THE EXPLICATOR

2018, VOL. 76, NO. 1, 40–43

https://doi.org/10.1080/00144940.2018.1430684

Revisiting New York as an Existential Metaphor in Paul

Auster’s THE NEW YORK TRILOGY
Sarah Yoon
Yonsei University

KEYWORDS Detective fiction; metropolis; postmodernism; 20th century

With recent events diverting our attention to New York and this year’s shortlist for
the Man Booker Prize announced (including Paul Auster’s latest novel 4 3 2 1), one
finds a renewed fascination with the topography of the Manhattan city-space in the
popular imagination. The physical locations of New York sites are being politicized
in public discourse, as parties seek to wrest control over contentious and symbolic
zones, known for their eye-catching prominence and historical associations. Yet
among the individual inhabitants of Manhattan, life remains much the same as
before. If anything, individuals remain dwarfed by the large corporations and polit-
ical organizations that seek control over towering locations and sites in New York.
On the part of the individual, particularly those living on the margins of society,
life remains much the same, as they navigate the concrete jungle of the Manhattan
city-space.
Jean Baudrillard, upon visiting New York in the late 1980s, commented on the
sense of utter isolation and paradoxical solitude found among inhabitants of New
York. “Why do people live in New York? There is no relationship between them.
Except for an inner electricity which results from the simple fact of their being
crowded together,” Baudrillard remarked (15). In this “self-attracting universe,”
Baudrillard noted that there was “no human reason to be [in New York], except
for the sheer ecstasy of being crowded together” (15). Among the city-dwellers,
Baudrillard observed “a certain solitude like no other” with a “mind-boggling”
number of people who “think alone, sing alone, and eat and talk alone” in the
streets (15). Writers have narrated this experience of mental alienation and isola-
tion in New York, with perhaps one of the more prominent popular authors being
Paul Auster, whose novels have come to be intrinsically associated with New York.
In his first notable literary work and perhaps still his best-known, The New York
Trilogy (1987), Auster narrates the experience of living in Manhattan in a way that
recurs, at least metaphorically, throughout his subsequent novels. The experience
of living in Manhattan, a city reputed for both its “disintegration and renewal” in
the words of one historian, resembles the existentialist maze that is found in post-
modern detective stories (Lankevich 230). The postmodern detective story (also
termed metaphysical detective story or anti-detective story), as pioneered by writers
© 2018 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC
 THE EXPLICATOR 41

like Jorge Luis Borges and John Barth in the mid-twentieth century, returns obses-
sively to the literary motifs of labyrinths, mirrors and mazes. These spatial configu-
rations, rather than representing a purely conjectural maze, highlight the very
uncertainty of existence. As William V. Spanos wrote, the effect of postmodern
detective stories is to provoke an “existential critique of positivistic humanism”
(148), namely, the “monolithic certainty that immediate psychic or historical expe-
rience is part of a comforting, even exciting and suspenseful well-made cosmic
drama or novel—more particularly, a detective story” (150). Writers of postmod-
ern detective stories, like Borges and Barth, highlight the uncertainty of existence
and the contingency of given knowledge. Through guiding their readers through a
series of textual mazes and labyrinths, these writers transform the space of the text
into a liminal site between physical and psychological investigation. The text
becomes the meeting-point between the lived certainty of experience and the psy-
chological uncertainty of interpretation.
In The New York Trilogy, Auster also returns to the postmodern themes of tex-
tual self-reflexivity and metafiction, which together work to undermine faith in the
teleological or ratiocinative process. More importantly, the novel conjures up an
image of the Manhattan city-space that also mimics and resembles this process of
disintegration—what Spanos called an “aesthetic of de-composition” (156). This is
explicitly seen in City of Glass (the first of the three installments in The New York
Trilogy), which includes drawings of walks traced through the grid-like Manhattan
streets. These diagrams resemble letters, so that walking literally transforms into
the “silent production” of letters and signs (Certeau xxi). Michel de Certeau dis-
cussed the emergence of “a migrational, or metaphorical, city” through the practice
of walking that “slips into the clear text of the planned and readable city” in The
Practice of Everyday Life (93). The “ordinary practitioners of the city” in Manhat-
tan create a “texturology” through the experience of walking, producing “networks
of these moving, intersecting writings [that] compose a manifold story that has
neither author nor spectator, shaped out of fragments of trajectories and alterna-
tions of spaces” (92–93).
In Auster’s “postmodern city of glass,” the characters are constantly seeking to
establish permanence amid the forces of renewal and disintegration (S€ oderlind 3).
Boston Stillman wanders the streets to recuperate “broken things, discarded things,
stray bits of junk” lying in the streets, much like an “archeologist” (Auster 72). His
son Peter Stillman struggles to control and master the excess of words inside him,
noting that “there are many more words to speak” than he is capable of expressing
(26). The protagonist Daniel Quinn is also distracted by the opaque quality of his
interior world, haunted by memories of his deceased wife and infant son. To escape
the darkness of his inner self-consciousness, he creates a “triad of selves” with both
his pseudonym (William Wilson) and fictional character (Max Work), who is a
detective in his mystery novels (6). Quinn resorts to walking in the city streets, not-
ing, “By flooding himself with externals, by drowning himself out of himself, he
had managed to exert some small degree of control over his fits of despair” (74).
42 S. YOON

Similarly in Ghosts and The Locked Room, the protagonists are characterized by
interior darkness and inscrutability. Blue in Ghosts, for instance, struggles with his
inner consciousness, which resembles “an unknown quantity, unexplored and
therefore dark, even to himself” (171), even as he finds himself dangerously close
to “falling into some dark, cave-like place” (173). The sheer absence that character-
izes the narrator’s personal history (who is not even given a name) in The Locked
Room is offset by the extreme excess that characterizes Fanshawe’s presence (his
childhood, memories and literary success) in the story.
New York is the location where these struggles take place, representing an excess
of information that lacks content. New York becomes a space that is full of frag-
ments and debris that does not provoke deeper inquiry into their meaning or func-
tion in the city of circulating signs. Not only are the streets of Manhattan organized
according to a principle of utilitarian efficiency—Auster describes New York as “an
inexhaustible space, a labyrinth of endless steps” that reduces him to “a seeing
eye”—it also represents a no man’s land between the processes of birth and death,
decay and renewal, an immortal city that outgrows the organic processes of its
own inhabitants (4). Philip Kasinitz wrote about the city in Metropolis,
Beneath the orderly geometry of its street grid New York seemed (and still seems) to tee-
ter on the verge of hysteria and chaos. The contradiction of unprecedented technological
progress and mastery over the environment, coupled with deeply felt alienation and the
sense of society gone out of control, epitomizes [an] ambivalence of many observers of
the modern metropolis. (86)

In this milieu of nothingness amid plenitude, Auster’s protagonists find shelter

in “the nowhere” that is New York (4). If anything, they are drawn to the city pre-
cisely because it is “the most forlorn of places, the most abject” (94). As Boston
Stillman says, “The brokenness is everywhere, the disarray is universal. You have
only to open your eyes to see it. The broken people, the broken things, the broken
thoughts. The whole city is a junk heap” (94). In Auster’s world, the topography of
the New York streets transforms into an existential metaphor that must be deci-
phered, just as life must be examined and investigated. In the inherent unknow-
ability of the Manhattan city-space, New York becomes the immortal force that
resists all investigation, leaving its inhabitants to create their own invisible and
transient texts amid the city streets.

ORCID
Sarah Yoon http://orcid.org/0000-0002-5271-0296

Works Cited
Auster, Paul. The New York Trilogy. Penguin Books, 1990. Print.
Baudrillard, Jean. America, translated by Chris Turner, Verso, 1988. Print.
 THE EXPLICATOR 43

Certeau, Michel de. The Practice of Everyday Life, translated by Steven Rendall, U of California
P, 1984. Print.
Kasinitz, Philip. Part III: Introduction. Metropolis: Centre and Symbol of Our Times, edited by
Philip Kasinitz, Macmillan, 1995, pp. 85–97. Print.
Lankevich, George J. New York City: A Short History. New York UP, 2002. Print.
oderlind, Sylvia. “Humpty Dumpty in New York: Language and Regime Change in Paul Aus-
S€
ter’s City of Glass.” MFS Modern Fiction Studies, vol. 57, no. 1, 2011, pp. 1–16. doi:10.1353/
mfs.2011.0018. Print.
Spanos, William V. “The Detective and the Boundary: Some Notes on the Postmodern Literary
Imagination.” Boundary 2, vol. 1, no. 1, 1972, pp. 147–68. doi:10.2307/302058. Print.