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Antoine Dechêne Université de Liège, Belgium “Anywhere out of this World”: Cognition, Perversion and Arbitrariness in Paul Auster’s Metaphysical Detective Stories1 1. The Metaphysical Detective Story and Space According to Walter Benjamin, Poe’s “The Man of the Crowd” can be described as “something like the X-ray picture of the detective story” reducing the genre to its bare structural essentials: In it, the drapery represented by crime has disappeared. The mere armature has remained: the pursuer, the crowd, and an unknown man who arranges his walk through London in such a way that he always remains in the middle of the crowd. This unknown man is the flâneur. (48) While for Benjamin “the original social content of the detective story was the obliteration of the individual’s traces in the big-city crowd” (43), the function of the flâneur lies in his capacity to “become a ‘botanist on asphalt’ in possession of special languages and keys that made it possible to identity and classify the components of the crowd” and “gain access to the history and the consciousness of oth1 I would like to thank Michel Delville for his valuable comments on the early drafts of this article. This research has been financed by the Belgian Science Policy Office (Belspo) as part of the Interuniversity Attraction Poles program (IAP). 20 Antoine Dechêne ers” (Brand 6) as he walks through the streets of a city that provides an overload of spatial and conjectural possibilities.2 Richard Lehan points to the limits of this capacity to decipher and taxonomize life in the city when he remarks that “the flâneur is discontented because the city offers more experiences than he can assimilate” and that “he always feels that he is missing out even in the process of experiencing: his state of mind is restless dissatisfaction, aimless desire” (qtd. in Eckhard 16). Be that as it may, most definitions of the figure of the flâneur insist on his capacity to perceive the city as an “arena of signs and secrets” (Marcus 248) that conveys, in Bachelard’s terms, “an esthetics of hidden things” (xxxvii). As we will see, this image, which Bachelard originally used to describe houses and interior spaces,3 is relevant to a study of the poetics of the macrocosm of the city space as it reverberates in postmodern literature, and especially in the metaphysical detective story. Bachelard’s model of social and psychological spatialization is also particularly apt to convey the notion of a detective story such as “The Man of the Crowd” which seems devoid of its primary epistemological and ontological content.4 In the same way as “an empty drawer is unimaginable” and “can only be thought of ” (xxxvii), it is unconceivable for the classical detective story to end without a culprit; the postmodern – meta – detective story is more often than not based on this very emptiness or lack of clues and solutions and on the temptation to fill the void with meaning as an act of remediation and (sur)interpretation. 2 For Benjamin the myth of the flâneur as the supreme “urban interpreter” is largely a social construct meant to create the illusion that the crowd is all “harmless and of perfect bonhomie”, thereby reassuring the bourgeois readership that the urban masses are not as meaningless and threatening as they seem to be (Benjamin 37). 3 Bachelard’s poetics is also relevant to the flâneur’s conception of the street as an intérieur, in Benjamin’s terms: “[t]he street becomes a dwelling for the flâneur; he is as much at home among façades of houses as a citizen is in his four walls” (37). 4 The fact that there is no crime in the story enables it to point out to interrogations such as what there is to be known and how can we know it. For more examples of epistemological and ontological questions see Brian McHale, Postmodernist Fiction,1987, 3–12. “Anywhere out of this World”… 21 In their foundational work entitled Detecting Texts: The Metaphysical Detective Story from Poe to Postmodernism, Patricia Merivale and Susan Elizabeth Sweeney argue that the “metaphysical” alternative to the classical detective story is characterized by “the profound questions that it raises about narrative, interpretation, subjectivity, the nature of reality, and the limits of knowledge” (1).5 Merivale and Sweeney also note the potential for parody and subversion of the metaphysical detective story which they describe as: . . . a text that parodies or subverts traditional detective-story conventions – such as narrative closure and the detective role as surrogate reader – with the intention, or at least the effect, of asking questions about the mysteries of being and knowing which transcend the mere machination of the mystery plot. Metaphysical detective stories often emphasize this transcendence, moreover, by becoming self-reflexive (that is, by representing allegorically the text’s own processes of composition). (2) Poe’s “The Man of the Crowd” fits this model insofar as it embodies enigmas that test our interpretational abilities. Furthermore, its capacity to question accepted notions of subjectivity reveals unfathomable mysteries that lie at the heart of the process of cognition as well as of our aptitude to think about the conditions which determine the acquisition of knowledge. This essay aims to reconsider the figure of “the Man of the Crowd” in a way that casts a different light on Paul Auster’s The New York 5 Laura Marcus builds upon this definition when she writes that such stories ask epistemological questions on the problematics of knowledge while also dealing with ontological issues relative to world-making (246). More than forty years ago, Michael Holquist had already used the term “metaphysical” to talk about crime fiction in his article entitled “Whodunit and Other Questions: Metaphysical Detective Stories in Post-War Fiction”. Holquist applies his definition of the metaphysical detective story to writers such as Borges, Robbe-Grillet or Nabokov, arguing that their stories are “non-teleological” and are “not concerned to have a neat ending in which all the questions are answered, and which can therefore be forgotten” (153). As for William V. Spanos, the “anti-detective story” is characterized by its formal purpose “to evoke the impulse to ‘detect’ . . . in order to violently frustrate it by refusing to solve the crime” (154). 22 Antoine Dechêne Trilogy, and especially on its opening part, City of Glass, in the wake of recent theories about the “metaphysical detective story”.6 My intention is to focus on two major aspects of these stories: the search for knowledge for its own sake and the elements of perversity which contaminate this quest. In these “metaphysical” or “metacognitive” texts, the detective is guided by a compulsive and addictive desire to gain knowledge – independently from any considerations of justice and moral order. In short, this article exposes how and why a text like “The Man of the Crowd” “does not permit itself to be read” (Poe 475)7 and how this “unreadability” shapes Auster’s first novel. I will also give special interest to the definition of a specific chronotope,8 to use Bakhtin’s concept, which characterizes the metaphysical detective story. Indeed, the figure of the flâneur, like Auster’s protagonists, seems to develop outside accepted, stable categories of space and time. This becomes clear in the opening part of the Trilogy when Paul Auster pauses with Baudelaire’s decentered poetics and reflects upon the complex interplay between space and selfhood: Baudelaire: Il me semble que je serais toujours bien là où je ne suis pas. In other words: It seems to me that I will always be happy in the place where I am not. Or, more bluntly: Wherever I am not is the place where I am myself. Or else, taking the bull by the horns: Anywhere out of the world. (Auster 132)9 Auster’s digression on Baudelaire’s “Anywhere Out of the World” – a poem which originally stressed a desire to escape from a life of 6 For other readings of The New York Trilogy as a metaphysical detective story see for example Alford, Bernstein, Eckhard, Kugler, Marcus, Merivale, Nealon, Russel, Shiloh, Sweeney and Swope. 7 It is interesting to note that “The Man of the Crowd” (1840) precedes Poe’s tales of ratiocination, namely: “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” (1841), “The Mystery of Marie Roget” (1842) and “The Purloined letter” (1845). This chronology and the evolution from the figure of the flâneur to that of the detective has been studied by Dana Brand in “From the Flaneur to the Detective: Interpreting the City of Poe” (79–105). 8 Bakhtin defines a chronotope as “the intrinsic connectedness of temporal and spatial relationships that are artistically expressed in literature” (84). 9 “Anywhere Out of the World/N’importe où hors du monde” was published in Le Spleen de Paris (1869). “Anywhere out of this World”… 23 boredom and despair – follows a lengthy description of life in the city, one which lists a series of characters caught in the throes of various forms of social and psychological isolation. “These beggars and performers . . . locked inside madness” (Auster 130–1) constitute the crowd in which Auster’s flâneur seems to be at ease and able to feel “out of the world”. Auster’s reappropriation of Baudelaire also points to a desire to convert spatial and mental disorientation into an art: the “art of losing one’s way” and of losing oneself (Vidler qtd. in Eckhard 77); a consideration not unlike Michel de Certeau’s suggestion that “[t]o walk is to lack a place”, that it is “the indefinite process of being absent and in search of a proper” (103). The flâneur in the “city of glass” knows that motion is essential to (self-)knowledge at the same time as it is geared towards the dissolution of the self. He believes that by walking endlessly he will be “able to feel that he [is] nowhere” and eventually disappear (Auster 4). In lieu of what de Certeau calls a “place”, Auster’s flâneur only encounters countless provisional “spaces” which have “none of the univocity or stability of a ‘proper’” (de Certeau 117).10 In Auster’s novel, New York stands for the ultimate nowhere, the infinite space where the wanderer vanishes in the abysses of introspection, unable to find “true selfknowledge” (Alford, “Mirrors of Madness”). As shown in the close readings which follow, de Certeau’s concept of the city as a textual space is particularly relevant to an analysis of the Trilogy against the background of recent theories of the metaphysical detective story. For de Certeau, the action performed by the stroller can be compared to an act of enunciation: “The act of walking is to the urban system what the speech act is to language or to the statements uttered” (97–8). The flâneur as well as the “vagabond population” that surrounds him (131) are part of the city, they are walkers without a purpose: 10 Michel de Certeau defines a “place” as “the order (of whatever kind) in accord with which elements are distributed in relationships of coexistence. It excludes the possibility of two things being in the same location (place). The law of the proper rules in the place . . . A place is thus an instantaneous configuration of positions. It implies an indication of stability”. On the contrary, “space is composed of intersections of mobile elements”. It is not stable, “space is a practiced place” (117). 24 Antoine Dechêne The ordinary practitioners of the city live “down below”, below the thresholds at which visibility begins. They walk – an elementary form of this experience of the city, they are walkers, Wandersmänner, whose bodies follow the thicks and thins of an urban “text” they write without being able to read it. These practitioners make use of spaces that cannot be seen; their knowledge of them is as blind as that of lovers in each other’s arms. (de Certeau 93) Auster’s novel as a whole would seem to subscribe to this model. This inability to read the “city-text”, especially when one seeks to cross the thresholds below which “visibility begins”, is mainly represented by the infructuous investigations that Auster’s protagonists undertake in the three New York novels. Of course, the epitome of this “unreadability” is the meaningless pursuit of “The Man of the Crowd”. Poe’s narrator runs in the streets of London after what he thinks is “the genius of deep crime” only to realize that it would be “in vain to follow” (481): ultimately, he has to face what Alford has described in his study “Chance in Contemporary Narrative” as “the meaningless randomness of our existence” (7). Accordingly, the dominant chronotope that best defines the metaphysical detective story is one of absence and arbitrariness. Auster’s sleuths/flâneurs develop “anywhere out of this world” that is, without a place, without a “proper”, outside time. The self, trying to find meaning, inevitably gets lost. The detective’s quest for “true self-knowledge” (Alford, “Mirror of Madness”) reaches a “nowhere” which represents both the impossible closure and the struggle that lie at the heart of the endless work of interpretation and the representation of subjective experience. In this context, what remains to be ascertained is why these surrogate detectives begin their quest in the first place. First, there is the chance factor11 – the wrong telephone number in City of Glass, the appearance of a countenance in “The Man of the Crowd” – which governs the entirety of the plot. But there is another, more basic and mundane emotion developed by Baudelaire in his inaugural work on the flâneur in Le Peintre de la vie moderne, which accounts for 11 For more information on the theme of chance/coincidence/fate in Auster’s work see Steven E Alford’s “Chance in Contemporary Narrative: The Example of Paul Auster” (2004). “Anywhere out of this World”… 25 the behavior of Poe’s narrator: the pangs of curiosity and the need to satisfy them. It has to be noted, however, that this curiosity is far from being cathartic since it is never really fulfilled or satisfied in the absence of a solvable mystery. Instead, it soon turns into “une passion fatale, irrésistible!” (690).12 This obsessive, perverse and irrational “passion” is combined with a permanent state of “drunkenness” which symbolizes, for Baudelaire, a return to childhood that enables the artist to see everything anew: “L’enfant voit tout en nouveauté; il est toujours ivre” (690).13 Thus, “The Man of the Crowd” is an eternal convalescent, a “manchild” drowned into a state of euphoria which seems to be a fertile ground for sublime thoughts and for a sensibility detached from any form of utilitarian reasoning. He also appears to be restless in his desire to become one with the multitude: “Sa passion et sa profession: c’est d’épouser la foule” (691).14 In Auster’s novels, he eventually disappears from the “city-text” and enters an absent “place”, an “entirely white” city (Auster 158) – New York under the snow – like a blank page on which stories never cease to be written out of thin air. Let me turn now to my close readings of Edgar Allan Poe’s “unreadable” tale and Paul Auster’s just as inscrutable Trilogy. My purpose is to understand why and how “The Man of the Crowd” remains a popular and pervasive figure more than a hundred and fifty years after its appearance, one which amounts to one of the biggest and most generative mysteries in the history of literature. 2. “The Man of the Crowd” and “unreadability” Poe’s story introduces an anonymous “I” narrator who reflects upon “mysteries which will not suffer themselves to be revealed” (475). Sitting in a London coffee house, he looks “at the passengers in the masses” (475), observing “with minute interest the innumerable varieties of figure dress, air, gait, visage, and expression of counte12 “Curiosity has become a fatal, irresistible passion!” (Baudelaire 7). “The child sees everything in a state of newness; he is always drunk” (Baudelaire 8). 14 “His passion and his profession are to become one flesh with the crowd” (Baudelaire 9). 13 26 Antoine Dechêne nance” (476) that compose the mob he dwells upon. Interestingly enough, this man is recovering from an unspecified illness which has weakened him for months. For Baudelaire, physical convalescence – along with its potential spiritual extensions – is an essential aspect of the artistic mind. The prospect of a never-ending recovery is also linked to another inherent characteristic of the artist’s “genius”: curiosity. Indeed, the narrator of “The Man of the Crowd”, after making very Dupin-like deductions and speculations about the different social groups that constitute the crowd of the city around him, is fascinated by the appearance of “a countenance”: As I endeavored, during the brief minute of my original survey, to form some analysis of the meaning conveyed, there arose confusedly and paradoxically within my mind, the ideas of vast mental power, of caution, . . . of excessive terror, of intense – of supreme despair. I felt singularly aroused, startled, fascinated. “How wild a history”, I said to myself, “is written within that bosom!” Then came a craving desire to keep the man in view – to know more from him. (478) As this passage indicates, the narrator’s wild imaginings take him away from speculation per se towards a catalogue of paradoxical emotions and mental idiosyncrasies which seem organically inscribed in the old man’s body and urge him to succumb to “a craving desire to keep the man in view – to know more from him” (478). The rest of the story describes his attempts to “read” “the Man of the Crowd” who walks “without apparent aim” (479) and tries to confront him in vain, reaching an ending without closure. The narrator acknowledges this confusing deficit in meaning in the final sentences of the short story: “This old man”, I said at length, “is the type and the genius of deep crime. He refuses to be alone. He is the man of the crowd. It will be in vain to follow; for I shall learn no more of him, nor of his deeds”. (481) Again, the narrative structure of this tale clearly works as a mise en abyme of a quest for knowledge. This metacognitive dimension can only lead to Poe’s assertion that his story “does not permit itself to be read” (475). It seems impossible to give a meaningful shape to the “Anywhere out of this World”… 27 chaos of the crowd as the narrator’s curiosity only leads him to more confusion and self-disorientation. In her analysis of Poe’s story, Patricia Merivale takes a step further, reading “beyond the ending” (106) and showing how the triad of characters – the detective, the criminal and the victim – that constitutes the traditional detective story, “is reduced to a solipsistic unity” (107). She explains that “[f]rom the narrator’s point of view, I, the detective, am following the criminal, to discover more about him. From the Man of the Crowd’s point of view, I, the victim, am being followed by a . . . silent criminal” (107). In fact, the narrator mimics the Man’s behavior, or rather mirrors it, turning himself into the real “Man of the Crowd”. “From the reader’s point of view”, Merivale continues, “I am following (as I read), and mirroring as I follow, the movement of a man who is detective, criminal, and victim in one” (107). The detective-reader and writer, who is also the criminal and the victim, lacks the power of interpretation of a sleuth like Dupin and thus finds it impossible to give a meaningful shape to the chaos of the crowd. Rather, he reveals that this chaos and arbitrariness cannot be mastered or explained because, as the narrator states at the end of City of Glass: “At this point the story grows obscure. The information has run out, and the events that follow this last sentence will never be known. It would be foolish even to hazard a guess” (157). This final quotation from The New York Trilogy marks an appropriate transition towards Auster’s texts, which, as we are about to see, clearly revolve around the figure of the sleuth as a “man of the crowd”. Indeed, these three metaphysical detective stories provide good examples of meaningless quests that only reveal, as Ilana Shiloh puts it, that “beyond the visible chaos there is nothing but chaos” (51). 3. The New York Trilogy Jeanne Ewert provides an interesting definition of what might be called a “postmodernist private eye”. The contemporary follower of “The Man of the Crowd” possesses: 28 Antoine Dechêne . . . all of the marginality, but none of the self-confidence of the classic detective, he spends much of his time walking in circles through streets that look alike, adopting roles for himself to boost his confidence or stepping into roles suggested for him by others, acting a suspect before he is one, excusing his guilt before he becomes guilty. (Ewert qtd. in Merivale, “Gumshoe Gothics” 110–1) This characterization of the postmodern detective as a weak, paranoid, insecure and self-deprecating individual can be usefully related to the three detective figures of The New York Trilogy: Quinn in City of Glass, Blue in Ghosts and the nameless narrator in The Locked Room. It is to be noted that these three protagonists are all readers and writers. Quinn writes detective novels under the pseudonym of “William Wilson”,15 involving the hard-boiled private eye Max Work. Because of a wrong telephone number, he will be caught up into a case, taking on the identity of the private detective “Paul Auster”, thus passing from writer to detective. As for Blue, he is a detective who likes action but who is hired on a case that forces him to stay all day long in a lonely room, reading and trying to write about his mirror image, a man named Black. Lastly, the nameless narrator is a writer who tracks down his youth best friend – Fanshawe,16 another writer – trying to find some clues and writing his story in one of the several notebooks that constitute the Trilogy.17 4. City of Glass: An Urban Text City of Glass is the novel that best symbolizes the concept of the city as a text as defined by de Certeau. Indeed, the narration highlights the central motifs of walking and writing and the way these two activities are interconnected and interweaved. For Quinn, just like for 15 A clear reference to Poe’s doppelgänger eponymous short story. Another intertextual subtlety since Fanshawe is the title of Hawthorne’s first novel published anonymously in 1828. 17 For structural reasons and in the hope of gaining clarity, I decided to analyze the three novels separately. However, this does not prevent me from making unavoidable links between these texts, which of course form a “coherent” whole, working together to highlight the lack of coherence that determines human experience. 16 “Anywhere out of this World”… 29 Peter Stillman Sr. – the man he is hired to follow – writing and walking, interpretation and pursuit, are identical activities that involve the deciphering of “urban hieroglyphics” (Marcus 248). Quinn’s tail job echoes the pursuit of “The Man of the Crowd” and shows that writing and walking at the same time is a difficult task: For walking and writing were not easily compatible activities. If for the past five years Quinn had spent his days doing the one and the other, now he was trying to do them both at the same time. In the beginning he did many mistakes. It was especially difficult to write without looking at the page, and he often discovered that he had written two or even three lines on top of each other, producing a jumbled, illegible palimpsest. (Auster 76) This tail job makes Quinn reflect upon the possible meanings of the “urban text” he is writing while walking. He wonders “what the map would look like of all the steps he had taken in his life and what word it would spell” (155). In a similar manner, Quinn wants to find meaning in Stillman’s wanderings. He eventually maps the old man’s itineraries, drawing shapes in his red notebook that strangely resemble alphabetical letters. Quinn, in the traditional detective fashion, craves to discover a clue “no matter how obscure” (83) and thus chooses to believe that Stillman’s actions are not all governed by chance. He transcribes Stillman’s steps into diagrams, forming the shape of the letters OWEROFBAB. Quinn completes this message as THE TOWER OF BABEL, “conjuring up the Biblical narrative of the fall into linguistic multiplicity which underlies Stillman’s belief in a single ‘natural’ language of humanity” (Marcus 260). This example reveals how Quinn truly believes in the power of the sleuth to read and interpret the chaos of the world. In a very “conventional” way, he thinks that: “[t]he detective is one who looks, who listens, who moves through this morass of objects and events in search of the thought, the idea that will pull all these things together and make sense of them. In effect, the writer and the detective are interchangeable” (Auster 9). The traditional detection method, Poe’s “ratiocination”, is one that implies a perfect convergence of language and reality, in which signifiers and signifieds connect clearly and 30 Antoine Dechêne deliver a transparent, empirically verifiable narrative. Nevertheless, this method is bound to fail in the context of the definitions of the metaphysical detective story considered above. In fact, as Matthias Kugler has argued, “none of the detectives and pursuers of clues in the trilogy succeed in combining signifier and signified to a meaningful shape” because “[w]ords cannot convey presence, reality or absolute truth” (102). Auster’s protagonist has to acknowledge that he knows nothing and that “nothing [is] real except chance” (Auster 3). He feels trapped inside a “city of glass” that does not bring transparency but reflection; a city of mirrors and doubles, a labyrinthine city of words in which signifiers can only refer to other signifiers, thereby precluding the production of meaningful information. As already suggested, New York symbolizes this endless maze where the one who tries to find meaning is doomed to get lost: New York was an inexhaustible space, a labyrinth of endless steps, and no matter how far he walked, no matter how well he came to know its neighborhoods and streets, it always left him with the feeling of being lost. Lost, not only in the city, but within himself as well. . . . On his best walks, he was able to feel that he was nowhere. (Auster 4) Walking through the grid of New York, Quinn seems to exist outside space and time, to melt into the walls of the city (Auster 139). His wandering is a metaphysical experience whose only goal is to reach the “end of himself ” (Shiloh 53). He explores the darkness of subjectivity and selfhood, trying to find answers to an irrational investigation that has no other purpose than to satisfy the obsessive curiosity of a self-defeating detective. Furthermore, as Edward Margolies stated in his book on New York and the Literary Imagination: . . . in Auster’s New York, gridded numbered streets and avenues appear constructed on rigorous mathematic principles. At first these seem to bear little resemblance to Auster’s aimless peripatetic heroes. Yet as the tales unravel, differences turn out to be largely illusory. The city, for all its extended symmetries, is as mysterious and improbable as any western wilderness. (158) “Anywhere out of this World”… 31 The city shapes and mirrors the mystery of the metaphysical detective novel. It works as a mise en abyme of the process of cognition, trying to impose order and meaning onto the arbitrariness of signs and the chaos of a world that refuses interpretation, despite the apparent symmetries which characterize its material, architectural environment, so that “there is nothing to be learned from the great world of New York other than that design only serves to conceal underlying disorder” (Margolies 159). Petra Eckhard links New York’s grid to the image of the Tower of Babel, which symbolizes “both the unity and the confusion of languages” (82). According to her, “the grid also comes to stand for the strange synchronicity of order and disorder” (82). In fact, the grid is based on a structural paradox that also defines the labyrinth, as Paul Basu has explained: The labyrinth . . . simultaneously represents order and disorder, clarity and confusion, integration and disintegration, unity and multiplicity, artistry and chaos. The duplicity is deeply perspectival; to the “maze-walker” immersed in the structure’s passages, the labyrinth is constricted, fragmented, and confusing, whereas to the “maze-viewer”, able to rise above the convoluted chaos and perceive its pattern, the dazzling artistry of the labyrinth is made apparent in all its admirable complexity. (qtd. in Eckhard 83) Lost within himself, Quinn becomes a “maze-walker” deprived of the traditional detective’s power and cannot reach the end of the case, which eventually proves to be the sheer presence and materiality of the text in and of itself. He is a flâneur who gradually loses his place in the world while living on the street and finds himself degraded to homelessness and near-insanity. Eventually, he has no other choice than to retreat into Stillman Jr.’s dark room and vanish from the text when there are no more pages left for words to remain. However, at some point, the deceived detective seems to have an insight of what is going to happen to him. From the very beginning of the book onwards, Quinn knows that closure is out of the question although he perhaps does not foresee the entire perversity of his situation as he is forced to live a narrative loop that can do nothing but go on forever: “Quinn was nowhere now. He had nothing, he knew nothing, he knew that he knew nothing. Not only had he be 32 Antoine Dechêne sent back to the beginning, and so far before the beginning that it was worse than any end he could imagine” (124). The metaphysical detective story does not move “forward in order to move back” (Porter qtd. in Kugler 90) like the traditional genre. Rather, the quest ends where it has begun but with more questions, as announced in the first lines of City of Glass: “The question is the story itself, and whether or not it means something is not for the story to tell” (3). 5. Ghosts: Detectives and Writers Similarly, Blue, in Ghosts, happens to be living an even more traumatizing experience when he is hired to observe a man named Black: his mirror image. Blue used to be an “ardent walker” (177) but for the sake of the case, he is now forced to stay into a lonely room where life “slow[s] down” (172) in such a way that it reveals a new perception of things to him, a different way of seeing the world and himself. This new awareness, close to Baudelaire’s conception of curiosity, helps the detective to elaborate a new interpretation of his case while also bringing the “perverse temptation” (175) of inventing an explanation that would impose reason upon arbitrariness. In fact, Blue conceptualizes Black as “a kind of blankness” (173), a hole that he has to fill in with meaning. The case soon becomes a real obsession. The detective even writes to his retired mentor asking for some advice and feels an “irrational desperation” (187) in front of his lack of interest. Blue tries to speculate further about Black’s condition – which is also his – thinking about how the inactive life they are leading has been reduced to words, to reading and writing, which for him amounts to “almost no life at all” (201). Blue even links his situation to a quote he has taken from Thoreau’s Walden: “We are not where we are . . . but in a false position” (200); a statement that echoes Baudelaire’s and de Certeau’s poetical conception of space.18 Like Quinn, Blue is unable to find a “proper” 18 As James Peacock has pointed out, although Blue’s seclusion is ironically similar to Thoreau’s, their situations do not have the same implications since “this solitude is for Thoreau a political as well as poetic act, a means of reassessing American notions of individuality and one’s relationships with others in a democratic, rapidly industrializing nation” (66). “Anywhere out of this World”… 33 place. So far, his investigation has only resulted in an endless introspection, reverberating Thoreau’s pessimistic view of mankind and his conviction that man cannot attain self-knowledge. Black and Blue mirror each other through opaque words which only reflect the ghostly position of the writer, the solitary activity of writing. Nearly bored to death, Blue decides to take action and accosts Black several times under different disguises, eventually confronting him in a Manhattan hotel. The encounter leads Black to confess that he himself is also a private detective who has been hired to follow and watch a man twenty-four hours a day. Of course, this man is Blue and because of this revelation, “Blue lives with the knowledge that he is drowning” (212). Black complains about how tiresome his work is and how it drives him crazy (214) to watch a man writing all day long without having access to the words on the page. Overwhelmed by the idea of his purposelessness, Black abruptly leaves the hotel. The next day, Blue crosses the street under a new disguise and enters Black’s apartment for the first time with the feeling that he has come to “a no man’s land, the place you come to at the end of the world” (220). This empty room is another nowhere in the novel inhabited by a ghostly figure. Blue and Black are mirror images, doubles which reproduce the emptiness and darkness that lie at the bottom of their selves. Similarly, their final confrontation is described in terms of shadows and nothingness: “Blue [is] losing control . . . and the moment he sets foot in Black’s room, he feels everything go dark inside him . . . one more step into the room and then he blacks out, collapsing to the floor like a dead man” (223). Interestingly, his watch stops with the fall, suggesting that he is really “out of the world”, that is also out of time. When Blue recovers, Black is facing him with a gun. But Blue loses his temper and rushes on his enemy. They fight and Blue, “all crazy with the passion of his anger” (231), hits Black until he falls unconscious. This final fury is the only possible answer of a deceived and desperate detective who has to face the abyss his life has become. Blue vaguely understands that he has been “nowhere . . . lost from the first day” (230) and that he must accept the arbitrariness of life, the impossibility of a restored order. Space and time are mainly a matter of perception, especially when they are transcribed into words. The 34 Antoine Dechêne solitude of the locked room has given a glimpse of a new perspective to the detective-writer who nearly became insane when he confronted the illisibility of the world and the perversity of a quest for knowledge that could not be fulfilled. 6. The Locked Room or the Perversion of Knowledge In a similar way, The Locked Room relates the story of literary critic who becomes a detective in search of his childhood friend named Fanshawe,19 another writer who inexplicably left his wife and baby. The narrator is then asked to take care of his friend’s work and publish it if he feels that it is worth being read. The Locked Room is, again, a doppelgänger story and the narrator soon takes Fanshawe’s place, marrying Sophie, adopting Ben and living with the success of his friend’s work. However, this is only the beginning and as the narrator admits it: if “there were no more than this, there would be nothing at all” (278). Everything falls apart when he receives a letter from Fanshawe, thanking him for taking care of his former life and asking to consider him as dead. This is when darkness enfolds the protagonist as he gets caught into an obsessive quest for answers, which he intends to fulfill by writing the missing author’s biography. The narrator knows that his project is not sane. He confesses that “perhaps [he] needed to be a little mad in order to get started” (273) but he also knows that no “man is strong enough to reject the possibility of hope” (245) and that one always looks for a chance to reach firm knowledge and redemption: Only darkness has the power to make a man open his heart to the world, and darkness is what surrounds me whenever I think of what happened. If courage is needed to write about it, I also know that writing about it is the one chance I have to escape. But I doubt this will happen, not even if I manage to tell the truth. Stories without endings can do nothing but go on forever, and to be caught in one means that you must die before your part in it is played out. My only hope is that 19 See Marling’s article for more information about the affiliation between Auster’s character and Hawthorne’s Fanshawe. “Anywhere out of this World”… 35 there is an end to what I am about to say, that somewhere I will find a break in the darkness. This hope is what I define as courage, but whether there is reason to hope is another question entirely. (278) Like “The Man of the Crowd” and Baudelaire’s flâneur, the narrator of The Locked Room, is a man who develops a different perception of the world that surrounds him and who, at the same time, cannot find his “proper” place. In fact, he even seems to be convalescent, old inside, “already used up” (245). Becoming the guardian of a ghost’s work only makes things worse for him. His publishing work resembles “a kind of delirium” (272) in which he will be trapped for good. The narrator’s first success to fit in Fanshawe’s skin soon turns out to be a deception although he manages to cope with his new role for some time. Living the ideal life, he senses that he has found his “true place . . . the tiny hole between self and not-self, [seeing] this nowhere as the exact center of the world” (274–5). Again, The New York Trilogy presents a character who seems to develop “anywhere out of the world”. The nowhere of the self is a liminal locus that remains on the verge of knowledge. The epiphany of cognition is always postponed and this is what creates the perversity of its quest: in these conditions, the search for answers can only become addictive, an obsession that will lead the detective outside space and time, into the infinity of the unfathomable. This is what the narrator realizes before his breakdown: that “every life is inexplicable” (291) and that “[n]o one can cross the boundary into another – for the simple reason that no one can gain access to himself ” (292). He is lost and irrationally wants to track down his friend’s ghost and confront him in order to recover a life of his own. With the excuse of having to write Fanshawe’s biography, the narrator investigates, questions old acquaintances and meets again Jane Fanshawe, whose son he always considered distant and “cold inside” (306). Fantasies from the narrator’s boyhood resurface one afternoon as he has lunch with Jane after sorting out letters and pictures of Fanshawe and his sister Ellen. During their conversation, the mother reminds herself of how physically identical the two men were and still are, “almost like twins” (308). This resemblance adds another dimension to the destructive sexual relation that the narrator and Jane Fanshawe have that drunken afternoon, as the narrator 36 Antoine Dechêne realizes: “Perhaps she felt this unspoken bond between us, perhaps it was the kind of bond that could be proved only through some perverse, extravagant act. Fucking me would be like . . . fucking her own son – and in the darkness of this sin, she would have him again – but only to destroy him” (313–4). Still the violence of the sexual act is another element that will lead to the climax of the investigator’s fury and confusion. His orgasm is synonymous of death and implies that by having sex with Fanshawe’s mother, the narrator wants to reach his friend in his most intimate space and kill him. The narrator’s frustrated desire to know triggers an irrational impulse of destruction that will nearly cause his death. He continues his investigation in Paris, a city where language is only “a collection of sounds” (338) to him, complicating further the construction of meaning. He looks for “traces of madness” (327), for a reason to explain Fanshawe’s unexplainable act. The detectivewriter is clearly addicted to his quest: “[u]nless he wanted to be found, I didn’t have a ghost of a chance. Still, I pushed ahead, trying to come to the end” (340). He tracks Fanshawe down to a house in the south of France where the missing author had stayed for a year. There, “holing up in the middle of nowhere” (344), the narrator understands that he is not looking for Fanshawe, but rather that he is trying to escape him, to run away from him and that his friend is not to be found beyond, but within himself: Fanshawe was exactly where I was, and he had been there since the beginning. From the moment his letter arrived, I had been struggling to imagine him, to see him as he might have been – but my mind had always conjured a blank. At best, there was one impoverished image: the door of a locked room. . . . This room, I now discovered, was located inside my skull. (344–5) The discovery of the Other within the self is a terrible experience for the narrator who is confronted with the ultimate image of space, the darkness of a locked room which hides the answers he longed for, the response to the craving desire to give meaning to his life. The narrator’s journey ends up again in Paris, in a halo of drunkenness. Drinking has become the only way to ease the pain, to protect him from his own nothingness. Then occurs another interest- “Anywhere out of this World”… 37 ing episode when one night, in a bar, he sees a man20 who vaguely resembles Fanshawe. Turning into a “sublime alchemist” (348) the narrator decides that if this man is no one, he can as well be Fanshawe. The “vertigo of pure chance” (350) pushes him to follow the man through the streets of Paris, shouting in French what could be regarded as the essence of the Trilogy’s mystery: “C’est mon frère . . . Il est fou. Je dois le poursuivre” (350). Indeed, the idea of a man following his mad double with no apparent reason symbolizes the pattern of “The Man of the Crowd”, a real leitmotiv throughout the three novels. He runs after the unknown man “passing the point of . . . sickness” (351), feeling “a sweet poison rushing through [his] blood” (352). The narrator is euphoric as he reaches the climax of his investigation by imposing an identity upon a random person and creating knowledge out of pure chance. Of course, when he catches up with the stranger, the roles are inverted and he is nearly beaten to death. True pain is the result of his quest and its randomness is the only cognition he can achieve. Three years later, the narrator receives another letter from Fanshawe asking him to meet in Boston for some final explanation. The missing writer eventually tells his story from behind a locked door but his narration is strictly factual, leaving out the clues that would explain his behavior. He hands down a red notebook which supposedly contains all the answers to the narrator’s doubts and questions. As one might expect, this red notebook mirrors the one in City of Glass, but in an even less satisfying way, as the narrator explains: If I say nothing about what I found there, it is because I understood very little. All the words were familiar to me, and yet they seemed to have been put together strangely, as though their final purpose was to cancel each other out. I can think of no other way to express it. Each sentence erased the sentence before it, each paragraph made the next paragraph impossible. It is odd, then, that the feeling that survives from this notebook is one of great lucidity. It is as if Fanshawe knew his final work had to subvert every expectation I had for it. . . . He had answered the question by asking another question, and therefore everything remained open, unfinished, to be started again. (370) 20 Interestingly, this man calls himself Peter Stillman. 38 Antoine Dechêne This red notebook symbolizes the ultimate “unreadable” text and works as a mise en abyme of the whole Trilogy, a book which tests our interpretational abilities as readers of metaphysical detective stories. The impossibility to make sense of the human experience is the final outcome of a quest for knowledge that cannot reach any fulfilling closure. The only hope lies in the acceptance of arbitrariness. True knowledge is nowhere to be found and this is precisely where the man who tries to reach cognition stands: on the threshold of interpretation, outside space and time, that is “anywhere out of the world” (Auster 132). 7. “Perfect non-solutions” I would like to conclude this article by quoting again from The Locked Room. Indeed, the last narrator of the Trilogy tries to come to an end with his story by linking it to City of Glass and Ghosts: The entire story comes down to what happened at the end, and without that end inside me now, I could not have started this book. The same holds for the two books that come before it, City of Glass and Ghosts. These three stories are finally the same story, but each one represents a different stage in my awareness of what it is about. I don’t claim to have solved any problems. I am merely suggesting that a moment came when it no longer frightened me to look at what had happened. If words followed, it was only because I had no choice but to accept them, to take them upon myself and go where they wanted me to go. But that does not necessarily make the words important. I have been struggling to say goodbye to something for a long time now, and this struggle is all that really matters. The story is not in the words; it’s in the struggle. (346) This paragraph has many implications. First, it “justifies” the coherence of the Trilogy, constructed on the central theme of a quest for knowledge rendered impossible by the unreliability of language and its inability to render human experience. Second, it also reveals that quests for knowledge are inevitable and important in themselves. It is the very process of asking questions that matters, not the possible outcomes. Although the detective is following a perverse instinct “Anywhere out of this World”… 39 and a desire for answers deprived of any considerations of moral and justice, he still has to fight in order to make sense of his life or, at the very least, to succeed in acknowledging that life is inexplicable and that words are not adequate to represent it. In brief, I hope that my analysis has provided a different way to approach texts like “The Man Of the Crowd” and The New York Trilogy as metaphysical detective stories or “metacognitive” mystery tales. Their fundamental “unreadability” is what makes these texts still worth studying today, especially in the light of their modern and postmodern legacies. Auster’s protagonists are all “men of the crowd” who share the curiosity and the anguish of Baudelaire’s flâneur, roaming through the streets of a labyrinthine city and facing the randomness of their existence. Auster followed in Poe’s footsteps in imagining another kind of detective, more in accordance with the postmodern era, dispossessed of his power of ratiocination, one which gets lost trying to find meaning in the chaos of the crowd.21 On their quests to nowhere, these sleuths seem to develop outside stable categories of space and time. Their chronotopes are determined by arbitrariness and chance. They are unable to decipher the city in which they are walking,22 becoming more and more alienated as they slowly vanish from the text. Pure knowledge only exists “anywhere out this the world”. The metaphysical sleuth, the “Man of the Crowd,” the postmodern flâneur, are constantly confronted with their own limits, with the small part of unexplainable that lies behind human thoughts and actions. The task of the detective figure is not to impose order on the chaos of the world anymore. His work now consists in accepting that no matter how hard he searches for truths, doubts will remain. Life is ultimately governed by chance and, as Steven E. Alford concludes: “chance . . . signifies nothing” (“Chance in Contemporary Narrative” 23). 21 Although, as has already been said, Poe first imagined a flâneur unable to read the metropolis masses before inventing a method – the ratiocination – which would lead to the creation of the modern detective C. Auguste Dupin. 22 Or, for that matter, the locked room in which they are trapped. 40 Antoine Dechêne On the whole, the examples that I have studied in this article confirm that the search for knowledge in the metaphysical detective story amounts to an endless quest into a text that is only made of inter-texts, of stories made of other stories that “do not permit themselves to be read”. This endless mise en abyme reflects Auster’s notion of the self, fragmented and confronted with its many doppelgängers. The postmodern subject has to face his “self-less-ness” or “decentered-ness” (51) in Matthias Kugler’s words, and must step into a quest for identity knowing, like Wakefield, that “by stepping aside for a moment, a man exposes himself to a fearful risk of losing his place forever”.23 “Out of the world”, he would become “the Outcast of the Universe” (Hawthorne 298). Another lesson to be learnt from Poe’s and Auster’s “unreadable” stories is that the struggle that lies behind the acts of interpretation and writing is complicated and often defeated by the ambivalent and arbitrary nature of language. Perfection only exits in “non-solutions”, and “unreadable” texts seem to be the only possible way to represent the experienced world. In any case, if life sometimes remains mysterious, one might want to trust Borges when he says that “the solution of a mystery is always less impressive than the mystery itself ” (qtd. in Irwin 2). 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