THE CITY AND PAUL AUSTER: AN EXAMINATION INTO THEORETICAL ISSUES ON THE CITY IN RELATION TO THE WORK OF PAUL AUSTER

BY

The first time I inhabited a Paul Auster novel I was captivated not only by the questions that Auster presented in the prose but also of the questions that I had at the end that I felt needed deciphering. I am not going to admit that I truly understand every element of his novels but with the above quotation it seems that Auster leaves enough room for reader interpretation. The following study is not a praise of Auster’s work but more of a challenge for it. I wanted to see if the themes that his novels present could be taken out of the prose and put into real life. One theme that stands out in Auster’s work is ‘the city’ and subsequently the two novels to be analysed are both based in city environments. ‘City of Glass’ taken from Auster’s novel The New York Trilogy (1987) is based in New York and In The Country Of Last Things (1987) is based in an unknown pre- apocalyptic city that has been likened to that of New York by numerous reviewers. The novels’ backdrops play important roles in both texts and it seems the natural choice to take this aspect of Auster’s work to examine.

The following two chapters inherit various theories on city life and these theories are then illustrated in Auster’s novels. The chapters intend to give a rounded notion of some important city theories and how Auster may or may not have used these theories to his advantage. It is quite obvious, when reading an Auster novel, that Auster focuses more on the characters than the cities in his work; however, there is sufficient reason to use the city as a way into Auster’s prose. The theories that are presented may or may not have even been made apparent to Auster but they can be seen to inhabit his work fluently. The structure of the following two chapters shows how sociological theories of the city have as much relevance as Auster’s work does. The chapters begin with the theoretical issues pertaining to cities and city life followed by a study of Auster’s novels in relation to the city theories examined. That is why this study is titled Paul Auster and the City; both are meant to be equal in stature and importance.

The two chapters I have chosen to present look at two different aspects of the city in relation to Auster’s novels. The first chapter discusses ‘City Of Glass’ and how the concepts of the flâneur and the detective can be seen in Auster’s novel. This chapter can be seen as focusing on the individuals that inhabit a city. The second chapter focuses more on the city and its structure and how that affects the individuals that live within its confines and this is analysed in relation to In The Country of Last Things. This chapter shows how a city may be seen as utopia to one person but not to another. I felt that these were the aspects best represented in Auster’s work.

One idea that may help in understanding why Auster has such an interest in his cities is his Judaic roots. Auster is a third generation Jew that lives in Brooklyn, New York. He has also frequented Paris. Paris and New York are two cosmopolitan cities steeped in culture and diversity. Auster’s Jewish history is that of exile:

This may be where Auster’s interest for the city comes from; the feeling of belonging or, as is most apparent in his work, the feeling of not belonging. The theme of identity has a significant part to play in any one of Auster’s novels. Living with a hyphenated identity is commonplace in America and especially in New York. Being an Italian-American; Afro-American and, most notably in Auster’s case; a Jewish-American is common. The city is a place where Auster belongs but his Jewish family history of not belonging can be seen throughout his novels. This thought may be valuable with hindsight when examining Auster’s work in the future.

When reading Auster there is a feeling that one enters the cities he describes but with a feeling of alienation that stops one becoming totally immersed. To live in a city is to understand a city. To write about a city, it is believed, is too big a concept to have total control of. This study shows that Auster’s cities have a lot in comparison with the real cities of the extra-textual world but it necessary to remember that they are Auster’s cities, complete with his creative input. Jonathon Raban in his book Soft City (1975) sums up his own ideas of the city in relation to the form of the book:

A novel may not be the best way to understand a city but it is a way that can interpret city life and make it palatable for a reader. Auster does not try to grasp city life. He tries to incorporate bits of his own life and history, which is steeped in city life, and graft this knowledge onto characters and plots that have their own experiences. This study can be seen as a complementation towards Auster’s work.

The flâneur is perhaps most famous within Charles Baudelaire’s use of the elogy in his writing. Charles Baudelaire used the character to encompass just one guise that a poet may adopt to become one with metropolitan life. As the title of the essay, The Painter of Modern Life (1964), that the flâneur was mentioned in, states: "He [the flâneur] is the incarnation of the ‘Painter of Modern Life’" (Baudelaire, 1986, 152): modern life being modernity. Keith Tester observed in the introduction to his book The Flâneur (1994), that the notion of the flâneur is still obscure: "The flâneur is the man that indulges in flânerie: flânerie is the activity of the flâneur" (Tester, 1994, 7). Walter Benjamin (1974) in his comments on Baudelaire’s flâneur seem to confine the concept to Nineteenth Century Paris; he sees the flâneur being like the epicentre of modernity. This chapter will show that the flâneur has breeched its confinements of nineteenth century Paris.

The flâneur is a very common motif within urban studies. It is not so much about the study of man in the city but the city within the man. The construct of the city is all around the flâneur but the wanderings within the city are from within. The flâneur is an individual, even when they are part of a crowd:

Baudelaire’s poet is the flâneur. He is of and not in the crowd and thus is set apart from the others within the crowd. Baudelaire compares the reaction of being in a crowd with that of a convalescent, where everything is new and seems to have a heightened meaning. However, there comes a point when the flâneur’s observations may change their focus; when one person is singled out to be observed rather than the masses. If this observation goes unnoticed by the observed, the flâneur can be seen to change the meaning of watching. This shift in perception can change the character of the flâneur to a Panoptic; a Panoptic being the personification of John Bentham’s invention of a 360-degree observation tower (1843), the Panopticon, for use in repressive institutions such as prisons. This tower can be seen as a place where individuals can evaluate inmates by their actions and assume these actions control the prisoners’ mentally. This can be seen as monitoring the outside to understand the inside. The idea of the Panopticon is analysed with more detail further on in the chapter. Using Paul Auster’s novel ‘City of Glass’ taken from The New York Trilogy (Auster, 1987) this chapter will illustrate how Auster has used the streets of New York for the act of flânerie and alongside this the act of Panopticism. In turn I will show how similar both the concepts are, and how, combined they make the basic elements of a detective; a concept that Auster seems to deconstruct within ‘City of Glass’.

It is mainly in the first two pages of Auster’s ‘City of Glass’, where we see the character Daniel Quinn acting like a flâneur: "Nearly everyday, rain or shine, hot or cold, he would leave his apartment to walk through the city - never really going anywhere, but simply going wherever his legs happened to take him" (Auster, 1987, 3). This notion of walking with no real destination is commented on by John Lechte in his postmodern analysis of the flâneur: "the flâneur’s trajectory leads nowhere and comes from nowhere. It is a trajectory without fixed spatial coordinates…" (Lechte, 1996, 103). Quinn can be seen as a wanderer. The walks he takes in the city are similar to that of a flâneur but his sense of belonging in a metropolitan environment seems to differ from Baudelaire’s idea that a flâneur: "… is a man who is driven out of the private and into the public by his own search for meaning" (Tester, 1994, 2). If Quinn is searching for meaning during his walks, it seems that he is failing:

The metaphor of New York being likened to a labyrinth is not a new one. Walter Benjamin also used the phrase to describe cities: " The city is the realisation of the ancient dream of the labyrinth. Without knowing it, the flaneur goes in search of this reality" (Frisby, 1994, 93). The reader is not told why Quinn’s walks take place but evidence suggests that he does not go in search of the reality of New York but merely walks through the streets to lose himself. This losing of himself may not be seen as a negative experience. It is learnt in the opening pages, of ‘City Of Glass’, that Quinn lives alone. However, the reader finds out that Quinn did have a wife and a child but both have died. This losing of himself can be seen as a characteristic of what Keith Tester calls the, "…emptiness of the flâneur" (Tester, 1994, 7).

The narrator’s descriptions of Quinn’s wanderings show frequent similarities between Quinn and the flâneur:

This extract displays Auster’s strong use of imagery that results in the body of Quinn and the streets of New York being brought closer together. Baudelaire believed that to be at the centre of the metropolis was the aim of the flâneur. Auster has brought Quinn closer than the centre by making him at one with the movement of the street. Quinn is also reduced to a seeing eye, meaning that when he is walking he is reduced to an absolute observer. Observation can be seen as the main act of the flâneur. This idea is explored again in another of Auster’s books, Moon Palace (Auster, 1989). The protagonist of the novel, Marco Stanley Fogg, finds himself in a job where he helps a blind man, Thomas Effing, around his house. Fogg’s main duty is to read to his employer but then they start to take walks and Fogg is given the task of observing everything that surrounds them when they are walking:

Fogg’s job was to describe everyday occurrences and objects to someone who has no way of seeing them. This can be interpreted as a metaphor for writing, with Fogg being the writer and the Effing the reader. In addition it also emphasises what a flâneur seems to do every time they are presented with metropolitan life; they seem to look at life within a city from a more heightened perspective: "I began to consider it as a spiritual exercise, a process of training myself how to look at the world if I was discovering it for the first time" (Auster, 1989, 122). Fogg’s awareness of new ways of looking at his surroundings is similar to Baudelaire’s flâneur, both with their convalescent awareness of metropolitan life.

In ‘City Of Glass’ Quinn not only encounters the feeling of being lost in his walks but also a disillusionment of change: " the world was outside of him, around him, before him, and the speed with which it kept changing made it impossible for him to dwell on any one thing for very long" (Auster, 1987, 4). Tester believes that flânerie: "… is existence at a pace that is out of step with the rapid circulations of the modern metropolis" (Tester, 1994, 15). It is only, like Quinn, when one is out of step of metropolitan life that one notices a difference in the speed of things. This is also similar to the notion of the convalescence; even though Quinn walks the streets everyday he is still lost and thus witnessing things with the perception of encountering things that are new to him.

It is in the first two pages of ‘City Of Glass’ where we are given information about Quinn and who he was before he took on the role of Paul Auster the detective. He takes on this role out of curiosity. His job is to follow Peter Stillman and watch that he does not abduct his son Peter Stillman Jnr. When Quinn assumes the role, his walking around the city for no reason changes to walking around the city with the reason to follow and observe Peter Stillman. Walter Benjamin stated that: "The figure of the detective is prefigured in that of the flâneur" (Frisby, 1994, 91). The relationship between the two is bound by observation. The difference being that the flâneur observes to find meaning about himself within his metropolitan environment whilst the detective tries to find rational answers to solve the felony that has been committed: "The fundamental ambiguity of the figure of the flâneur, sometimes verging on that of the mere stroller at other times elevated to that of the detective, to the decipherer of urban and visual texts" (Frisby, 1994, 82).

Another technique that Auster uses in ‘City of Glass’ is to deconstruct the form of detective fiction to show that it is a genre that is riddled with inconsistencies and does not reflect the irrationality and inconsistency of real life. Tzvetan Todorov, in his essay The Typology Of Detective Fiction (1981), looks at a list made in 1928 by the novelist S.S. Van Dine. He summarizes eight points that can be seen as rules of detective fiction. Some examples of the list are:

Auster’s story can be seen as an anti-detective novel. It follows the structure of a detective story; to begin with is the setting of scene and story followed by an attempt to answer all questions that arise. What is present at the end are vital questions that are left unanswered. These questions are commented on in Madeline Sorapure’s essay The Detective and the Author (1995): "Is a crime committed? What happens to the potential victim? What happens to the suspected criminal? Finally what happens to the detective himself?" (Sorapure, 1995, 75). These questions are deliberately remained unanswered. When reading ‘City of Glass’ there seems to be no sense of closure. All the loose ends that should be tied up are not and so we are left with no real answers to conclude the story. The solution is the most important element to detective fiction and can be seen to provide the missing link. It can be seen to complete a cause and effect sequence. Auster plays with this notion by omitting it completely and in turn he provides an opening to endless questions about the significance of cause and effect in narration.

Auster does however remain true to some elements of the traditional detective story and we can see this in Quinn’s wanderings around the city whilst following Peter Stillman. These wanderings are in a similar vein to Edgar Allen Poe’s short story The Man in The Crowd (1978). Baudelaire comments on Man in The Crowd in his essay The Painter of Modern Life (1964) and Walter Benjamin comments on Baudelaire’s observations in his essay titled ‘Passagenarbeit’ (1974), taken from Gesammelte Schriften Volume V, that… "The Man in Crowd constitutes… an x-ray of the detective story. In it the drapery represented by crime has disappeared. The mere armature has remained…" (Gilloch, 1997, 141). In this respect the story shows how close the relation between the flâneur and the detective can really be, both observers and detectives in their own right.

The essay From the Flâneur to the Detective (Brand, 1990) also examines Poe’s Man in the Crowd and focuses on themes that can also be seen in Auster’s ‘City of Glass’. The focus of the essay is solely on Poe’s short story but the similarities in themes between this story and ‘City of Glass’ are so rife that its themes can be represented in Auster’s story and also in the themes of the detective. One question that remains unanswered in both stories is was a crime committed? According to Dana Brand this does not seem to matter: "One implication… is that illegibility is itself a form of crime. It is a transgression against the interpretive laws imposed by the flâneur upon the city" (Brand, 1990, 5). Quinn when following Stillman has no idea what Stillman is doing within his walks while he collects broken and fragmented objects. He is not seen to commit a crime but as Brand suggests this is against the flâneur’s idea of interpretation. A crime does not need to be committed for someone to suspect someone else.

In ‘City of Glass’ the unknown narrator, a friend of the fictional Paul Auster, follows the words of someone that are unknown to him, this being Quinn’s writings in his red notebook to gain an understanding of who he is and what he is doing. Quinn is doing the same; by assuming the role of Auster he does what he thinks a detective should do, follow the potential criminal:

What Quinn records in his red notebook is something very similar to the way he walked around New York before he became Paul Auster. The novel presents Auster/Quinn as the detective identifying with the Stillman the criminal; this idea is commented on by Bernd Herzogenrath:

Quinn follows Stillman in a way that is aspiring to what a flâneur is. He wants to be an urban observer. Like a flâneur he wants to combine both observing and his incognito. Even if he gets caught he is Paul Auster and not Daniel Quinn, as this is the identity he has assumed. While observing, Quinn’s wanderings change as they now have a purpose. As commented on earlier the idea of purpose within the wandering is a change from flâneur to detective:

He was no longer wandering to lose himself but to in a sense to find out about someone else. Brand sees the viewpoint of a detective being:

This ‘panoramic perspective’ can be likened to Foucault’s (1975) idea of the role of Bentham’s Panopticon.

The Panopticon is the feature for Foucault’s essay, Panopticism in his book, Discipline and Punish (Foucault, 1975). J. Bentham’s Panopticon was an observation tower that was used in prisons and mental institutes. It was made with windows that were covered in venetion blinds so the observers, in the tower, could see out but the prisoners could not see in. Foucault was interested in the model of the Panopticon as it can be seen as a model for power relations. Mark Cousins and Athar Hussain comment on this in their book Michel Foucault: Theoretical Traditions in the Social Sciences, (1984): "Foucault specifies three means by which… [power relation] techniques are put into operation: (1) hierarchical observation, (2) normalising judgement and (3) examination and assessment" (Cousins and Hussain, 1984, 186). This idea is similar to Brand’s idea that a detective must have a ‘panoramic view’; this can be seen in the ‘hierarchical observation’ within the Panopticon. The ‘normalising’ of ‘judgement’ can be seen in ‘City of Glass’ with Quinn judging Stillman as a criminal just because of his suspect movements throughout the city that he appears to take. In some ways the model of the Panopticon can be seen to do the same things as the detective.

The Panopticon can be seen as a very early model for what we now know as Closed Circuit Television (CCTV). There are differences in what they are originally intended for but some theories in their observation are similar. The Panopticon was originally: "… a mechanism cleverly designed… to inculcate among prisoners the feeling that they were being watched constantly, regardless of whether that was so in fact – the sentiment of invisible omnipresence…" (Cousins and Hussain, 1984, 190). This idea of a ‘Big Brother’ omnipresence, coincidently the year of Cousin’s and Hussain’s book is 1984, is similar to the concept of CCTV; a machine with total observation within a society to deter rather than record.

The presence of cameras on the high street has two ways of working. Firstly, like the Panopticon there may not be anyone watching the images relayed from the camera but the whole idea that this is never known should act as a deterrent. The second way is different from the way the Panopticon works, it is the idea that there may not be anyone watching but there is constant recording. This is what the Panopticon lacked. If an incident occurred in a street then it is likely to have been recorded and can be relayed as evidence. CCTV has changed our society. The presence of cameras can be seen as a negative of the intentions of the flâneur. In nineteenth century Paris a person could walk round the streets all day everyday and only be observed for curiosity. Now there is a constant array of security guards and cameras to make an innocent stroller and observer feel guilty about wandering and essentially just looking. With regards to CCTV it is in a city environment where the cameras are most apparent. Foucault took this idea and applied it to everyday life he saw the public as not being repressed by their culture but fabricated by what their culture tells them: "We are watched but we are watchers. No Bourgeois scheme, it is us. We are the system. We can’t stand outside of it" (Christofides, 2001). The Panoptic can be seen to bridge the gap between the different forms of observation by the flâneur and the detective. The Panoptic may precede the flâneur as it was used in the eighteenth century but it can be seen to be closely related; they both seem to combine to produce the early notions of the detective; a wanderer within a city observing others in search of clues to understand the crime that has been committed. With Stillman it seemed he started to construct clues within the places he walked.

Michel De Certau’s (1988) examinations of walking in cities are visible in ‘City of Glass’. De Certau believes that walking is like a speech act. It can be seen as someone’s flourish, like poetry. Auster seems to take this literally. In ‘City of Glass’ Quinn discovers that Stillman has been making the outline of letters with where he walks. This is realised when Quinn draws the maps of Stillman’s frequent journeys and concludes that he is trying to spell out ‘Tower of Babel’ with his wanderings. The idea of the Tower of Babel is again commented on by Walter Benjamin within the context of cities: "Isn’t every city the new Tower of Babel?" (Gilloch, 1997, 183). This idea is also examined, within the context of CCTV and its effect on youths wandering the streets, in Ian Toon’s essay, ‘Finding a Place in the Street’: CCTV Surveillance and Young People’s use of Urban Spaces (2000). Using De Certau’s notion as contrast, of mapping out your own unacknowledged route on a street to make the street your own, he looks at how CCTV has changed the ways in which youths roam the streets:

Toon however, sees that there is a problem with CCTV in that unlike the Panopticon it is not totally omnipresent as it would hope to be: "CCTV cannot command total surveillance and displace all ‘improper’ productions of space because there are cracks in the vision of this scopic technology, pockets of space within monitored environments which remain invisible" (Toon, 2000, 153).

Quinn gives up on finding any meaning in the wanderings of Stillman, only to find the meanings are inscribed within the actual city. It is this realisation that leads to the demise of Quinn as a flâneur and also as a detective. He discovers that he cannot find any meaning into what Stillman is actually doing and this ends his detection:

This chapter has looked at the relations of three concepts; the flâneur; the detective and the personified Panopticon, the Panoptic. These theories, each of them similar in explanation seem to be about individuals that are close to the way society is constructed within a city. It can be seen that the change from the observing flâneur to the observing CCTV camera has been a part of society but has also changed the way a city works and in addition, the way society works within a city. What is the meaning of the New York that Auster presents to the reader in the novel? Maybe the real meaning of ‘City Of Glass’ is in the title itself. One of the most important discoveries for the flâneur was the invention of glass. Shops were no longer dark places where you had to go in to browse. With the installation of glass, looking can be done from the outside in. Walter Benjamin according to Graham Gilloch (1997) saw Paris as:

Auster does not present to us a New York filled with spectacle and commodity, these may be essential for the nineteenth century flâneur but for Auster’s reworking they are not necessary. The reader is presented with a stripped down New York only represented by street names and not the crowds on those streets. A New York transparent compared to the illustrations of a tourist guide. The title may relate to the flâneur’s representation of the city but the novel seems to take different meaning from it. Commodities can be seen as the words in the novel but are shown as transparent and not in relation with their meaning. The signifier of the objects Stillman picks up on his wanderings has been extracted from the signified of the object themselves:

Auster’s ‘City of Glass’ not only shows objects, when broken, as useless commodities but the words that represent them as useless also.

What is established in the conclusion of the novel is that the story is told through the real, within the context of the book, Paul Auster’s friend’s transcriptions of Quinn’s red notebook. He is the true detective deciphering Quinn’s words. It is only through the notebook that the reader encounter’s New York City and Quinn’s experiences within the city. The reader of ‘City of Glass’ can also be seen as a detective and a flâneur. They wander through the book making their own conclusions and assumptions along the way to the outcome. They are like Quinn following Stillman. The novel seems to ground detectives and humanise them making them seem fragmented and imperfect. This can also be said of the city in which the flâneur/ detective roams: "Stillman has come to New York because the city is: ‘the most forlorn of places, the most abject. The brokenness is everywhere, the disarray is universal" (Herzogenrath, 1999, 59). The reader of Auster’s novel peers into the ‘City of Glass’ with flâneur-like intentions of finding meaning and detective-like rational to understand that meaning but what Auster does not tell the reader is that the Glass, referred to in the novel’s title, seems to be opaque.

The structure of the word utopia can be seen as unstable. What we have is a word invented by Sir Thomas More (1516) for the title of his novel, which is seen as a serious proposal for an ideal society. The word broken down comes from the Greek root ou-topos meaning nowhere. This is where the instability appears. Some critics are defiant in where the line is drawn in the translation nowhere: " One irony of the conjunction of now and here is that it produces the word ‘nowhere’" (Soja, 2000, 72). This can be taken to illustrate that to some a utopia is no/where (nowhere) but to others it is now/here (now and here). Both of these meanings for a utopia are different from the meaning that is more generally acknowledged, that is that a utopia is traditionally seen as a ‘good place.’

To create a utopia is to create a good place, but as it is known that a utopia is seen as imaginary or unreachable, that good place can only be conceived in our minds. Where the line is drawn in the word nowhere is the point that is significant in relation to this chapter. What it will be focussing on is how the creation of a city is conceived as the creation of a utopia on paper; in realisation what could be created may produce a dystopian effect. Once more we seem to have a word consumed in instability. It has to be acknowledged that the word dystopia has appeared: "… through confusion of its [utopia] first syllable with the Greek eu as in euphemism or eulogy" (Carey, 1999, xi). However, I will use dystopia to mean a ‘bad place’ for the sake of representation, though a utopia can be seen to denote both good and bad. Using Paul Auster’s novel In The Country of Last Things (1987) I intend to illustrate the dystopian effects caused by a city that literally stops working, within the constructs of Auster’s novel. However, it can be suggested that Auster does not seem to focus on the now and here but the then and there.

With every city in the world there are two visions. These visions can be expressed as a town planner’s vision and the real; the real being an integration of both. When venturing to Paris I bought a tourist map to direct me through the city. It was complete with routes that encompassed all the main attractions. In one day it was plausible to see all the highlights, from the Eiffel Tower to the Moulin Rouge. I decided to travel on the Metro and picked up a map of the underground. When comparing both maps I noticed the Metro had considerably more lines and destinations. What seemed to have happened was that the makers of the tourist map had airbrushed out any destinations that were not deemed fit for a tourist. My holiday could be seen as not a holiday in the real city of Paris but a holiday in a fabricated, ‘safe’ Paris. Fabrication and the loss of a ‘real’ are looked at extensively in Jean Baudrillard’s essay Simulacra and Simulations (1988). In his essay he also examines maps and their relation to a fabrication of reality:

What is seen in a map may not be a total representation of what can be perceived as a real city; this idea can also help to understand the concept of how Town planners have a vision and the reality of that vision once the city is constructed and the public are living within it’s confines.

When an idea of a city is conceived there is a fixed idea of how the city that is created will look and be. It is the development of the city and the people within it that cannot be fixed and developed beforehand:

It is Jane Jacobs’s point that can be seen in any city. The actual city may not be alive but its inhabitants are and it is they that control the space each of them have and how much they respect that space. I took Jacobs’s quote to mean that when a city is constructed there are already areas that have been labelled. These areas would have been labelled due to the price given to housing in that area and in turn the type of people that will eventually live there. This may be the case but, as we can see from the quote, economy does not seem to be the reason some parts of a city ‘decay’.

Some town planners within the cities that they propose do not take in to consideration that something will go wrong. Jacobs felt this to be true with Ebenezer Howard; an English court reporter who felt that the living conditions in nineteenth century London were unacceptable: "He not only hated the wrongs and the mistakes he hated the city and thought it an outright evil and an affront to nature that so many people should get themselves in an agglomeration" (Jacobs, 1964, 27). What Howard proposed was his utopia. He wanted to divert the overpopulation of London to the countryside. This was one of the first times that the notion of the city was questioned. Up until then the city was doing its given job of taking a mass of people and housing them next to their jobs in industry. Howard found this process intolerable and decided he would build a ‘Garden City’. Jacobs comments that: "As in all Utopias, the right to have plans of any significance belonged only to the planners in charge" (Jacobs, 1964, 27). This was his idea and Howard seemed unaware of anyone else involved. Jacobs continues to explain that Howard’s Garden City: "… sent spinning powerful and city -destroying ideas" (Jacobs, 1964, 28). Jacobs saw Howard’s plan as very static. According to Jacobs he wanted his plan to be the final say on the city and only if totally necessary would he make subsequent changes and these changes would only be minor. Jacobs also thought that Howard did believe that his planning was not authoritarian but more paternalistic; also that Howard was not interested in any aspects of the city that could be seen as distant to his utopian ideas. Two things that can be seen to have a strong force in any city are policing and politics. These were the two things, according to Jacobs, which Howard stayed away from, as he believed that he was not designing a city for that kind of life. Howard made two Garden cities that still remain, Letchworth and Welwyn. Howard showed how diverse the ideas of what can be labelled as a city. Howard envisioned a city at one with nature: " Howard made sense in his own terms but none in terms of city planning. Yet virtually all modern city planning has been adapted from… this silly substance" (Jacobs, 1964, 29).

For Jacobs, Howard made no sense with his city planning. With this taken into consideration why did Howard feel that a garden city would be so successful? To begin with it must be taken in to account why he wanted to change the way people lived. London in the middle of the nineteenth century was: "…the largest city in the world, a plural city which encompassed almost every type of city and was supreme in each" (Waller, 1983, 24). Industry meant a huge influx of people came to London. This in turn brought a severe division in social class, between the rich and the poor. With the poor being the workers in the industry they usually stayed close to the factories living in squalid tenement buildings. This meant that pollution in these areas of London was rife. Howard wanted to change this way of life for the workers and actually build a city around their needs both physically and emotionally. Howard envisioned this and argued why his Garden City would be gratifying economically to the manufacturer:

Within every city there seems to be places of deviation. A city may have an outer structure of roads, alleyways and buildings but it is within that fixed structure that these deviations seem to occur. Jacobs sees these deviations as diversity: "Public and quasi –public bodies are responsible for some of the enterprise that help make up city diversity- for instance, parks, museums, schools…" (Jacobs, 1964, 255). This idea of diversity in a city can be seen to be closely related to Michel Foucault’s (1980) much more recent postmodern concept of heterotopias. Both Jacobs and Foucault seem to be examining similar themes concerning places that go against the grain of the city: " For Foucault heterotopias constitute a discontinuous but socially defined spatiality…" (Gennocchio, 1996, 38). Some examples he gives are: "…Brothels, churches, hotel rooms, schools, museums, libraries, prisons, asylums…" (Gennochio, 1996, 38). This is a list very similar to the ‘city diversity’ places of Jacobs.

The word heterotopia was coined by Foucault and was originally employed in his essay, The Order Of Things (1980). The word was first used to describe clusters of words that go against the structure of language. The word can be seen as Foucault’s opposition to utopia:

It was within Foucault’s essay, Of Other Spaces (1986) where heterotopias were lifted from within language to become a word that represents physical places as well. Foucault’s heterotopia is vital to postmodern thinking. Foucault was interested in, as the title of his essay suggests ‘other spaces’. He believed these spaces: "… have the curious property of being in relation to all the other sites in such a way to suspect, neutralise or invert the set of relations that they happen to disintegrate, mirror or reflect" (Foucault, 1986, 24). These other spaces were broken down into two types, utopias and heterotopias. In relation to space a utopia, according to Foucault, is without any actual locality but is a: " ‘Direct or inverted analogy’ with the ‘real’ space of society…" (Gennochio, 1996, 37). Heterotopias, according to Foucault are real, their function:

Foucault’s heterotopias and utopias are very similar in what they represent. As Foucault suggested they both seem to put a mirror up to the jumbled up inadequacies of our society. A utopia shows it with a fictional representation that inverts society; a heterotopia does it within the society by reflecting how unorganised spaces can be against the regulated institutionalised space that the heterotopia represents.

The previously examined examples of heterotopias show how different heterotopias can be within a city but they are all linked as they are: "… real existing places that are ‘formed in the very founding of society,’ as part of the presuppositions of social life" (Soja, 1995, 14). A heterotopia to Foucault has many different guises. One, which is significant to the city, is the idea that they must have a system of opening and closing: "Entry and exits are regulated in many ways; by compulsion or by illusions of freedom" (Soja, 1995, 16). We can see this with the examples given: a school and prison can be seen as compulsion, a museum and library can be seen as illusions of freedom. The notion of an entrance and exit is that of entering a different place, a place with new rules to abide by no matter how slight as in a library or how oppressive as in a prison. The notion that a heterotopia is an anti- utopia can be seen as again going against the grain of the ideals that town planners may have when trying to create a new city. Heterotopias can be seen to be bubbles of atmosphere that clash within the outlining atmosphere of the city. These institutions are regulated and controlled unlike the society on the other side of the heterotopia. Foucault never finished his idea about heterotopias, which makes the word seem as against the grain of meaning as its own meaning represents.

Before examining Paul Auster’s In the Country Of Last Things, there is a quotation by Oliver Wendell Holmes Jnr (No Date Given) that begins Jane Jacobs book. This quote can be seen to have justification alongside the themes that arise from Auster’s novel:

What I have presented so far in this chapter is one person’s version of a utopian city and another’s version of real life anti- utopias. I wanted to focus on Auster’s novel last as it can be seen as a vision of a city always nearing the end. What the quote by Holmes Jnr suggests is that we are all on the brink of despair. This is an idea that cannot be commented on enough and with the recent events of the eleventh of September World Trade Centre attacks we can see the extremes of what can happen. When the economic epicentre of New York and the western world was brought to a standstill we saw a city grind to a halt via our television screens. It does not even take something as big as a terrorist attack to do this, recently in Britain there was a week of London Underground strikes that seemed to turn the city upside down. When something is taken away, such as movement of money or movement of people, life for some seems to turn to despair. Auster’s city can be seen as an echo of what can happen.

Earlier I proposed that Auster’s novel did not focus on the now and here but the then and there. This was pointed out, as Auster’s comments in an interview about the book seem interesting:

This is a novel of a dystopian city. The text is presented to us as a letter written by the protagonist Anna Blume but given in the third person. This shows that the letter is being read to us and found its way out of the prison-like city. The name Blume is significant: we have a woman who comes to an unknown city and learns to understand how to live in a society completely different to the one she left behind. She is a women ‘coming to full bloom’ throughout the letter: "The city was new for me back then, and I always seem to be lost… I had no other method as the others seemed to have, no sense of what would be where and when. It takes years living in a city to get to that point…" (Auster, 1987, 34-35).

The city portrayed in the novel is economically and politically barren. It could almost be an effect of an Ebenezer Howard Garden City vision according to Jane Jacobs. Anna Blume has to scavenge to survive. This scavenging can be compared to the way a homeless person would survive in any major city. Scavenging is not uncommon in any city but the extent of the scavenging that is seen in the book is. Nearly everyone scavenges to survive, this is why Blume needs a good knowledge of the city to survive. Due to the stoppage of any production within the city the idea of buying commodities is something of the past. This takes us back to the idea of what is a city. For most cities consumption and production are the undercurrent of a cities survival; they are what keeps a city working:

The cities desolation has brought everyday objects to a point of recognising them as food, clothing, strength and survival. There is no longer a need for brands or types, the objects are stripped down to what Karl Marx (1844) would call their use- value.

Tim Woods in his essay "Looking for signs in the air": Urban space and the postmodern in In The Country Of Last things (1995) explores how urban space is seen in the novel. He states that:

Woods comments on the way space is used in the novel by the characters. We find out there a number of death sects within the city. These are the only formal groups to go to. The sects are varied but most actually parody what one would find in any city. The runners are the most obvious. They use the space of the whole city to literally run themselves to death. This is seen as a privilege as there is nothing else to look forward in relation to living in the city. Within the novel it can be seen that no matter what space you believe is yours there is always somebody to take it away. Anna Blume witnesses this first- hand after the death of Isabelle, her friend with whom she lived with and scavenged for: "The housebreakers forced the door open and then crossed the threshold… Isabelle had been dead for only two days, and already the neighbours had pounced" (Auster, 1987, 84). This idea leads to questions about belongings and what is rightfully ones own. This can also be seen with the scavengers; they are collecting objects that they have no real right over.

Blume finds solace in the form of a library within the novel. The library is the first place she runs to after surviving a fire that she thinks has killed her boyfriend. The library can be seen as an illustration, as Foucault suggested, of a heterotopia, the notion of the calm within the library contrasting and in turn emphasising the disarray of the cities society: " "You can’t come in here," he said impatiently. "This is the library"… This was the first time I had been in the National Library. It was a splendid edifice… one of the landmark buildings of the city" (Auster, 1987, 93/94). It is in the regulated institution, in which Blume breeches the no entry code for non-members of the library, that Blume meets the last remaining Jews living in the city. She is not welcome within the library until she tells them that she too is of Jewish origin, thus cementing an alliance and a sense of belonging in a city where nobody really feels they belong to. This occurrence seems to emphasise the contrast of unknown dangers of the city with the illusion of safety within the library as a heterotopia.

Wood’s continues in his essay to comment on the way characters use the space of the city. He cites Michel De Certeau (1988) and his notion of Wandersmanner (Walkers), a notion already examined in chapter one of this study, in the spatiality of the city environment: "The act of walking is to the urban system what the speech act is to language or the statement uttered" (De Certeau, 1988, 124). This idea can be represented by the langue and the parole; langue being the formal speech act and parole being the particular speech act that an individual uses. This is used in relation to individual walking patterns through the city. By walking your own route (parole) you condemn parts of the city to inertia.

There are numerous theorists whose theories on literature have been adapted to understand the whole notion of the city. In this chapter I have mentioned Foucault and De Certeau who have done just that. In The Country Of Last Things is no exception; the whole novel can be seen as a metaphor for language. Language evolves with time. There is numerous jargon that seeps into everyday speech; these words may be from military origin or more than likely technological advancement. What Auster can be seen to have done is portrayed an opposite to this notion, a dystopia about the end of words. The, ‘last things’ the title of the novel refers to can be seen as words and their meaning:

The whole book feels immersed in the fear of recycling until there is nothing left; the recycling of objects until they disappear and with them disappearing so does the word. The letter is a way of holding on to the words that are still left to describe the city. However, eventually the words will run out to:

As commented earlier, it does not matter how much description is given we will never totally understand Auster’s dystopia. As with Ebenezer Howard, he had an idea for his utopian city and built it to his expectations. The people who live in his cities will never feel that they are living in a utopia as they are not Howard. They may hate where they live and depending on their status they could be like Anna Blume, scavenging to stay alive.

Jaques Derrida in his Essay Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences (1988) talks of the multiplicity of language. Derrida believes that language is uncertain. Using the idea of a pun we can see the multiplicity that Derrida comments on. If we are uncertain about our language then we become anxious. The city Anna Blume inhabits is a personification of that uncertainty: "These are the last things. A house is there one day, and the next day it is gone. A street you walked down yesterday is no longer there today" (Auster, 1987, 1). There is no meaning to the structure of the city. Anna never understands the city as it’s meaning is in constant flux. The only constant is the palindrome of Anna’s name, a name that is in complete circulation with itself, a word with constant meaning. Anna can be seen as the beginning of meaning to the city’s end of meaning. Like the word utopia the meaning of words are in constant change. With living in a city environment there is a constant change in the faces seen and the experiences had. Auster’s novel can be seen as fiction steeped in fact. Woods sees the book as:

This is very apt and in keeping with the, already mentioned, working title Auster used for the book.

Cities, whether in literature or real life, can be seen as intricate places to understand. The concept of the city may start on the desk of planners such as Howard under the working title of utopia but, unlike Auster’s control within his writing, once the city is built there can be no real control of how the inhabitants lead their lives. It can be seen within Auster’s dystopian vision, that its inhabitants are a vital part of the city and in some respects are the city.

An ever-recurring theme in Paul Auster’s novels sees the main characters seemingly enter a period of change that concludes with them losing their identity. In ‘City Of Glass’, Quinn ends up as an outcast and then literally vanishes. This is similar in In The Country Of Last Things; Anna Blume also vanishes whilst trying to relinquish herself from the surroundings of a city that is in constant change. This vanishing can be seen as a trope of the urban nothingness that Auster seems to present in his novels:

This study of the city and Auster’s work has taken two aspects of the city and superimposed these theories onto two of Auster’s novels. The city may not always be the main focus of an Auster novel but it is still interwoven throughout the narrative, as in The New York Trilogy, acting as a means for the change of characters within the prose.

Using the theories of the flâneur and the detective, chapter one has shown how Auster’s character Quinn can be seen to take on the traits of these theories. Quinn is seen as a man of the crowd: "The crowd… is the veil through which the well known city appears to the flâneur as phantasmagoria" (Benjamin, 1982, 147). Quinn sees the opposite of the phantasmagoria, a dream- like vision where everything is engulfed and is changed to a state of nothingness, especially in himself, who after a change of identity from the flâneur to the detective means a total loss of identity and ending in the total loss of his self.

It was in the second chapter where there was an analysis of Anna Blume, the protagonist of In The Country Of Last Things; she is an Auster character in constant hope of finding her brother and it is within her urban environment where this hope fades and like the objects used in the city her life is stripped of any meaning other than that of survival:

The inclusion of heterotopias within Auster’s work, as has been commented on in the chapter, puts a mirror up to this negativity and thus emphasises the nothingness frequent in Auster’s prose.

The chapters presented in this study have shown two aspects of the city from separate perspectives. The two aspects that have been examined cover the city as a construct and an examination into some of the many characters found in a city’s populace. It was necessary to include both these aspects, as they are both inherent within Auster’s work and are the best to represent a rounded notion of the many city theories.

The devastating premise of an Auster city, especially to the solitary individual, is so overwhelming that what the protagonist ends up being is nothing, an absolute in the constant change of a city environment. For some, this is true when living in an extra-textual city:

Auster does not loathe city- life; he is accustomed to city life. Auster writes about the power of chance, such as the chance phone call that begins The New York Trilogy. His book are not a moralistic conjecture on the city, but a modern day look at a stripped down city, stripped of its brash and left with merely it’s streets and it’s people, which act only as maps for Stilllman’s words. Auster’s characters would not work if they were living in any other surroundings than a city. Auster needs the alienation of a city: "To live in a city is to live in a community of people who are strangers to each other" (Raban, 1975, 15).

Auster’s work balances between the modern and the postmodern. His literature takes away the thought and meaning from traditions such as religion and shows that there is no absolute truth: "The question is the story itself, and whether it means anything is not for the story to tell" (Auster, 1987, 3). He uses modernist paradigms such as the flâneur in ‘City of Glass’ and the quest narrative in In The Country of Last Things; Auster tackles modernist themes such as alienation within a city but underlines these themes with self- reflection and a playful parody of the detective genre and the anti- utopia genre. Auster merges fact and fiction, autobiography and artifice. His work is not read to understand a city like New York, it may even be seen as a superficial look at a city but it is Auster’s contemplation, complete with streets and alleyways that lead the reader to Auster’s vision.

Walter Benjamin saw the city as a "… space of intoxication, of excitement and distraction…" (Gilloch, 1997, 19). Auster has created cities that encompass all of these descriptions but he seems to have intoxicated his cities with an excitement and distraction of nothingness that exuberates every word on every page of his prose.

Auster, P., (1987). In The Country Of Last Things, London: Faber and Faber, 1992.

Auster, P., (1987). The New York Trilogy, London: Faber and Faber, 1992.

Primary Texts on The City

Foucault, M., 1986. Of Other Spaces, Diatricts, Spring.

Jacobs, J., (1961). The Death and Life of Great Cities: The Failure of Town Planning, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1964.

Tester, K., 1994. The Flâneur, London: Routledge.

Auster, P., 1997. The Art Of Hunger, London: Faber and Faber.

Auster, P., (1989) Moon Palace, London: Faber and Faber, 1992.

Barone, D.,1996. Beyond The Red Notebook, Pennsylvania: University of Pennsylvania Press.

Baudelaire, C., (1964). The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays, ed and trans. Jonathon Mayne. London: Da Capo Press, 1986.

Baudrillard, Jean, 1988. ‘Simulacra and Simulations’ in Baudrillard, Jean, Selected Writings, Cambridge: Polity Press.

Beevers, R., 1998. The Garden City Utopia: A critical Biography of Ebenezer Howard, Hampshire, Macmillan.

Benjamin, Walter,

Bentham, J., (1843). Cited in Foucault, Michel, (1975). Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1991.

Brand, Dana, 1990. ‘From The Flâneur To The Detective: Interpreting The City Of Poe’, in Bennett, T., Popular Fiction: Technology, Ideology, Production, Reading, Routledge: London.

Carey, John, 1999. The Faber Book of Utopias, London: Faber and Faber.

Christofides, R., 2001. Seminar: Foucault, Discipline and Punish II; Kafka, ‘In the Penal Colony’, University Of Plymouth.

Cousins, Mark and Hussain, Athar, 1984. Michel Foucault: Theoretical Traditions in Social Sciences, Hampshire: Macmillan.

DeCertau, M., 1988. The Practice Of Everyday Life, Berkley: Uni of California Press.

Derrida, Jacques, 1988. ‘Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences’ in Lodge, D., Modern Criticism and Theory, London: Longman.

Foucault, Michel, (1975). Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1991.

Foucault, Michel, (1975). ‘Panopticism’ in Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1991.

Foucault, Michel, 1980. The Order of Things, New York: Vintage.

Frisby, D., 1994. ‘The Flâneur in Social Theory’, in Tester, K., The Flâneur, London: Routledge, 1994.

Genocchio, Benjamin, 1996. ‘Discourse, Discontinuity, Difference: The Question of ‘Other’ Spaces’ in Gibson, Katherine and Watson, Sophie, Postmodern Cities and Spaces, Oxford: Blackwell.

Gibson, Katherine and Watson, Sophie, 1995. Postmodern Cities and Spaces, Oxford: Blackwells.

Gilloch, G., 1997. Walter Benjamin and the City, Cambridge: polity Press.

Herzogenrath, B.,1999. An Art Of Desire, Netherlands: Rodopi.

Lechte, John, 1996. ‘(Not) Belonging in Postmodern Space’ in Gibson, Katherine and Watson, Sophie, Postmodern Cities and Spaces, Oxford: Blackwell.

More, Thomas, 1965. Utopia, Harmondsworth: Penguin.

Munford, L., 1968. The Urban Prospect, England: Secker and Warburg.

Poe, Edgar Allan, 1978. Collected Works of Edgar Allan Poe, Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press.

Raban, Jonathon, 1975. Soft City, London: Fontana.

Rubin, Derek, 1995. ‘ "The Hunger Must be Persevered at all Cost": A Reading of The Invention of Solitude’ in Barone, D., Beyond The Red Notebook, Pennsylvania: University of Pennsylvania Press.

Soja, Edward, 1995. ‘Heterotopologies: A Remembrance of Other Spaces in the Citadel – LA’ in Gibson, Katherine and Watson, Sophie, Postmodern Cities and Spaces, Oxford: Blackwell.

Soja, Edward, 2000. Postmetropolis: Critical Studies of Cities and Regions, Oxford: Blackwell.

Sorapure, Madeleine, 1995. ‘The Detective and the Author: City of Glass in Barone, Dennis, Beyond the Red Notebook, Pennsylvania: University of Pennsylvania Press.

REF - Todorov, Tzvetan, 1981. The Typology of Detective Fiction

Toon, Ian, 2000. ‘Finding a Place in the Street: CCTV Surveillance and Young People’s use of Urban spaces’ in Haddour, Azzedine and Bell David, City Visions, Essex: Prentice Hall.

Waller, P. J., 1983. Town, City and Nation, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Woods, Tim, 1995. ‘ "Looking for Signs in the Air": Urban Space and the Postmodern in In The Country of Last Things’ in Barone, Dennis, Beyond the Red Notebook, Pennsylvania: University of Pennsylvania Press.