Who is Daniel Quinn? That may be the central mystery in Paul Auster’s first installment of his New York Trilogy, City of Glass. Identity and language are of the utmost importance to the novel from the very beginning, often taking precedence over the stated mystery.
Chapter one opens in Quinn’s apartment in “the dead of night” when a wrong number draws Daniel Quinn into a strange situation, and it is this story, the narrator assures us, that matters, not Quinn. “Who he was, where he came from, and what he did are of no great importance,” we are told, yet the narrator proceeds to tell us a great deal about Quinn, how he has lost his wife and his son, how he is a mystery writer using the pseudonym William Wilson, and how he only writes mystery novels because he doesn’t know what else to do.
Though his pen-name is attributed, much later, to the Mets centerfielder who goes by William “Mookie” Wilson (129) there is the obvious reference to the founder of the Alcoholic’s Anonymous, “Bill” Wilson. Though the narrator never makes this allusion directly, Quinn certainly resembles the advocate of anonymity more than the fielder of fly balls, hiding as he does in complete obscurity:
(5)
No book by William Wilson ever included an author’s photograph or biographical note. William Wilson was not listed in any writers’ directory, he did not give interviews, and all the letters he received were answered by his agent’s secretary.
Even before the wrong number (read: mistaken identity), Quinn is an enigma. This is complicated even further by the hero of the novels he writes, “private-eye narrator Max Work,” who suffers beatings and is confronted with elaborate puzzles but always prevails. Max Work presents a third identity for Quinn. “In the triad of selves that Quinn had become,” the narrator asserts, “Wilson served as a kind of ventriloquist. Quinn himself was the dummy, and Work was the animated voice that gave purpose to the enterprise” (7). If prose is a transcription of thoughts, a crystallization of the ephemeral mind onto paper, then whose thoughts does Max Work narrate–Quinn’s, Wilson’s, or his own? In the hard-boiled narratives Quinn writes, his own thoughts and experiences are translated twice–first through the lens of genre concerns for which he created Wilson and then through the lens of the story itself which Wilson created Work to embody.
It is after establishing all of this that Quinn answers the phone call, the wrong number. An anonymous voice, whispering to faintly to be distinguished as male or female, asks, “Is this Paul Auster…Of the Paul Auster Detective Agency?” (7) And now that the author himself has entered the text by reference if not in person, our minds are wrenched out of comprehension even further. What is this thing we are reading and who is Quinn if he is being mistaken for Auster? But, of course, we know already: before Quinn invented William Wilson to write mystery novels, Paul Auster created Quinn–but to what end? The narrator assures us it is to the same end as Quinn’s invention of Wilson–to tell a mystery story–but even now we know better than to trust the narrator who, after all, is also a tool of Auster’s.
If we’re still not convinced this is a narrative about narrative, Auster presents the crime: Peter Stillman is a man raised in complete isolation by his unhinged theology professor father (also named Peter) in an attempt to better understand language. The younger explains:
The father talked about God. He wanted to know if God had a language…The father thought a baby might speak it if the baby saw no people. But what baby was there? Ah. Now you begin to see.
(20)
This absence of language and human interaction leaves him awkward, stilted, and subhuman. His wife Virginia fears that Peter’s father, about to be released from a mental hospital, plans to return and kill his son who he now calls a “devil boy.” Under the guise of Paul Auster, Quinn accepts the case.
The task is simple: to locate the elder Peter Stillman and tail him, but nothing about this mystery is simple. Like Quinn, Stillman has multiple identities: the Columbia professor, the fictitious Miltonic pamphleteer, Henry Dark, and finally the madman. When Quinn finally locates Stillman, he is doubled:
Directly behind Stillman, heaving into view just inches behind his right shoulder, another man stopped, took a lighter out of his pocket, and lit a cigarette. His face was the exact twin of Stillman’s…The second Stillman had a prosperous air about him.
(55-56)
Quinn must choose between the prosperous and the shabby incarnations–the madman and the businessman–knowing “there was nothing he could do now that would not be a mistake” (56). He chooses the shabby Stillman and descends with him into madness and homelessness, recording all of it in his red spiral notebook, the same type of notebook he uses to draft his mystery novels.
At this point the narrator, who we assumed was a third-person omniscient voice, enters the story in the flesh. “I returned home from my trip to Africa in February,” he says. “I called my friend Auster that evening, and he urged me to come over to see him as soon as I could” (132). Auster, we learn, is not a private detective but a writer (read: another case of mistaken identity). After meeting Daniel Quinn, he has closely followed the Stillman case. The narrator accompanies Auster to find Quinn but manages only to find the red notebook:
I have followed the red notebook as closely as I could and any inaccuracies in the story should be blamed on me. There were moments when the text was difficult to decipher, but I have done my best with it and have refrained from any interpretations.
(133)
In this final chapter then, two elements are added: an additional identity for Auster (the unnamed narrator we’ve taken to be the real Auster all along but who has emerged as a new character) and an additional lens (that of the “found story”) through which we are to view the story. While the “found story” technique added a layer of authenticity to tales of the 19th century, here is only draws more conspicuous attention to the artificiality of this text.
If we are to believe that the heart of any novel is some central mystery, then what is the nature of that mystery in contemporary fiction? Again and again, authors of literary fiction turn to psychological ones: who is the protagonist? What is the essence of their identity and how did they come to develop it? The identity of Daniel Quinn, I would wager, is the central mystery of City of Glass, except Auster explores it not through the realistic, interior-focused techniques of literary fiction but through the twisting, exterior-focused ones of the mystery genre. I am curious to see what the central mystery of book two, Ghosts, will be.
Steven J Kolbe 