‘Spaced-out: Signification and Space in Paul Auster’s "The New York Trilogy" Steven E, Alford Contemporary Literature, Vol. 36, No. 4 (Winter, 1995), 613-632. Stable URL: Lhtp:flinks,jstor-org/sici?sici~0010-7484%28 199524%2936%3A4%3C613%3 ASS ASIP%3E2.0.COWIB2N Contemporary Literature is currently published by University of Wisconsin Press. ‘Your use of the ISTOR archive indicates your acceptance of ISTOR’s Terms and Conditions of Use, available at htp:sseww jstor org/aboutiterms.html. ISTOR’s Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you hhave obtained prior permission, you may aot download an entie issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and ‘you may use content in the ISTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obyained at hupsfevw jstor.org/journals/uwise heel. Each copy of any part ofa JSTOR transenission must contain the same copyright tice that appears on the screen or printed page of such transtnission, ISTOR isan independent not-for-profit organization dedicated to creating and preserving a digital archive ot scholarly journals. For more information regarding ISTOR, please contact suppom@jstor org. hup:thrwwjtororgy ri Oct § 18:44:49 2004STEVEN E. ALFORD Spaced-Out: Signification and Space in Paul Auster’s The New York Trilogy wonder whether, i€our tracks about the globe were visible at ane glance {com a god's point of view, they would not have the same designs 2s they have on the palm Graham Groene, Ways of cape He wondered what the map would look like of all the stepshe had taken in his life and what word it would spell Paul Auster, City of Giass nn Paul Auster’s The New York Trilogy, we encounter genuinely puzzling characters and spaces: characters disappear from the space of the novel, characters seek to lose themselves by wan- dering through unfamiliar space, characters employ space as an arena for hermetic communication, and still other characters de- sign utopian spaces based on their (ears and misapprehensions. By looking at how three spaces—pedestrian spaces, mapped spaces, and utopian spaces—function in the novels, we can see that the ‘matically a relationship is established between selfhood, space, and signification. Pedestrian spaces are the seeming theater for a loss of selfhood, but only because the characters misunderstand what it means to leave “home” for their walks, or how in leaving home for a place completely new they carry their “home” with them. Spaces are also the apparent scene of signification, but anly through a mis- apprehension of the missing human elements in mapped represen- tations of space. Ultimately we will discover thatthe space of signifi- Contemporary Leste XXXVI, 4 IOI 51.50 (0 199 bythe aurd of Regents ofthe Univerty of Wescanin SytemS14 + CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE cation is what we have traditionally called utopia, which is not a “nowhere” but a “neither-here-nor-there.” ‘Toward the end of the first volume of The New York Trilogy, City of Glass, the reader finds Quinn, the protagonist, in a strange place. Having allowed himself to be confused with the detective Paul Auster, Quinn promises to protect Peter Stillman, fils, from his fa- ther, Peter Stillman, who abused him as a child and is about to be released from prison. Quinn/Auster follows Stillman on his release, keeping notes on him in a red notebook. Part way through the in vestigation, Stillman Senior disappears, and then, following an ex- tended surveillance of the apartment in which the younger Stillman and his wife live, Quinn/Auster learns that they have disappeared Quinn/Auster enters their apartment and takes up residence in “a windowless cubicle that contained a toilet and a sink” (151).! Na- ked, he remains there, eating food that mysteriously appears in the room and alternately sleeping and writing in his notebook, OF Quinn/Auster, the narrator says: ‘This period of growing darkness coincided with the dwindling of pagesin the red notebook. Litle by little, Quinn was coming to the end. At a certain point, he realized that the more he wrote, the sooner the ‘ime ‘would came when ke could no longer write anything. Hebegan to weigh ‘his words with great cave, struggling to express himself as economically and clearly as possible. He regretted having wasted se many pages at the beginning of the red natebook, and in fact felt sorry that he had bothered, to write about the Stillman case at all... . Nevertheless, he tried t face theend ofthe red natebook with courage. He wondered ifhehad tin him. to write without a pen, if he could learn to speak instead, fling the dark- ness with his voice, speaking the words into the air, into the walls, into the city, even ifthe light never came hack again, ‘The last sentence of the red notebook reads. “What will happen when there are no mote pages in the ted notebook?” 06 What happens, as the narrator indicates, is that Quinn/Auster ceases to exist. 1. The novels forming the togy—Cityof las (1985), Ghosts (1586), and The Locke oor (1986) —wareorigitally published separately, fost by Sun & Moon Press and then ‘by Penguie. Penguin published the combined edition—The New York Tilegy-—in 1980 Page references here are to the combined editionALFORD + 615 Seen one way, this incident, and also the fate of Blue in Ghosts, establishes that thematically Auster's trilogy is a meditation on the problematic of self-identity, in which a “textual” sense of the self undermines our commonsense, essentialist notions of selfhood. We could alsa ask, Where is Quinn/Auster? He's living in a back room of the Stillmans’ apartment, but where does the food come from? Who brings it? We could perhaps say that Quinn/Auster has gone mad, but where does he disappear to? Why can’t the narrator find him? Novels needn't establish verisimilitude to carry out their business, but from the reader's point of view, it helps. When the novel overtly refuses to do so (as in magical realism), we may be sure that the text intends something thematically significant. While on one level The New York Trilogy invokes the problematic between signification and selfhood, on another level we can see a thread in the trilogy involving the relationship between signification and space. City of Glass opens with Quinn leaving his apartment to walk around New York, a random walk he takes almost every day: [New York was an inexhaustible space, a labyvinth ofendless steps, and rho matter how far he walked, no matter how well he came to know its neighborhoods and streets, it always left him with the feeling of being Jost. Lost, not only in the city, but within himself as well... . By wander- ing aimlessly, all places became equal, andit nalangermattered where he ‘was. On his best walks, he was able to feel that he was nowhere. And this, finally, was ll he ever asked of things: to be nowhere. New York was the nowhete he had built around himself, and he realized thazhe had na {intention of ever leaving it again. «i Becoming an aimless pedestrian has internal as well as external con- sequences, Through walking, Quinn leaves “home,” both his apart- ment and his sense of self. But as he indicates, he és somewhere: “nowhere,” a nowhere of “his” construction. Unlike Rousseau and Nietzsche, those famous walkers who came to themselves when ‘walking (albeit in much different ways), Quinn creates a pedestrian space for himself where he is not, This space is for him, we assume, 2 See my “Mietaes of Madness: Paul Asster’s The New Yok Tilagy "For anes views cn the wily se Lavender, Raver, and Rucell416 CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE an ideal place, a utopia, a na-where.? And unlike Rousseau and Nietzsche, Quinn/Auster takes on a job: protecting Peter Stillman and his wife from Peter's father. Rather than losing himselfin space, he must now track another, and hence must meticulously observe the space and self of his quarry. Quinn watches in Grand Central for Stillman to emerge from his train, When two men matching Stillman’s description materialize, Quinn arbitrarily chooses the second as his man and allows him to the Hotel Harmony on Broadway and 93th, where Stillman rents a room and Quinn begins his surveillance. Stillman emerges every morning for a walk. Like the formerly solitary Quinn’s, these walks seem to follow no pattern, except that they keep “to 4 narrowly circumscribed area, bounded on the north by 110th Street, on the south by 72nd Street, on the west by Riverside Park, and on the east by Amsterdam Avenue” (72), Stillman, the sidewalk iricateur, stops frequently, collecting random junk from the streets ‘As the days go by and Quinn senses that he “was going nowhere, ‘was wasting his time,” he comforts himself by reflecting that he’s impersonating Auster, “a man with no interior, a man with no thoughts” (75). After thirteen days of following Stillman’s aimless wandering, however, Quinn becomes increasingly hopeless. For no particular reason, he moves to a fresh page in his notebook and begins to map Stillman’s walks, day by day. Doing so, he comes toa stunning realization: Stillman’s walks were not random at all, but a mapping out, with his steps through the streets of Manhattan, of the words THF TOWER OF MABEL: ‘Quinn's thoughts momentarily flew aff to the concluding pages of A Gorden Pym and ta the discovery of the strange hieroglyphs on the inner wall of the chasm—letters inseribed into the earth ite, as though they ‘were trying te say something that could nalonger be understood. But on second thought this did not seem apt, For Stillman had not left his mes- 5. Roussenk notes in Reser of Stary Mates, “Lean only meditate while walking, aszoens stop, 1stopthinlang, and my heed goes only with my fst” fl in Van Don. AAbbecle 114). We cat anticipate Rousseat’sdierence rom Quire with this comment tram Georges Van Den Abbeele, (tacoma that for Rowman, ofind ar eafing anesel sto find oneself alone, and its this sclipsatic implication ofthe topographical understand- ing ofthe sel that is described most strikingly in the strange would ofthe Reerss of ‘Soliery Wai, which begins, Here Lam, then, alone upar the earth" (108)ALFORD 617 sage anywhere, True, he had created the letters by the mavement af his steps, but they had net been written down. It was like drawing a picture in theair with your finger. The image vanishes as you aremakingit. There is no result, na trace fo mark what you have dane ‘And get, the pictures did exist-—notin the streets where they had been drawn, but in Quinn's red notebook (95-86) Stillman’s steps and their evanescence mirror the prablem Quinn finds at the end of the book, quoted earlier: “He wondered if he had itin him to write without a pen, if he could learn to speak instead, filling the darkness with his voice, speaking the words into the air, into the walls, into the city, even if the light never came back again” (156). The answer to Quinn's speculation seems to be No, because significance in the world must emerge as the consequence of the relation between one’s self and another (even if sometimes that ‘other is oneself). Looking at his notebook, Quinn realizes that the ‘words he has mapped out, THE TOWER OF BABEL, refer to Stillman’s book The Garden and the Toaver: Early Visions of the Net World ‘The idea that space is significantis not new, of course: witness the phrases “the book of the world” and “the book of nature.” As Emst Robert Curtius notes, “as early as Plato, we find the comparison between the dressing of a field [plowing] and writing” (313). ‘Curtius adds that throughout the early and middle Christian eras, significance was something not to be inscribed onto the earth bitt to be discovered in it: “[Nicholas of Cusa] remarks that there had been saints who regarded the world asa written book. For him, however, the world is the ‘showing forth of the inner word,’ . . . Hence the things of sense are also to be regarded as ‘books’ through which God as our teacher declares the truth to us” (321).4 Unlike space ‘which is inscribed with significance through an intentional act, or 4, Indeed, tourism owes its origin in the Christian world toa desi not to traverse ‘pce forrereatcn and enjyment (much less to “fin” oe “ose” anesalt 8 18 Quin’ intonwton} but to make 2 pligcmage to spars ga the earth wherein the sigaificance of God's woed seven visually tothe fsthul. As Mary Campbellexplains, “Thealogical ‘egor necessitated the eanatnuction ofa geography more literary than empincal, conform Ingat whatever costo the tera and imple cosmography of Scripture The ballin sligoiticences that resulted from the atchment af theaogy to geography, snd oF ora allegory 1 natueal story, are ofcourse decsve e any temp to situate the compusof pre-mcudern travel literature between the exteres oF science and fctian” (55).618 + CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE space which is discovered to contain a type of implicit transcenden- talintentionality, Peter Stillman’s book describes the space of signifi cation as one that occurs within discourse, a space that, he notes, emerged only following the discovery of the New World $ Stillman wrote The Garden and the Tower: Early Visions of the New World as his dissertation and then published it as @ book. Divided into two parts, “The Myth of Paradise” and “The Myth of Babel,” the first part asserts (according to narrator Quinn) that “From the verybeginning, . . . the discavery af the New World was the quiick- ening impulse of utopian thought, the spark that gave hope to the perfectibility of human life—from Thomas Mare’s book of 1516 ta Gerdnimo de Mendieta’s prophecy, same years later, that America would become an ideal theocratic state, a veritable City of God” (61). The second part, basing its discussion in part on Milton, ar- ues that human life per se did not actually begin until after the Fall ‘Adam’ one task in the Garden had been ta invent language, to give each ‘creature and thing its name, In that state af innocence, his tongue had gone straight ta the quick of the world. His words had not been merely ‘appended to the things he saw, they had revealed their essences, had literally hrougist thems to life. A thing and its name were interchangeable. Alter the fall, this was no longer true. Names became detached from things; words devolved into a collection of arbitrary signs; language had been severed fram God, The story of the Garden, therefore, records not only the fall of man. but the fll of language. 2) The Tower of Babel story, occurring where it does in Genesis, re- cords “the very last incident of prehistory in the Bible. . . . In other 5. Investigators into the relation of space ta ignifiatcn should be 2ware ofthe mye- iad other ways terry works establish this line. For example, ane has 2a distinguish between works (such as those of George Herbert, Malarez, and the concrete poets) is ‘whieh the physical shapes ol the words a groups of words oem signs and those (suchas ater Ackzoyal's Hecmaar Michael Dihin’s The Lat Sher Helms Story, Kaas the Penel Colony,” and Poe's The Nora of Arthur Garden Fyre of Nentuclst) in whiek lecters as slgas re nseribed on the earth physically oe tacad out theough a pedeseiae ‘act. Other examples the latter include the salution tothe mystery he flee Se of Zone, ‘wherein windows in a highrise building represent musical notation, and. Brice CChatie’s wodkan the aboriginal notion tha the eae tse Ig inscrbed wits ei, Tot SongtinesALFORD + 619 ‘words, the Tower of Babel stands as the last image before the true beginning of the world” (53). Stillman’s work then turns abruptly to the story of Milton’s puta- tive secretary, Henry Dark, and his journey to the New World. In ‘America in 1690 Dark wrote a pampihlet, The New Babel, discovered by Stillman. Dark did not assume paradive to be a place that could be discovered There were no maps that could lead a man toit. . Rather, its existence ‘was immanent within man himself: the idea of a beyond he might some day create in the here and now. For utopia was nowhere—even, as Dark explained, in its “wordiood.” And if man could bring forth this dreamed «of place, it would only be by building it with his own two hands, @ With the building of the new Babel in the New World, “the whole earth [could] be of one language and one speech. And if that were to happen, paradise could not be far behind’ (58). In this new (physi- cal) Tower, “There would be a room for each person, and once he entered that room, he would forget everything he knew” (59). For Datk, then, the utopian project of the new Babel would at ance incorporate postlapsarian, human intentionality with God's tran- scendental plan, ‘Two of the preponderant spatial themes in City of Glass—those of utopian space and of “losing” oneself in space—recur in altered form in Ghosts, the second volume of the trilogy. For this utopia, however, we must move forward to the American Renaissance. While observing Black, Blue notes the book he is reading, Thoreau’s Wilden. Later, following him into a bookstore, he comes across the book (published by Walter J. Black, Inc.) and buys it. Several days later, sitting indolenily in his apartment, Blue finally brings himself to read the book. Hoping fora story, all he reads are endless natural descriptions and harangues. Even a second try, while helping, understand the book a little better, doesn’t prevent him from toss- ing it aside. Nonetheless, it has had its effect: Whatié he stood up, went out the door, and walked away fram the whole business? He ponders this thought for 2 while, testing it out in his mind, and little by litle he begins totcemble, overcome by terrorand happiness, like a stave stumbling onto a vision of his own freedom. He imagines620 + CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE himself somewhere else far away from here, walking through the woods and swinging an axe aver his shoulder, Alone and ftee, his own man at last. He would build his life from the bottom up, an exile, a pioneer, 2 pilgrim in the new world. But thats as far as he gets. For no sooner does he begin to walk through these woods in the middle of nowhere than he (eels that Black is there, too, hiding behind some tee, staking invisibly through some thicket, waiting for Blue to lie dawn and clase his eyes before sneaking up on him and sliting his throat: (22 Momentarily envisioning himselfin a solitary, Thoreauvian utopia, Blue quickly realizes that solitude would be impossible, that his tie to Black is inextricable.* The utopia of Walden clearly differs from those of More and Dark. In bath Utopia and The New Babel, the quest is to build an external structure—an island or a huge building—and, by reorder- ing citizens’ external relationship to space and property, to destroy historical time and its attendant injustices through mandating an ultimately static space. Thoreau, by contrast, believes in the trans- formative inner power of the imagination—a change in our inner space will affect external space. Like Wordsworth’s “spots of time” (themselves an interesting spatialization of temporality}, the events narrated in Welder record the power of nature to transform the seer morally through affecting his imagination. The language of Walden becomes a second-order phenomenon that in turn affects the author's readers Ghosts also gives us a vision of losing oneself in space, not through a pedestrian act but through the time-honored American vision of lighting out for the territories, But here, too, the vision is qualified, this time by a narrator who allows Blue an escape, only to take it back by showing it to be “merely” a linguisticact on the narra- tor’s part: myself (the narrator] prefer to think that he went far away, boarding a train that morning and going out West ta start a new life, tis even passi- ble that America was nat the end oft. In my secret dreams, like to think 6, Like Rousseau, Thoreau demonstrates selipsstis conception ef the sel, thinking that he ese “tind” himself by removing himseit fear al possiblity of comparisen, by boeing alone in the waods. Blue recogatzes the problematic chaaciar of this natin.ALFORD + 621 of Blue booking passage on some ship and sailing to China. Let it be China, then, and we'll leave it at that. For now is the moment that Blue stands up from his chair, puts on his hat, and walks through the door. ‘And from this mament on, we know nothing, ex Like Quinn and his red notebook, outside the constitutive purview of language, Blue ceases to exist in space. Hence from the point of view of The New York Trilogy, space canbe a place where selfhioad is lost, where selves (the quarry) are found, where intertextuality can be maintained, where space itself can be overmastered within space, through mapping, and where, through the act of establishing a utopia, space can finally express its domi- nance over history.” But how do these spaces intersect? What is the relation between map spaces, pedestrian spaces, and utopian spaces? Since Descartes and the development of modem science, space hhas emerged as an absolute yet transparent and insubstantial “con- tainer” that holds the things of this world. Henri Lefebvre has argued that Descartes’s view of space overturned the traditional Aristotelian idea that space and time were categories within which sensory evidence cauld be named and classed: ‘The status of such categories had hitherto cemained unclear, for they could be looked upan either as simple empirical tools for ardering sense data.r, alternatively, as generalitiesin some way superior to the evidence supplied by the body's sensory organs. With the advent of Cattesian logic, however. space had entered the realm of the absolute. As Object opposed to Subject, as rs exlense opposed to, and present to, rescagitans, space came to dominate, by containing them, all senses and all bodies o This Cartesian transformation, however, coupled with the emer gence of empirical science, saw the “dominance” of space reduced 7. When Quinn's mapping ofSillman’s walks reveals the words THE TOWPR OF BABEL raced an the sreets of Manhattan, Quinn discovers tes! that not inscribed in space, ‘but or which spaces the area for the posiilityofitstrace. This Mace becomes arest shrough Quinn's insription af Stilman’spazh tea Quinn's ted notchoak. [ten the text of the notebook refers to sill another text, Stilman's dissertation This chain of signitirs links texto text, bu Stillman’ soviginal ato signfiatian vanishes into the ait ‘of his Manhattan walks622 CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE to the concept of a container for the objects that were science’s true field of study. Seeing a historical development in the concept of space (from, say, Aristotle to Descartes), one tends to locate a time, early on, when space was “pure,” nat contaminated by the fatces of history. According to Lefebvre, however, such purity is illusory. The con- cept of a “natural” space mapped by geographers and then later occupied can lead in one of twa ideologically charged and equally mistaken directions, nostalgia for a space that has disappeared or obliviousness to a rapidly disappearing space: In ceallty, whenever a society undergoes a transformation, the materials, used in the process derive from another, historically (or developmentally) anterior social practice. A pucely natural or original state af affaics is no ‘where tobe found, Hence the natoriausly difficult problems encountered, by iphilosophical thinking on the subject of origins. The notion of aspace wt first empty, butis later filled by a social life and modified by it, also depends on this hypothetical initial ‘purity,’ identified as ‘nature’ andas asort of ground zero of human reality. Empty spacein the sense of a mental and social vaid which facilitates the sacalization of a not-yet- social realm is actually merely a rpresentation of space om As Lefebvre indicates, our contact with space qua space is always secondhand; itis always a tepresentation. Like the attempt to find. an “essential self,” interiorized and below or priar to language, we are forever consigned to inventing a nonexistent spatial “ground,” the consequence of our essentialist positing, Atleast since Hegel (and perhaps since the advent of Christianity, if one takes God’s plan asa historical one), space, understood notas an object of science but as an arena for human action, has been subordinate to the concept of revolutionary time. Space is the field within which History unfolds, a backdrop to the drama of the World Spirit or the class siruggle. As such, space has not been compre- hended, but understood instead merely as the elemental domain forthe play of the forces of history. As either a cantainer of objects or abackdrap toaction, space has occupied a subordinate rolein physi- cal and historical existence. Yet the space of The New York Trilogy is intimately involved in theALFORD 623 significatory acts of self-constitution, acts that somehow involve the intersection of self and other, space and language. Is space, then, according to this work, a constitutive element in the significatory act, ora neutral background against which signification occurs? Let us return to Quinn’s solitary New York wandering, a practice that eaves him “Lost, not only in the city, but within himself.as well” (4) Quinn thinks that by leaving home, and by having no particular destination, he can lose not only his way but his self. However, to lose himself, he would have to lose not only his destination but also his point of origin, since his home (in geographical space) is linked intimately to his sense of self. Using the Greek term aikas to charac- terize “home,” the origin and endpoint of one's voyages, Georges ‘Van Den Abbeele notes that the oikos is not a geographical location but “a transcendental point af reference that arganizesand domesti- cates a given area by defining all ather points in relation to itselt.” Hence “home” could refer to any element in the vayage: all travel is a cicculae voyage insofar as that privileged point or aos is posited as the absolute origin and aéwolute end of any movement at all Forinstance, a journey organized in termsafits destination makes ofthat destination the journey'sconceptual pointof departure it pointofonten- tation. Thus, a teleological point of view remains comfortably within tis, economic canception of travel i) The only way Quinn could be truly lostis if he never returned home atall. Ironically, of course, Quinn doesn’treturn home at the end of the novel; he disappears into the atextual, nonspatial void of having completed the red notebook. Along the way, however, he does re- turn to his apartment, only to find that it has been rented out to someone else in his absence. Although he has been absent from his apartment, it functions as an anchor to his selfhood, a home that isa metaphysical and epistemological place, and only incidentally a ‘geographical location. With respect to travel, “home” functions ret= rospectively and not prospectively, as Van Den Abbeele observes: It, however, a voyage can only be conceptualized econcrmically in terms af the fixity ofa privileged point (otis), the positing of a point we can call home can anly accur retroactively. The concept ofa home is needed (and in fact can only be thought) only after the home has already been left624 + CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE behind. Ina strict sense, then, one has always already left home, since hhome can only exist as such at the price of ils being lost, The aikes is posited aprés- coup, Thus, the voyage has always already begun, eat) Like the proper name in discourse, “home” functions as the anchor in the pedestrian’s movements through space (analogous to the self’s journey through discourse). We can see as well the self-delusion inherent in lighting out for the territories. Epitomized in the ending of Huckleberry Finn, going West has embodied a certain vision of freedom, the ability to absan- don the space we've cteated for ourselves in the hope of encounter- 1B a new, virgin space, But home, like Cavafy’s city, is something, ‘we carry with us, however interdependent it may be with our seli- hood, Home, according to Van Den Abbeele, is 2 moving anchor: For the point of return as repetition ofthe point of departure cannot take place without a difference is that repetition: the detour constitutive of the ‘voyage itself. Were the point of departure and the point of rewrn ra re main exactly the same, that is, were they the same point, there could be no travel. Yet if the oikos does nat remain selfsame, how can ane feel secure in it, especially given the fact that this identity af theaifosis whats necessarily presupposed by the economic view aftravel, che anly way we can think af a voyage as such? im) Home is an anchoring point, but one whose spatial location de- pends on the other of “awayness” (atid its spatial Location, like our selfhood, may change through time without losing its character as “home”). As with the prison of the other that many of the characters in The New York Trilogy experience (Quinr-Stillman, Blue-Black, and, in The Looked Room, the narrator-Fanshawe), any attempt they make to escape home emerges from a misperception of the self- anchoring (yet with respect to the journey, always “underway”) character of home. To leave home is to abandon the self altogether, yet “home” derives its meaning only from its relationship to the “away.” Hence Quinn, like Hawthorne's Wakefield in Ghosts, isalto- ‘gether deluded in thinking that by wandering the streets he can lose himself. While his wandering presupposes the absence of atlas, a destination, the oikas-telos link cannot simply be denied and therebyALFORD + 625 disappear; in this instance he is merely suppressing his sense of self in the pseudocategory of going “nowhere.” Nowhere, a5 we will see, is not a physical space, but the space of textuality. Beginning cach day from the Harmony Hotel, Peter Stillman leaves his home on a seemingly arbitrary journey. Yet during that journey he traces out something that emerges as mysteriously si nificant. Henti Lefebvre has argued that what is “primary” in estab- lishing space is the nexus of patterns of use of that space (paths inscribed by both animals and humans), but that this nexus cannot bbe understood itself as “significant” “This graphic aspect, which was obviously nat apparent to the original “actors’ but which becomes quite clear with the aid af modern-day cartog- raphy, has more in common with 2 spider's web than with 2 drawing or plan. Could it be called a text, or a message? Possibly, but the analogy ‘would serve no particularly useful purpase, and it would make more sense to speak of texture rather than af texts in this connection, as, At the same time, areas of human habitation and pedestrian mave- ment havebeen determined by semiotic intentions, such asauniver- sity quadrangle laid out in the pattern of a cross. Michel de Certeau argues that irrespective of an intention toward significance, pedes- trians do inscribe meanings through their wanderings, ‘The ardinary practitioners of the city live “down below," below the thresholds at which visbility begins. They walk—an elementary farm af this experience af the city; they are walkers, Wandersmanay, whose bod: ies follow the thicks and thins of an urban “text” they write without being able to read it. These practitioners make use of spaces that cannot be seen; theie knowledge of them is as blind as that of lovers in cach other's arms The paths that correspond in this intertwining, unrecognized poem, in which each body is an element signed by many others, elude legible ity... . The networks of these maving, intersecting writings compose a ‘manifold story that has nelther authar nor spectator, shaped out of frag- ‘ments of trajectories and alterations of spaces: in relation ta representa- tions, it remains daily and indefinitely other. oy The point of disagreement between Lefebvre and de Certeauis this: Lefebvre seeks to understand what is essential space, or fundamental626 + CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE space, something he calls social space, produced ultimately by class struggle. De Certeau, on the contrary, while agreeing that “real” space is social space, chooses to view this space from the standpoint ‘of an observer rather than an actor, or “producer.” The significance of space, then, emerges not from the one who moves through space, the pedestrian, but from the ane who observes he who mtoves through space, the person with the red notebook. Significa- tion thus emerges from movement without being ofit. As the narré tor notes, Stillman’s movements vanished into thin air: “the pic~ tures did exist—not in the streets where they had been drawn, but Quinn’s red notebook” (86). The “book” of Stillman’s voyages turns out to be simply that: something that appears not on the streets of Manhattan, but in a red notebook. Toengender significance, Stillman’ steps have to be transformed from the movements of a pedestrian through space to vectors on a map. However, “to be mapped” in one’s movements implies an other to do the mapping (even if that other may be, ex post facto, oneself). The space opened between the pedestrian and the mapper is the space of signification. As de Certeau observes: The act of walking isto the urban system what the speech actis ta lan- guage or tothe statements tttered. ... It thus seems possible to give a preliminary definition of walking as 2 space of enunciation. ‘we mustadd that this location (here thera) (necessarily implied by ‘walking and indicative of « present appropriation af space ay an."(") also has the function of introducing an atherin relation to this “I” and of thus ‘establishing a conjunctive and disjunctive articulation of places. 67-99) This space—neither a property nora consequence of the pedestrian or the mapper—exists in a “nowhere” out of which meaning emerges. Hence the “placelessness” from which so many of the trilogy’s characters suffer owes its origin not to (by now traditional) ‘modernist alienation, but to their sense of the self being neither ex- actly at “home,” nor exactly “away,” without their understanding the 8, One is seminded here ofthe Hedeggcrian distinction between Earth ana World explored in Der Unprung des Kunesuertes While this connection is certainly fecund, the ‘ontological defect it Heidegger's position (that ofa presence flly present conscious tess which permis the intentional significstory act to have is agin in that conselous- ness has been fly cited by Jacques DeraALFORD + 627 grounds of that homelessness, out of which the possibility for self hood emerges. But what of the space of the map and the mapper? While the pedestrian moves through space withouta sense of his movement's significance, the mapper must remain stationary, must stay “home” to understand the movement of the pedestrian other, What space does the mapper inhabit? The map is not a simple representation of space. It represents a space from which perspective has been re- maved. The viewpaint af a map is an impossible one, one which no human could ever occupy, because to be human in space is to pos- sess a perspective, a perspective which moves with the pedestrian. ‘The map view is somewhat like looking down from a tall building, as de Certeau explains, His elevation transfigures him into a voyeur: fe puts him ata distance. It transforms the bewitching warld hy which one was “possessed” into a text that lies before one’s eyes. [allows one to read it, tobe a salar Eye, looking down likea god. The exaltation ofa scopicand gnostic drive: the fiction of knowledge is related ta this lust to be a viewpoint and nothing The panoramacity isa “theoretical” (that is, visual) simulacrum, in short a picture, whose condition of possibility is an oblivion and a misunderstanding of practices e233) Such a perspective grants the illusion of knowledge of what is viewed, up and away from the practice of the pedestrian. But even. the viewer atop a skyscraper maintains a perspective (the airplane passenger in contrast shares an “elevated” view but has a shifting perspective), one that is missing in maps. The map user, looking at a mapped landscape, is abserving something that quite literally no fone has ever seen. The map rationalizes and deracinates space in order to masteriit Despite the power aver space thata map brings, 9. Lwin Manin argues, “The map is originally 4 net of itnerates and a system of ‘potential outings al present st she same time, cx-presemt Those paths are the apposite ‘fs tip and ite surprices and events They are aaa the reverse side afa narrative mfod- fing in surpsie and expecation. of «story limited Sy its characters wiewpoin's. Wich ‘map and tts surface presentation, he viewpoint is na longer allected by surprise oF he expectation ofthe unusual. The gazeiseverywhere present, andall points view arethe viewpoint, simular to Leibriz’s God. All points of view ace negated by its ubiquitous62a + CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE italso fosters an illusory, inhuman knowledge of that space, devoid as it is of human perspective. According to de Certeau, the map engenders forgetfulness Itis true that the operations of walking on can be traced on city mapsin such a way as to transcribe their paths there welltradden, there very faint) and their trajectories (going this way and nat that) Bot these thie. for thin curves anly refer, ike wards, ta the absence of whathas passed by, Surveys of routes miss what was: theactitselfof passingby. . The trace left behind is substituted forthe practice. Itexkibits the (voracious) prop- erty that the geographical system has of being able ta transform action. into legibility, but in doing so it causes a way of being in the world to be forgotten om ‘The space of language, existing as it does in that nowhere between the pedestrian and the mapper, confers on the map a significance and on the pedestrian a self, without, however, being of either of those two spaces. Maps eliminate perspective; language provides the possibility for establishing a perspective by establishing a self. Fr Quinn, the knowledge he derives from mapping (THE TOWER OF BABEL) emerges within the narrative as fictive, given that Stillman’s dissertation was not the product of research but largely of the imagi nation, since Stillman invented, for example, Henry Dark and his literary products. Quinn's textualization of Stillman’s pedestrian acts engenders a dialectical play between Stillman, Quinn, and the reader, Quinn thinks he has learned something from Stillman by mapping his walks, knowledge which turns out to be “only” fictive; the reader understands that what Quinn leams is fictive does de- scribe the intertextual nature of the knowledge that emerges fram the space between the pedestrian and the mapper (and, ina differ- ent way, between the novel's text and the reader) ‘The spaces of which the characters dream in the trilogy are invari- ably utopian: Henry Dark’s Babylonian utopia; Quinn’s best walks, which rendered him nowhere; and Blue’s encounter with Walden, a vision, everywhere present for everyone and every detail All routes and joucneys are ‘equivalent and reverse, Vertically situated with reference tothe map, che damnating, ‘gaze sin complete possession of al places. eistself nat past of theiesyster, but rather At the transcendent center organizing ther into a spsterts0 as to ender the elements interchangenble” (264)ALFORD + 629 romantic noplace of the imagination. In each of these instances, utopia asa place emergesasa space that opens between two appasi- tions, While traditionally utopia has been thought of as an other, as the stuff that dreams are made of, as a not-here, we can see that utopia in The New York Trilogy is not a not-here but a neither-here- nor-there. Itis an arena of mediation aut of which the possibility for the spaces of home-away, self-other, inside-outside, and pedestrian space-mapped space emerges, an arena that Louis Marin calls “the neutral”: This no-place daes nat mean the unteal or the imaginary. Rather it signi- fies the indeterminabilty ofthe place, the place of the neutral, of differ- tence and of the force of differentiation. Itis a place neither here nor there {tis the presence of alack whose spaceis that by which and around which space is organized. 963) Blue recognizes both the impulse toward utopia and its attendant difficulties when he quotes Walden: “We are nat where we are, he finds, but in a false position. Through an infirmity of our natures, ‘we suppose a case, and put ourselves into it, and hence are in two cases at the same time, and itis doubly difficult to get out” (200). By supposing ourselves to be in a place (“home”), and finding it not ideal, we posit (tarough the textual act of describing a place where, in principle, we could never be) another place (utopia) where we aren’t either. This sets up the spatial problematic. The original mis- understanding, that “home” is a place (as opposed to a pole of the binary opposition home-away], engenders another mistaken act, the positing of a someplace that would substitute for this place and relieve us of our difficulties. We are always already someplace else, and that is the index of our being-there." Like the violence, implied or actual, that characters employ to eliminate their others (Quinn Auster, QuinniStillman, Blue/Black, and, in The Locked Room, the narrator/Stillman and the narrator/Fanshawe), mistakenly believ- ing that their selves exist independently from them, Quinn, Still- man, Dark, and others seek to eliminate “home” either through 10. Heidegger would have this other place be the future that emerges from Dasein’s Drcjects, but whether the isue of novplace can be understaod through hs temporal Astysis es outside the scope of my discussion.630 + CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE wandering or through the positing of a utopia to solve their spatial woes, not understanding the co-implication of the oikas and the telos Utopian space shares with mapped space an inhuman quality: both lack a perspective, any perspective. Unlike mapped space, however, utopian spaceisnotaseries of vectors representing experi- enced space with any possible perspective removed; it is instead engendered through an act of linguistic signification. As language that brings into being and orders a space, it announces at its incep- tion its fundamental inhabitability, noted by Marin: "Utopic dis- course is perhaps this extreme pretension of language to provide a complete portrait of an organized and inhabited space. Ifit does man- age it, however, itis pethaps because this portrait is constituted by its discourse and constructed through its language in order to serve as the origin and foundation for every map and every image” (51) As language, then, utopian space gives rise to mapped space and, we cauild say, the significance qua significance of pedestrian space. Marin’s “neutral” is textual: “Utopia is thus the neutral moment ofa difference, the space outside of place; itis a gap imapossible either to inscribe on a geographic map or to assign to history. Its reality thus belongs ta the order of the text; more precisely, it is the figurative representation that the text inscribes beneath its discourse, and by it” (87). Henry Dark suggests as much when he says, “ar utopia ‘was nowhere—even, as Dark explained, in its ‘wordhood.’ And if man could bring forth this dreamed-of place, it would only be by building it with his own two hands” (57). And those hands do not so much build as they write. The narrator of The Locked Room (and putative author of City of Glass and Ghasts) describes this place figu- ratively asa “tiny hole”: “My true place in the world, it turned out, was somewhere beyond myself, and if that place was inside me, it was also unlocatable. This was the tiny hole between self and nat- self, and for the first time in my life I saw this nowhere as the exact center of the world” (274-75). Utopia is not so much projected by an intentional consciousness as it is that space of signification from which the possibility far intentionality arises. Figuratively speak- ing, it is behind and before our significatory acts. The characters in ‘The New York Trilogy, as well as those who succumb to the impulse to create utopian fiction, suffer from the misapprehension that utopiaALFORD + 631 is out there somewhere, somewhere out in the territories. Instead, itis the ground of our spatial being, which historically has occupied the position of an “up-there,” a transcendental signified, when in- deed it (and for the verb we should perhaps employ the Heideggerian sous rature—his “under erasure”) is. neither-here- northere. Asnoted in the first epigraph, Graham Greene fatalistically views journey as destiny: our travels fulfill what has been preordained, ‘what has been inscribed upon us, Quinn, on the other hand, views journey as meaning, travel as a significatory act. The traveler, for ‘Quinn, is a retrospective hermeneutist, one whose pedestrian in- scriptions spell out a greater understanding, Quinn’s own lack of rospection, his willingness to inhabit the self of an other (the detective Paul Auster) and to consider that other “a man with no interior, a man with no thoughts” (75), his desire to lose his self in the streets of Manhattan—all point to a figure who suffers from a genuine misunderstanding of his place in the world, of the space that he occupies, one that is neither here nor there. Quinn's misap- prehensions exemplify the problem experienced by all the protago- nists in The Neto York Trilogy, a lack of understanding that space and the selfare coeval, engendered from the possibility for signification that arises from.a place that is neither here nor there Nowa Southeastern University WORKS CITED Alford, Steven, “Mirrars of Madness: Paul Auster's The New York Tila." Cré- tigue 37 1996): 16-32 ‘Auster, Paul. The New York Trilogy, New York: Penguin, 1990, ‘Campbell, Mary B. The Witness and the Other Warld: Exotic European Travel Wri sng, 4001600. Ithaca: Cornell LP, 1988, Curtivs, Emst Robext. European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, Trans. Wile lard R. Trask. Bollingen Ser. 36, Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1953. De Certesu, Michel. The Practioe af Exeryday Life. Trans. Steven Rendall. Herke= ley: U of Calitornia P, 1984 Greene, Graham. Ways of scape. 2980. New York: Penguin, 1982 Lavender, William. “The Novel of Critical Engagement: Paul Auster's City of Gass.” Contemporary Literature 34 (1993): 119-38. Lefebvre, Hens). The Production of Space. 1974. Trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith ‘Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1992432 CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE “Marin, Louis. topics: The Semiologica! Flay of Textual Spaces, 1984, Trans, Robert A. Vollrath, Contemporary Studies in Philosophy and the Human Sci- ences. Atlantic Highlands, NI: Humanities Press International, 1990. Rowen, Norma, "The Detective in Search of the Last Tongue of Adam: Paul Auster's City of Clos." Critique 32 (1991): 224-34 Russell, Alison. “Deconstructing, The New York Trilogy: Paul Auster's Anti= Detective Fiction." Critique 31 (1990): 71-84, ‘VanDen Abbecle, Georges. Trevel as Metayhor: From Montaigne to Roussacu. Min- neapalis: U of Minnesota F, 1992.