The Annihilation of Identity

IV. The Annihilation of Identity in Paul Auster’s City of Glass

Unlike Henry Park in Lee’s Native Speaker, Daniel Quinn in Auster’s City of Glass does become completely invisible before the novella’s end. Quinn begins the novel as an author of detective fiction, but after a series of phone calls from Virginia Stillman who has mistaken him for a detective—one named “Paul Auster”—Quinn decides to take up the persona of detective Paul Auster and accept the case Stillman pleads for him to take. Viriginia hires Quinn to protect her husband, Peter Stillman Jr. More specifically, Quinn is hired to observe Peter Stillman Jr.’s father. After Peter Stillman Sr. dissappears, Quinn believes that the only way to protect Peter Stillman Jr. is to watch his apartment unendingly, ensuring that Stillman Sr. cannot approach the apartment undetected. In the course of doing so, Quinn begins living in an alley alone, eventually becoming invisible—dissapearing into the city itself. Quinn’s invisibility is not rooted on the racial blindness of the observer, as Tina Chen argued for Native Speaker, but instead is due to his own unwillingness to see others. More dramatic than being reduced to being “Korean” or “Asian,” as Henry was for Janice, Quinn’s transformation into “part of the city” is to become non-human, to become blind not only to individual identities, but to the concept of The Other itself.

Through reproducing events and refraining simple crimes, Auster’s novella makes a compelling case for his use of biblical metaphor, each crime becoming not just a transgression against an individual but a problem of ontology. The most striking commonality between Auster’s and Lee’s novels is also the grounding that enables the emotional conflict of each novel: the death of the son. We learn that Daniel Quinn once had a son, but the son has died. What we learn of Quinn’s son in City of Glass is mostly through Quinn’s mirroring of his son with Peter Stillman Jr. In addition to reminding Quinn of his son, Quinn’s son was also named Peter. Quinn’s rationale for accepting the case offered to him to protect Peter Stillman Jr., what prompts him to use his knowledge of the detective genre to become a detective is not only the commonality of his dead son and Peter Jr., but more specifically his desire to avoid allowing the crime committed against his son to be reproduced. Stillman Sr.’s crime against his son was a vain attempt to rebuild the Tower of Babel. In a sense, Stillman reproduces the sin in the original myth. Peter Stillman Sr. theorizes in his work within a work, The Garden and the Tower: Early Visions of the New World, that the fall of man as depicted in Paradise Lost was both the fall of man and the fall of language, the loss of God’s will from language, mirrored in the fall of the Tower of Babel.

Stillman’s project only left a pale man, with everything about him white. On the one hand, watching Stillman Jr. walk was like a “watching a marionette trying to walk without strings” yet “it was as though Stillman’s presence was a command to be silent.” To some extent, then Peter Stillman Sr.’s project is a success, if one might call it that—the image of Stillman turns Quinn into the equivalent of an object in the Garden of Eden. Just as Stillman and his wife Victoria change Quinn’s name to Paul Auster by calling him on the telephone until he accepts the title and define his identity as a detective, for Quinn, Peter Stillman Jr. indeed represents the language invested with the power of God—the capacity to make what one calls something, and what something is, identical.

If the case is that calling someone a detective makes them a detective, then that begs the question in terms of understanding the category of what a detective is. Paul Auster’s New York Trilogy is regarded as detective fiction, yet the Literary Review claims that it is not just detective fiction; it is a series of seductive metaphysical thrillers. One might argue that the detectives of Auster’s novels are not detectives at all. They are men who prefer invisibility and acting as someone they are not. In City of Glass, Quinn only puts on the façade of the detective and plays the part from his experience writing detective fiction. Each protagonist has more in line with the Noir film genre’s antiheroes. In City of Glass there is some basis for the observations of detection—Peter Stillman Sr. reportedly locked his son in a dark room for several years, and despite having spent years in prison and being deemed rehabilitated, might return to try his experiment again. Yet, this explanation is tenuous at best, and even if it were satisfactory, it is unlikely that Quinn alone could successfully take on such a case. Jake Gittes in Chinatown required an entire team of men to follow one subject for a few days, and even then there was a multitude of misinformation he confronted.

Auster’s novel beckons a reevaluation of the detective genre as a genre, recentering the genre away from the heroism of the protagonist, instead emphasizing the primary action as the confrontation with the overwhelming phenomena of the world, where the detective’s real job is to select objects of meaning for the sake of forming some sort of narrative. As critic Barry Lewis, argues, “At the beginning of an investigation everything is a potential clue, and both the detective and the reader operate at their height of attentiveness.” Ontologically, this mirrors what Peter Stillman Sr. did before being arrested; he reduced all potential red herrings from the development of a child in the hope of forming a narrative of human existence. This process came off as insanity, demonstrating what Arendt and many others would regard as the fundamental violence of the act of detection: “He locked Peter [Jr.] in a room in the apartment, covered up the windows, and kept him there for nine years.” The result, however, is a man who can speak—after years of rehabilitation—but not in a way that is immediately clear as being somehow more representative of mankind’s narrative arc. Further, in addition to questioning his sanity, one must also question Peter Stillman Sr.’s methodology. The covering of the windows serves a dual purpose: it prevents Peter Jr. from seeing out, but also keeps all others from seeing in. It is, in essence, the opposite of Bentham’s Panopticon. Peter Stillman Sr. seems to view New York City as a panoptic structure. He covers the windows and seals the room to prevent his son from internalizing the threat of the panoptic space, to feel unimpeachable against mankind and thus, in a sense, to become akin to a God.

Auster’s recentering of the detective genre is also to a purpose: he uses the detective genre to deconstruct of identity. Daniel Quinn is the opposite of Peter Stillman Jr. Quinn is a man with a plurality of identities, and in his quest to prevent the violence done to Peter Stillman Jr., he nevertheless allows himself to be subjected to the same experiment, to be reduced to nothing more than a man. He proceeds through the novel with a multitude of identities: the narrative voice describes him as Daniel Quinn, yet he also identifies himself with Max Work, a fictitious character that he creates, and uses William Wilson for a pseudonym. He plays the role of detective Paul Auster. When Quinn confronts Peter Stillman Sr. after following for days, he identifies himself as “Quinn.” On their second meeting, he identifies himself as “Henry Dark,” a character that Stillman created—and finally as Peter Stillman’s son, “Peter Stillman.” From this multiplicity of identities, Quinn reduces this multiplicity of identities by seeking to determine who he really is, or at least who he really believes himself to be. When he takes on the persona of Paul Auster the detective, he performs the identity as though he were Max Work, his own fictive creation. In confronting Peter Stillman Sr., Quinn has to realize that the Paul Auster/Max Work character is not central to his identity, and returns to Quinn. In performing that identity for Peter Stillman Sr. however, in regarding what he used to pretend his identity was as a character of his own fictions, he realizes that that too was never really who he was. He must take on the persona of Henry Dark for the sake of understanding that Henry Dark always had been a narrative device and never a physical entity. Anne Cheng’s argument that “the subject effects mimicry in order to lose, rather than save, itself and, in doing so, finds itself” is central here—yet, even it presupposes that there is some sort of fixed identity to be found. A different reading might be more effective, such as that which Judith Butler argued in Gender Trouble, that identity is constituted by the performance of that identity. Peter Stillman Sr.’s quest to return to prelapsarian innocence was always futile because to believe that a Man is defined as a Man and constituted by a Man begs the question of what a Man is; without an Other, something else to distinguish it from and understand it in terms of, language is without meaning. Instead, what Peter Stillman really seeks is to constitute his son’s identity not in the power system governed by the gaze of civilization, but constituted in the power of language. To do so, he seeks to escape language so that he might understand what language is. Just as is the case with performing identities, however, language is constituted by the performance of it.

To lose language is to lose everything, and Quinn, in reproducing the experiment done by Peter Stillman Sr. on Peter Stillman Jr., does so. As Quinn loses his language, he loses the investments in the world around him, his sense of structure, and every iota of power he ever held. The narrator states, “A long time passed. Exactly how long it is impossible to say.” Next is his place of residence and, after this, his sense of decency. Instead of living in an apartment, he lives in an alleyway overlooking the apartment where Peter Stillman Jr. lives, seeking to ensure that Peter Stillman Sr. never tries to contact him. He learns to defecate into garbage bins and to live without food or sleep. He does not talk to other people except in rare occurrences. The only thing holding him together is his sense of duty to Peter Stillman Jr., and through him, to his long dead son. Even that too becomes unnecessary when Quinn learns that Peter Stillman Sr. committed suicide shortly after their confrontation. Quinn is left with not only nothing to go on, he is left with absolutely nothing. As he becomes aware of how little he has, he moves into Peter Stillman Jr.’s apartment which he learns has been empty for much of the time he spent watching it. Only when he is in the room, completely alone, does he realize he is connected to the city intrinsically. Ironically, “he felt that his words had been severed from him, that now they were a part of the world at large.” The goal of Peter Stillman Sr. was always to unite man with language, to make it so that categories were absolute and real. Yet, in attempting to do so, for the first time Quinn feels that his words are no longer a part of him. And, in losing his language, Quinn has to confront that he has lost himself—or, more, that “he” or “himself” as a coherent identity had never existed in the first place.

Stillman, in his goal of uniting man with language, also presents the problem of a fluid language. As Stillman claims, “Most people…think of words as stones, as great unmovable objects with no life.” Quinn has no problem accepting the malleability of language, even if he accepts the stone metaphor—stones, after all, can be chipped or worn away, the reduced thing no longer having the same identity. Stillman’s primary example is that of an umbrella that has broken. Since an umbrella is something that serves a purpose, to block the rain, an umbrella that doesn’t work isn’t necessarily an umbrella. As though accepting the failure of his old quest, Stillman’s new quest is to create a language that “will at last say what we have to say.” It is for this very reason that he has come to New York, since New York is a place where “the brokenness is everywhere, the disarray is universal.” Stillman has to accept that he cannot regain prelapsarian innocence; just as one third of the Tower of Babel burned down, and as Henry Dark’s manuscripts burnt down in a fire, so did his apartment and project. Although in essence one facet of his old goal remains the same in his new project—to provide a name for all things in the world, he no longer seems interested in having a language that gives the world shape. His project has become descriptive, rather than prescriptive. When he completes his project, though, he believes he will “hold the key to a series of major discoveries… the key. A thing that opens locked doors.” This statement evokes the locked door he enclosed his son behind, as though this new research will somehow resolve the issues at stake when he first entrapped his son. The combination also presents the central metaphor behind the second novella in the trilogy, The Locked Room; the difference between the signifier and the signified, and the difference between what a writer intends to imply and what a reader infers.

Auster’s novel demonstrates the obliteration of identity without needing to racialize it, and in doing so reconceptualizes it. The first refraction of identity occurs with the disappearance of Peter Stillman Sr. After confronting him, Stillman disappears; as the text describes, “Stillman was gone now. The old man had become part of the city.” Stillman, having committed suicide by jumping off a bridge, is “part of the city” both in the sense that his body had become part of the physical structure of the city, and because his individual identity was obliterated by the collective of the city. The case of Peter Stillman Sr., however, pales to what happens to Quinn in the alleyway. Devoting himself entirely to ensuring that Peter Stillman Sr.—despite being dead, unknown to Quinn—does not reach Peter Stillman Jr.—who has vacated his apartment already, also unknown to Quinn—Quinn takes up living outside Peter Stillman Jr.’s apartment in the hope of ensuring that Peter Stillman Sr. never threaten Peter Stillman Jr. In effect he becomes a derelict homeless man, not quite a beggar, hiding in garbage bins to avoid the rain and pissing in the corner of his alleyway. Yet, the narrator never goes so far as to call Quinn homeless, or a bum, or to categorize him at all. He is still Quinn, and his actions persist in being represented as that of a detective. Quinn does continue to act out the plot of detection through his continuous gaze at the apartment of Peter Stillman Jr. The only mystery accepted, in fact, is the mystery of “how he managed to keep himself hidden during this period.” If New York City were a panoptic space, then simply hiding when trash collectors came by should not be enough to avoid detection; further, if Quinn persisted in his quest, as he claims to, of never allowing his eyes to leave the apartment where Peter Stillman Jr. continues to reside, then Quinn could not have avoided detection. The only explanation is for Quinn to have himself, a white male in New York City, become invisible. Quinn, as the narrative says, “melted into the very walls of the city,” and became as Peter Stillman Sr.— part of the city.

Quinn’s invisibility was based off his own unwillingness to see others. As the narrative describes, “Because he did not want anyone to see him, he had to avoid other people as systematically as he could. He could not look at them, he could not talk to them, he could not think about them.” There may be garbage collectors, passer-bys, pedestrians, or anyone else on the street, but the most important facet of not being seen is to not see them, to not engage with them. To allow oneself to become “part of the city”, the most general of categories and far more dramatic than “Korean” or even “Asian”, to become non-human, one must not only give others individual identities, it is to make the Other itself a non-entity; and only then is complete invisibility possible.