Nothing to Go on: Paul Auster’s "City of Glass" William G. Little; Paul Auster Contemporary Literature, Vol. 38, No. 1 (Spring, 1997), 133-163. Stable URL: http flinksjstor.orgsicisici=0010-7484% 28199721 %2038%3A | AC 133% 3ANTGOPAAED0.CO%IB2Z 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 hhupvful-jstor-orp/abouv'terms.himal. ISTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have ‘obtained prior permission, vou may not download an entire issue of a joumal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial us. Please contact the publisher cegarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at bhupsfukjstor-orp/journals/uvise. hel. Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed page of such transtnission. ISTOR is an independent not-for-profit organization dedicated to creating and preserving a digital archive of scholarly journals. For more information regarding ISTOR, please contact support @jstor.org- hupsfuk jstor.org/ ri Oct § 23:07:44 2004WILLIAM G. LITTLE Nothing to Go On: Paul Auster’s City of Glass Nothing happens, And stil, itis not nothing, Paul Auster, “White Spaces” The poet is he who hears 2 language which makes nothing heard Maurice Blanchot, The Space of Literature 1 Paul Auster’s The New York Trilogy nothing happens again and again. To say “nothing happens” in these detective stories is not to say that they are plotless, but rather to indicate that the plots are continually foiled—foil 1: ofs. to tread under foot: trample 2: to spoil (a trail or scent) by crossing or retracing 3a: to prevent a person) fromattaininga desired end: keep fromachiev- ing a goal b. to bring (as a scheme, an effort, an attack) to naught” (Webster's) —by a fugitive otherness resisting apprehension by the standard procedures of systematic interrogation, empirical analy- sis, and deductive logic. In these texts, the detective, who is also a writer, castsnets, transcribes events, and traces marks, buthis calcu- lations and representations lead to no final illumination, no climac- tic discovery: “He had nothing, he knew nothing, he knew that he knew nothing” (City of Glass 159); “He has learned a thousand facts, but the only thing they have taught him is that he knows nothing” (Ghosts 59); “What I had done so far amounted to a mere fraction of nothing at all” (The Locked Room 20). While the goal of detection is to uncover the whole story, in Auster’s work nothing, especially not nothing, is grasped in its “all.” No case is closed. Appropriating, Contemporary Leratare XXXVI, 1 OOIOTASABTOOOL-I33. $1.50 (©1997 by the Baad af Regents af the Univesity of Wisconsin Seem134 + CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE only to subvert, the teleological notion of progress toward “a de- sired end,” each tale entails a search for meaning—a tail jab— marked by repeated bewilderment, perpetual crossing (out) and re- tracing, interminable wandering. ‘The refrain of nothing in Auster’s writing—a refrain pointing to- ward a darkness which refrains from coming to light or which only comes to light as darkness—is a response toa modern, secularized conception of experience as fractured, arbitrary, and incoherent. As the narrator in The Locked Room (1986) professes, “In the end, each life is no more than the sum of contingent facts, a chronicle of chance intersections, of flukes, of random events that divulge noth- ing but their own lack of purpose” (35). This sense of a lack of purpose—the feeling that nothing is sure or that nothing adds up— is not, however, cause for nihilistic despair. Instead, Auster’s com- plex investment in nothing signals a deconstructive investigation into the repressive effectsof any claim tabeable ta account forevery- thing, to arrive at the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, Enacting one of Gregory Jay’s definitions of the project of deconstruction, The New York Trilogy “investigates how truth oper- ates as the foreclosure of values, as the expropriation of wills and desires” (73). Auster appropriates the model of the detective’s pur suit of the truth in order to illustrate how certain narratives de- signed to render modern experience totally coherent through the revelation orattainment of perfect knowledge—the fundamentalist narvative of Divine Will, the humanist narrative of the divine self, the literary critical narrative of divine Author-ity—are totalizing schemes whose operations depend upon the silencing of different values and the value of difference. More specifically, I wish to argue that City of Glass (1985), the first installment in the trilogy, exposes the repressive nature of these powerfully seductive projects by critiquing two interrelated strate~ gies for restoring a transcendent Real immune to the vicissitudes of “wills and desires.” Depicting two ascetic investigators who under- take rituals of purgation and starvation, Auster writes a slender book in a spare style with an eye to demonstrating how the modern embrace of asceticism—es it appears in the minimalist prose of cer- tain modernist writings and as it appears in the regimens of self- denial so prevalentin contemporary culture—expresses a will and aLITTLE 135 desire to purge difference from the text and from the self, While minimalist abstraction seeks to produce an autonomous text cleansed ofimpuritiesinherentin acts of representation, theindivid- ual who practices self-starvation seeks to produce an autonomous identity cleansed of impurities inherent in the act of consumption. The auster(e) detective writer and the auster(e) detective who writes are puritanical operatives undertaking a religiously inflected quest to uncover transcendent truth by eliminating waste from the body of the text and from the text of the body. They try to yield an immutable, decontextualized, value-free form by reducing their fi ures tonothing, In City of Glass, Auster works through these exor ing exercises in order to point ta a different kind of nothing, a noth- ing that makes a difference by refusing to be eliminated in the name of truth, thus keeping open ather ways toread the lues, atherleads ‘on the case. When read in a culture where the identification of “tue” values by various self-appointed guardians of virtue and cor- rectness results in the denial of difference and “the foreclosure of values,” the novelist’s declaration of artistic intent, delivered suc- cinctly in a poem entitled “Credo,” appears all the more urgent: ‘To say nothing. To say: ‘our very lives depend on it (Dispperonees 13} ede In Donald Barthelme’s short story “Nothing: A Preliminary Ac- count,” the author sets out to make a list ofall the things that noth- ing is not, hoping, by a process of elimination, to arrive at what nothing is. At the same time, he realizes that any such investiga tion, no matter how methodical or thorough, is incapable of pin- pointing or nailing down nothing. Nothing, it turns out, is that which cannot be properly registered within any work, regardless of how encyclopedic; “nothing must be characterized in terms of its ‘non-appearances, no-shows, incorrigible tardiness. . . . Nothing is nota nail” (248). Any account of nothingisinevitably preliminary or incomplete because nothing is the always improper name for that136 + CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE which, in philosophical terms, resists being appropriated or appre- hended by thought. Always lying at the limit of absolute knowl- ‘edge, nothing is wholly Other—a radical heterogeneity, an irreduc- ‘ble difference, an unreclaimable remainder. Neither presence nor absence, neither being nor nonbeing, neither identity nor differ- ence, neither inside nor outside, nothing is (yet # not) utter (yet unutterable) waste, that which cannot be treated or processed by the technologies of reason. As refuse refusing to be re-fused into the productive economy of the known, nothing remains the unname- able residue at the margins of any field of representation. In one of his several (un}accomplished approaches to nothing, Mark C. Tay- for names this nondesignatable no-thing the “not”: “Declining all nominations and eluding or resisting every oppositional structure constructed to repressit, the not entails an altarity more radical than any binary difference or dialectical other” (Nots 1-2). Nothing gives structure fits because it fits nowhere, or, as Barthelme’s ever-failing list Mlustrates, nothing ties any system up in (k)nots. To address and entertain the impossible task of inscribing noth- ing, Auster works in a genre whase form and content have been marked by a determination to negate nothing. As he indicates in City of Glass, the traditional detective novel is governed by a to- talizing imperative; it invariably presumes a structure and a case in which nothing goes to waste since everything turns out to conform toacentral, organizing logos or author-itative cause: “What he liked about these books was their sense of plenitude and economy, In the good mystery there is nothing wasted, no sentence, no word thatis not significant. . . . nothing must be overlooked. Everything be- comes essence” (14-15). Governed by the teleological formula of a clear beginning, middle, and end, the “good” bookis a secular con- struct that nevertheless offers the reader the salvational promise of “plenitude” by being a utilitarian, waste-free work in which nothing ‘must be overlooked. Like the Christian plot of history, the good mys- tery appears to be a master(ful) narrative in which both author and 1. Taylor's teem “altar,” ike Jacques Derrida’ s term difirance, is yet another insutf- ent name fora difference, cz an alternative tha, like nathing, cannot be reduced tothe same. The difarence betweon altaity and dijférance, according to Taylor, is that altanity entertains the eacred aepect of euch Otherness it bears within i the term “ater"— ‘hile “the question of the religious. iesilem in the a of differance” (Alterity wo),CiTTLe + 137 investigator are able to reassure us, by enacting what Taylor refers toas “the closure of the book” (Erring 73), that we are not wander- ing in a wilderness of ambiguous signs. Writer and detective close the book (ona case) by silencing the synchronicand diachronic play of difference(s) that make(s) signification possible. It thus makes sense that in City of Glass the writer-turned-detective Daniel Quinn binges on these clased books even though he is otherwise commit ted to recovering a state of wholeness through literal and figurative acts of purgation: "When he was in the right mood, he had little trouble reading ten or twelve of them in a row. It was a kind of hunger that took hold of him, a craving for a special food, and he would not stop until he had eaten his fill” (14) In contrast to this “special food,” Auster’s postmodern potboil- ers are harder to digest because nothing warks out in the end, or, rather, nothing works out through the loase ends of the texts’ for ever unfinished fabrics. Auster’s refrain of nothing leaves the reader perpetually hungry by pointing toward that which inevita- bly gets excluded in the logocentric claim to comprehensive under standing of self and world. Deviating from the straight and narrow form of the closed book, The New York Trilogy—despite being as- cribed a design that recalls the tripartite structure of Christian history—constitutes what Taylor calls “erring scripture” (Erring 170). While Auster’s texts appear to follow the redemptive-bound script of the traditional detective novel, they are nevertheless er- rant versions stressing that subjects and signs are never single, straightforward, or self-evident but rather are always duplicitous, always (at least) double and deceptive. In City of Glass there are two operatives (or three if one counts the author)—Quinn and the theologian Peter Stillman—both of whom err by roaming the streets of New York on religious quests to establish the univocal presence of the patemal Word. Quinn seeks to “save Peter Still- man” (142) by establishing the identity and intention of Stillman’s true father, also named Peter Stillman; Peter Stillman (the elder) seeks to save the world by reestablishing the self-negating clarity, the unerring intentionality, of “God's language.” Each quest in the trilogy entails ceaseless straying in part because the private eye is not a perfectly composed private “I.” Auster’s investigators are neither unique nor self-possessed. Never sure of138 + CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE themselves, they are double-crossed from the beginning. Quinn writes under the pen name William Wilson (the eponymous char- acter from Poe's tale of doubling) and then loses himself in the role of detective "Paul Auster.” The narrator/writer in The Locked Room becomes obsessed with tracking down a man named Fanshawe (the eponymous character from Hawthorne's first novel), his “closest friend” from childhood, a “blood brother” and “twin” about whom the narrator says, “without him I would hardly know who lam” (7). Fanshawe has disappeared, leaving the narrator to assume his life—to marry his wife, to publish his writing, to write his biography—but the narrator still fails to organize a proper reunion with this other; Fanshawe appears at theend only asan absent pres- ence, speaking through the crack of locked “double doors.” Always self-divided and dis-integrated, always exiled from the ground of self-identical Being, always, in one sense, a missing person, Auster’s private eyell can only ever appear, like the detective in Ghosts, Black and Blue. As the narrator in The Locked Root puts it “In general, lives seem to veer abruptly from one thing to another, to jostle and bump, to squirm. A person heads in one direction, turns sharply in mid-course, stalls, drifts, starts up again. Nothing is ever known, and inevitably we come to a place quite different from the one we set out for” (87). Nothingis ever knownin Auster’s writing because he works through the resistance to nothing which marks (a) traditional detective work charged with the imperatives of closure and disclosure in order to draw attention ta the blindness that always accompanies the insight of a private eye/l. But these narratives with nothing to them are also errant because the signs the sleuths stumble upon refuse to yield ana priori logic— “a coherence, an order, a source of motivation” (City of Glass 105). Governed by the fantasy of matching signifier to signified, clue to crime, the stereotypical gumshoe is confident that signs conform to. a classical economy of representation. Language, far from being marked by errancy, is characterized by a glassy stillness: His method isto stick to outward facts, describing eventsas though each ‘word tallied exactly with the thing described, and to question the matter ro farther. Words are transparent for him, great windows that stand be- ‘ween him and the world. ... Oh, there are moments when the glassLITTLE + 139 {gets a trifle smudged ... but once he finds the right ward, everything clears up. (Chests 23-26) ‘Austes's speculations on detective work explore the faults in this, method by investigating the cracks and splinters embedded in the panes of language. Like the other two texts in the trilogy, City of Glass is (de)composed of a discourse that is glassy in an altered sense of the term. In this novel, words, like identities, are unstable, fragile, chancy, glissant (Slippery; [fig.] ticklish, delicate, hazard- ous” [Cassell’s}). Always shifty, the glass of language is aleatory and aberrant, a place of displacementin which the profits of (a) workare forever deferred. While the work of the detective and the work of detective fiction ate defined by the goal of leaving nothing to chance, Auster's useless work is marked by “the musicof chance,” an example being his glassy gloss on the name of his writer- detective: “I see many possibilities for this word, this Quinn, this... quintessence . . . of quiddity. Quick, for example. And quill. And quack. . . . like your name enormously, Mr. Quinn. It flies off in so many little directions at once’” (117), This quintes- sence of quiddity—the essence of the essential (a tautology) or the essence of a trifle (a paradox), The series of associative glissades never cuts to the quick; it denies transparent access to a transcen- dent signified, or, in Quinn’s case, ta a private “I. In Auster's te- vision of the oir, the clue-seeking reader sees through a (magnify- ing) glass darkly. The music of chance scored (scratched, cut, transcribed) in(to) Auster's sheets of glass answers Norman ©. Brown's plea: “Get the nothingness back into words. The aim is words with nothing to them; words that point beyond themselves rather than to them- selves. ... Empty words, corresponding to the void in things” (259). For Taylor, borrowing from M. M. Bakhtin, language with nothing to itis analogous to the grotesque body of the carnival par- ticipant. Marked by levity, it freely admits its own incompletion, ‘open-endedness, and wastefulness.? Like the bulging, gaping body 2. kis interesting to nate that the concept oF levity informs much of Auster’ most recent novel, Mr. Vertigo (198), astory about a young orphan tained a the art of levita- Hon. A reminder ofthe unbesrabe ighiness of being, Walt the Wonder Boy ia bterally140 + CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE of the Rabelaisian reveller, the language of nothing is irreducibly meaty. As the word made flesh, it subverts the conception of lan- guage as pure reflection, as a medium thin to the point of transpar- ency. Instead of conforming to the sober logic of monovalence, it violates the rules of propriety governing the proprietary subjectand delights in the transgressive discharge of repressed meanings: “The body of the incarnate word marks the negation of the transcen- dence that is characteristic of God, self, and history” (Erring 168). Ceaselessly flowing, the language of nothing is always excessive and never full. Auster’s improper texts insist upon the carnality of their medium, and, in so doing, they continually upset established hierarchies of organization or binary structures af sense-making (for example, identity/difference, utility/waste)s In other words, such dissolution and equivocation undo the discrete eyelT of the reader by presenting a discursive scene always already contami- nated or turned inside out so that the plot can never be uncovered, the book can never be closed: “[There] were empty spaces for me, blanks in the picture, and no matter how successful I was in filling the other areas, doubts would remain, which meant that the work could never truly be finished” (The Locked Room 140). 12s First ofall, there was the question of food. Paul Auster, City of Glass Food, like language, is originally vested in the other, and traces of that otherness remain in every mouthful that ane speaks—or chews. Fram the beginning one eats for the other, from the other, with the other: and for this, ‘Boating sigrufie: who hovers in and ever the vold, refusing to be bound by the law of araviy, a law that defines being as a grounded presence. His remarkable routines are, above all, performances on the plane of nothing: “Ie wasn't a matter of fist going up and then going cut it was a matter af going up and out at the same time, of launching myst in ane smooth, iinterrupted gesture inta the ams ofthe great ambient nothe lingness” (5). 3, Another example of Auster’s camivalesque collapsing of hierarchies is his decision to permit City of Gass to be adapted asa graphic nove. The metaphysical mystery story ‘gts a mass-culture twist, See Net Lit al Austr City of Clase,LiTTLe + 141 reason eating comes to represent the prototype of all transactions with the other, and food the protatype of every object of exchange. Maud Ellman, The Huger Artists Not “In the beginning was the Word,” but rather first of allo in the beginning, was the question of food. As the glassy prose of The New York Trilogy illustrates, language is never redeemed by the atten~ dance (“and the Word was with God”) or presence of an Author- God but rather is always already fallen, haunted by “empty spaces.” Likewise, food, beginning with the farbidden fruit, calls attention, physiologically and symbolically, to the subject's empty spaces. Drawing upon eating’s importance as a symbolic instance of “transactions with the other,” Auster invokes images of self- starvation in several af his writings to critique logocentrism’s ascetic insistence that difference be purged so that identity not remain in question. Nothing cannot be ventured without addressing the ques- tion of food, since consumption, as the ritual indulgences of carni- val demonstrate, always bears “traces of that otherness” defiling the proper subject. In Auster's work, writing and the refusal to eat are inextricably linked in ways deserving extended explanation. In an early essay entitled “The Art of Hunger,” Auster valorizes the nameless and nomadic protagonist of Knut Hamsun’s novel Hunger (1890), an as- piring writer who is “willing to risk everything far nothing,” starv- ing himself in isolation rather than relying upon any sustenance— alimentary, financial, social, spiritual—from existing economies or institutions. Refusing the physiological obligation to eat, “Ham- sun's character systematically unburdens himself of every belief in every system, and in the end, by means of the hunger he has i flicted upon himself, he artives at nothing” (20). To arrive at nothing —which is not to arrive in the sense of reaching a terminus or finding a place—is to have rejected any promise of parousia, any guarantee of total satisfaction. Vagrant and vacuous, his pockets stutfed with unfinished manuscripts, the errant writer tums away from every course that promises to be (ful)filling. Hunger enacts a disgust with the concept of a finished book, with the notion of a proper subjectivity, and, ultimately, with the belief in God as tran- scendent presence. As Auster puts it: “In the end, the art of hunger142 + CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE can be described as an existential art. Ibis a way of looking death in the face, and by death I mean death as we live it today: without God, without hope of salvation. Death as the abrupt and absurd end of life” (20). To live with hunger, to embrace, as a writer, what Auster calls “the aesthetics of hunger,” is to confront the fact that experience and language are irremediably wanting, to admit, as hunger always ‘reminds us, that life is constituted by lack and desire. Maud Ell- mann, in her study The Hunger Artists: Starving, Writing, and Impris- ‘onment, describes the nature of this wantin psychoanalytic terms by arguing that the desire for food, while indicative of the self’s effort tosecute the boundaries of a stable, independentiidentity by assimi- lating or devouring the world around it, is nevertheless also indica- tive ofthe self’s foreverexpropriated, unwhole-some state, itsinevi- table dependence upon, and penetration by, others: itisby ingesting the external world that the subjectestablishes hisbody as his own, distinguishing its inside from its outside. If the subject is founded in gustation, though, this also means that his identity is con- stantly in jeapardy, beceuse his need to incorporate the outside world exposes his fundamental incompleteness. ... the catch is that the very need to eat reveals the “nothing” at the care of subjectivity eo) Food is the toxic, yet tempting, agent of dissolution and disorder. Every swallow hollows out the subject striving for self-fulfillment. To give in to one’s own cravings is to admit that identity, like lan- ‘guage, is always haunted by difference. In Ellmann’s words, “our bodies are composed of what we eat, and what we eat is always foreign to ourselves. Eating, then, confounds the limits between self and other” (56). In this context, the refusal to eat can be understood as an indi- vidual commitment to take to the extreme the cultural “logic of distribution” defined by Julia Kristeva in Powers of Horror: An Es- say on Abjection.* Self-starvation is a ritual in which everything 4. According a Kristeva, the “logic of distribution” that stcuestes batts society and subjectivity by setting upa formal system afoppositions—puretimpure, holydefling et cstera—is nowhere more in evidence than inthe prohibitions and divisions constructed ‘with regard ta food: “Food leathing i perhaps the most elementary and mast archaic form of abjection” (2). Like the imposible memory of the mothers plenicude, whichLITTLE 143 has become taboo; the subject seeks fulfillment by not allowing anything in, thereby aiming to repress “the ‘nothing’ at the core of subjectivity.” Paradoxically, then, preferring not to eat may also be construed as a denial of hunger; it can be read, in fact, as a strategy for realizing perfect self-presence, a strategy Auster’s hungry art calls into question. Ellmann terms this economy of self-domination “an economy of sacrifice” and finds it at work both in modernist aesthetics, where authors such as Yeats and Kafka depict the artist’s search for “an implacable aesthetic that demands the decreation of the flesh” (59), and in the late twen- fieth-century preoccupation, particularly among women, with diet and abstinence, an obsession intimately bound up with a de- sire ta transcend the weaknesses of the flesh and the imperatives of culture by going without, by seeking a “fast” track to the end: “there is something, more eschatological at stake in self-starvation than the fashionable taste for slenderness o the equally fashion- able ideology of ‘self-control’ (16) ‘The logocentric impulse to isolate an exclusive, atemporal iden- tity as well as an autonomous, well-wrought book—an impulse Auster continually works through in his approaches to nothing —is perhaps best described by Mark Anderson in an article entitled “An- otexia and Modernism, or How I Learned to Diet in Al Directions.” Anderson makes the compelling argument that certain modernist writers respond to the fragmentation, ephemerality, and contin- gency characterizing modern life by constructing texts that enact and portray a radically ascetic denial of the world. Tapping into a growing sense of spiritual decomposition, semiotic confusion, and petsonal alienation, these writers dramatize rejection of a world that appears inane, devoid of sense and sustenance: “When the self can no longer ingest and digest the world as food, can no longer turn the raw matter of sensation into abstract concepts, judgments, and generalizations, the subjects thrown back on itself for nourish- ment, becoming both brute matter and pure spirit” 1). Particular modernist authors— Anderson cites the writings of Kafka and Beck- ett as critical examples—represent this strategy of introversion and Kristeva names “the hallcination of nothing” (2), food, which fist isues from the mother, is 2 constant reminder ofthe fragility af every subject's integrity144 + CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE autophagy by producing minimalist texts which, like the bodies af anorexics, seek to embody a discarnate form (“pure spirit”), an “anti-body” purged of the world’s contaminating corporeality, its phenomenal fat. And like the anorexic figure, the self-consuming ‘work presents to the would-be aid or interpreteran unsettling, even haunting “cipher text,” a spectacularly silent corpus (“brute mat- ter”) that resists being easily diagnosed or deciphered. Anderson's identification of what he calls “textual anorexia” hinges upon the idea that modernist minimalism —like the nonrep- resentational painting of abstract expressionism and the dis- figured buildings of international-style architecture—articulates a disgust with conventional language. The hunger artists who prac- tice this craft of aversion inscribe upon their textual bodies a convi tion that the signs of traditional discourse are corrupt, exhausted, and opaque, unable to operate as clear, redeeming forms of media tion between self and world. In order to “make it new,” these writ- ers try to spit out the old language as nutritionless and fattening, the discursive equivalent of empty calories. Adopting a revolution- ary aesthetic diet, they strive to fashion an increasingly attenuated text, The goal is to produce a “language-body” which, through its own restrictive and relentless regimen, gets rid of the flab that ‘hangs upon language, body, and world: “Having rejected the no- tion of art as mediation of the world, the minimalist constitutes his ‘own body as a second and alien self, as a ‘world’ that he can con- trol, discipline, mold into an ideal” (36). The skeletal minimalist textis thus similar to the anorexic woman in that it undertakes the torturous task of saying something without speaking, of shaping a bodiless body. Just as the anorexic verges on physical collapse even as she approaches what she imagines to be “an ideal” figure, the emaciated narrative wastes away in the process of eliminating ‘waste; itis always on the verge of breaking off, shutting down, or collapsing, a good example being the exhausted opening of Beck- ett’s Endgame: “Finished, it’s finished, nearly finished, it must be neatly finished.”® In this radically pared down play, characters who are ironically given the food names Hamm and Clov are stuck 5. Ancxample ofthis exrausted openings the st Line of Auster’s own vision of the ature, eotiled In the Country of Last Things, which begins, "These ae the last things, sheLITTLE 145 a scene reduced to a “bare interior,” a space—like an empty stomach—painfully contracted and forced to feed off itself, since lacks relief from without in the form of organic, linguistic, or spiri- tual pabulum, The discipline of self-deprivation governing these hollowed-out bodies and books also threatens to lead to a kind of interpretive collapse on the part of the reader. Texts such as Melville's “Bartleby the Scrivener’ and Kafka’s The Metamorphosis—stories stuffed with images of inappetence and antipathy toward food in which the protagonists eventually starve to death—create what Anderson re- fers to as a “hermeneutical blockage,” an explanatory impasse that makes it difficult for readers inside (Bartleby's lawyer, Gregor’s family) and outside to digest or make sense of a form that insists on offering and incorporating nothing: “The text's literal nature re- fuses to be transformed by a transcendent, allegorical spirit, re= mains stuck in the throat, unassimilable, “beyond interpretation’” 32). Refusing ta participate in an exchange of food and language, these body-texts present a silent challenge to the social, financial, and interpretive exchanges defining modem bourgeois culture. But in becoming inane, they also admit a certain powerlessness in the face of these economies. Anorexia ravages the woman’s frame; Bartleby expires in prison; Kafka's hunger artist dies alone in his cage. While self-starvation can thus be understood as a resistance to specific historical forces, according to Anderson it should be under- stood principally as.a desire to resist all comprehension, a desire to make the story and the subject so thin that they avoid the defiling, effects of criticism and of time. Putanather way, the obsession with purging the fleshy wor())d is a longing to return to a prelapsarian state of plenitude: Anorexia and modernism both provide a countermyth to the story of Cre- ation, 2 subversively private and individual strategy for sneaking back into the garden of childhood. Ultimately they can be seen as particular forms of natcissiam and masochism~strategies of seltdenial and self- negation that seek to establish a primal unity uncontaminated by the “"Glth" of the other: sexual differentiation, social hierarchy and power relations, temporality and. “history.” om146 + CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE The commitment to emptiness promises a pure fullness of Being which cannot be re-presented by a dirty, carnal medium of contin- gency and loss. Auster’s work contains several examples of physiological andaes- thetic rituals of asceticism undertaken in the hope of eliminating “the ‘filth’ of the other.” In Moon Palace (1989), Marco Stanley Fogg, an orphan with a name steeped in allusion to the exploration and, colonization of the “dark” other, begins his story by recounting how henearly starves himself to death while a student at Columbia Uni- versity in the late sixties. Haunted by genealogical gaps and familial losses as well as by the political upheavals of the time, M. S. Fogg (foggy manuscript), as he styles himself, decides to turn his own body language into a perfectly blank text by secluding himself in his apartment, devouring and then selling (or purging) the books his uncle has bequeathed him, and then proceeding to watch his money and food run out. Ina self-destructive attempt at “sneaking back into the garden of childhood,” at regaining a centered whole- ness, he takes refuge in Central Park after being evicted from his apartment, where, at one point, he draws upon 2 national fantasy of return to a pristine state of grace: 1 suddenly began to dream of Indians. It was 250 years ago, and I saw _myself follawing a group of half-naked men through the forests of Man- hattan. ... A soft wind poured through the foliage, muttling the foat- steps of the men, and T went on following them in silence, moving as rhimbly as they did, with each step feeling that Iwas daser to understand- ing the spirit of the forest. co In one respect, Fogg’s severities of self-consumption constitute a hunger strike, an act of individual withdrawal in symbolic protest against America’s imperialist practices, its refusal to withdraw from Vietnam and its refusal to curtail investment in the space race: “I ‘was an instrument of sabotage, I told myself, a loose part in the national machine, a misfit whose job was to gum up the works. . Iwas living proof that the system had failed, that the smug, overfed Tand of plenty was finally cracking apart” (61). However, his fas in another respect, a personal corollary to the public events swirling around him; he nearly cracks apart attempting to subdue differenceLiTTLe + 147 in the name of a united state. Separated from the presence of a founding father, Fogg tries to overcome feelings af incompletion, ambiguity, and ache by subjugating the absences inscribed in his, flesh: “Iwas trying to separate myself from my body, taking the long, road around my dilemma by pretending it did not exist” (29). In the navel Ix the Country af Last Things (1987), a bleak vision of late twentieth-century life transposed onto an unnamed, entropic setting in the near future, Auster pokes dark fun at the trendy rites of self-renunciation whose demands promise to release one from the problems of social decay, cultural barrenness, and spiritual tor- por. In a disintegrating domain where “food is a complicated business” —food shortages, food theft, and black market corrup- tion being the rule—some people attempt ta overcome the neces- sity of scavenging in the streets, of esting in search of sustenance, by fasting: “It is also possible to become 50 good at not eating that eventually you can eat nothing at all” (3), Belief in the salvational work of self-denial reaches its apotheosis in “the Runners,” a sect committed to suicide by racing through the streets until members collapse from exhaustion. Similarly to an anorexic, a Runner self- destructs in the effort to be liberated from the limitations of the body; the goal is to be redeemed from the ravages of hunger and history by sprinting to 2 life-in-death. As Auster's female narrator indicates | suppose it's kind of religion. . .. Once you have been accepted, you ‘must submit to the code ofthe group, This involves six to twelve months of communal living, a strict regimen of exercise and taining, anda gradu- ally reduced intake af food, By the time a member is ready to make his death run, he has simultaneously reached a point of ultimate strength and ultimate weakness. He can theoretically nun forever, and atthe same time his body has used up all its resources. This combination produces the desired result. 03) The aesthetic equivalent of this ecstatic self-erasure is the work done by a character named Ferdinand, a radically diminished ver- sion of the imperialist Spanish king who confines himself toa room where he creates exquisite, ever smaller renderings of the ship-in-a- bottle. A mumbling, marginalized, powerless old man disgusted by148 + CONTEMPORARY LITERATY the fact that the “country of last things” turns out to be something other than 2 utopia (“It’s all death out there’”), he has become obsessed with a hermetic medium to the point where he imagines assembling a figure so miniature as to be totally dis-figured, com- pletely invisible: “The smaller the better,’ he said to me one night, bragging about his accomplishments as an artist. ‘Some day I'l make a ship so small that no one can see it” (55). In this minimalist fantasy, the desire to place nothing under glass is a desire to negate the glassy nothingness infecting language. To model such a spare text would be to rediscover a New World paradise. Auster’s political conviction that the minimalist aesthetic consti- tutes an inverted application of the imperialist economy of domina- tion is most clearly spelled out in The Music of Chance (1990). fn this novel, two American millionaires, Stone and Flower, imprison on their grounds two visitors, Nashe and Pozzi, whom they have leaned out at poker. The “guests” are forced to pay off their gam- bling debt by rebuilding, ina meadow, the imported stone ruins ofa fifteenth-century Irish castle, The stones are to be reassembled into the shape ofa single, linear wall, an abstract artwork envisioned by Flower as “rising up like some enormous barrier against time” (86). While the wall’s monumental blankness dis-figures the castle’s Old. World structure and context, the work of construction, overseen by an increasingly sinister foreman with the puritanical name of Calvin Murks, walls off Nashe and Pozzi from the outside world. Equally ominous is “the city of the World” being created by Stone in his, mansion, an elaborate, miniaturized depiction of a utopian future. Unlike City of Glass, “the city of the World” offers a social vision of primal unity where, as Flower gushingly narrates, “the past and future come together, . . . good finally triumphs over evil” (79), What makes this exercise in minimalist megalomania frightening is, that the totalizing impulse yields “a model of some bizarre, totalitar- ian world” (87). As the miniature scene ofa prisoner being executed suggests, the dream of wholeness demands the extermination of difference: “the overriding mood was one of terror, of dark dreams sauntering down the avenues in broad daylight” (96). It makes sense, in this context, that the millionaires should eat like children, serving, before the game of poker, “a kiddie banquet... ham- burger patties on white, untoasted buns, bottles of Coke with plas-LITTLE 149 tic straws sticking out of them, potato chips, corn on the cob, and a ketchup dispenser in the shape of a tomato” (88). Having won the lottery with a selection of prime numbers, “numbers that remain themselves for all eternity” (74), they imagine that they have walled themselves off from the division and multiplication marking tempo- ral being; they believe that they have snuck back into the garden of childhood. In Flower’s words, “at times I feel that we've become immortal” (75). +3 City of Glass looks like an incarnation of minimalist modernism. It is, on the surface, an austere text, a navel stripped of any stylistic ‘ornamentation or excess, a bare-bones book, Like the glass curtain of the modemist skyscraper, to which the title makes allusion, Auster’s slim volume would appear to embody, in its immateriality and abstraction, a desire to realize a perfectly formless Form, a pure language shed of the dumpy, disfiguring folds—the corrupt fleshiness—of figuration.* However, whereas the disciples and de- scendants of the Bauhaus idealized their distilled, disembodied buildings as re-presentations of the Absolute and the Real, Auster adopts an ascetic modernist form only to scramble the logocentric values assumed by such dis-figuring designs. Fashioning an emaci- ated, minimalist text crammed with images of askesis, Auster mod- elsa spectacularly self-obliterating script that still manages to enter- tain a play of difference and to bear witness to the repressiveness inherent in presuming the presence of an ethereal language, 2 fat- free system of signs. Insofar as its body language simulates a case of textual anorexia, the novel hungers to achieve a negation of materiality and history. Ellmann makes clear that the refusal to eat is, in part, a determina tion to have nothing to do with the uncontrollable errancy under- writing words and world: "self-inflicted hunger is a struggle to re- lease the body from all contexts, even from the context of embodi- ment itself. It de-historicizes, de-socializes, and even de-genders 6. Far more on the disigurieg penciples of mederist archteerure, sce Mark C. ‘Taylor's Disiguring: Art, Ardtecure, Religion150 + CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE the body” (14). The narrative’s ascetic aesthetic reflects this desire to construct a perfectly decontextualized text. Though the story does have a specific geographical and historical setting (New York City in the early 1980s), fo the reader and to the detective the lacation fre- quently transforms into a kind of anti-topas, a place of absence. Framed as a traditional detective story, in which so often the mys- tery is solved upon disclosure of a hidden location, Auster’s text repeatedly refuses hermeneutical and topographical orientation, yielding nothing in acts of narrative and environmental emptying ‘ut. When the detective, like a “goad” reader, goes back, after his failure to wrap up the case, to the scene where his assignment be- gen, he finds it “stripped bare . . . the rooms now held nothing. Each one was identical to every other: a wooden floor and four white walls” (193). Likewise, the final image of the city is one in ‘which the landscape threatens to white out, to be reduced toa blank (page): “The city was entirely white now, and the snow kept alling, as though it would never end” (202). Offering an inane domain ora starved space, City of Glass appears to provide only a hermeneutical blockage, an impenetrability that frustrates the reader's expecta- tions just as it haunts the detective's dreams: “In his dream, which he later forgot, he found himself alone in a room, firing a pistol into a bare white wall” (16) But if the text does no more (or less) than “hold nothing” for the reader, its not an idealized emptiness (dis)embodying a way out of time. As the previous passages illustrate, Auster uses the image of white to signify an anorexic text attenuating itself, by trying to go without the repast of representational language, in order to achieve a steady state of not signifying. Nevertheless, white otherwise ap- pears, on several darkly humorous occasions, significantly con- nected with the consumption af food, the very stuff that reminds the self of its cavernous want, its inescapable carnality. Adulterated by its intermixture with the impurity of food, white re-presents something other than a waste-free figure. When Quinn enters a diner, after having assumed the identity of an other—the detective “Paul Auster”—he encounters “A tall Puerto Rican man in a white cardboard chet’s hat” (60). The cook, a nonwhite in white, relates to Quinn a tale of errancy (while the latter eats a hamburger, “feeling with his tongue for stray bits of bane” (62)), recounting the eve-LitTLe + 151 ning’s Mets game in which a player named Kingman makesan error costing New York the game, When Quinn later attempts to get to the bottom of the mystery by seeking out the real detective Paul Auster, he looks him up in “the white pages” of the phone book, only to find that the namein the book belongs to an other, the writer “Paul Auster.” This “Auster,” after telling Quinn he knows nothing about the case, cooks bath of them “omelettes, two of them, oozing on white plates” (150). Finally, when Quinn retums to his apart- ment after his unsuccessful stakeout, he is met by the new occu- pant, a woman “wearing a white nurse's uniform,” who, shocked by his disheveled appearance, drops her grocery bag, from which “milk gurgle[s] in a white path toward the edge of the rug” (189). Stray bits of bony text, these difficult-to-digest clues bear witness to the errant, broken play of experience: the error breaking open the game; the erroneous lead marking a point where the search for ‘truth breaks down; the spilled milk, reminder of a home (the mother’s breast, the primal nurse) from which we have always already broken away; the oozing yolks —“yolk 1. The yellow internal part of anegg, surrounded by the ‘white’ or albumen, and serving as nourishment for the young befote it is hatched 2. fig. Centre; innermost part, “core’; also, best part 3. Name for a gastropod mollusc of the genus Nerita, from the appearance of its shell 4. A rounded opaque or semi-opaque part occurring in window-glass; also, a pane of rough or thick glass” (OED)—sign of a center already dispersed or broken apart, of meaning always already broken up by the semi-opaque glass of language. In place of the empty plate of plenitude, a dish of bro- ken eggs. Those are the breaks—repressed in the ascetic dream of utopian Oneness, Such stray scenes can be read as highly meta- phorical illustrations of the metaphoricity of all experience, of the fact that life is always borne elsewhere from the proper, carried away from the true. Like the clues that the narrator pursues in The Lacked Room, Auster’s white signs lead the reader to err: “the mate- tial expanded, grew in geometric surges, accumulating more and more associations, a chain of contacts that eventually took on a life of its own, It was an infinitely hungry organism, and in the end I saw that there was nothing to prevent it from becoming as large as the world itself” (131). White is thus not simply the dis-figured figure of dis-figurement152 CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE but moreover an elusive, blinding figure with the unfathomable dimensions of a white whale. Not exclusively a primary color of integrity and unity, white is also the color of nothing, a color that deconstructs or shipwrecks the metaphysical longing for a unified “origin or original union. Indeed, white shows up in the story as the sign of a duplicitous or impossible nonorigin.” The younger Peter Stillman, victim of his father’s monomaniacal experiment to discover a prelapsarian language of God, appears once in the story, white-haired and dressed all in white. Though he is in some respects the origin of the story—his phone call to Quinn sets the narrative in motion—he remains an apparitional return-of-the- repressed, an indeterminate “I hovering at the limit of the private eye's vision: “As their eyes met, Quinn suddenly felt that Stillman had become invisible. He could see him sitting in the chair across from him, but at the same time it felt as though he was not there” (26). In his near-blinding whiteness, the son shadows forth Wel- lace Stevens's Snow Man: “Nothing that is not there and the noth- ing that is." His ghostly appearance and his stuttering tongue not only testify to the damaging effects of trying to recover absolute presence (of the Ward) but also bear traces of a nonabsent absence that refuses to fit neatly within the binary structure presence/ absence: “But what does poor little Peter say? Nothing, nothing. Anymore” (28) ‘The first installment in Auster’s trilogy, City of Glass subverts the notion of origin-ality from its outset. The story begins with a voice reaching Quinn through an untraceable knot of cables, speaking through an intricate “not”: “It was a wrong number that started it, the telephone ringing three times in the dead of night, and the voice ‘on the other end asking for someone he was not” (7), Placed from “the other end” —or the Other’s end—the wrong number, ar errant call, appears by chance, the result perhaps of crossed lines, and arrives at the protagonist's place only to dis-place him, only to mis- 7. In Ghost, the detective, Bue, Is hired by a man eamed White to spy on a ma named Black. Whitesetsthe staryis mation, reents the deveesiveceader a teack ace, follow a narrative, pursue an objet: however, White isa conspicuously absent Eure "Not only does he never reappear in the text, but even when he does appeer atthe begin ning, he “ls obwausly nat the man he appears tbe” (9). White differs frm kimself by turning out perhaps tobe Black. The Authorizing igure fades into Black and Whit, o#, nother words, inta wating,LITTLE 153 take him for an other, “someone he was not.” The call is, in effect, an example of what Avital Ronell refers to as the “toxic invasions waged by the telephone” (10), toxic because, like the consumption of food, the telephone call represents a transaction with an other that constantly calls into question the address of a proper subject: “Ie {the telephone] destabilizes the identity of self and other, subject and thing, it abolishes the originariness of site; it undermines the authority of the Book and constantly menaces the existence of litera ture” (9). Auster’s book thus opens (up) menacingly and playfully with a knotty call—a faulty connection—that announces the self as, faulted or split even as it is made in the hope of locating a singular, independent subject, the private eye/l named “Paul Auster.” Itis a desperate critical effort, made by an other reader at the very mo- ment the book is cracked (open), to establish a primal unity for the work by locating an original literary site, to reach the Author at a permanent address. But in this errant text, the author is never at home. The novel's opening call of the Other is answered by a hunger artist of sorts, Daniel Quinn being a writer who undertakes a strat egy of ascetic withdrawal and self-negation after suffering the death of his wile and son, Haunted by his losses, he adopts a regimen of radical renunciation in the effort to purge himself of the residues of desire and the imprints of memory—to white out his past-—and thereby to recover an imaginary condition of wholeness. On the ‘one hand, he starves himself of all social and professional interac- tion, severing personal contact with friends, agent, and publisher, disappearing completely behind his pseudonym, William Wilson. On the other hand, he tries to (avoid himself—to evacuate his own subjectivity or to attain “a salutary emptiness within” (8)—by tumn- ing himself over to the subject of his own writing, the nazrator-hero Max Wark: fhe lived naw in the world at all, it was only at one remove, through the Imaginary person of Max Work. His detective necessarily had to be real. ‘The nature of the books demanded it. If Quinn had allowed himself to vanish, to withdraw into the confines af strange and hermetic life, Work ‘continued to live in the world of athers, and the more Quinn seemed to vanish, the more persistent Work’s presence in that world became. 6)154 + CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE Quinn's self-deprivation and isolation in pursuit of a purely atomistic ego—“the tiny life-bud buried in the body of the breath- ing self” (15)—is signified by his identification with a detective who lives up to his name, who is not someone other than he says he is. ‘Though he does “live in the world of others,” Max Work remains a tough egg, a “hard-boiled” dick, a tightipped loner whose ascetic dedication to his work always enables him, unlike the Mets’ King- man, to be an error-free king’s man, one able to put all the pieces back together again, to solve the crime, tomake sure that nothing is left hanging. Quinn is a hunger artist in that his longing for the immaculate integrity of personal and narrative (en)closure—his desire to em- body and inscribe the exclusion of otherness—is a drive that gov- ems both writing and self-starvation. Viewed from one perspec tive, writing and fasting are, according to Ellman, attempts to transcend the somatic, to break the chains of corporeality; “writing is itself a form [of] starving inasmuch as both activities reduce the flesh to nothingness” (92). Writing and the refusal to eat are both undertaken in a quest for immortality, a struggle to release subjec- tivity from its bondage to the body by allowing it to be delivered elsewhere. Quinn's “work” actually turns him into a kind of secu- larized, modern-day martyr insofar as he seeks to make himself dead to the world by conforming to the rules of the conventional detective genre and by rewriting himself as ascetic hero. Geoffrey Galt Harpham, in his analysis of “ascetic linguistics,” finds that early Christian ascetics, as much as they expressed a logocentric dread of writing’s demonic duplicity, frequently turned to hagio- graphical writing in an effort to escape the glassiness of existence by devoting themselves to a purifying “science of imitation,” an autobiographical duplication of the textualized lives of saints: For the effect of mimesis is to displace and sa stabilize the wandering subject, to humble human pretensions to autonomy by submitting lfe to the mules of grammar, rhetoric, and generic convention, including the constant interpolation of citations from Scripeure. Textuality constirutes anascesis, adeadening, a purging of materiality and mutability that atic [pates the release of the soul from the body at death. Hence for tie early (Christians textuality was closely linked with martyrdom, which lent a purpose and even ideality tothe randomness of existence, as well as “rekitTte + 155 [peating” the death of Christ... the unrelenting ambitian af these peo- pple was precisely to eliminate the “horsexte from their existence, to be- ‘come their own texts. sas) To “stabilize the wandering subject” is to put an end to errancy. Quinn, haunted by nothing outside the text, seeks to eliminate the de-composing effects of body and world by encrypting—burying and encoding—himself in the ideal work of an other (the Work of his pseudonymous self), reducing himself to the naught ofa cipher by a process of encipherment. This rigorous pursuit of what Ellman calls the “dream of dis- embodiment”—the fantasy of a plenary emptiness—is re-created as a detective’s classic pursuit of the economy of truth and as a writer's pursuit of the classical economy of representation when, paradoxically, Quinn finally decides to play along with the call of the Other by pretending to be Paul Auster, PLL. While he responds to the first call by negating it—“There’s nothing I can do for you” (13)—he does not respond to the second call because he is “in the act of expelling a turd” when the telephone rings (17). The text clev- erly juxtaposes electronic and excremental currents (or technolagi- cal and biological calls), the telephone, like the feces, 2 wasteful reminder ofthe self’s holey status. Interrupted while emptying him- self, Quinn is temporarily forced to confront the impossibility of eliminating all exchange and circulation, the impossibility of not accepting the charges and discharges which show identity to be inreparably incomplete. However, when he accepts the thitd call, he insists on mis-taking itas a call to Reason, responding to the request for the Auster Detective Agency by pretending to be a subject who embodies (or runs) a proper agency: “This is Auster speaking” (19). Taking the call in the name of the (novel's) father, Quinn seeks to repress all traces of nothing. By assuming the role of private eyell, he seeks to re-present a transcendent, author-itative presence and to assume the absolute intentionality of patemal speech, but this dissemblance, as his new work unravels, only provides a further gloss on his already duplicitous identity. The hunger artist's dissembling resurrection as detective is noth- ing other than an effort to redeem the self from the etrancy of exis-156 + CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE tence. Quinn abandons his (Max) work as fiction writer for a sleuth’s seemingly even more seli-deadening work as disem- bodied observer and faithful transcriber of the facts. This new “ob- jective” writing seems to hold out a means of realizing perfect pur- ‘gation; it promises a way of “discarding the slack and embellishing, the gist” (Ghosts 24), a way of eliminating those shreds and traces, that—not capable of being properly identified, placed in evidence, and submitted to a court of law—point toward nothing. To achieve this transcendent state of purity, Quinn begins his task of making notes on the case by cleaning off his desk and stripping off his dlothes. In other words, he takes his redemptive-bound work to the max, literally ridding himself of the extinguished, the expecto- rated, the extraneous: He cleared the debris from the surface—dead matches, cigarette butts, ‘eddies of ash, spent ink cartridges, a few coins, ticket stubs, doodles, a dirty handkerchief—and put the red notebook in the center. Then he drew the shades in the room, took offall his clothes, and sat down at the desk. He had never done thisbefore, butt somehow seemed appropriate +0 be naked at this moment, He sat there for twenty or thirty seconds, trying not to move, trying not to do anything but breathe, @ This purification rite, like the writing of minimalist modernism, is anattempt to recollect the centered presence of Being by fashioning, a language and a body that have eliminated errancy or that will “not move.” The goal in creating such still-life figures is to exorcise noth- ing, to sweep away the waste that lies forever at the limit of any system, challenging its productivity and integrity: the useless resi- dues (dead matches, spent cartridges) that resist proper employ- ‘ment; the loose change (a few coins) that remains uninvested in a proper economy; the signs of leakage (dirty handkerchief) that com- promise the proper subject; the idle marginalia (doodles) that de- form the frame of the proper book. Asittums out, however, Quinn's case initially has him always on the move. He is assigned a tail job which forces him to circulate around New York pursuing a man who may or may note the Still ‘man he is assigned to watch. In one of the many doublings in the novel, Stillman “himself” appears as a figure obsessed with elimi-LITTLE 1587 nating waste, wandering around the city in an effort to undo, in his, words, the “serious error” of errant language. Like the modernist minimalist, he links his lament about the corrupt nature of the sign—its inability to represent properly—toa lament about the frac- ‘tured, disunited state of modern existence. For him, the contempo- rary American landscape, epitomized by New York, is a scene of cultural decay, environmental degradation, personal isolation, and spiritual anomie, the kind of wasteland that T. S. Eliot, in “Ger- ontion,” calls “a wilderness of mirrors,” a city of glass: ‘The brokennessis everywhere, the disarray is universal. You have only to ‘open your eyes to seeit. The beaken people, the broken things, the bro- ken thoughts. The whole city isa junk heap. Itsuits my purpose admira- bly. [find the streets an endless source of material, aninexhaustible store- hhause of shattered things. aay ‘The world, as well as the language used to apprehend it, is shivered, riven, dis-integrated, like the fallen figure of Humpty Dumpty. To overcome modernity’s cracked condition, to, in his words, “put the egg back together again” (128), Stillman acts as a deranged recycler, hoping to rid language of its difference while ridding the streets of detritus. Both poet and litter patrol, both serivener and scavenger, he picks up valueless items and restores their “original” value by assigning them proper names in a red notebook: Each day I go out with my bag and collect objects that seem wortty of investigation. My samples now number in the hundreds—from the chipped to the smashed, fram the dented tothe squashed, from the pul- vverized tothe putrid, .. Tinvent new words that will correspond to the things. amy One of the king’s men, Stillman collects rubbish in a linguistic and theological quest to re-collect a transcendental signified. His waste management program seeks fo “make it new” by re-membering a uniform Form, a perfectly intact egg. Quinn's tracing of Stillman is also a search for a transcendental signified, a quest for a “still” point or immutable Real beyond the glassy contingency of experience. Quinn wants tobelieve his move-158 + CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE ments constitute 2 teleological quest, the solution (to the mystery) promising salvation by re-creating the original scene (of paradise): “By coming to the end, perhaps he could intuit the beginning” (10). Yet his case is cracked from the beginning, not only because the private eye is always partially occluded, the “I” always having its dark side or blind spot, but also because the figure of Stillman is, marked by duplicity from the moment Quinn lays eyes on him. Determined to locate an essential truth behind the shifty signs in the city of glass, Quinn plans on starting his tail at the center station—Grand Central—only to see two nearly identical PeterStill- mans get off the train, Confronted with this radical cleft at the ori- gift, Quinn has (nothing other than) nothing to go on: “There was nothing he could do now that would not be a mistake. Whatever choice he made—and he had to make a choice—would be arbitrary, a submission to chance. Uncertainty would haunt him to the end” (90). The detective, or the writer, is bound to miss the mark. Like Melville's famous copyist, Quinn is a tracer of duplicates, one whose attempts to re-create the original are doomed to failure: “Then, suddenly, with great clarity and precision, [Quinn] saw Bar- tleby’s window and the blank brick wall before him” (84). For both Quinn and Stillman, as for Bartleby, the mast dramatic measure undertaken to cure the dis-ease caused by the duplicity of signification and subjectivity is to fast. Trying to live up to his name—to insure a centered stillness of meaning and identity— Stillman undertakes an experiment in askesis, locking up his son in a room for nine years with the hope that, taken out of circulation, he will learn to speak an “original language of innocence” (76). Sub- stantiating Ellmann’s claim that “writing and starvation are impli- cated in imprisonment” (95), Stillman starves his son of contact with the outside world, isolating him from the (d)rifts of words in order to recover the abiding, unbroken Word. The father takes liter- ally logocentrism’s claim that the glassiness of language is negated when there exists the constant presence ofa paternal figure, a speak- ing subject who acts as what Jacques Derrida calls “the father of his, speech,” Stillman strives to repress the waywardness of writing by embodying an author-ity who prevents his logos from going astray. As Derrida puts it: “Logos is a son, then, a son that would be de- stroyed in his very presence without the present attendance of hisLITTLE 159 father. . . . Without his father, he would be nothing but, in fact, writing” (77). Nothing but the nothingness of writing, Peter Still- man the younger is buried alive at the patetnal address in what really amounts to an act of self-starvation (not least because father and son share the same name), since fasting can be read, in psycha- analytic terms, as the subject's symbolic attempt to seal off (by shut- ting the “trap”) the way out for an other who has been enclosed in the crypt of the self through a cannibalistic fantasy of incorporation. AsEllmann puts it, “starving also keeps the other inand fortifies the stronghold of the ego, lest the ghosts within the self should break out of their tomb” (95), It makes sense, in this context, that Auster’s writing “begins” with the ghostly voice of the son who has broken free from the father’s repressive presence and who now seeks pro- tection from this ravenous figure. For Quinn, haunted by the awareness that he has always already slipped up, the last-ditch attempt to protect his client and save his case is to undertake an around-the-clock watch on the Stillman resi- dence, an impossible exercise in vigilance which requires him to eliminate the distraction of food, since leaving even for fast food entails a lapse in surveillance—an absence from his post—that only a total fast can prevent: His ambition was to eat as little as possible, and in this way tostave oft his hhunger, In the best ofall worlds, he might have been able to approach absolute zero, but he did not want to be overly ambitious in his present circumstances. Rather, he kept the total fstin his mind as an ideal, astate ‘of perfection he could aspire to but never achieve. He did not want to starve himself to death—and he reminded himself ofthis every day—he simply wanted to leave himself free to think ofthe things that truly con- ‘cerned him. aay The total fast. The fast for totality. Quinn’s determination to leave nothing to chance in the pursuit of a positive I.D. precipitates the “crisis of gender” that Mark Anderson sees marking both modern- ism and anorexia. As a result of his ascetic stakeout—after having, observed nothing for months amid the garbage of an alley—Quinn has, like Bartleby, removed himself from every form of circulation, Having abandoned the traditional trappings of male power and160 + CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE prestige, having wasted himself, he emerges as a figure with no profession, no office, no home. He has become, in effect, a hapless dick, greeted with “irritation” by the author‘father “Paul Auster” ‘upon his return. ‘in the end, Quinn returns to the place where the case seemed to begin—the younger Peter Stillman’s residence—but with a differ- ence. On these now evacuated premises, he gradually lets go of his ascetic commitment to a final solution and to pure Being—"he real- ‘zed that Max Work was dead” (195-96)—and experiences a rebirth different from his earlier reincarnation as “Paul Auster.” Stripping himself naked again, he comes to embrace the dissemination and displacement that make language glassy. Having taken to writing in the red notebook about something other than the case, he begins to acknowledge the errancy of his representations: “He felt that his words had been severed from him, that now they were a part of the world at large, as real and specific as a stone, or a lake, ora flower” (200). And itis when he relinquishes his pursuit of a transcendent signified that he receives, in the form of trays of food appearing from nowhere or out of nothing, the unfathomable grace of an unfigurable Other: “There was a tray of food beside him on the floor, the dishes steaming with what looked like a roast beef dinner. Quinn accepted this fact without protest” (196). Unlike Bartleby, who, when read one way, represents the transcendenialistfigute of self-reliance longing “to establish a primal unity uncontaminated by the ‘filth’ of the other,” Quinn ultimately prefers to eat. Instead of trying to withdraw from writing’s dead letters by starving him- self, he withdraws into writing’s dead letters and breaks his fast. However, Quinn turns out to be Bartleby’s double in more than one way. Gregory Jay has argued that Bartleby’s withdrawal from the practices of copying and eating force the narrator-lawyer to try to justify his (legal) authority in expelling the anti-body from the system, Refusing incorporation of any kind, yet stubbornly lodged in the chambers of the “firm,” Bartleby “solicits” the law, drawing attention to the limitations of the lawyer's customary assumptions: “The lawyer exhausts every conventional strategy available to him asa historical subject, only to find that Bartleby cannot be confined by any of their premises. As a writer, his primary motivation is to build a narrative structure that will bath contain Bartleby’s errancyLITTLE + 161 and justify his own behavior toward it, Melville makes his failure on ‘each count evident” (26). Neither properly within nor without the premises of the law (in literal terms, he occupies the office but won't work), Bartleby tries to get the lawyer to see otherwise by revealing nothing. As the lawyer remarks at the outset, “Bartleby was one of those beings of whom nothing is ascertainable’ (13); or, as Bartleby asserts when the lawyer comes to visit him in the Tombs: “I want nothing to say to you” (43). Like Bartleby, Quinn solicits his readers to think otherwise. While Bartleby admits “I like to be stationary” (41), and Quinn longs to be 2 still man, they both embody an errancy that resists being held easily accountable by the conventional assumptions of the reading, subject. Quinn’s disappearance at the end of the navel dramatizes a process of sipping away (from himself and fram the reader) that he has been enacting all along. Never properly within or without the lawful premises of the traditional detective story, Quinn finally van- ishes from the Stillman premises, and from the premise of being a still man, but leaves behind a trace of himself the red notebook — through which he reappears as an elusive trace, While the notebook isclaimed, by the narrator who suddenly appears at the end, as the original manuscript upon which the novel is based, the narrator admits that the novel “is only half the story” (202). Just as Bartleby does with the lawyer, Quinn leaves the reader with nothing to go on. City of Glass tums up nothing besides the truth. In so doing, itis a profoundly ethical text. The virtue of a text with nothing to ities in calling us on to the case and then forcing us to reassess, in the face of stubborn darkness, our methods of bringing “the truth” to light. The text challenges us to ruminate, in the absence of any indisput- able, uncontaminated evidence, upon our own position(s) as read~ ers. Unable to fulfill the role of detached, masterful private eye, unable to make the proper arrest of meaning, we are left to chew over the grounds of ourinvolvementin the case. Upon what prem- ise(s) did we begin our investigation? Why have we failed to follow certain leads? What are the repercussions of the report(s) we have filed? For what solution are we hungering? Indiana University162 + CONTEMPORARY LITERATU WORKS CITED ‘Anderson, Mark, “Anorexia and Modernism, of How I Learned to Diet in All Directions.” Discourse: Journal for Theoretical Studies in Media and Culture 11-1 (1988-89): 28-41 Auster, Paul. “The Art of Hunger.” The Art of Hunger: Essays, Prfeces, inter- views. Los Angeles: Sun & Moon, 1992. 9-20 City of Glass. 1985. New York: Penguin, 1987 —— Disppearances: Selected Foams. Woodstock, NY: Overlook, 1988, Ghosts. 1986, New York: Penguin, 1987. Inthe Country of Last Things. New York: Viking, 1987. ——. Tie Laced Room. 1986. New York: Penguin, 1988, =: Moon Petce. New York: Viking, 3989. — Mr Vertigo, New York: Viking, 1994 ——. The Musi of Chance. New York: Viking, 1990. —— Neow Lit: Paul Auster’s City of Glass, New York: Avon, 1994 —— “White Spaces.” Ground Work: Selected Poems and Essays: 1870-1879. London: Faber, 1990. 81-86. Barthelme, Donald. "Nothing: A Preliminary Account.” Sixty Stories. New York: Putnam's, 1981, 245-48, Beckett, Samuel. Endgame: A Pay ix One Act. New York: Grove, 1958. Blanchot, Maurice. The Space of Literature, Trans. Ann Smock. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P1982, Brown, Norman O. Loves Body. New York: Random, 1966, Cassels French English English-French Dictionary. 1981. Derrida, Jacques. “Plato's Pharmacy.” Dissemination, Trans. Barbara Johnson. ‘Chicago: U of Chicago P 1981. 61-171. Ellman, Maud, The Hurger Artists: Staring, Whiting, and fmpsonment, Cam- bridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1983. Harpham, Geoffrey Galt. The Ascetic Imperative Culture and Criticism, Chicago: Wot Chicago P1987. Jay, Gregory 5. America the Scrivener: Deconstruction and the Subject of Literary History. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1990. Keisteva, Julia, Powers af Horror: An Essay on Abjetion. Trans. Leon 8. Roudiez. New York: Columbia UP, 1982. ‘Melville, Herman, "Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of WallStreet.” The Piazza Tales and Other Prose Pieces, 1689-1860. Bd. Harrison Hayford, Alma A. Douglas, G, Thomas Tanselle et al. Vol. 9 of The Writings of Herman Mel vill Evanston, IL: Northwestern UP and Newberry Libraty, 1987. 13-45. ‘The Oxford English Dictionary. 2nd ed. 1989. Ronell, Avital. The Telephone Boak: Technology, Schizophrenia, Electric Speech. Lis col: U of Nebraska P1989, Stevens, Wallace. "The Snow Man.” The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens. 1954 [New York: Vintage, 1982. $10.LITTLE 163 ‘Taylor, Matk C. Altarity. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1987. Digfiguring: Art, Architecture, Religion. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1992, Exring: A Postmodern Atthelogy. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1984. Nats. Religion and Pastmodernism. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1995, Webster's Third New International Dictionary of the Englisk Language. W981