ABOUT THE AUTHOR

While my field of study at Dawson is the sciences, I have always been fascinated by how artworks (especially cinema) can have contradictory interpretations. This essay was an attempt to break down the challenging techniques Paul Auster uses to build his “detective story” in City of Glass. I approached the analysis with a playful parody of Auster’s postmodern, metafictional style—never expecting to get away with it! Special thanks to Professor Alexander Flamenco, the English Department, and the English Journal for encouraging creative and contrarian approaches to literary content and form in our coursework.

–Eden Atlas

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Crime was rampant that summer, and the Fandango mystery was far from a resolution. The reasons why Arthur Elliot met Eden Atlas in a restaurant, in a former hockey arena, did not matter, but if the encounter gave any fruit, more power to him. Between sips of brandy, Eden Atlas spoke as follows:

“The notion that Paul Auster’s City of Glass killed the detective genre is oft repeated in academic circles. This proposition, however, is far from the truth. Beyond superficial rebuttals about how detective novels have been published after Auster’s 1985 work, it is trivial to analyse his use of detective-fiction (DF) conventions to prove he does something else. Paul Auster does not destroy the detective genre at all. Saying so would disrespect his literary project. He simply infuses this detective narrative with so many unrealistic premises and superfluous sidetracks that its particular mystery seems ridiculous. The author achieves this by implementing an incompetent detective and giving him a futile case to crack. He also overshadows his DF elements with musings on philosophy and other displays of writing prowess.”

Atlas asked the waiter for a tortilla, a dish of chicken fajitas, and the largest tin of caviar available, to be delivered in that order. Once he received the tortilla, Eden Atlas tore it into pieces. He resumed:

“Obviously, detective fiction necessitates a detective to solve the mystery. In City of Glass, the detective, Daniel Quinn, is so unsuited for his job that he makes a mockery of the profession. Quinn’s undeniable depth as a character is of little concern here. As an ineffective detective, he makes the detective story ineffective in kind. For one, he is a writer by trade. As such, his knowledge of crimes is limited to fictitious ones. Furthermore, Auster does not introduce him as a stalwart, strong-willed, or intelligent character. He is instead a man stuck in false identities. “It reassured him to pretend to be Work … to know that he had it in him to be Work if he ever chose to, … even if only in his mind” (Auster 16). The connection Quinn conceives between himself and Max Work, the detective character he created, is useful for an author to make. This quote does not reflect on Quinn’s abilities as a detective. His self-identification as someone else (this is the first of many examples) hints at how easily he will fall into unreality, and how liable he will be to misrepresent facts later on. The uncertain thoughts in nearby passages are enough to characterise Quinn as less mentally stable than any conventional detective. As he proceeds with his investigation into Peter Stillman Sr., he encounters a cognitive roadblock: “Everything had been reduced to chance, a nightmare of numbers and probabilities. There were no clues, no leads, no moves to be made” (141). This passage is often interpreted as an acceptance of the world’s meaninglessness. However, it may also speak to Daniel Quinn’s inability to grasp some clue that a more competent detective would. To Sherlock Holmes, everything is a clue. To Quinn, nothing is, as evidenced by his Socratic admission that he knows nothing. As the story goes on, Daniel displays an attitude toward the case which is somehow more fanatical and less thorough, laying bare a crumbling mental state. His ostensibly genius plan involves moving to a garbage-filled alleyway to keep an eye permanently on the Stillmans’ building. As a detective, he does not concentrate on this task as much; instead, he is swept away by the mysteries of the clouds: “Quinn spent many afternoons studying them, trying to learn their ways” (179). The language goes on to paint a picture of Quinn becoming one with these heavenly colours and shapes, dissociating from reality. In short, Daniel is often distracted from reality because of his unusual psyche. What limited investigative attempts he makes yield clues that add up to nothing and further his mental decline. No matter how they are framed, these qualities do not make an effective detective.”

After some time, a waitress arrived with a tray of stewed chicken. Eden Atlas was quick to distribute the dish evenly across the table, not just on his fragmented tortilla. He continued,

“In City of Glass, the mystery that Daniel Quinn is tasked with solving is inherently futile. In other words, the author deliberately constructs a plot which is unexplainable, even by a skilled investigator. For example, Quinn encounters two identical people with the same face as his suspect at the train station. “Whatever choice he made – and he had to make a choice – would be arbitrary” (90). One must understand that the appearance of the two twin Stillmans is entirely unrealistic; the man had no siblings to speak of. Thus, this passage may be understood as the author imposing a supernatural element to make his detective’s journey all the more “arbitrary.” (Doubling is incidentally an important idea in postmodern DF.) Later on, Auster makes a direct reference to the narrative’s inscrutability through the symbolism of eggs. After a long day, “Quinn made a light supper of scrambled eggs” (104). The fact that eggs (later established by Stillman to be meaningful objects) are scrambled here, echoes the idea that this detective narrative might be scrambled as well, with no discernable structure. Furthermore, this scrambled egg reference is especially adept at undermining this DF’s structure, because the term “hard-boiled” is a descriptor of the grittiest and least neat mysteries in the conventional canon. This “scrambled” mystery is even more difficult. The most evident reason why City of Glass’ mystery is futile is that the suspect, Stillman Sr., kills himself before doing anyone harm. In fact, he allegedly “died in mid-air, before he even hit the water” (187). It is as if the scholar would have died at that moment regardless of any other possible factor. Thus, there is no suspect at large, and no mystery at all for the incompetent detective to even solve.”

At that moment, an enormous tin of beluga caviar arrived at the table. With confused eyes, Elliot witnessed Atlas heap the product onto his plate, forming a pile half a foot tall. He went on:

“Looking beyond the detective narrative of this novel is not difficult. In an attempt to reinforce a nihilist worldview and to elevate the book’s literary status, Paul Auster overshadows (or almost replaces) his detective story elements with non-sequiturs, philosophical musings and coy winks at the audience. All these additions effectively water down the mystery. For one, an entire chapter is devoted to Quinn’s meditation on language acquisition. Dozens of pages are concerned with Stillman Sr.’s thoughts on hermeneutics and philosophy of language itself. Strikingly, the senior Stillman, the detective’s suspect, waxes lyrical about how “[Humpty Dumpty] is a philosopher of language” (127) to Daniel Quinn. In any detective story, this moment between the sleuth and the “bad guy” would be full of tension. Here, Stillman’s monologue, which borders on comedy with Humpty, is instead a way for the author to drown out his mystery with unrelated notions. This speech and others like it (plus the metafictional elements) manage to overshadow the detective narrative and make the book feel more literary because of their superficial intellectiveness. A glaring example of Auster distracting from the mystery at hand to perform a witty pirouette comes when Quinn spots a woman reading one of his novels. She shrugs, “it’s no big deal. It’s just a book” (86). In this scene, Auster invites the phrase “It’s just a book” to be used with reference to City of Glass too. This delegitemizes Quinn’s journey for the reader in a way no conventional detective stories do. The reader is made to question how valuable the mystery they are reading really is. At the same time, Auster necessarily uses this line to reinforce how profound an author he is, and how excellent the book is, as someone skilled enough to bring this paradox of self-reference to life. Elsewhere in the novel, Quinn’s lengthy descriptions of passersby take the stage: “He felt an urge to record [them], … before he forgot them” (165). What follows is a description that bears little relevance to any sort of detective’s goal. Whereas the vignettes of city life in another detective novel, Cotton Comes to Harlem, enhance the racial tensions that drive the mystery, Quinn’s passersby have next to no purpose. Why else would their characteristics be something Quinn could “forget”? He even admits that his observations in this scene are something not to “analyze the possible implications of” (165). In sum, a large fraction of the novel distracts the reader from the detective narrative with superfluous, meaningless asides.”

Eden Atlas looked across at Elliot, and then down at his plate.

“A detective narrative is like a taco, and just as Paul Auster has deconstructed that literary format, so too have I deconstructed the dish before me. Auster centres his story around a mentally unstable detective who proves incapable of putting all the clues together; I have torn up my tortilla. Auster goes out of his way to keep his mystery impossible to solve; my taco meat is strewn across our table. Auster fills his book with heady literary tricks, meaningless descriptions and philosophical treatises; I have overloaded my taco with caviar. We have certainly deconstructed what makes a detective story such, and what makes a taco such. However, I have not ended the very concept of the taco, nor has Paul Auster done the same with DF.”

Arthur Elliot soon left the restaurant and sighed, wondering about the relevance of Atlas’ words to the sleuthing he was carrying out. Perhaps they were of little consequence. He was, after all, just a man attempting to analyse an obscure novel in a former hockey arena.

 

Works Cited

Auster, Paul. City of Glass. Penguin Books, 1987. 

Himes, Chester. Cotton Comes to Harlem. Random House, 1988.