1. Masculinity and City Signs - Paranoid Mappings of City Space

Since The New York Trilogy was published 12 years ago, critics have primarily dealt with it in terms of an ”anti-novel” analyzing how Auster deconstructs total claims to meaning, truth and unity by Auster’s writing technique which denies any kind of certitude concerning these concepts and by the allegorical plots filled with detectives and criminals through its use of identifications and constant trading places seem to parodize the presumptions made by the conventional ”novel of quest” - detective fiction. My aim here is to explore how Auster represents masculinity and the desire behind discourses which produces it. In Auster’s novel there are constant battles between men over language signs and interpretation. I will deal with two of the three stories in the trilogy: City of Glass which depicts the struggle between two competing narratives, a scientist who is trying to create a perfect and absolute language and the detective who is following him in order to make sense of his project. Their battle is fought over the scientist’s son, whose identity the scientist has tried to control through a language experiment and who the detective is trying to save from his father. Secondly, in The Locked Room the narrator is trying to free himself from the overwhelming influence of a childhood friend, who seems to dictate his behaviour and identity, giving us a new version of the ”doppelganger”.

These stories are full of creative primal scenes, which take place between men struggling over the control and origination of meaning in language. The structures of the primal scenes are intrinsically paranoid as each character’s main aim is to deny introjection (intake of influence) from the other and instead try to project his view onto the competitor. It is exactly through this denial, however, that they fail to see connections between their own views and the others’ and instead of producing any real challenge to former mappings they repeat earlier ones. Auster, therefore, shows how the structure of masculinity is created through continuous primal scenes which sustain its shape, and which in their Oedipal triangularity take place between men. The connection between paranoia and masculinity in narratives with gothic elements has already been extensively theorized by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. In her readings, the attempt to create a homosocial order ( i.e. an order where the most important and evaluated bonds within and by society are those between men), leads to homophobia or ” homosexual panic” when the eroticized bonds or identifications between men become overtly sexualized, which according to her is at the root of paranoid masculinity. She argues that ”Particularly relevant for the Gothic novel is the perception Freud arrived at in the case of Dr. Schreber: that “paranoia is the psychosis that makes graphic the mechanisms of homophobia.” Though relying on Sedgwick’s for explorations of the linkages between patriarchal constructions of masculinity and paranoia and most specifically on her notion of the triangular shape of homosociality, I will deal with these relations in alternative ways, and analyze the implications of ”paternal singular procreation” in discourse. I will draw parallels between paranoia and the total schemes or metanarratives which are the locus for Auster’s critique, a connection which has been made since the occurrence of psychological metanarratives (as the self-reflexive moments in Freud’s own discourse seem to reveal in his famous case study of Schreber’s paranoia). To summarize some of the elements involved in paranoia: the ego has an overblown and exaggerated status as a centre from which and to which all connections in the world seem to flow, secondly there is a sense of being the first one to discover a conspiracy or total plot through which processes in the world can be understood; finally there is an overloading of meaning, where everything makes sense and can be explained through one masterful narrative.

Paranoia is intrinsically linked to what in psychoanalytical terms is called ”projective identification”, which in the terms of Laplanche and Pontalis is ”a mechanism revealed in phantasies in which the subject inserts his self-in whole or in part-into the object in order to harm, possess or control it”. It is connected to a view of the outside as persecutory and threatening when the aggressive parts invested in objects are viewed as turning back on the self.

”Projective identification” relates first of all to a splitting process of the early ego, where either good or bad parts of the self are split off from the ego and are as a further step projected in love or hatred into external objects which lead to fusion and identification of the paranoid parts of the self with the external objects. There are important paranoid anxieties related to these processes as the objects filled with aggressive parts of the self become persecuting and are experienced by the patient as threatening to retaliate by forcing themselves and the bad parts of the self which they contain back again into the ego.

There is a connection in The New York Trilogy between the creation of total and controlling narratives and paranoia. The megalomaniac projects characters in the novel attempt have destructive and annihilating results as they, by projecting a complete fantasy of unity onto objects in the outside world simultaneously arrive at what I will refer to as a fixity of signs - in other words, the paranoid narrative fixes an ultimate meaning onto language signs and arrive at a state of totality, but the second step is a fear of the possible harmful elements present in the constructed plot which then are felt to be persecuting. Paranoid narratives with their desire to control and possess, it can be argued, are responsible for the aggressive and destructive components of patriarchal constructions of masculinity.

In the beginning of City of Glass there is Daniel Quinn, a former poet and now writer of detective fiction who has closed himself off from any influence of the outside world as a result of mourning for his wife and son who were killed in a car crash years earlier. There is a mysterious phone call where an anonymous caller asks him for the detective Paul Auster and urges him to take on a case, at which point, for reasons which remain opaque to him, he assumes the identity of the latter. At the appointment the following day he finds out that the caller is a Peter Stillman jnr, the son of scientist Peter Stillman. Quinn’s first meeting with Stillman jr leaves a weird and unreal impression on him:

It seemed to Quinn that Stillman’s body had not been used for a long time and that all its functions had been relearned, so that motion had become a conscious process, each movement broken down into its component submovements, with the result that all flow and spontaneity had been lost. It was like watching a marionette trying to walk without strings.

Quinn at this moment also makes a personal connection, as meeting Stillman reminds him of his dead son, a repressed memory which he has managed not to think about for a long time: ”Instead it was a young man, dressed entirely in white, with the white-blond hair of a child. Uncannily, in the first moment, Quinn thought of his dead son”. Through a long and disconnected monologue from the traumatized Stillman , he finds

that his father had him locked up in a room for years as an experiment to make him speak the ”language of god”, the prelapsarian language (which man spoke in the Garden of Eden and which had an unequivocal relation between the signifier and the signified). Stillman’s idea is that the isolation from outside influence and what he perceives as the ”awful mess” of the contemporary world will reproduce the original state of innocence in his son. In a renewal of the ancient myth of origins which states the trinity of God- Father- Son as involved in creation, Stillman is trying to arrive at an act of singular paternal procreation. Triangular scenes between men are constantly reproduced in City of Glass and, in a new circularity the violence done to Stillman jnr, makes Quinn think of his son and the attempt to save him becomes, through an identification, also an attempt to try to resurrect and save his own son.

The attempt to create a being according to scientific ideas and ideals obviously has a long tradition in the gothic, Frankenstein being perhaps the most obvious example. With the rise of the industrial revolution and lately with technological innovations, fears arise concerning the new creations. As man’s creations become close to the complexity of his own psyche, this suggests that machines can be like humans, and, in a reversal twist, that men can be created as machines are. Simultaneously nineteenth century Jewish literature produced the figure of ”the golem” a figure of clay which a rabbi gave life to through speech as a symbol for a manmade creation, and which has been used in subsequent stories into the twentieth century:

The golem stands as the oldest and most successful story of paternal singularity. In this act of procreation, sexuality is erased and replaced by linguistic pronouncement, first meant to duplicate God’s act by creating man, and meant also as an illustration of the magical and cryptical power of words and the mysterious origins of life.

Stillman takes possession of his son as if he were indeed a mass of clay whose identity can be organized according to his own ideals. To achieve his end, to take full control of his son, Stillman has to isolate him from the world before he reaches the entry into language. He also has, suggestively enough, to obliterate the mother. Her death in the novel is veiled in disconcerting uncertainty, it is not clear whether she has committed suicide or been murdered by Stillman. The room in which Stillman locks up his son is therefore solely created and controlled by him, a paranoid attempt to control the space and objects through which his son will construe an identity, to make him into ”his own image”. Elisabeth Grosz , in her reading of Irigaray, argues that there is a tendency in patriarchal thought to this sort of paranoid domination of objects in spatial arrangements, and that this is the vehicle by which patriarchy perpetuates an exclusion of the female element:

Here Irigaray is not talking about specific men, nor even a general tendency in men (although this may in fact be appropriate), but rather, a tendency in phallocentric thought to deny and cover over the debt of life and existence that all subjects, and indeed all theoretical frameworks, owe to the maternal body, their elaborate attempts to foreclose and build over this space with their own (sexually specific) fantasmatic and paranoid projections.

Eventually Stillman is found out by the authorities and is locked away in a mental institution. Stillman is taken care of by a psychologist who marries him, to get him out of hospital and to fully take care of him herself. He is then turned into her life mission, as she tries to re-establish a new identity for him, Auster in this way refuses any absolute binary opposition between men and women in the attempt to recreate anew the subject.

As Stillman is being released from the institution, Stillman jr and his wife want Quinn to make sure that they are safe from any further involvement with the father. Quinn starts to follow Stillman around New York finding to his surprise that the old man collects broken objects from the street. In order to make sense of the man’s haphazard movements Quinn starts drawing a map of his wanderings and to his astonishment he finds himself with a map of letters. Stillman’s footsteps mark out the words ”Tower of Babel”. The Tower of Babel implies the attempt to unify men into a project to recreate a total and prelapsarian language where the name and what it signifies are one. Stillman is therefore still trying to realize his life-long project. At this point Quinn decides to confront Stillman about his project. Stillman explains the connection between his project and the broken objects he has been collecting, using the example of a broken umbrella which fails to perform its original function, therefore no longer being an umbrella, in his reasoning. To put the world back together again and to save it from the ”awful mess” it is in, Stillman argues that one needs to rename things, making it possible for the word to adequately describe the thing. In other words the perfect name for every object or feeling, must be found which involves a purification of signs. In this way, he denies the history of broken objects, the continuing influence of a historic signification attached to them and additionally, the diverse application of signs onto objects. Consequently he is also trying to deny the violent and disastrous effects his experiments have had in the past, as represented by Peter Stillman jr. Stillman tries as a scientist to create an official and complete language which will subsequently be used by others, a language imposed from above as a correct version. Deleuze and Guattari call this a desire to inhabit and create a ”major function” in language:

How many styles or genres or literary movements, even very small ones, have only one single dream: to assume a major function in language, to offer themselves as a sort of state language, an official language.

Stillman, therefore, tries to reinstate himself both as the originator and controller of meaning, an attempt which is justified by scientific pretensions. His view of himself and the world is close to what Freud writes on Schreber in his famous case study on paranoia: ”[Schreber} himself was ”the only real man left alive”, and the few human shapes that he still saw, the attendants, the other patients - he explained as being ”miracled up, cursorily improvised men”. Stillman tries to arrive at a fixed state in the flux of signs. The fixing of signs can be understood as a process in which the arbitrariness of meaning is denied, the arbitrary connection between signifier and signified being ignored by reference to absolute criteria outside history. In this sense Auster’s inherent critique of the Stillman project seems be the same critique that Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick has located in the Argentinian writer Borges:

This view of meaning as a process deeply embedded in the temporal, psychological, and cultural states of each of two parties seems to point toward the Wittgensteinian denial that there is such a thing as meaning, ”the intangible something; only comparable to consciousness itself”, of which view he says, ”it is, as it were, a dream of our language”. It is ”to try to purify, to sublime, the signs themselves”. It is the dream from which Wittgenstein is trying to awaken us, the dream which Borges is trying to make more vivid to us.

Stillman is trying to lay down the law for a ”proper language” the criteria for which seem God-given and eternal. This would mean freezing social structures, and denying the power structures inherent in language, as it were, the ways language can be used to suppress members with alternative class, gender and race. Quinn by doggedly trailing Stillman, fails to grasp the implication of his project, the intention of it.

For Stillman had not left his message anywhere. True, he had created the letters by the movements of his steps, but they had not been written down. It was like drawing a picture in the air with your finger. The image vanishes as you are making it. There is no result, no trace to mark what you have done. And yet, the pictures did exist-not in the streets where they had been drawn, but in Quinn’s red notebook.

The crime in City of Glass is never detected by Quinn, for whom Stillman’s motives remain opaque. The implication of the crime can be found in the totalitarian map Stillman is attempting to create, by replacing earlier and alternative mappings with his own . The mess he sees around him is due to multiple and contradictory mappings and worldviews which fail to create a complete picture , and, as identity and language are intrinsically linked, Stillman is attempting to undo alternative writings and identities by extinguishing them from his map, which amounts to a symbolic murder. The paranoia inherent in his project can be explained as a projection of his fantasies of plenitude onto signs outside him, in order to possess and control their meanings.

The meeting between Stillman and Quinn can be read as a primal scene. Marshall Berman comments in his All That is Solid Melts Into Air on how Dostojevsky and Baudelaire create primal scenes set in the street where members of different classes are confronted and act out a social struggle:

Both writers are original in creating what I have called primal modern scenes: everyday encounters in the city that are raised to first intensity (as Eliot put it in his essay on Baudelaire), to the point where they express fundamental possibilities and pitfalls, allures and impasses of modern life.

It seems significant here that Stillman is a totalitarian scientist who is trying to give an authoritarian writing of the streets, while Quinn is the ”little man”, the ordinary citizen who fails to grasp the implications of the former’s project. It first appears to him as senseless and random and later as unbelievable and incredible. The postmodern world, with all its confusing multiplicities and endless production of information, implies that the one in charge or with any capacity to organize it becomes part of a new upper class. Allen Lloyd Smith writes:

What is the parallel in postmodern fiction to the superstitious dread of Catholicism, monkishness and the Inquisition? Contemporary scientific materialism opens the possibility of what exceeds our understanding; the system running itself, for itself; and hence generates antihumanism, plots beyond comprehension. (16)

When Quinn tries to confront Stillman he takes on the role of his son, (which mirrors the inherent power structure between them),an assumed identity through which he less achieves a confrontation than a re-enactment of a classic father and son division.

In the final section of the novel, when Stillman has disappeared and Quinn fails to make any contact with Stillman jr and his wife, he stays outside their house for months, obsessively refusing to give up the case even though both his criminal and employers have disappeared. In the final passage he enters the house he has been surveying and finds it empty. He locks himself in one of the rooms and starts writing in his red notebook.

He felt that his words had been severed from him, that now they were part of the world at large, as real and specific as a stone, or a lake, or a flower...He wondered if he had it in him to write without a pen, if he could learn to speak instead, filling the darkness with his voice, speaking the words into the air, into the walls, into the city, even if the light never came back again.

Quinn has thus turned the initial struggle with Stillman over the writing of signs, in a primal scene, into a repetitive movement rather than a challenge, as he dreams of his words being part of the world as pure signs without differentiation, without any interpretative division between himself and his reader, like Stillman wanting to lay down, as a law, a singular and only meaning. We have here, therefore, what on the surface looks like a division of roles between criminal and detective, between reinstator and challenger of the former’s mapping of meaning, instead something like a repetition of structure. Quinn has not managed to challenge the father, but through a repetition of an Oedipal scene managed to recreate the premises for patriarchy.

In The Locked Room Auster uses the figure of the doppelganger to highlight certain aspects of masculinity in the form of a complex relationship between an unnamed narrator and his childhood friend and idealized hero, Fanshawe. The double has, as is well known, a rich tradition in nineteenth century fiction and has served different representative purposes. According to Marie-Helene Huet its appearance sprung from the figure of the golem discussed in the last section:

The notion that the golem is a more primitive version of ourselves was developed in the early nineteenth century by the German Romantics, who used this figure as a doppelganger or double, to represent the co-existence and conflict of reason and unreason in the human condition. With the advent of psychoanalysis, the golem, in turn, came to represent the Id. Drawing on both these traditions, twentieth century artists gave the Golem new life as a doppelganger and alter ego in the Expressionist and Neo-Expressionist movements.

While Auster indeed draws on both these traditions, and while the influence Fanshawe has on the narrator can be explained in the enormous influence of the Id on a weakening ego, their relationship, as Stephen Bernstein has pointed out, in ”Auster’s Sublime Closure” fit perfectly into Sedgwick’s analysis of gothic paranoia. She writes:

To begin with, however, it is true that the limited group of fictions that represent the ”classic” early Gothic contains a large subgroup - CalebWilliams, Frankenstein, Confessions of a Justified Sinner, probably Melmuth, possibly The Italian - whose plots might be mapped almost point for point onto the case of Dr. Schreber: more saliently, each is about one or more males who not only is persecuted by, but considers himself transparent to and often under the compulsion of, another male”

Fanshawe, as we will see, can be understood as the narrator’s idealized and ideological mirror image of masculinity which he partly identifies with, but in a double-bind always conducts an inner battle with. The complicated interaction between the narrator and Fanshawe is mapped out clearly in the first paragraph of the novel:

It seems to me now that Fanshawe was always there. He is the place where everything begins for me, and without him I would hardly know who I am. We met before we could talk, babies crawling through the grass in diapers, and by the time we were seven we had pricked our fingers with pins and made ourselves blood brothers for life. Whenever I think of my childhood now, I see Fanshawe. He was the one who was with me, the one who shared my thoughts, the one I saw whenever I looked up from myself.

There are therefore two Fanshawes dealt with, the narrator’s internalized image and Fanshawe outside him, who in the entire novel runs on a parallel line to the narrator and who he alternatively tries to forget or track down. In this way the technique Auster uses leads to endless doublings in the narrative.

There is, as Bernstein has noted a gap between the endless monologues by characters who fail to make sense, who think everything in life is designed by chance and moreover that anything can happen, and, in opposition to this, the structure inherent in their relationship to others which is incredibly repetitive and inevitable, fatalistic almost.

The novel’s narrators speaks almost obsessively of life’s meaninglessness; ”each life is no more than the seem of contingent facts, a chronicle of chance intersections, of flukes, of random events that divulge nothing but their own lack of purpose”...”[e]very life is inexplicable”,...”[l]ives make no sense. Posed against this almost nihilistic bravado is the unavoidable fact that the narrator’s life is being steered by Fanshawe.

Bernstein only mentions the connection between the narrator and his masculine ideal in passing but I would like here to examine more closely the implications this structure has for the creation of masculinity in The Locked Room.

The obsession with Fanshawe starts anew for the narrator when he is contacted by Fanshawe’s wife. It turns out that Fanshawe has disappeared and left behind him unpublished literary material to which he wants the narrator to respond to. After not having heard from Fanshawe for many years, the narrator is suddenly left in charge to decide whether the former’s lifework is worth publishing and, if it is not, to destroy it. Even though he is flattered by the task he has been assigned by Fanshawe, the duty also weighs heavily on his consciousness:

There was no difference in my mind between giving the order to destroy Fanshawe’s work and killing him with my own hands. I had been given the power to obliterate, to steal a body from its grave and tear it to pieces.

There is here, as well as in City of Glass a connection between the written word and identity, and a capacity to undo or resurrect a person’s identity through writing. In the Locked Room, however this writing process, or the leaving of traces, the inscription of presence is marked onto diverse female bodies. Female bodies function in the narrative more or less as empty spaces, material for the battle of primal inscription between the narrator and Fanshawe. Indeed it is the leaving of traces continuously and obsessively which is the essence of this struggle, which corresponds to the divisions between the sexes as active and passive, productive and reproductive and their assigned value schemes. As Hannah Arendt writes: ”Contempt for laboring originally {arose} out of a passionate striving for freedom from necessity and a no less passionate impatience with every effort that left no trace, no monument, no great work worthy of remembrance” The battles between the narrator and Fanshawe over inscription of territory are presented as continuous primal scenes, which begins with their loss of virginity at a prostitute’s:

I could only think of one thing: that my dick was about to go into the same place that Fanshawe’s was now. Then it was my turn, and to this day I have no idea what the girl’s name was.

The pattern of ”sharing women” continues when the narrator falls in love with Fanshawe’s wife. After his disappearance she has chosen to believe that Fanshawe is dead whereas the narrator knows that this is not the case as Fanshawe has kept in touch with him by letter. Nevertheless he keeps this a secret and convinces Sophie to divorce Fanshawe and marry him. The third occasion when the narrator perpetuates this pattern is the most disturbing one. At a visit to Fanshawe’s mother they end up in bed together:

As I came into her the second time - the two of us covered with sweat, groaning like creatures in a nightmare - I finally understood this. I wanted to kill Fanshawe. I wanted Fanshawe to be dead, and I was going to do it. I was going to track him down and kill him.

In this primal scene the narrator, on the one hand, is attempting to erase Fanshawe’s trace and reinscribe himself in his place, while, on the other hand, he is using Jane Fanshawe to injure her son. In this dizzying spectacle though it seems to the narrator as if she is using him as well to get to Fanshawe, as if they were killing him together:

Recently I’ve begun to wonder if she didn’t somehow sense a hatred in me for Fanshawe that was just as strong as her own. 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 Fanshawe - like fucking her own son - and in the darkness of this sin, she would have him again - but only in order to destroy him.

This is simultaneously the narrator’s wish, to resurrect Fanshawe, or the memory of him, which is done by sexual acts and by writing. The way the narrator makes use of diverse women for this purpose seems to correspond to what Gayle Rubin has written on the exchange of women as goods in The Traffic in Women: Notes on the ”Political Economy” of Sex

Every relationship between male kin is defined by the woman between them. If power is a male prerogative, and must be passed on, it must go through the woman-in-between. Marshall Sahlins (personal communication) once suggested that the reason women are so often defined as stupid, polluting, disorderly, silly, profane, or whatever, is that such categorizations define women as ”incapable” of possessing the power which must be transferred through them.

It is by virtue of Fanshawe the women gain importance to the narrator as they are vehicles in his endless and phantasmic battle with his ideal.

The narrator never actually gets to meet Fanshawe after his disappearance and it is only through a cryptic note he finds out that he is still alive. The image of Fanshawe is simultaneously connected to the idea of a ”locked room” outside the narrator and inside his head where Fanshawe resides:

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. That was the extent of it: Fanshawe alone in that room - condemned to a mythical solitude - living perhaps, breathing perhaps, dreaming God knows what. This room I now discovered, was located inside my skull.

The narrator cannot gain access to this image as he feels he can only get close to Fanshawe through repetition of his accomplishments, in his personal project which in an abbreviation entails ”repeat to compete” as it were. We have, in the text, many gothic metaphors of death and graves, of killing and resurrection in the narrators attempt to gain access to Fanshawe. It is after he has got Fanshawe’s work published and gets hired to write Fanshawe’s biography by the publisher that this attempt to get through to him by words seems impossible: ”I felt like a man who has signed away his soul” is his instant reaction. It soon becomes clear that he is bringing the ideal Fanshawe in his head to resurrection in the text and the boundary between them becomes increasingly blurred. ”I was digging a grave after all, and there were times when I began to wonder if I was not digging my own”. In a complex interaction, bringing Fanshawe back to life, also means ”the return of the repressed”, bringing the aggressive and violent feelings that this sadistic ideal has caused him into the light. Whereas the narrator is trapped in a blind struggle with his ideal it is his wife who sees the connection clearly. Sophie comments on the transformation in two exacting phrases: ”Don’t you see what’s happening. Your bringing him back to life”and I sometimes can see you vanishing before my eyes” As an allegory of writing, we can see how the narrator conjured up the image of Fanshawe, which has nothing to do with the Fanshawe of the present time, and then by falling under its sway, in a repetitive movement falls back on an earlier order. In a regressive way sadistic and aggressive drives then take over his entire existence. As Sedgwick writes in relation to another novel:

Between the conflicted blood- and property- bond to his brother outside, and the far more conflicted bond of narcissistic fascination with the murderous ’inner” brother, Robert becomes only the barest membrane of a person: a mere, murderous, potential, violent against men and women alike, and incapable of being seized and used by and in the service of any social force.

The narrator reaches this state in Paris where he has gone with the intention to research Fanshawe’s past but also to escape from the situation in New York where his wife is a witness to his disintegration. He feels himself more and more losing track of himself. Here the classic gothic narrative of descent follows, as descent into an underworld of uncontrollable and instantly gratified desires in a foreign and alien landscape:

I see myself prowling the rue Saint-Denis at night, picking out prostitutes to sleep with, my head burning with the thought of bodies, an endless jumble of naked breasts, naked thighs, naked buttocks. I see my cock being sucked, I see myself on a bed with two girls kissing each other, I see an enormous black woman spreading her legs on a bidet and washing her cunt. I will not try to say that these things are not real, that they did not happen. It’s just that I can’t account for them. I was fucking the brains out of my head, drinking myself into another world. But if the point was to obliterate Fanshawe, then my binge was a success. He was gone - and I was gone along with him.

In other words when he manages to obliterate Fanshawe temporarily he loses track of himself or his identity completely, and all sorts of repressed material starts to surface, as in the case of the ”enormous black woman” as a symbol of horror that haunts him. In this episode which consists of coldly narrated and abject imagery everything that the Fanshawe ideal hid and excluded takes him over. Bernstein writes that ”the enormous black woman would appear to be a rather awkward metaphor by the narrator to figure the immensity of the darkness he has entered.” Perhaps it is possible, however, to read the ideal’s close connection with the series of locked rooms and bourgeois privacy as a violent exclusion and veiling of the social structures which have created and sustained it. When an ideal dies its violent side-effects come to the surface.

At the end the narrator reaches the room where Fanshawe has locked himself up. Fanshawe is on the other side of the door, and refuses to show himself. As a final gesture he pushes the last book he’s written under the door.

These were not the words of a man who regretted anything. He had answered the question by asking another question, and therefore everything remained open, unfinished, to be started again. I lost my way after the first word, and from then I could only grope ahead, faltering in the darkness, blinded by the book that had been written for me.

The narrator then tears up the book, page by page, standing on the train station ready for a new departure. It is not clear however how Fanshawe will continue to influence him or whether this erasure of his words will amount to another violent reinscription of his own identity. With reference to writing it is possible to see this exercise as the constant erasure and preservation of meaning which Alison Russell has analyzed as one of the trilogy’s themes:

Since language is unstable and its meaning indeterminate, no place can be completely claimed or owned by its discoverer. The uncertainty of language also denies the self-exploring traveller access to an absolute origin, or self.

Simultaneous to what this claim amounts to the trilogy also explores how paranoid patterns of masculinity perpetuate themselves, even if patriarchs do not find any origins to justify their claims, the structure of masculinity is nevertheless repeated. This seems to coincide with Sedgwick’s comment on Marx and ideology:

In German Ideology, Marx suggests that the function of ideology is to conceal contradictions in the status quo by, for instance, recasting them into a diachronic narrative of origins. Corresponding to that function, one important structure of ideology is an idealizing appeal to the outdated values of an earlier system, in defense of a later system that in practice undermines the material basis of those values.

We have seen how the protagonists’ struggle with an ideal masculinity continuously takes on new forms, and how its order though obsolete influences any movement or change in his life.

Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. Between Men - English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire. 91.

Frosh, Stephen. Identity Crisis - Modernity, Psychoanalysis and the Self. (London: Mac Millan Education Ldt, 1991) 168.

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Auster, Paul. The New York Trilogy 14.

Huet, Marie-Helene. Monstrous Imagination. (London: Harvard University Press, 1993) 245.

Grosz, Elizabeth. Space, Time and Perversion - Essays on the Politics of Bodies. (New York & London: Routledge, 1995) 121.

Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Felix. Kafka - Toward a Minor Literature. (Minneapolis & London: University of Minnesota Press, 1993) 27.

Freud, Sigmund. Case Histories 2: The Ratman, Schreber, The ”Wolf Man”, A Case of Female Homosexuality. (London: Penguin Books, 1979) 207.

Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. The Coherence of Gothic Conventions. (New York: Arno Press, 1980) 64.

Auster, Paul. The New York Trilogy 71.

Berman, Marshall. All That is Solid Melts into Air - The Experience of Modernity. (London: Verso, 1985) 229.

Smith, Allan Lloyd. Modern Gothic - A Reader 16.

Auster, Paul. The New York Trilogy 130-131.

Huet, Marie-Helene. Monstrous Imagination 243.

Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. Between Men 91.

Auster, Paul. The New York Trilogy 199.

Bernstein, Stephen. Beyond the Red Notebook - Essays on Paul Auster. ed. Barone, Dennis. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995) 90.

Auster, Paul. The New York Trilogy 222.

Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. Between Men 4.

Auster, Paul. The New York Trilogy 216.

Auster, Paul. The New York Trilogy 267.

Auster, Paul. The New York Trilogy 266.

Rubin, Gayle. ”The Traffic in Women: Notes on the ”Political Economy” of Sex” Toward an Anthropology of Women. ed. Reiter, Rayna R. (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1975) 157-210.

Auster, Paul. The New York Trilogy 292-293.

Auster, Paul. The New York Trilogy 247.

Auster, Paul. The New York Trilogy 250.

Auster, Paul. The New York Trilogy 285.

Auster, Paul. The New York Trilogy 286.

Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. Between Men 114.

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Auster, Paul. The New York Trilogy 314.

Russell, Alison. ”Deconstructing The New York Trilogy: Paul Auster’s Anti-Detective Fiction” Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction (Washington Dc, Summer 1991) 71-84.

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