El was the ancient Hebrew
for God” (87). “El” is also the diminutive by which New Yorkers once referred to
the elevated trains that criss-crossed the city. Evoking a position above the city, one
that bypasses the usual strictures of the streets, provides Quinn with the illusion of
God-like, all-powerful knowledge. Losing his subjectivity in this instant of chaos
Lindsey M ichael Banco | M apping Authorship
provoked by Stillman’s perambulations, Quinn finds momentary clarity by imagining omniscience and by metonymically reminding himself that a god-like perspective
is a perspective specifically elevated above the city. The next sentence after this revelation is: “In his dream, which he later forgot, he found himself in the town dump of
his childhood, sifting through a mountain of rubbish” (87). The God-like viewpoint
provides him with temporary coherence, but the futility of the project, like the futility of Peter Stillman renaming the garbage he finds in the street, ultimately emerges
when Quinn sees himself not hovering above the city but rummaging through the
dump.11 As Quinn’s project unravels, he too aligns himself with the dereliction and
the displacement of the streets, with the unplaceable people, “the tramps, the downand-outs, the shopping-bag ladies, the drifters and drunks…[,] the merely destitute
to the wretchedly broken” (129). Significantly, such an alignment-a reconceptualization of the city from street level that “re-breaks” the bond between signifier and
signified-occurs after Quinn manages to achieve a literal position above the city:
he tracks down the “real” Paul Auster, the man for whom he was initially mistaken, 393
on the eleventh floor of an apartment building. It turns out that the Paul Auster in
the novel is not a detective but rather a writer, one who provides the novel’s mise-enabyme in the form of an essay he is writing on the real authorship of Cervantes’ Don
Quixote. By standing, in the position of an omniscient god, for the authorial Paul
Auster, the fictional Paul Auster encapsulates neatly for Quinn in an apartment high
above the city a central tension informing City of Glass between “author-ity” and the
uncertainties of authorship. His god-like self-representation turns out to be ironic.
When Quinn returns to the streets, instead of finding conventional enlightenment he
finds postmodern (non)awareness. He finds that he is “nowhere now. He had nothing,
he knew nothing, he knew that he knew nothing” (124). He then spends the next day
wandering the city, focusing with particular vigor after his depopulating and dehistoricizing trip up to the eleventh floor, on all the dereliction and poverty associated
with “practicing” urban space. He realizes now that the overhead perspective upon
which his illuminating mapping was based elided, among other things, the seamier
side of urban practice. His revised perspective is, of course, a pessimistic one, and it
resembles to a certain degree the prevalent anomie toward postmodern indeterminacy’s supposed disregard for real, lived material conditions. How interested Auster
might be in buttressing this accusation is open to debate, but this scene nonetheless
underscores his critique of the ostensibly omniscient overhead view and-though
there may be a lingering desire for authority in Auster’s literary ethos-of authorship
itself.12
As mapping and its attendant metaphors continue to traverse the discourses of
literary theory and criticism, and as visual culture continues to increase in prominence in the discipline of literary studies, Auster’s reminder that mapping has the
potential to distort and misrepresent is still an important one to heed even twenty
years later. City of Glass has a resistance yet a curious amenability to visual adaptation, as the Picador graphic novel edition suggests. In that one of that adaptation’s
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primary visual tropes is the grid, the graphic novel evokes both the productive potentialities of multiple textual entry points and the bars of a prison cell, both creative
indeterminacy and proscribed subjectivity. The artwork in Paul Karasik and David
Mazzucchelli’s adaptation also frequently simulates the movement associated with
shifting one’s perspective up and back and out and away as a means of producing
comprehension, but the fact that such movements frequently turn city features into
impenetrable mazes (4), inscrutable maps of the United States (44), or minimalist renditions of the entire globe (81), and the fact that such a simulation can only take place
in this medium through sequences of still images, remind us that such movements
and such perspectives can also limit comprehensibility. Transparency-of language
or of perspective-hopes to reassert the self, but the god-like position required for
total textual authority and transparent language in fact vitiates individuality.
After New York’s World Trade Center buildings-from the tops of which Michel de
Certeau articulated his theories of practice-were destroyed on September 11, 2001,
394 the annual memorialization of the towers with columns of light encapsulates both
the drive to restore skyward thinking to a place of prominence in the New York skyline as well as the ephemerality of that effort. The striking visual effect of the pillars
of light, together with the insubstantiality of the light itself, illustrate fundamental
characteristics of skyward thinking: it is a powerful visual tool in the (re)production
of knowledge, yet like the city of glass in Auster’s title, it offers transparency only at
the cost of extreme fragility. Nonetheless, within the broader context of American
history and American identity in which The New York Trilogy is set, it is always with
some radicalism that someone such as Paul Auster would repudiate the omniscient
authorial perspective and the utopian impulses it generates. Movement-towards
the West in many myths, but also upwards, towards the spaces of purported omniscience-plays a crucial role in American utopia, but in City of Glass, Quinn’s literal
and imaginary movements allow Auster to warn against the problems and the dangers associated with such thinking.13 The totalizing perspective, the view from above,
reflects the desire to survey, to grasp, and to perfect the vast and often unknown
landscapes of America, but for a writer to relinquish that omniscience, to step down
from the tower in acknowledgement of its potential deceptions, remains a bold move
indeed.
Works Cited
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New York: Hill and Wang, 1977. 155-64.
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___. S/Z. Trans. Richard Miller. New York: Hill and Wang, 1974.
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Derrida, Jacques. Writing and Difference. Trans. Alan Bass. Chicago: U of Chicago
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Dimovitz, Scott A. “Public Personae and the Private I: De-compositional Ontology
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Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Trans. Alan
Sheridan. New York: Vintage, 1977.
___. “Of Other Spaces.” Diacritics 16.1 (1986): 22-27.
Franchot, Jenny. “Melville’s Traveling God.” The Cambridge Companion to Herman
Melville. Ed. Robert S. Levine. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1998: 157-85.
Fredman, Stephen. “‘How to Get Out of the Room That Is the Book? Paul Auster
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Harvey, David. The Condition of Postmodernity. Cambridge, MA and Oxford, UK:
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the Politics of Space in Early Modern Britain. Eds. Andrew Gordon and Bernhard
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Little, William G. “Nothing to Go On: Paul Auster’s City of Glass.” Contemporary
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Malmgren, Carl D. “Detecting/Writing the Real: Paul Auster’s City of Glass.”
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Hans Bertens. Amsterdam and Atlanta, GA: Rodopi, 1995: 177-201.
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Endnotes
1. Recent volumes dealing, in whole or in part, with postmodern mapping and cartography in America
include John Brinckerhoff Jackson, Landscape in Sight: Looking at America (New Haven: Yale UP,
1997); Brian Jarvis, Postmodern Cartographies: The Geographical Imagination in Contemporary
American Culture (Chicago: Pluto, 1998); Helena Mitchie, Nineteenth-Century Geographies: The
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Transformation of Space from the Victorian Age to the American Century (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UP, 2003); Rick Van Noy, Surveying the Interior: Literary Cartographers and the Sense of Place
(Reno: U of Nevada P, 2003); and Peter Turchi, Maps of the Imagination: The Writer as Cartographer
(San Antonio: Trinity UP, 2004). On the charting of social space more generally, see, for example,
Edward W. Soja, Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory (London:
Verso, 1989); Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space (Trans. Donald Nicolson-Smith. Oxford:
Blackwell, 1991); and Alison Blunt and Jane Wills, Dissident Geographies: An Introduction to Radical
Ideas and Practice (New York: Prentice Hall, 2000).
2. Norma Rowen first points out this connection.
3. The novel reproduces Quinn’s maps pictorially within its pages, but interestingly, the graphic novel
adaptation, in spite of its innovative imagery, appears to reproduce the original novel’s reproductions. This (re)doubling strategy refuses to clarify the ultimately ambiguous maps, and it remains
consistent with one of the key allusions in City of Glass, one which William G. Little astutely points
out: the endless and ultimately pointless tracings of Melville’s Bartleby.
4. In addition to Koolhaas’ Delirious New York: A Retroactive Manifesto for New York (New York:
Oxford UP, 1978) and van Leeuwen’s volume, other important works on the role of skyscrapers in
America include Charles Jencks’ Skyscrapers-Skyprickers-Skycities (New York: Rizzoli, 1980) and
Roberta Moudry’s The American Skyscraper: Cultural Histories (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2005).
The epistemology of skywardness is everywhere in America; on U.S. currency, for example, we find
an all-seeing eye looking out from the top of a pyramid.
5. Rowland A. Sherrill provides the following succinct account of the fabled tower: “the achievement
of the tower to heaven seemed possible, at least to begin with, only because those human beings
laboring at it shared a universal tongue, a language and a discourse, that enabled their mutual
understanding and common pursuit. An unfaithful, untoward, and arrogant effort in the biblical
depiction, the work on the tower is finally stymied by the divine action of introducing into the human world the multiplicity of tongues, the numerous languages that would separate people, distance
them in understanding, segregate them into spheres of discrete discourse, all further reinforcing the
‘fallen’ character of human history by alienating people from each other” (114).
6. See Harvey’s The Condition of Postmodernity: An Inquiry in the Origins of Cultural Change (Cambridge, MA and Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 1990). Incidentally, the paperback edition of Harvey’s book
features on its cover Madelon Vriesendorp’s Dream of Liberty (1974). The illustration depicts, among
other things, New York’s Chrysler Building in a state of collapse, implying that failed skywardness is
at least partially emblematic of the postmodern condition (and, since September 11, 2001, representative of the “new normal”).
7. See Discipline and Punish (1977).
8. See PrairyErth: A Deep Map (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1991). In this travelogue, Heat-Moon ranges
over a county in Kansas, presenting us with a remarkably detailed portrait of its limited confines, an
echo of Henry David Thoreau’s famous aphorism, “I have traveled widely in Concord.” As something of an antidote to travel based on well-bordered, two-dimensional maps, Heat-Moon reorients
Thoreau’s “widely” as “deeply,” using a land-as-narrative lens through which he reads the county as a
geographical, geological, linguistic, ecological, and historical palimpsest. His is a map-in-progress. It
is not a map that fantasizes about objective access to absolute space.
9. Quinn’s pseudonym William Wilson is also the name of the famous doubled protagonist in the Edgar
Allan Poe story of the same name. Like Melville, Poe is an important touchstone in Auster’s fiction.
10. Quinn’s and Stillman’s fates are part of a tradition in American literature of associating madness
with the encompassing vistas that help characterize American identity. For example, Alison Russell makes the following comment on characters in William Gaddis’ The Recognitions (1955): “One
may also recall that Esme…is institutionalized at ‘Bellevue,’ and that Otto…experiences…mental
instability after being wounded outside the ‘Bella Vista’ hotel. Gaddis’ playful references to beautiful
397
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views are associated with madness rather than clarity of vision; thus, these ironic appellations reveal
how The Recognitions raises questions about transparent language and representation” (Crossing
Boundaries 31). In a similar vein, Jenny Franchot’s reading of Moby-Dick (1851) locates the origins of
monomaniacal obsession in “that lofty, comprehensive perspective that will later prove so enchanting to Melville’s mast-climbing heroes” (164).
11. The fact that we are able to find out that Quinn “later forgot” his dream is one of several instances
in which the novel’s narrator, working from Quinn’s notebook (which could not possibly contain an
account of a dream Quinn forgot), slips into omniscience. As one of several moments in City of Glass
that can perhaps be read as Auster giving in to a desire for omniscient novelistic “author-ity,” this
brief phrase undercuts Auster’s postmodernist project somewhat and lends additional credence to
Stephen Fredman’s contention that Auster is in fact interested in truth and wholeness.
12. Scott A. Dimovitz’s article on Paul Auster argues that City of Glass in fact “implies a transcendent
structure, a series of correspondences that will undermine pure metaphysical contingency and give
meaning to an otherwise meaningless existence, yet it refuses to name it as such” (619). In claiming
that “Auster’s work does not enact the postmodernist undermining of the bourgeois liberal humanist
subject as such” (627), Dimovitz concludes that “In the world of The New York Trilogy, postmodernism functions as byproduct, not as cause” (629).
398 13. In his article on space and signification, Alford comments on the equally depopulating effects of
utopia when he asserts that “Utopian space shares with mapped space an inhuman quality” (630).