Focusing specifically on City of Glass, analyzing the relationship between the story's protagonist and the city he inhabits (or the city that inhabits him), Richard Swope furthers the growing scholarship of Auster's work and its relation to space through an examination of Auster's detectives and Henri Lefebvre's spatial theories. Coming to grips with a shattered reality, Swope argues, Auster's detective makes a thoughtful excursion into the uncertainties of urban life and the unreliability of the facts that has come to be understood as postructuralist reality.

Supposing a Space: The Detecting Subject in Paul Auster's City of Glass

Richard Swope

<1> Paul Auster's City of Glass, the first book in The New York Trilogy, offers a prototype for metaphysical detective fiction, a genre marked by its use and abuse of the conventions of the classic detective story. While the classic detective arrives at a solution to a crime, the more recent metaphysical "sleuth finds himself confronting the insoluble mysteries of his own interpretation and his own identity" (Merivale and Sweeney 2) [1]. Auster's work in particular has been recognized for its investigation of such mysteries. As Alison Russell notes, rather than locating a missing person or solving a murder, Auster's detective "becomes a pilgrim searching for correspondence between signifiers and signifieds" while also undertaking "a quest for his own identity" (72-3). In City of Glass, however, the questor can never arrive at his desired destination, for in this world signifiers are not attached to signifieds, while the distinction between self and other no longer holds. Language (or its interpretation) and identity are not, however, the only "insoluble mysteries" that we confront within the pages of City of Glass; Auster's novel also explicitly speculates on the nature, or to use Henri Lefebvre's terms, the production of social space [2], which includes exploring the connections between the production of space and the formation of identity.

"It was a wrong number that started it"

<2> City of Glass begins with the transformation of Daniel Quinn, who writes mystery novels under the pseudonym William Wilson, into a real-life detective when he mistakenly receives a phone call intended for one Paul Auster, private detective, requesting his assistance. The call is placed by Virginia Stillman, who wishes to hire Quinn/Auster to protect her husband, Peter Stillman Jr., from his father whom she fears intends to kill his own son. She later tells Quinn/Auster that some years prior Stillman Sr. locked his son away in a dark room for nine years as an experiment in the possibility of recovering a prelapsarian language, an act that landed Stillman Sr. in prison. Now Stillman Sr. is being released, causing Virginia Stillman to fear for Stillman Jr.'s life. For reasons even Quinn cannot explain, rather than ignoring the mistaken call, he pretends to be Auster, taking on the identity of a detective, and accepts the case, which he initially sees as little more than a "glorified tail job" (34). The Stillman case becomes much more, however, to the point of literally consuming Quinn. Once Quinn has fully committed himself to his new role as a detective, the case disintegrates and with it his reason for being. Exhausted by a case he can neither penetrate nor close, Quinn himself seems to dissolve with the final words of his red notebook, inside which he documents his entire ordeal. Quinn's predicament is not, however, the result solely of the Stillman case; from the very beginning of the story his place in the world is already very much in question. He lives alone; his wife and son have died; he no longer has any friends, and his only contact with his publisher or agent is conducted through the mail. It is "as if he were somehow living a posthumous life" (6). To complicate matters, he is not only Quinn but also Wilson, as well as his "private-eye narrator, Max Work." Add to this "triad of selves that Quinn had become" (6) his role as Auster and it is no wonder Quinn's sense of identity is thrown into crisis.

<3> The senselessness of Quinn's "real" life explains his attraction to the world of detective fiction:

What he liked about these books was their sense of plenitude and economy. In a good mystery there is nothing wasted, no sentence, no word that is not significant....Everything becomes essence; the center of the book shifts with each event that propels it forward. The center, then, is everywhere, and no circumference can be drawn until the book has come to its end. (9)

In this neatly diagramed world, the "detective is the one who looks, who listens, who moves through this morass of objects and events in search of the thought, the idea that will pull all these things together and make sense of them" (9). The detective "looks out from himself into the world and demands that the world reveal itself to him" (9-10). The world is a text laid bare before the eyes of the master reader, the detective. This schema provides Quinn with the security and comfort he lacks; it promises him the possibility both of making sense of his world and consequently of securing his position in that world.

<4> As Quinn's sense of detective fiction reveals, the detective's reliance on his ability to decode the world reflects a closely linked belief in both a tightly formed linguistic economy as well as the possibility of maintaining a singular, stable identity, a correspondence that Auster repeatedly evokes and dismantles. Regardless of the obvious splintering of Quinn's identity, he continues to believe that "he could return to being Quinn whenever he wished" (62), assuming that a "true" self remains unchanged and accessible beneath his various facades. Unfortunately, unlike the cases Quinn writes and reads, the case he "lives" not only fails to produce a tidy conclusion, but in failing indicates the instability of the world as well as the indeterminacy of language and the self. Quinn eventually loses track of Stillman Sr. as well as Virginia and Stillman Jr., the target of his surveillance as well as his reason for being on the case in the first place. He finds himself inside a case in which there "were no clues, no leads, no moves to be made" (109). Still, Quinn does not pack it in and return to his former life, nor apparently can he. Unwilling to give up on the mystery prior to the moment of revelation, the kind of revelation one might find in Quinn's own mystery novels, Quinn decides instead to place Stillman Jr's apartment under surveillance. To watch the Stillman apartment day and night, Quinn takes up residence in the alley across the street, settling in for months on end. When Quinn finally exits the alley, he discovers that he has been investigating a case that does not actually exist. Even before he entered the alley, Stillman Sr. committed suicide, and the Stillman apartment was vacated prior to Quinn's surveillance, meaning he has kept watch on nothing. As a result, Quinn "had nothing, he knew nothing, he knew he knew nothing" (124). Quinn discovers, ultimately, that the world does not behave according to the detective logic he so admires, meaning he has no access to that core self he assumes exists. And since he has no access, he can no longer say with certainty if it does indeed exist or not. As the narrator of the The Locked Room, the final book in the trilogy, explains, "Every life is inexplicable...the essential thing resists telling" (291), and, therefore, eludes the detective's drive to locate that central truth beneath the surface clues [3].

Space and the Detective

<5> Just as Auster's fiction calls into question the notions of language and identity that subtend the logic of the traditional detective, City of Glass also undermines conventional notions of urban space as a rationally ordered environment. Quinn's understanding of language and identity are, in fact, inextricably intertwined with his conception of space. Significantly, once facing the loss of both a coherent identity and a determinate language, Auster's detective seeks spatial solutions, or a rationally ordered social space in which he may still have a place; such spaces, however, fail to materialize, leaving Quinn bereft of the security he desires.

<6> Auster's choice of the detective story is particularly fitting for an investigation of spatial production in that detective fiction as a genre has a long history of preoccupation with space(s), particularly urban spaces. In the classic detective story, space functions as more than a mere backdrop; rather, space itself is routinely both part of the mystery (the murder generally occurs inside a sealed environment: an isolated hotel, a train, a locked room) as well as a necessary means through which the detective solves the crime (by narrowing the space the classic detective novel also narrows down the list of possible suspects). The detective's ability to use spatial parameters in his effort to solve a crime also performs another, ideological function by suggesting that social space is subject to Western metaphysics and its impulse to rationally order and controlled. The more recent hard-boiled private eye has played an equally significant role, ideologically and other wise, in our sense of twentieth-century urban space. His unique construction as the (male) subject who "sees and deciphers the signifiers of that labyrinth of populated spaces and buildings which forms the modern metropolis" (Willett 3), makes the hard-boiled detective a vehicle through which we see the modernist city as we have never seen it before, its criminal element and alienating effects laid bare.

<7> The point I wish to emphasize here is that in both its nineteenth and twentieth-century manifestations the detective figure epitomizes the post-Enlightenment (thinking) subject who produces a rationally ordered social space and is in turn a produced by that space. As Lefebvre argues, subjects are not constructed exclusively within language; in addition, "all 'subjects' are situated in a space in which they must either recognize themselves or lose themselves" (35). He further explains that becoming a subject involves accepting "a role and a function" which "implies a location, a place in society, a position" (182-3), that is, a space. The detective figure stands out within this schema in that his function involves delineating or reinscribing the position of all subjects; his primary task, accomplished through surveillance, is to reestablish order, or to return every object and subject to his, her, or its ideologically appointed space. But while the classic detective, armed with his ability to map and contain the scene or space of the crime, produces -- or at least imagines -- a clearly delineated space inside which subjects can be securely placed, in Auster's metaphysical detective story, both the ideology of positivism and the neatly packaged spaces (and the identities that correspond to those spaces) it produces are invoked only to be called into question.

<8> City of Glass focuses this attack on the spatial logic of the conventional detective at a number of specific fronts, each of which requires discussion. First, Auster's novel reconceives the spatial concept of "home," a space that Auster compares to and contrasts with the pedestrian spaces of the roaming city walker. It also counters the notion that space can be read as a text, an idea that involves both the mapping and subsequent reading of spaces. Finally, Auster's fiction dramatizes the connection between the production of space and the construction of identity.

Home is Where the Detective is Not

<9> Contrary to the impulse to order and control, space in City of Glass, the space of New York City, does not behave as it does within the paradigm of detective fiction. At the beginning of his quest, however, Quinn is not conscious of this; it is only after the failure of detective logic that this metaphysical private eyes recognizes the need to reconceptualize the spaces inside which he lives. In the opening pages of City of Glass Quinn, in keeping with his high regard for the detective's ability to center the world, operates under the notion that he can locate a stable place for himself in a well-ordered universe. Quinn maintains this outlook despite the fact that from the opening of his story he already seems out of place; he has no secure familial or communal ties and prior to entering a detective fiction, spends much of his time walking the city aimlessly in an effort to lose himself, in every sense:

New York was an inexhaustible space, a labyrinth of endless steps, and no matter how far he walked, no matter how well he came to know its neighborhoods and streets, it always left him with the feeling of being lost. Lost, not only in the city, but within himself as well. Each time he took a walk, he felt as though he were leaving himself behind...reducing himself to a seeing eye...On his best walks he was able to feel that he was nowhere. And this, finally, was all he ever asked of things, to be nowhere. New York was the nowhere he had built around himself. (4)

There are a variety of issues at stake in this passage, some of which I will return to later, but what I wish to note here is how Quinn's attempts to lose the self directly contrasts with his high esteem for the detective and the centered world the detective produces. While to "walk is to lack a place," being "the indefinite process of being absent and in search of a place" (de Certeau 103), detective fiction is about keeping or restoring every subject and object to his, her, or its "proper" place. Despite the seeming disparity here between Quinn's belief in the fictional world of the detective and the displacement he experiences in his "real" life, ironically, his walks to "nowhere," to a no-place are actually made possible by his belief in the stability of place, and the detective's role in maintaining that stability. Regardless of Quinn's efforts to lose his place, underneath his excursions through the city lies a deep-seated belief in his ability to be placed once again. That is to say, Quinn's ability to wander the city without destination, to lose himself, is made possible only by his certainty that he can always return home, a certainty that is eventually stripped away.

<10> Stability, one's sense of having a place, has long been symbolized by the home. As Doreen Massey argues, a "place-called-home" is an anchoring point that provides both spatial stability, an unchanging geographical or architectural structure to which one can repeatedly return, as well as "a source of unproblematical identity" (151). Even the detective, as Auster's work dramatizes, no matter how willing to roam the urban landscape, has always required such a place. While the armchair detective finds sanctuary in his house or apartment, the hardboiled detective seeks comfort in the security of his office space, each respectively providing a retreat from the chaos of the city. The relationship of Quinn's walks in the city to his anchoring at home recall not only the detective figure but also the detective's opposite, the missing person. Plundering the annals of American literature, Auster suggests that we read Quinn's ordeal, as well as that of Auster's other two detectives, against the backdrop of a number of male protagonists who leave home. In particular, Auster calls our attention to the title character of Nathaniel Hawthorne's short story "Wakefield," a story that is recounted in the second book of the trilogy, Ghosts.

<11> As I have argued elsewhere, "Wakefield" functions as a mise en abyme within Auster's trilogy, or as a foundational missing person narrative upon which Auster draws in order to dramatize the relationship of identity to the space of the city. Briefly, "Wakefield" tells the story of an apparently typical married man who, as a "joke," steps out to work one day and does not return for another twenty years. The narrator tells us that at the end of this twenty years Wakefield simply "entered the door one evening, quietly, as from a day's absence, and became a loving spouse till death" (290). Despite the fact that Wakefield takes up his life again, as if without repercussions, during his exile Wakefield is forced to confront the central question that the story poses, whether or not, after having taken an extended walk, he can return to his former "place" in the world. At times it, in fact, appears that Wakefield cannot return to his former abode even if he wanted. At one point, the narrator indicates that the "dead have as much chance of re-visiting their earthly homes, as the self-banished Wakefield" (295). Uncannily, Wakefield "had contrived, or rather he had happened, to dissever himself from the world -- to vanish -- to give up his place and privileges with living men, without being admitted among the dead" (296). Hawthorne's story, then, explores the possibility of losing one's position in the world, "the fear that one might simply wander outside the system that is society, might unintentionally cross a threshold of no return -- breaking the very boundaries of containment that the detective strives to secure" (Swope 210). This anxiety, however, largely dissipates once Wakefield returns to his "forsaken domicile." Thus, as in conventional detective novel, the missing person is both located and returned to his designated space. According to the cultural logic out of which Hawthorne writes, the same cultural logic in which detective fiction thrives, the world has a certain order in which every person and thing has a proper place; consequently, Wakefield not only can but must go home. His return is possible because no matter how much Wakefield changes, no matter how much his identity appears to fluctuate, his home remains virtually unchanged, his wife waiting for him as if he had been absent only a day. In Hawthorne's missing person story as long as the home remains stable so does one's position in society and consequently one's identity.

<12> Unlike the original Wakefield, Auster's missing person, ironically the detective himself, "must confront the possibility of never returning, of having no home to return to, or even of not knowing which self is to return" (Swope 211). In the postmodern city the very notion of "home" is thrown into question, and with it the social and individual stability with which it is ideologically infused. When we first meet Quinn, his apartment is all he has left that provides him with any security or sense of having a place. Unlike his literary ancestor Wakefield, Quinn has no wife -- traditionally the embodiment of domestic security -- to maintain his place of residence while he ventures out to solve the Stillman case. Furthermore, Quinn does not own his home; it is a rented space, an already temporary dwelling rather than the symbol of permanence that ownership implies. From the beginning, then, Quinn teeters between place and no-place. Still, he appears strikingly unaware of his predicament; his belief in his ability to return home, no matter how far into the city he ventures, never wavers, that is until he literally loses or is evicted from his apartment.

<13> City of Glass, in effect, reads like the story of one man's slow drift away from his "home," the home ironically that does not really exist in the first place. Crouching in the alley across from the Stillman apartment, Quinn literally becomes homeless (one of the inexplicable inhabitants of the city who defy the detective's logic that accords to every subject a place of physical as well as ontological certainty). Since Quinn operates under an assumed identity, however, he continues to believe that his predicament is "all an illusion," that "he could return to being Quinn whenever he wished," and up until this point he has the "home" to insure him of this seeming inevitability. When Quinn finally does leave the alley, at which time he discovers the Stillmans' fate, he notices his reflection in the glass of a shop window. Yet, uncannily, "he did not recognize the person he saw there as himself...He tried to remember himself as he had been before, but he found it difficult" (142-43). At this moment of crisis, Quinn walks to his apartment expecting that, in a replay of the Wakefield story, nothing has changed, that he can reclaim what he assumes must be his proper place in the world, and with it his old self. But just as his former name and appearance have slipped from his grasp, the apartment that acted as a spatial anchor for his sense of identity has also vanished. When Quinn finally returns "home," upon entering the apartment, he discovers that another person inhabits his abode: "Everything had changed. It seemed like another place altogether, and Quinn thought he must have entered the wrong apartment" (147). At this moment he realizes, "He had come to the end of himself. He could feel it now, as though a great truth had finally dawned in him. There was nothing left" (149). Quinn has no family, no friends, no proof of his identity, or possibly no identity at all, and now no home, no "place" in the world. In an urban nightmare, his experiment as a detective has swallowed up his former position as if it never existed.

<14> Despite the fragmentation of identity that Quinn undergoes early in the story, it is not until he loses his apartment, or home that he gives up all hope of returning to the old Quinn. Having absorbed rationalized notions of space, Quinn holds to the one constant, the container that he assumes stands apart from the societal and individual flux he experiences. Assuming both the identity and the logic of a detective, Quinn makes the mistake of investing in his apartment, as an anchor for his position, and, therefore, when his apartment vanishes, so do his hopes of regaining his previous life. Even the change in his appearance, does not have as much of an effect on him as does the recognition that what he assumed was his material space in the world no longer exists. Auster's version of the "Wakefield" story suggests, then, that in the postmodern space of the city, the subject risks more than being temporarily alienated from his or her home, a place which remains, ideological speaking, permanent even in the modernist urban environment. In the postmodern city, however, place, home, the "proper" is exposed as an illusion -- no wonder Quinn cannot locate Stillman. Quinn's residence is as unstable as his repeatedly changing name, that is, "home" is little more than a tag, a-place-called-home.

<15> It is important to note that Auster's attention to "home" reveals more than the relationship between the lone subject and his position in the world. The trilogy suggests that the notion of "home" has a larger ideological function, especially when we consider the middle-class investment in the concept of a domestic space separated out from the deteriorated streets. Auster evokes this spatial separation when, in a highly metafictional moment, he takes Quinn to the domicile of none other than Paul Auster, a writer no less -- we never do see the detective -- who not coincidentally lives with a wife and son, much as Quinn once did, in a comfortable apartment. Quinn meets Auster shortly after being given the slip by Stillman, Auster's apartment representing the final safe haven for Quinn just prior to his fall into nothingness. Auster's apartment, both its spatial positioning high above the street as well as its symbolic import as a sign of stability, of home, reflects a class-conscious spatial logic that clearly influences the conventional detective story. The novel describes Auster's home as having "an air of bourgeois sobriety" (111). Auster's use of the word "bourgeois" places the eleventh-floor apartment in direct contrast with the space of the street where Quinn will eventually lose both his home and his belief in the existence of such a place. Highlighting this contrast, the sight of Auster's domestic security causes Quinn to feel "as though Auster were taunting him with the things he had lost" (121), not to mention what he is about to lose. Similar to the broken yo-yo that Auster's son finds in the street, which drops down its string but does not rise again, once Quinn leaves Auster's apartment, descending into the alley he will never recover his former "place" in the world again; he will never rise again to a bourgeois space of security.

<16> Further dramatizing the contrast between the stability of the middle-class home above and the streets of the homeless below, the day immediately following Quinn's visit to Auster, he takes a walk through the city, a walk that will eventually carry him to the alley, during which he becomes cognizant of "many things...he had never noticed before" (126). Specifically, Quinn becomes acutely aware of "the tramps, the down-and-outs, the shopping-bag ladies, the drifters and drunks" (129), those perpetual missing persons for whom the detective has located neither a solution nor a place. Anthony Vidler argues that space itself, or a particular production of space, has been used to cover over the homeless element of the city: "space is assumed to hide, in its darkest recesses and forgotten margins, all the objects of fear and phobia that have returned with such insistency to haunt the imaginations of those who have tried to stake out spaces to protect their health and happiness" (167). First and foremost among such spaces of "health and happiness" is, of course, the (modernist) bourgeois home lifted above, or set apart from the contagion of the city [4]. Vidler argues further that "space as a threat, as harbinger of the unseen, operates as medical and psychical metaphor for all the possible erosions of bourgeois bodily and social well being" (167), a threat he directly connects to "the person of the homeless" (168). Once Quinn enters the street, everything that Auster's and his own apartment above the city is designed to escape becomes visible and, therefore, threatening. Indeed, in Quinn's case the contagion of homelessness in the city literally erodes his "bourgeois bodily and social well being." Thus, City of Glass, as its title indicates, suggests that the security of the middle-class notion of home is itself little more than an ideological fantasy, as this space is continuously invaded by that which it seeks to erase or escape: that homelessness to which Quinn has in effect always belonged.

<17> By drawing our attention to the effect that class consciousness has had on the production of urban space, Auster's fiction cannily recognizes the class demarcation of spaces as a crucial element in even the earliest forms of detective fiction. According to Robin Woods, the role of the classic detective was "not only to capture the criminal, but also to protect society from the criminal's moral influence." (16). The detective's job, then, was to secure bourgeois space and all that it symbolizes. Ironically, in his attempt to maintain middle-class morality, "the fictional detective himself became an outcast, a link between crime and society who, by the nature of his task, had to work alone in order to protect his community from the taint of criminality" (Woods 16). Thus, in order to protect the sanctity of the bourgeois home, the detective sacrificed his own position, or home, within that space. Detectives have, in fact, always been "outsiders"; they do without such middle-class staples as family or conventional employment. The detective moves in both the middle-class and criminal worlds but belongs to neither, a liminal figure who for all intents and purposes "does not really exist when he is not on the case" (Holquist 142). This explains why the detective requires a space, apartment or office, to which he can return after collecting clues, for without such an anchor he would drift into nothingness, as indeed Quinn does. It is worth noting that the detective's office is itself a bourgeois space of sorts, or a mirroring of such a space. Since the bourgeois subject typically practices a profession in an office space, to the degree that the detective works out of an office, he maintains a foothold in the middle-class world -- though, again, this foothold is tenuous at best; for the detective every trip out of his office into the city means the possibility of not returning. Furthermore, as the hardboiled tradition shows, the detective's office is far from impermeable and repeatedly fails to maintain the bourgeois illusion of being isolated from the street. While the office appears to be a fortress against the criminal element, as the apartment space of a conventional detective such as Dupin truly was, in a hardboiled detective story the detective's office is typically violated by that very element. How often have we seen the detective's office ransacked by thugs? The hardboiled version of detective fiction suggests, then, that the detective's version of a hermetically sealed space, free of the taint of the street, is at least questionable [5].

<18> Auster's metaphysical variation on the detective genre extends this critique of the bourgeois segregation of space, and the bourgeois subjectivity it enables, even further by blurring the separation between the street and the supposedly sanitary space above; his version exposes the boundaries that isolate and protect the apartment or office above as a fiction, as spatial productions that can be deconstructed just as easily as they were once erected. The strict separation of the two worlds, as the detective's ability to traverse both spaces indicates, is untenable, for as Quinn notes, his apartment is not the sanitary space he had supposed; rather, "the city encroaches with its soot" (125). Thus, by dramatizing Quinn's loss of his abode, City of Glass does more than undermine one individual's place in the system. By suggesting that the bourgeois "home" is a fiction, a fiction perpetuated by the detective and his belief in the proper, Auster's novel critiques an entire cultural logic whose production of space hinges on its very notion of "home." Once the "home" is gone, all is out of place, including the detective whose function it is to maintain such spaces.

Walking in the (Un)Readable City

<19> Quinn's belief in the constancy of home is far from his only misunderstanding of the city space he inhabits. As I have been arguing, Quinn takes the Stillman case because it holds out the promises of recapturing a former cultural logic, that of the detective, which includes the previous spatial regime, under which everything and everyone has a clearly demarcated, or enclosed place. In accordance with this logic, once Quinn is on the case, his walks cease to be about losing himself and are transformed into efforts to place the other inside a definitively bounded or mapped space. While following Stillman, Quinn charts the path they walk, recording their every step in his red notebook. While Quinn's earlier pedestrianism is described as little more than "aimless motion," mere "wandering," once he becomes the watcher, it is no longer possible for him to be a mindless peripatetic; this is now "a privilege denied to Quinn" (74-5). He has become, rather, the one who polices, a keeper of place, and, therefore, begins to "set down with meticulous care an exact itinerary of Stillman's divagations" (76). Stillman spends day after day wandering the city collecting seemingly "valueless" "bits of junk." Since Stillman's daily walks have nothing to do with Stillman Jr., Quinn begins to wonder if he has not "embarked on a meaningless project" (73). As a detective Quinn desires to make meaning from Stillman's steps, to make sense of the pedestrian in the city; therefore, he later translates his notes into maps of Stillman's travels. To Quinn's amazement, the map of each day's walk appears to form the shape of a letter; combined, these letters spell out "OWER OF BABEL." Since Quinn did not record the first four days of Stillman's walks, he surmises that Stillman has been leaving a text of footsteps that spells out "THE TOWER OF BABEL," a topic, not coincidentally, on which Stillman published a book prior to his incarceration.

<20> As both Steven Alford and Ralph Willett have noted, de Certeau's theorization of the walker in the city is particularly relevant to a discussion of Auster's accounts of pedestrianism. De Certeau's critique of conventional spatial logic is, in fact, aimed at intellectual efforts which, like Quinn, attempt to construct a map/text of the walker's path. De Certeau argues that walking "is a spatial acting-out of the place (just as the speech act is an acoustic acting out of language)" (98). He suggests, therefore, "a preliminary definition of walking as a space of enunciation" (98), a definition that appears to reaffirm the notion that space can be read as a text. De Certeau qualifies this definition, however, noting that while walkers "write" the city, they do so "without being able to read it" (93). Together the city's pedestrians "compose a manifold story that has neither author nor spectator, shaped out of fragments of trajectories and alterations of spaces" (93). Thus, as I mentioned in the introduction, these "spatial stories" run contrary to what de Certeau terms the "erotics of knowledge" which seek the "pleasure of 'seeing the whole,' of looking down on, totalizing the most immoderate of human texts" (92). By way of example, de Certeau likens this will-to-knowledge to the plight of Icarus whose "elevation transfigures him into a voyeur. It puts him at a distance. It transforms the bewitching world by which one was 'possessed' into a text that lies before one's eyes" (92). Similarly, such architectural phenomena as the former World Trade Center, which at the time de Certeau was writing provided another position above, "construct the fiction that creates readers, makes the complexity of the city readable, and immobilizes its opaque mobility in a transparent text" (92). From such a vantage point the observer can capture the sense of "seeing the whole" and, consequently, of being able to know the city. As seductive as such a position might be, according to de Certeau, the position above in fact symbolizes the "lust to be a viewpoint and nothing more," a viewpoint that appears to produce knowledge, but which constructs only "the fiction of knowledge" (92). The city experience remains unreadable and unknowable.

<21> This position of knowledge, this viewpoint, is, of course, the very place Quinn tries to occupy, both in his earlier walks and in his attempts to map Stillman's actions. Again, while walking Quinn attempts to reduce "himself to a seeing eye." (4). By doing so, "Quinn endeavors to transcend the limitation of the walker, to become an all-seeing voyeur" (Willett 56). This desire becomes only stronger once he assumes the role of the detective, whose very function has been to immobilize the mysteries of the world by constructing a coherent text. In this respect, the detective both thrives on and perpetuates the "erotics of knowledge." As a writer of mysteries, Quinn knows only too well that his story must end with the "fiction of knowledge." The problem is that the conclusion he desires from the Stillman case fails to materialize, leaving him bereft of the moment of pleasure at which the perfect geometry, the "circumference," of the mystery comes into focus. Nonetheless, he continues to jot down every move that Stillman makes in the hope that the moment of gratification is yet to come. And indeed, Quinn's observational efforts do appear to produce a readable text, a clue that ought to lead to knowledge. Yet Quinn's map/text of Stillman's urban travels does not produce such a moment, in part because the question remains as to who produces the text/map found in Quinn's notebook: the walker or the reader? Quinn himself doubts his own discovery: "The letters were not letters at all. He had seen them only because he wanted to see them...Stillman had nothing to do with it. It was all an accident, a hoax he had perpetrated on himself" (86). If this proves true, then Quinn has failed miserably as a detective, for the detective operates under the fiction that he is little more than a viewpoint collecting clues that have an existence a priori and apart from the detective's imagination. In Quinn's scenario, however, the very clue, the map, that would bring knowledge, or even the fiction of knowledge, arrives after the fact. Furthermore, Quinn's doubts suggest the possibility that the spatial act and its reader, the one who occupies a position distanced from the walker, do not coincide, meaning the detective is not so much reading the acts of the pedestrian as he is constructing his own story of the city.

<22> While the novel allows for the possibility that Stillman actually does walk the path that Quinn traces in his notebook, even if Stillman intends to leave Quinn a message or clue, ultimately this message exists only in Quinn's reconstruction of the earlier acts, as a representation removed from the pedestrian's experience of the space, distanced from that of which Quinn is attempting to make sense. Thus, a gap exists between the experience of space and the attempt to know, read, or represent that experience. Auster highlights this gap in his description of Quinn's initial efforts to document Stillman's movements. While following Stillman, Quinn attempts literally to unite the act of writing and walking (signification and spatial practices) into a single, seamless act. Quinn discovers, however, contrary to his desire to know Stillman fully, that "walking and writing were not easily compatible activities" (76). Since Quinn must maintain constant surveillance, recording every gesture, he finds it "especially difficult to write without looking at the page" (76). The difficulty of performing the two tasks simultaneously frequently causes Quinn to transcribe "two or even three lines on top of each other, producing a jumbled, illegible palimpsest" (76). Auster's choice of words here is reminiscent of Lefebvre's answer to the question of whether it makes "sense to speak of a 'reading' of space" (142). While Lefebvre grants that "it is possible to envisage a 'reader' who deciphers and decodes and a 'speaker' who expresses himself by translating his progression into a discourse" -- the detective and the object of his pursuit -- he argues that reading space is ultimately not possible "in that social space can in no way be compared to a blank page upon which a specific message has been inscribed...Both natural and urban spaces are, if anything, 'over-inscribed': everything therein resembles a rough draft, jumbled and self-contradictory" (Lefebvre 142), and, therefore, inscrutable. While Quinn's will-to-knowledge does eventually convert Stillman's strolls through the city into a seemingly legible text, that on the surface appears to mean, this fact only highlights the gap that exists between the moment of observation, which in itself produces a palimpsest, and the moment at which the spatial act is converted into a readable text. This gap suggests once again that the detective is producing a fiction of knowledge rather than discovering out there in the world a concrete text waiting for him to decipher its meaning.

<23> Quinn's inability to walk and write simultaneously is not the only moment in the novel that "defers the expectation that the city can be read" (Bernstein 138). To begin with, Quinn has failed to record the first four days of Stillman's travels, meaning his text can never be complete. Secondly, as Stephen Bernstein remarks the message itself, "THE TOWER OF BABEL" provides "yet another suggestion of the fragmentation, the unrecoverability, of reality as text" (138). Lastly, Quinn himself notes, "Stillman had not left his message anywhere. True, he had created the letters by the movement 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" (86). As de Certeau explains, acts of walking "can be traced on city maps in such a way as to transcribe their paths...But these thick or thin curves only refer, like words, to the absence of what has passed by" (97). The remaining written text or illustrated map, though "itself visible...has the effect of making invisible the operation that made it possible...The trace left behind is substituted for the practice" (97). The act of walking, the moment of experience in urban space, leaves only a trace; furthermore, this trace is conceived only after the fact, as substitute for the act itself. The missing person vanishes, ironically, with a trace, but with only a trace that leads nowhere. Quinn hopes that Stillman's steps are indeed like words because he sees words as providing direct access to the objects they signify [6]. Yet just as language is severed from the world, representations of space are severed from the spatial practices as well as the material spaces they supposedly reflect. Quinn assumes that he can know the meaning of the urban space that surrounds him, but discovers that he himself has constructed both a meaning for that space as well as that space itself. Just as he cannot recapture the first four days of Stillman's walks, he cannot fully recapture even the days during which he was present. The map/text comes always after the fact, at one remove. Auster's trilogy suggests, then, as Alford argues, that "our contact with space qua space is always secondhand; it is always a representation. Like the attempt to find an 'essential self,' interiorized and below or prior to language, we are forever consigned to inventing a nonexistent spatial 'ground'" (622).

<24> While Quinn's efforts to construct a text of the city produce a multi-layered jumble, Auster's fictional account of New York City, the urban text we read is impenetrable because it is all surface, as if nothing exists beneath the glassy veneer. As both Willett and Jarvis have pointed out, Auster's "cityscape itself is flat, uniform, without depth, its repetitions and lack of features creating what Edward Relph called the placelessness of place" (Willett 57), as instanced by Quinn's last trek through the city prior to entering the alley which is accompanied by a mere list of place names, a string of tags without descriptions. While both Willett and Jarvis read Auster's "aesthetic code of flatness" as a commentary on late capitalism, which in its penchant for reproduction robs every thing and place of a unique identity [7], I would argue that although their account strikes me as accurate, it tells only part of the story. Late capitalism has created a sense of placelessness not only because of its reproduction, but also because of the speed with which that reproduction occurs. Once circulation speeds up, it is much more difficult to determine where in the circuits of exchange the commodity, or walker, belongs; the idea is, in fact, to keep both commodities and consumers in constant motion. And it is also worth noting that the flatness of Auster's New York landscape is created by a complex set of social relations, that we term the city, of which economics plays only a part, even if a significant part. What Jarvis and Willett miss is that the placelessness of Auster's city is primarily a product of the very motion, the walking that the postmodern city demands. De Certeau explains,

The moving about that the city multiplies and concentrates makes the city itself an immense social experience of lacking a place-an experience that is, to be sure, broken up into countless tiny deportations (displacements and walks), compensated for by the relationships and intersections of these exoduses that intertwine and create an urban fabric, and placed under the sign of what ought to be, ultimately, the place but is only a name, the City. The identity furnished by this place is all the more symbolic (named) because, in spite of the inequality of its citizens' positions and profits, there is only a pullulation of passer-by, a network of residences temporarily appropriated by pedestrian traffic, a shuffling among pretenses of the proper, a universe of rented spaces haunted by a nowhere of dreamed-of places. (103)

De Certeau indicates here that the city is not so much a place as a set of signifiers, representations of space that again defer the detective's attempts to penetrate the heart of the urban environment. Again, we are reminded of Quinn's walks prior to his becoming a detective, during which "all places became equal" (4). These walks allow Quinn to construct a city of his own making: "New York was the nowhere he [Quinn] had built around himself" (4). According to de Certeau, however, this is always the case for the walker, who rather than producing a stable place, "a-place-called-home," repeatedly reproduces a no-place of names. The palimpsestic jumble created by the network of pedestrian acts in the city, ultimately leaves the detective suspended at the surface, as if the city space were indeed flat. As with Quinn and his map of Stillman's travels, the detective has access to symbols only, beneath which he fails to find the meaning, or the proper place of which he dreams.

<25> If, as de Certeau argues, the city, that "universe of rented spaces" is always "haunted by a nowhere," then when Quinn finally recognizes the homeless, those perpetually placeless walkers, he also comes to recognize what has been his predicament all along, that from the very beginning he, along with all the inhabitants of the city, has lacked a place. Rather than the secure, stable position he imagined, his rented space was little more than a representation of a home, and self. Quinn's lack of a place reminds us again of an irony inherent to detective fiction, that the detective, the one whose function is to place, himself lacks a "proper" home. On one hand, the detective, particularly the classical or armchair detective, constructs a position for himself that is removed from the urban space he observes, a position of knowledge which embodies both his place and his function simultaneously. From this position, the detective reads the urban environment, much as does de Certeau's voyeur, constructing a coherent narrative of clues that provide closure to the urban narrative. On the other hand, the detective, primarily though not exclusively the hardboiled detective, inevitably must enter the city, must leave the voyeuristic vantage point of knowledge and become a participant in the urban flux. In so doing, he exposes himself to the threat of becoming one of the homeless, placeless wanderers he observes. By having Quinn suffer this very fate, Auster suggests that the tramp, a figure reminiscent of Wakefield, is both the detective's opposite-one maps the individual in the city while the nomadic other cuts across the grain of urban planning-and the detective's kindred spirit, for the detective also inhabits a liminal space that offers only "pretenses of the proper."

<26> Thus, as de Certeau indicates regarding the need for knowledge to construct a position for itself, it is not only Quinn's map that takes on the qualities of a fiction, but also the very position from which Quinn writes and reads this map. Alford notes, "The map is not a simple representation of space. It represents a space from which perspective has been removed. The viewpoint of a map is an impossible one, one which no human could ever occupy, because to be human in space is to possess a perspective" (627). By constructing the map of Stillman's walks from a distance, from his home no less, Quinn removes himself, and his perspective -- which as we have seen produces a jumbled, inscrutable text -- from the experience. He becomes a mere viewpoint, but as we have also seen the very position, the homing point from which Quinn reads his map is always, already itself destabilized. Unlike Wakefield, whose point of origin remains constant, a home from which he might know his place in the world, the vantage point from which Quinn attempts to solve his case proves itself to be a construct. Auster's novel suggests, then, that the myth of "home" and the myth of a perspectiveless point of knowledge from which one maps or reads urban space are inextricably linked; both perpetuate the notion that the autonomous subject, or the detective, can stand apart, in a position from which he can demand that the urban environment "reveal" itself to him. Such a position turns out to be, however, yet another perpetually dreamed-of place. As the detective Ghosts, Blue, recalls from Thoreau's Walden, "We are not where we are...but in a false position. Through an infirmity of our natures, we suppose a case and put ourselves into it, and hence are in two cases at the same time, and it is doubly difficult to get out" (200). Or in Quinn's case, he has supposed a space where he is not, leaving him doubly trapped, another walker seeking a place where he only pretends to be.

The Self/Other in the City of Glass

<27> The un-homing that Quinn experiences in the postmodern city is notably heightened by the structures or buildings that he confronts during his excursions through New York. If New York is a "city of glass" as Auster's title suggests, it is so in a dual sense, that is according to both a modernist and postmodernist architectural logic that co-exist in most contemporary cities. On the one hand, as Anthony Vidler argues, modernity was "haunted...by a myth of transparency; transparency of the self to nature, of the self to the other, of all selves to society, and all this represented...by a universal transparency of building materials" (217), i.e., glass. These new transparent materials were to produce a "new and modern subject" capable of "spatial penetration" (220, 217), much as this subject was thought to be capable of penetrating the mysteries of the universe as well as the human psyche. Access to the transparent buildings reproduced a feeling of knowledge, knowledge of the inner workings of both machines and humans. Furthermore, "Transparency, it was thought, would eradicate the domain of myth, suspicion, tyranny, and above all else the irrational" (168). The detective, obviously, would thrive in such a space, the fiction of transparency being amenable to the panoptic gaze under which surveillance is perpetuated and maintained. In postmodernist architecture, on the other hand, while transparent materials remain prominent, they signify something quite different than the ability to penetrate and know the space one inhabits. Once we move into the postmodern, we discover that what appeared to be unmediated access is yet another spatial illusion. As Vidler notes, glass also acts as a deterrent, a boundary that forbids access rather than granting it; thus, transparency "quickly turns into obscurity (its apparent opposite) and reflectivity (its reversal)" (Vidler 220). One of the best examples of this is the Los Angeles Westin Bonaventure Hotel of which Jameson has written at length. Sheathed in mirrored glass, the Bonaventure, as Jameson describes it, possesses a "great reflective glass skin" that "repels the city outside" (42). Jameson suggests that this glass skin "is not even an exterior, inasmuch as when you seek to look at the hotel's outer walls you cannot see the hotel itself but only the distorted images of everything that surrounds it" (42). Synecdochic of the larger postmodern city of glass to which Auster calls our attention, the Bonaventure by evoking former transparent glass structures simultaneously both invites the subject to look inside, to uncover the meaning beneath the surface, and refuses that very possibility. In the postmodern city, what once appeared as architecture of transparency "allows us neither to stop at the surface nor to penetrate it, (arresting us in a state of anxiety)" (Vidler 223). This is the liminal space inside which Quinn is suspended, perpetually on the verge of uncovering some great mystery, while remaining interminably on the surface, not so much looking in as looking back at a distorted image of himself and the space he inhabits.

<28> Quinn's predicament becomes most apparent when, after his extended stay in the alley, he sees himself in the mirror on the facade of the building and, again, does not recognize the image as himself. "Feature for feature, he studied the face in front of him and slowly began to notice that this person bore a certain resemblance to the man he had always thought of as himself...He tried to remember himself as he had been before, but he found it difficult. He looked at this new Quinn and shrugged. It did not really matter. He had been one thing before, and now he was another. It was neither better nor worse. It was different, and that was all" (143). While Quinn does not feel the anxiety of which Vidler speaks, a point to which I will return, his experience is certainly that of someone being suspended somewhere between penetration, of both space and self, and reflection, or better yet deflection. He is compelled to look deeper as if he will discover some kernel or essence that will assure him of his existence, yet what he finds in the mirror is always other, the other by which, ironically, he "knows" himself. As Lefebvre explains,

The mirror is a surface at once pure and impure, almost material yet virtually unreal; it presents the Ego with its own material presence, calling up its counterpart, its absence from-and at the same time its inherence in-this 'other' space. Inasmuch as its symmetry is projected therein, the Ego is liable to 'recognize' itself in the 'other,' but it does not in fact coincide with it: 'other merely represents 'Ego'...Here what is identical is at the same time radically other, radically different -- and transparency is equivalent to opacity. (185)

While urban space is haunted by the modernist ideology of transparency, just as it is haunted by the specter of the detective who participates in the production of transparent space, ultimately this is the space of a former logic.

<29> Auster's commentary on the uncanny effect of postmodern architecture dramatizes a shift in the logic of surveillance, which Vidler suggests is "no longer panoptical" (160). Vidler quotes Alice Jardine who argues that we are "no longer in the system of the panopticon described so accurately by Foucault...we are rather in a mode of self-surveillance: we watch ourselves as someone else" (160). In other words, the city of glass has not so much facilitated the observation of the other as it has culminated in the observation of the self (a self to which the subject has no access). Auster's trilogy highlights this very point when it reveals that Quinn has been tracking only himself all along. He is the person who has gone missing, yet when he appears to rediscover himself, in the mirror, it is as if he were watching someone else, the other, as if he were condemned to monitoring himself while at the same time being denied entrance, unable either to resist seeking what is inside or to penetrate the surface. This is, in fact, the primary theme of Ghosts, in which Blue watches a virtually identical man, Black, in a virtually identical room for days on end: "in spying out at Black across the street, it is as though Blue were looking into a mirror, and instead of merely watching another, he finds that he is also watching himself" (172). The startling revelation for Blue is that, as Black tells him, he "needs" Black, the other "to prove he's alive" (216), just as Quinn needs the mirror to prove he still exists after vacating the alley. Again, though, full access is denied; both men are suspended on the surface of a city of glass, knowledge remaining other.

Locked Rooms/"How to get out?"

<30> A symbol of denied access to knowledge, the locked room provides Auster with yet another spatial motif with a longstanding history in the genre of detective fiction. Although there are many variations on this motif, in the conventional detective plot it supplies the space of the crime; typically, a dead body is found inside a room that locks only from the inside, the question being how did the murderer get out, or in for that matter. In short, the locked room is both the site of mystery as well as a part of the mystery itself. Nonetheless, in the world of the conventional detective story, these rooms can eventually be unlocked as can the mysteries they held. In each of the books in the trilogy, Auster includes more than one allusion to or variation upon the locked room motif, but as one might guess in the world of the metaphysical detective story, such rooms are not so easily opened. In City of Glass, the final space inside which we find Quinn is a "windowless cubicle," formerly a room of the Stillman apartment, where he strips naked and finally disappears altogether -- apparently the inexhaustible space of the city proves exhaustible after all. But it is only in the aptly titled final novel that Auster fully dramatizes the relationship of the locked room to both postmodern subjectivity and space.

<31> As it turns out the narrator of The Locked Room, who we find out is the "writer" of the first two books, does locate his missing person -- a childhood friend -- or at least he comes close, for when he finally confronts the man he seeks, he does so through a locked door rather than face to face. The detective is suspended on the very threshold of locating the object of his pursuit, the locked door symbolizing the inability of the detective or subject in general to locate or know the other, a condition which ultimately comments on the ability of the subject to penetrate the self. As the narrator says, "No one can cross the boundary into another -- for the simple reason that no one can gain access to himself" (292). As with the homeless wanderers in City of Glass, who "locked inside madness" are "unable to exit to the world that stands at the threshold of their bodies" (131), there is no way in or out of the locked room that is "located inside" the "skull" (345). This corporeal spatial barrier itself represents an impenetrable ontological limit inside which lies an insoluble mystery. The self remains a final locked room to which the detective has no key. The metaphysical detective remains trapped in a city and self that denies both exit and entrance, a locked room of his own construction.

<32> When confronting such spaces, spaces that resist attempts to intellectually contain or penetrate them, the post-Enlightenment reflex has been to continue to try to solve them, to seek solutions detective style. Auster's fiction, on the other hand, offers no such solutions. In fact, the City of Glass critiques a number of what David Harvey terms "spatial fixes" [8], especially attempts to construct utopian spaces, a tradition to which belongs Stillman's hope of restoring the world, of making it "whole" again, by resurrecting a "new Babel" in the year 1960. According to Stillman, who proposes his ideas through the fictitious Henry Dark, "once completed the Tower would be large enough to hold every inhabitant of the New World [America]. There would be a room for each person, and once he entered that room, he would forget everything he knew. After forty days and forty nights, he would emerge a new man, speaking God's language" (59). Stillman here assumes that the skyscrapers would eventually lift all urban inhabitants to that position of knowledge of which de Certeau writes, a spatial position from which the subject can literally be erased, and in this case eventually remade. Stillman's theory supports the notion that the secret to a utopian existence lies in altering one's spatial position, evoking a longstanding American tradition of utopian texts, and imagined utopian spaces, from the puritans, to the transcendentalists and on down to the modernist architects who sought to separate out their prized structures from the "degraded and fallen city fabric" (Jameson 41) [9]. Interestingly, unlike premodernist utopian dreams such as those of Thoreau, however, which sought a utopian space outside the confines of the city, Stillman suggests that the city itself leads to salvation, somewhat analogous to the notion that the transparent building materials of modernist city would indeed lead to a moment of unimpeded knowledge. Yet, Auster's detective finds that such a construction leads not to lucidity but rather to more Babel, more confusion, for Stillman imagines yet another space designed to produce a moment of knowledge that never arrives, the dark room remains locked as it were, allowing neither exit nor entrance.

<33> Despite this resistance to spatial solutions, the narrator/author does, nonetheless, arrive at a discovery of sorts. In The Locked Room, he realizes, "My true place in the world, it turned out, was somewhere beyond myself, and if that place was inside me, it was also unlocatable. This was the tiny hole between self and not self, and for the first time in my life I saw this nowhere as the exact center of the world" (275). This does not mean that he has found a way out: "I don't claim to have solved any problems. I am merely suggesting that a moment came when it no longer frightened me to look at what had happened" (346). The metaphysical detective's conclusion is yet another non-conclusion; he locates a place that is a no-place, that resists the proper. Nonetheless, and this is likely why Quinn does not experience extreme anxiety upon not recognizing himself in the mirror, he at least comes to accept his condition (the postmodern condition?), freeing him from some of the terror of losing the very spatial certainties upon which he once comfortably relied. In short, the narrator comes to a point at which he resists the detective-like compulsion to suppose a place, accepting rather a non-place, a "neither here nor there" as Alford has it, to which he has no access. Unlike the detective, he accepts not knowing as part of the business of living in the space of the postmodern city.

Notes

[1] As Michael Holquist suggests, "the new metaphysical detective story...is non-teleological, is not concerned to have a neat ending in which all the questions are answered, and which can therefore be forgotten" (153). He further explains, "instead of familiarity," metaphysical detective stories offer "strangeness." "Instead of reassurance, they disturb" (Holquist 153).

[2] According to Lefevbre, "(Social) space is a (social) product" (26), in the sense that space, or more precisely spaces plural, are produced by a complex set of modes of production as well as "representations of space" that intersect to form a given social space.

[3] The narrator of the concluding book of the trilogy, The Locked Room, tells us that all "three stories are finally the same story" (346), the difference being that each "represents a different stage" in the narrator/author's "awareness" of what the story is ultimately about (346). In this spirit, while I focus on City of Glass, the other volumes in the trilogy, Ghosts and The Locked Room, heavily inform that reading, or add to our awareness of what Quinn's metaphysical foray into the city is really about.

[4] Fredric Jameson indicates that modernist architects such as Le Corbusier consciously sought to isolate "the new Utopian space of the modern from the degraded and fallen city fabric which it thereby explicitly repudiates" (41).

[5] One of the more striking scenes in Chandler's The Big Sleep is when Carmen Sternwood invades Marlowe's apartment-one of the few times we see him there. Her transgression of his home space, or the infiltration of someone connected to his present case, suggests that he, in fact, has no "place" to retreat from his life as a detective in the city; this might explain why he appears so uncomfortable with her presence. In Robert Aldrich's Kiss Me Deadly, based on Spillane's novel, Mike Hammer's office is, in fact, his home, which not only further suggests that he has no life outside the case but also indicates that he has no space to which he might retreat when the criminal element comes calling; his home is also in effect missing.

[6] The assumption that language provides direct access to the world surfaces even more clearly in Ghosts, in which the detective, Blue writes his reports as if this were the case: "His method is to stick to outward facts, describing events as though each word tallied exactly with the thing described, and to question the matter no further. Words are transparent for him, great windows that stand between him and the world" (174). Blue operates as if the signifier allows unhindered access to the signified.

[7] Jarvis argues that Auster's "aesthetic code of flatness...is isomorphic with the economic code and spatial structuring of commodity capitalism" (88). He suggests, "Depthlessness here can be interpreted as an index of a socioeconomic system which perpetuates the establishment of placeless places and as a formal mimesis of the opacity and illegibility of its urban spaces" (89).

[8] Harvey uses the phrase "spatial fix" primarily to describe the means through which capitalism has addressed the problem of overaccumulation, which he explains "entails the production of new spaces within which capitalist production can proceed" (183).

[9] We could include as the postmodern entry on this list the clearly constructed Disneyland or Disney World fantasy versions of utopian space that continue to crop up in contemporary culture.

Works Cited

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