Reconciling the Detective Genre with Postmodernism: Considering Genre in Paul Auster's The Book of Illusions
MA Thesis Literary Studies: Literature and Culture (English) Marc Warmerdam, 6325157
Supervisor: Dr. Rudolph Glitz 23 June 2014
Table of Contents
Introduction 3
1.1 Looking into the Postmodern Side 7
1.2 Considering the Detective Genre 17
1.3 Revealing the Postmodern Detective 24
2.1 Paul Auster's Work 33
2.2 The Book of Illusions as a Postmodern Detective Novel 39
Conclusion 47
Reconciling the Detective Genre with Postmodernism: Considering genre in Paul Auster's The Book of Illusions
Introduction:
Paul Auster's The Book of Illusions is, unlike some of his other works, not generally considered to be a detective novel. Although crime is present in the book, central to the plot even, there is no thought of solving the case through careful and ingenious deduction. However, in the postmodern detective genre, these and more aspects of the traditional detective genre are overturned and adapted. Exactly how the detective genre has combined with or integrated postmodernism to create what can be considered an entirely separate genre is an interesting matter, seeing as there are several elements to detective novels which are almost the exact opposite of postmodern, such as the structured cohesion and especially the detective character's ability to correctly deduce everything that had transpired in the novel. The aim of this thesis is to consider both postmodernism and the traditional detective genre in order to better understand the postmodern detective genre, using The Book of Illusions as a case study. Although The Book of Illusions lacks some of the straightforward qualities of a traditional detective novel, it does contain the more subtle characteristics of the postmodern detective novel. This thesis will map out the postmodern detective as a genre, and place The Book of Illusions within this genre.
The subject of the postmodern detective is one that has been broached before by several academics, whose work forms a solid basis which can be used to consider The Book of Illusions. The greater part of their articles deal with books which are more easily recognizable as featuring the characteristics of postmodern detectives, such as The New York Trilogy, another book by Paul Auster which has garnered more attention as a novel, and which is more concerned with notions such as crime, private investigators, and truth. This book thereby more easily presents itself as a
postmodern detective. This being the case, more research has gone into The New York Trilogy belonging to this group of books than The Book of Illusions, and the latter has mostly been considered in tandem with Auster's films, due to the exhaustive analyses of the different films in the book. Unlike most of the previously mentioned articles, which will be discussed in more depth later on, my discussion of the novel aims to shed light on the different ways in which the postmodern detective novel can be recognized, showing a slightly different way in which a novel can be a postmodern detective. The Book of Illusions uses elements from the postmodern detective genre to further its own plot, but the two separate fields of postmodernism and detective fiction are used separately and only tenuously intertwine even when murder becomes part of the equation. In this respect, The Book of Illusions is almost the opposite of books like The New York Trilogy, or Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49, where the detective character reaches a state of high anxiety despite the complete lack of any recognizable crimes. In other respects, the stories show clear similarities, such as the protagonists´ developing and increasing unfamiliarity in and understanding of the world they live in, and their overwhelming desire to understand a part of that same world that, to the reader, is seemingly trivial and obscure. The Book of Illusions might not be like other postmodern detective novels in several significant areas, but the genre is not defined by the common traits of a few books, and there are also several aspects which make The Book of Illusions stand out as a detective novel or a postmodern novel more strongly than those other books do.
The choice to discuss The Book of Illusions from among Paul Auster's work had to do with several factors. As I previously already mentioned, The New York Trilogy might seem a more logical choice, one that multiple academics have already made, such as Debra Shostak and Alison Russel. However, it is exactly because The New York Trilogy is already such a thoroughly explored subject in terms of the postmodern detective that it would have been difficult to add anything of great interest. The Book of Illusions, on the other hand, is an as-of-yet mostly undiscussed novel, especially in regards to postmodern detective fiction. The aspects of the book which have already
been discussed, film analysis and ties with Auster's movies, fall outside the scope of this essay, leaving the book to be discussed completely by itself, aside from any comparisons between it and other novels. Furthermore, whereas there were other novels which conformed to the postmodern detective genre, Auster's writing generally lends itself well to the genre, and The Book of Illusions more than the others, aside from The New York Trilogy, that is.
In establishing whether or not, and how, a book belongs to a certain genre, it is first necessary to realize the extent and depth of that genre. The postmodern version of the detective novel is perhaps even harder to classify than most, due to one aspect in which postmodernism and the detective novel are often seen as opposites by academic critics like Brian McHale and Vanessa Guignery, where postmodernism is seen to obfuscate and the detective novel is generally found to clarify. The first half of this thesis will therefore be devoted to, on the one hand, considering postmodernism and the detective genre, and on the other hand reconciling them. In initially considering these two fields as separate, it should also shed some light on the combination, as well as broaden any understanding of the postmodern detective genre. A detective novel with strong postmodern elements is not necessarily the same as what many academics have already labeled the postmodern detective. In attempting to map out these different fields, this thesis will incorporate different articles on the relevant subjects, using them as examples and drawing on their theory. As for then combining postmodernism with the detective genre, this thesis will draw on both the considerations of postmodernism and the detective genre, and several articles which deal with this combination. The second part will consist of an application of the theory from the first part, firstly briefly considering aspects of postmodernism and the detective genre in Auster's entire oeuvre, before moving on to a close reading of The Book of Illusions, and thereby wrapping up this thesis with the consideration of how and to what extent the novel is a postmodern detective novel.
The main thrust of this thesis is that Paul Auster's The Book of Illusions is a postmodern detective novel, despite the ways it differs from other works in the genre. By setting out the nature
of the postmodern detective, and the different features through which it can be recognized, it will become clear that The Book of Illusions belongs in the genre, even while it becomes clear that the book can be seen as taking the genre in a new direction.
1.1 Looking into the Postmodernist Side:
This part of the thesis will be dedicated to the analysis of postmodernism, and will consider it separately from the detective genre and The Book of Illusions. As mentioned in the introduction, the reason for this is twofold. With such a combination of literary fields as the postmodern detective, it is inevitable that the two fields would influence each other, although it must also be said that it is mostly the detective novel which has adapted in this case. Also, The Book of Illusions is not exactly like most other postmodern detective novels, which is why it has never been studied as one. Therefore, it is necessary to look at postmodernism beyond what has been established within the theory around the genre of postmodern detectives. Luckily, postmodernism is a well-researched subject, so the number of articles on the topic is vast. These articles do not necessarily tie in with each other, so this chapter will consider a number of them, try to sort out the differences between them as well as the similarities, and try to arrive at a reasonable idea of what constitutes a postmodern novel.
Postmodernism has been around for quite some time, not just in literature, but also in art, architecture, philosophy, etc. As such, it is a vast field, and is currently still in the process of growing and changing. However, for the sake of this thesis, those fields of postmodernism which are not relevant to literature will be ignored, as a broader investigation would not fit within the scope of this thesis, or add any relevant arguments to what is being discussed. As the name implies, postmodernism came after modernism, but there have been mixed views concerning the relation between these two terms. On the topic of postmodernism, Brian McHale wrote that “Nothing about this term is unproblematic, nothing about it is entirely satisfactory... Nobody likes the term” (McHale 3). On the other side of the spectrum stands Robert Siegle, who writes that, universally, “We like 'postmodern' in all its confusion” (Siegle 165). In other words, this chapter will have to deal with a myriad of articles that sometimes conflict in opinion, whether this be a result of differences in approach or time frame (there was an eight-year gap in between the publications of
McHale's and Siegle's articles).
For the sake of this thesis, postmodernism will be considered as a genre, looking at features which are prevalent in postmodern fiction. The notion of genre, therefore, is also something which should be considered before moving on to the discussion of postmodernism as a genre. As Tzvetan Todorov writes, “Initially, the answer seems obvious: genres are classes of texts” (Todorov 161). This might seem a reasonable explanation, yet as Todorov subsequently points out, this hardly serves as a good explanation. If a class of texts refers to a collection of texts that have something in common, it would be impossible to define any genre, for almost every text has something in common with almost every other text. If the detective genre was defined solely by the fact that there was a detective present, the genre would likely extend beyond what it is considered now, though many actual detective novels would no longer fall within this category, for not all detective characters are actual investigators or part of the police force. There must therefore be more than just the one feature to identify a genre, both to exclude texts that do not fit in despite one coincidental commonality, and to include texts that lack one or more features, but otherwise fit the genre perfectly. Even so, there will always be novels that conform more strongly to the detective genre than others. This is a result of the expectations built around a genre, where the more a text fits in with expectations, the more it is considered to be part of a genre. Regardless of how a genre comes to be in the first place, it can be explained as a group of texts which have a certain amount of features in common across all texts. Not all texts might have the same features in common, and theoretically, if a genre was broad enough, there might even be texts that share almost no features.
Todorov also discusses the possibility that a text might disobey the rules of a genre, and might therefore be excluded from the genre. However, he argues that “The fact that a work 'disobeys' its genre does not make the latter nonexistent; it is tempting to say that quite the contrary is true” (Todorov 160). By blatantly turning around or avoiding a certain convention of a genre, that aspect is thereby acknowledged, and the genre reinforced. It can also affect the genre, as Todorov
points out, if noticed by the general crowd and successfully affecting public opinion, actually becoming a part of the genre it tried to subvert. In studying the detective genre, the most important thing is therefore to identify conventions or rules of this genre, looking both at elements that the novels belonging to this genre share and elements that are crucial to the genre.
McHale's view on postmodernism is a good place to start this discussion, not because he elaborates on the basic idea of the term, but because of his view on its ephemerality. Also, aside from the core concept of postmodernism, the focus is entirely on its application to literature. In the first chapter of his Postmodern Fiction, he writes that “the thing to which the term claims to refer, does not exist” (McHale 4). By this, he does not deny the existence of postmodernism, but rather argues that it can not be classified as one single idea. Postmodernism, as an umbrella term, contains a multitude of ideas of which “it is possible to construct them in a variety of ways” (Ibid.). The rest of this chapter will attempt to deal with postmodernism holding the notion of postmodernism as an umbrella term in mind, while also taking into account that “this does not mean that all constructs are equally interesting or valuable (Ibid.). McHale goes on to discuss dominants in postmodernism. By dominants, he refers to those aspects within a book which signify it as belonging to a specific genre or concept. The postmodernist dominant McHale spends most of the rest of that chapter discussing is an ontological one, in contrast to the modernist dominant, which he considers to be an epistemological one.
It becomes clear from his subsequent discussion of epistemological dominants changing into ontological ones that he sees postmodernism as a continuation of modernism, marked by the gradual change of dominant. McHale briefly raises the issue in his book that ontology and epistemology can never be completely separated, “A philosopher might object that we cannot raise epistemological questions without immediately raising ontological questions, and vice versa”, but then dismisses the issue by claiming that one of the two will always be foregrounded (McHale 11). However, his reasoning behind this dismissal is that one of the two must always be said before the
other, “one cannot say two things at the same time” (Ibid.). It is understandable that questions of one sort could lead to the other, as with questions like 'Who are we and how can we know?', and 'How can we know anything without understanding our own nature?'. The problem with McHale's dismissal lies in his relying on the arbitrary natures of linearity and temporality. The questions could as easily have been 'How can we know who we are?' and 'Is understanding our own nature not essential to gaining knowledge?'. The order in which the ontological and epistemological questions are raised has been reversed here, but it remains difficult to determine which is foregrounded.
Considering this in regards to literature, rather than simple questions, the matter becomes less simple. McHale argues that Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49 is a modernist novel because Pynchon does not “break through here to a mode of fiction beyond modernism and its epistemological premises” (McHale 24). Oedipa, the protagonist of the novel, struggles with what is real and how she can recognize it, so McHale seems to be right in this regard, still going by the assumption that an epistemological dominant is what defines modernist and postmodernist literature. Even so, part of the reason Oedipa finds herself unable to distinguish reality from paranoia is because she finds herself unable to trust herself, leading to a question of ontology. Epistemology is more foregrounded and present, yet, as McHale explains, ontology is more at the core of the novel. In considering both of these elements, the difference between modernism and postmodernism is a matter of approach, more than anything else.
In Siegle's “Postmodernism(TM)”, he delves even further into the problematic nature of McHale's theory of postmodernist fiction. Where McHale saw postmodernism as a reasonably clearly identifiable by means of dominants, Siegle sees postmodernism as an indistinct collection of ideas that are sometimes incoherent, where “we persist in a muddle about 'postmodernism' because, at not even so deep a level, we desire this world to preserve a protective confusion. We are, quite predictably, ourselves confused tangles of self-difference, our allegiances and dependencies distributed more widely and contradictorily than our conscious belief systems attest” (Siegle 165).
Although it seems somewhat contradictory, Siegle goes on to argue that “We have our way of 'fixing' the game of Definition”, by which he means that the definition of postmodernism can be whatever a person wants it to be (Siegle 166). Despite Siegle's criticism of McHale, this broad view of postmodernism appears to be something they both agree on. However, if the definition of postmodernism is fixable, how can it simultaneously be ungraspable?
Siegle dedicates numerous paragraphs to a discussion of the shortcomings in McHale's Postmodern Fiction concerning how to define postmodernism in the middle part of his article, but initially remains vague about how he himself would define postmodernism. He himself seems to be aware of this as well, but reaches a coherent point when he writes that “To either do postmodernism, or make one's talking about it productive, one has at this point no other choice but to think one's way across this paradigmatic divide” (Siegle 169). In other words, postmodernism might be presented as incoherent and impossible to understand, but it can still be used to access literary works. The main complaint I have with Siegle's understanding of postmodernism is that it either offers too many answers, making postmodernism a mess from which no reasoning becomes possible, or any approach becomes feasible, at which point it transcends itself and becomes useless. Siegle's argument that the paradigmatic divide must be crossed offers no explanation of how this is supposed to be done, which is perhaps his point.
Siegle puts forward that “Postmodernism means the multivalence of the question, what are we to make of living in the mode of information, media, and multinational capitalism?” (Siegle 181). His argument becomes clearer at this point, as he describes the process of approaching one matter from different angles. By shifting emphasis from one aspect to another, the nature of the work considered can be changed in the eyes of the reader. While interesting, Siegle's theory ultimately revolves around the interpretation of literature, rather than the literature itself.
Marianne DeKoven takes her study of postmodernism in a new direction, considering the relationship between postmodernism and the post-utopian moment. She also establishes the
beginning of postmodernism, which has not yet been discussed in this thesis, and which she places in the sixties. According to DeKoven, this coincides with a specific utopian moment she describes, a period in which many small communities were established in America, attempts at utopia. The post-utopian moment, according to her, is not merely linked to postmodernism through period, though. In describing the two utopian/distopian novels she is working with in this article, she writes that “A characteristic postmodernist narrative strategy works in both novels to handle the dilemma of at once representing a powerful utopian desire and at the same time representing a thoroughgoing skepticism about the possibility of its fulfillment” (DeKoven 78). This somewhat ties in with Jean-Francois Lyotard's idea of the death of the grand narratives1. The characters in the books DeKoven
discusses want to believe that something as great as a utopian society could be brought about, but having lost faith in its realization: “Utopia in postmodernity is multiply defeated and discredited, yet it persists in the form not only of desire for elimination of domination, inequality and oppression but also of desire for transcendence itself” (DeKoven 91).
DeKoven sees postmodern utopia as a place where people have the desire and the drive to try and make their idea of utopia a reality despite not believing in the possibility of success. To consider this an admirable attitude would be misguided, especially considering the inevitable collapse of the utopian society they have attempted to establish. Furthermore, DeKoven explains that this paradoxical attitude continues even after the fall. If, as DeKoven implies, the search for utopia is a string of repetitions that will never end, regardless of any lack of hope of the utopian society's enduring success, that strongly implies a dissatisfaction with the alternative. As DeKoven writes, the novels she discusses “choose and enact a postmodern form of resistance-from-within”, where assured, repeated failure is more appealing than remaining the current, mainstream society of the novel (Ibid.).
It should also be pointed out that, like McHale, DeKoven does not consider the novels she chose to discuss to be entirely postmodern. She discusses “the persistence of utopianism as
modernist form within the reconfigured formal conventionality of postmodernism” (DeKoven 78). She describes the difference between a postmodernist utopia and a modernist utopia as a difference in the presence of belief in the utopia, where belief was only still strong in the latter. The postmodernism DeKoven describes is one where paradoxical attitudes are prevalent and satisfactory outcomes are not.
Yet another way to consider postmodernism identify postmodern literature is to consider its religious aspect, or so John McClure argues. He suggests that “many postmodern texts are shot through with and even shaped by spiritual concerns”, though he also admits there is a strong trend of looking at postmodernism as secular (McClure 143). He ties this trend to a period of an apparent resurgence of faith in America “from the 1960s to the present” (McClure 142). Concerning the belief that postmodernism is secular, McClure writes that the efforts of different academics he discusses in his article “to produce an effortlessly secular and utterly desacralized present is unpersuasive but illuminating”, illuminating because it allowed academics to look at literature without having to consider its religious aspects, and unpersuasive because those religious aspects were nevertheless present (McClure 144).
McClure looks at DeLillo and Pynchon and argues that “In work after work, they sympathetically explore certain non-secular constructions of reality while repudiating others as forms of repression and control and insisting on the inevitable partiality of it all” (McClure 153). Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49 seems to conform to this idea, and it would be hard to ignore the religious aspects of the novel, especially the Christian association that inevitably comes with the character named Jesus Arrabal.
According to McClure, there are several “tendencies in the spiritual counter-culture” and the regular spiritual culture that are represented in postmodernist literature (McClure 156). He identifies several of them in the works he discusses, such as “spirituality as an enabling practice that precedes and may or may not result in some coherent vision of things”, the hope that there will be
reconciliation between estranged friends or family members who embrace different faiths, and spiritualities as representing “a refusal of modernist-existentialist pessimism” (McClure 156, 158). In looking at these tendencies as postmodern, McClure tries to start a broader trend of studying the religious aspects of postmodern literature, but it is not the religions themselves that he considers postmodern. Rather, he is interested in “manifestations of powerful discursive shifts in the broader culture”(McClure 160). Similar to how DeKoven tries to understand the simultaneous desire for a utopian society and the belief that such a society is impossible, McClure tries to understand the phenomenon of growing religiosity in a world that is largely understood to be secular. Trying to understand the relationships between different religions or spiritualities is an equally large part of this equation, where the question is not just about whether or not someone is religious, but also how someone is religious. In short, McClure's notion of postmodern literature involves “a culture increasingly committed to understanding human experience in religious ways and deeply divided about how to do so”, though, as McClure points out, there are apparently also academics discussing postmodernism in an exclusively secular fashion (Ibid.).
Finally, Timothy Bewes writes that in his article, “the postmodern novel will turn out to be about belief rather than skepticism, immediacy rather than alienation, integrity rather than isolation, ethics rather than cynicism, honesty and sincerity rather than irony” (Bewes 7). This view apparently derives from a difference in understanding postmodernism as “the end of the possibility of the event” or understanding postmodernism as “precisely the occasion of the event” (Bewes 5). The word possibility is used here in a rather abstract fashion, but can be taken to refer to the reader's understanding that the events in the novel could occur, simultaneous with the moment of reading. The “occasion of the event”, as Bewes uses the term, is a “direct experience of time, a liberation of subjective... temporality, the sudden insertion of the reading subject into a sensuous experience of the world” (Bewes 5, 14). The first of the two previously mentioned ways to understand postmodernism refers to a view of postmodernist novels where they do not engage with their own
possibility due to their historical linearity “limited by an inadequate understanding of temporality as linear chronology” (Bewes 18). In his article, Bewes strongly favors the idea of postmodernism as the occasion of the event. One of the books he uses to explain his theory is Auster's City of Glass, in which the protagonist, a writer, writes detective novels for a living, “a commercial rather than literary enterprise” (Bewes 9). He also uses a pseudonym, and this leads to a situation, Bewes argues, where the writing of the “novel as such... is put into suspension as something impossible, at least in the hands of this writer”, thereby allowing the actual writing of the novel (Ibid.). City of Glass is about a writer who does not write literature, and instead finds himself becoming one of the characters from the detective novels he wrote. Meanwhile, he uses the name of Paul Auster himself, and by adopting this name gives Auster the means to write the book in his place. In City of Glass, this would refer to Paul Auster becoming himself part of the novel, and the novel becoming a character in itself.
There are several aspects of these theories that, to a certain extent, clash with each other. First of all, there are McHale's and Siegle's differing views on the likeability of postmodernism. Beyond that, Siegle also spends a significant portion of his article discussing the shortcomings of McHale's book, shortcomings that mostly revolved around McHale's not having taken certain authors or factors into account. Even had this discrepancy not existed, the two academics have little in common concerning their view on postmodernism. Furthermore, there seem to be no clear cut oppositions among the different articles I have discussed. Although Bewes' theory has little in common with those of the others, this is because he discusses a separate area of postmodernism, rather than because of any discernible disagreements.
Despite the general idea that postmodernism is a multivalent term, the articles discussed in this chapter mostly do not seem to disagree with each other. While McHale and Siegle might not exactly agree, at least their ideas are similar enough to be comparable. Furthermore, while several of the other academics might not be discussing the same aspects of postmodernism, their ideas seem
to follow similar lines. For instance, while DeKoven and McClure discuss different issues, namely religion and the ideal society, they both consider the way in which these issues are discussed in postmodern novels and arrive at similar conclusions. Whether it concerns religion or society, there is a struggle to come to terms with it in a world where there are no certainties. Siegle, too, argues that postmodernism is essentially about crossing divides, and the difficulties that come with such an endeavor.
This chapter has looked at five different articles dealing with postmodernism. The first, by McHale, offered the ontological dominant as a way of recognizing postmodern novels. The second, by Siegle, offered criticism on McHale's theory, and instead argued that postmodernism was about the multivalence of the question, without an understanding of how to connect the questions with each other. DeKoven and McClure offered similar ways of looking at the postmodern novel. Though one looked specifically at utopianism and the other at religion and secularism, both considered postmodernism in the same light as Siegle, though focusing only on their respective subjects. While The Book of Illusions focuses on another different subject, the notion of being confronted with opposing ideas is also quite prevalent in this book. The last article considered the possibility of the novel being aware of itself. Bewes distances himself from certain other postmodernist academics, and his theory has little in common with the others presented in this chapter, but his theory seems widely applicable to postmodern novels. While the study of postmodern goes in a myriad of directions, it was still possible to get some working notions together in this chapter, which will be used later in this thesis to discuss Auster's The Book of Illusions.
1.2 Considering the Detective Genre:
The detective genre differs from postmodern fiction in several ways. First of all, its aspects are generally more pronouncedly present, consisting of certain forms of plot development, rather than for example ontological questions. While the detective genre has had many permutations over the years – it has been over a century since the first detective stories were published – many of the core elements remained the same. This chapter will mostly look at the genre as it was in its early days, while still acknowledging some of the more general changes that occurred throughout the years. After all, certain early detective novels are still among the best-known examples within the genre, including the books by Arthur Conan Doyle and Agatha Christie. Furthermore, to give an accurate overview of all the ways that the detective genre has adapted would be beyond the scope of this thesis. Instead, the aim of this chapter is simply to understand the basic format of detective novels, showing an awareness of the ways in which the genre has developed, but not actively mapping out these changes.
What most people understand by a detective novel is a novel in which a crime is committed which is eventually solved by one person, or perhaps by more than one, “a story etc about a crime, often a murder, and a detective who tries to find out who did it” (. This is true, aside from a few exceptional cases. In some detective novels, the twist has been that there was an accident, rather than a crime, but the mystery would still be solved by one person, or a combination of several persons. In other words, there is no way to describe the entirety of the detective genre in a single sentence. For this reason, this chapter will concern itself with identifying elements that, if not universal, are at least common for detective novels, as well as make an attempt to understand why these elements are, or are not, used.
The genre is generally considered to have started with Edgar Allan Poe's short stories about Dupin, in which a person with extraordinary deductive capabilities solves three separate mysteries. The genre then grew with publications by several authors who are also still well-known, like Agatha
Christie, Ngaio Marsh, and of course Arthur Conan Doyle. While there were differences between the novels published by these different writers, and even between the novels themselves, the format was largely the same, in many cases even nearly identical. As time passed by, however, the detective novel began to take on new shapes. The hard-boiled detective became popular, and the forensic detective after that. Scandinavia produced its own brand of detective novels, which often featured a somewhat depressed protagonist, and offered criticism on society. These, and many more, filled the ranks of the detective genre, despite the many differences between them.
One aspect that many of the early detective novels shared was that they took place in a rural location. Poe's stories took place in Paris, and a number of the Sherlock Holmes stories took place in London, but the countryside is still an often-used location for authors like Christie and Marsh, and some of Doyle's books transported Holmes to the countryside as well, like The Hounds of the Baskervilles. According to W. H. Auden, the appeal of the countryside as the location of murder lies in the fact that “Nature should reflect its human inhabitants, i.e., it should be the Great Good Place; for the more Eden-like it is, the greater the contradiction of murder” (Auden 408). This theory relies on the countryside, as viewed by readers, as a beautiful place, and the city as a place where murder would be more commonplace. If the case is indeed that murder should be committed in a “Great Good Place” for it to have a stronger shocking effect, it might be that this could also be applied to Poe's short detective stories. The murders, and the more minor crime of theft, Dupin solved took place in Paris. Although Paris can hardly be seen as countryside, the foreign aspect, as well as Paris' status as an extremely cultural city with great cuisine, might well have conveyed a similar image of Goodness to American readers. However, the number of detective novels that take place in the countryside has diminished greatly over the decades, where the greater part by far now take place in urban areas instead. As such, while the countryside, or a similar area of what Auden referred to as Goodness, might once have been a marker for the detective genre, it can no longer be counted as such.
Auden also raises several other arguments concerning what should define a detective novel. Perhaps the most obvious among these is the murder. Not every detective novel features a murder, but the vast majority does. The murder is appealing in its cold-blooded brutality, and it makes it easier to add mystery to the story, as the murder victim will never be able to provide any help (until forensic pathology was introduced, at least). Also, as Auden points out, “Murder is unique in that it abolishes the party it injures, so that society has to take the place of the victim and on his behalf demand restitution or grant forgiveness; it is the one crime in which society has a direct interest” (Auden 407). Many detective novels therefore also feature side characters who believe they will be able to solve the crime, which either leads to their fooling about for the duration of the story, their supplying the protagonist with a crucial hint, or an unfortunate discovery leading to another murder. Thanks to this same feature, the detective character is also free to meddle and do research, although the police force and other characters might not necessarily approve. Of course, not all detective novels require the solving of a murder mystery. Poe's “The Purloined Letter” features nothing more serious than a stolen, though incriminating, letter, and other novels similarly feature theft or kidnapping as the main crime.
Another feature discussed by Auden is that of “A closed society so that the possibility of an outside murderer (and hence of the society being totally innocent) is excluded; and a closely related society so that all its members are potentially suspect” (Ibid.). Auden contrasts this with the thriller, which he claims deals with “an open society in which any enemy may be a friend or enemy in disguise” (Ibid.). Practically all of Agatha Christie's and Ngaio Marsh's novels conform to this notion, as do a few of Arthur Conan Doyle's novels. However, this idea strongly ties in with the idea of a murder in the countryside, where there are only a few people living in the near vicinity, allowing to introduce only a small number of suspects without having to exclude anyone without good reason. This becomes more difficult in urban environments, where the number of suspects is often too large to introduce all potential suspects separately. It is, of course, still possible. Most of
Colin Dexter's detective novels take place in the city of Oxford, but he still manages to identify small communities in his work, where only a select few could potentially have committed the crime. Still, the number of detective novels where the criminal remained faceless for most, if not all, of the novel has increased. The use of online databases where repeat offenders can be looked up, along with fingerprints and other relevant material, made it possible to discover the identity of the criminal without ever having to have been in the same room with them. However, a detective novel where the murderer remains faceless is not an entirely modern phenomenon. In “The Mystery of Marie Rogêt”, for example, Dupin is unable to identify the murderer(s), despite being able to explain the events leading up to Marie Rogêt's death in their entirety. As such, while the closed society is without a doubt a recurring element in early detective fiction, and still in use, it is by no means a necessary feature in a detective novel. Furthermore, while the open society might be common to the thriller genre as well, it is by no means denied as a tool to detective writers.
The last aspect Auden introduces which I will discuss in this chapter is the detective character. The detective character comes in many forms, Miss Marple is a retired old lady, father Brown is a parish priest, and Sherlock Holmes is an “unofficial consulting detective” (Doyle 98). Naturally, there are also detective characters who are actually detectives, such as Colin Dexter's inspector Morse, Ngaoi Marsh's Inspector Alleyn, and Columbo, from the identically named television series. Furthermore, while characters like Doyle's inspector Lestrade may also be professional detectives, they will not be counted as detective characters. They are not protagonists, and they never manage to solve any mysteries. As such, they do not fulfill a role as detective, regardless of the job they hold.
Anyway, the notion of detective character is rather vague, and open, up to a certain point, to interpretation. Whether a professional or not, the detective character usually possesses several traits which easily identify him or her as the detective character. The first of these, and the most well-known, is the detective character's deductive capabilities. Dupin and Sherlock Holmes are the most
famous and accomplished in this regard, where the first could follow a person's train of thought simply by watching him2, and the second repeatedly identifies people's lifestyle and occupation at a
glance. Other detective characters were able to similarly, if not as spectacularly, recreate events in their mind, allowing them to analyze situations, and realize the identity of the criminal. Auden writes that the “detective genius may have weaknesses to give him aesthetic interest”, which also makes it easier to identify with these characters who would otherwise be seemingly flawless. Sherlock Holmes is not only a deductive genius who knows how to play the violin, he is also “an expert singlestick player, boxer and swordsman”, and has compiled vast amounts of knowledge on different subjects (Doyle 21). However, as pointed out in A Study in Scarlet, he was unaware of the basic workings of the solar system. Other detective characters have similarly noticeable flaws, where miss Marple is old, inspector Morse is a lonely alcoholic, and Martin Beck goes from an unhappy marriage to no marriage at all over the course of Sjöwall and Wahlöö's detective series. On the other hand, there are also detective characters like Dorothy L. Sayers' Lord Peter Wimsey, who have no strong, discernible flaws. Such detective characters are rare, though, and can be seen as the exception, rather than the rule.
So far, then, this chapter has looked at location, murder, closed societies, and the detective character, some of which are more necessary or expected in detective novels than others. Another aspect of the detective novel is the degree to which the story is revealed, and to which the reader is fed information throughout the novel. Initially, after the first few chapters, the reader is generally aware of little more than the fact that a crime has been committed. As the story progresses, a steady flow of information, which is not always reliable, is presented to the reader. Finally, at the end, the detective has a big reveal in which every aspect of the plot is revealed. This sets the detective genre apart from other genres, not through its gradual disclosure of information, but through the gradual disclosure of information that is both central to the plot, and occurred towards the start of the novel. Eyal Segal writes that “An awareness of not knowing would create an expectation for receiving the
missing information. This would result either in suspense, if the expectation relates to the narrative future, or in curiosity, if it bears on the narrative past”, which is exactly what happens in a detective novel (Segal 159). The reader is aware that a murder has been committed, and is therefore curious as to the identity of the killer for most of the novel, and in suspense towards the end, when the killer's identity will always be revealed. Naturally, many detective novels also have unexpected disclosures concerning events from the beginning of the novel, or from before the novel began. On these disclosures, Segal writes that “if the reader is unaware that an informational gap exists, this gap will become perceptible and operative only when unexpectedly disclosed, thereby creating surprise” (Ibid.). This is the basic structure of most detective novels, where the crime is released early on, the detective character manages to gather bits of information throughout the book, and eventually explains the entire situation.
The final aspect of the detective genre to be discussed in this chapter ties in with the previous paragraph. As the detective character explains all that had transpired, nothing in the novel is left to the imagination of the reader. As Segal points out, “the detective story is generally recognized to be a paradigm case of strong closure”(Segal 154). Not only does the detective character announce the identity of the criminal, he or she also provides the method, the motivation, and sometimes even an analysis of the criminal's psyche. Furthermore, this explanation includes all the other involved parties more often than not, carefully summarizing and analyzing all events in the entire novel. The criminal then wraps up the entire affair by freely admitting his guilt, leaving no doubt at all as to the validity of the detective character's explanation.
This chapter looked at several elements commonly found in detective fiction. Although all of these elements are, to a certain degree, associated with detective novels, it is clear that hardly any of them are actually essential to the detective genre. In fact, none of them wholly escape being left out or subverted in detective novels. The rural background to the novel and the closed society in which murder or another crime takes place are easily recognizable as elements used in detective
novels, and can also be found in The Book of Illusions, but are nevertheless hardly necessary. This goes for murder as well, despite its iconic status within the detective genre, as it is easily replaced with another manner of crime. The detective character is more stable, as they possess a number of traits which are more universal, yet still not entirely. Despite the similarities between different detective characters, they are all unique. Lastly, the detective novel is commonly perceived as having no open endings, and rightfully so, as any questions in these novels are seldom left unanswered by the end of the book. Even if it seems exceedingly difficult to establish the detective genre's composition, due to the many differences in, and adaptations of, the genre, it is nevertheless quite easy to identify most detective novels, using these and other elements to identify them, disregarding any lack of specific elements simply as that particular novel's individual take on the detective genre. It is in this fashion that the genre adapts and grows to encompass what are publicly perceived as new styles of detective novels.
1.3 Revealing the Postmodern Detective
Having looked at both postmodernism and the detective genre is not enough to understand postmodern detective fiction. In fact, it is something that cannot be understood by only looking at a combination of the two. There are several elements to the two fields that are irreconcilable in their opposite natures, and so it must be understood that it would be inaccurate to say that the detective genre combined with the postmodern genre. Rather, the true basis for the postmodern detective is that “One of the characteristic features of the postmodern writing consists in bowing to, and borrowing from, the literary past, acknowledging that legacy both consciously and ironically through the use of pastiche and parody” (Guignery 2). The postmodern detective novels are, quite naturally, essentially postmodern, whereas traditional detective fiction had more modernist tendencies, as modernist logic “is that of a detective story” (McHale 9). The postmodern detective should therefore be looked at as a subversion of the traditional detective genre, with enough of the traditional detective genre's narrative incorporated in the novels to make the subversion recognizable. This chapter will attempt to identify aspects from the traditional detective genre and postmodernism within postmodern detective fiction, looking also at the different aspects in the fields that were reconcilable, and the areas which might already have overlapped.
As with the chapter on postmodernism, this chapter will consider several articles on the subject of the postmodern detective. Before that, however, this chapter will consider the different aspects of postmodernism and the detective genre discussed in the previous two chapters, as well as several books already considered to be postmodern detectives, to identify which elements have been carried over into postmodern detective fiction.
Probably the most glaring discrepancy between postmodernism and the detective genre is the amount of closure they offer. Whereas the detective genre elaborately explains all events, postmodern fiction deals with uncertainty, unknowability, and contradiction. Detective novels provide answers. Postmodern novels provide questions. These questions and answers do not deal
with the same subjects. The traditional detective novel deals with questions of crime and corruption, giving an answer to the question of “whodunnit?”. The questions of postmodernism are less easily identifiable, and more diverse as well. In the chapter on postmodernism, two articles dealt with the question of an ideal society in postmodernism, and the question of religiosity in the same, but these two examples are hardly the extent of matters dealt with in postmodernism. This being the case, regardless of the difficulty in establishing the nature of the detective genre, the detective genre is considerably less complicated than postmodernism. The latter, after all, is marked and understood by its contradictory nature and the multiple interpretations of its nature.
While the hard-boiled detective novel has not been considered in the chapter on the detective genre, it becomes relevant here. The traditional detective might be considered fully focused on closure, but the hard-boiled detective already breaks away from this trend, “showing how it may be a letdown to get even what we think we want” with regards to closure” (Martin 167). Nevertheless, as Martin points out, “the popular detective novel offers at least the appearance of closure, even if it often turns out to be less than rewarding” (Ibid.). This being the case, the hard-boiled detective can be interpreted as a step in the direction of the kind of ending the postmodern detective offers.
The detective character is another element that is not generally seen in postmodern fiction. Even if they have a single, noticeable weakness, the detective characters still stand out from average people, as I pointed out in the chapter on the detective novel. In a novel where the story is not brought to an entirely satisfactory conclusion for the protagonist, a character who could achieve beyond what others could achieve would be out of place, unless they failed despite their superior abilities, in which case they would not be satisfactory as a detective character. There are, of course, exceptions as well. In John Grisham's The Chamber, for example, the protagonist is able confirm that his grandfather did not commit the murders for he was incarcerated. As such, while The Chamber is not a traditional detective novel, the protagonist fulfills the role of detective character
admirably. Nevertheless, he is unable to prevent the death sentence his grandfather receives. Similar developments can be found in other novels as well, and are especially not uncommon with the lawyer detective branch of the detective genre, where the detective character is able to solve the mystery of the crime entirely, but is then foiled by the system he or she is a part of. Another example of a fallible detective character is the one where the detective character is able to solve the mystery, as well as beat the system, but nevertheless decides to allow the criminal to go free, like what happens in Scott Turow's, Presumed Innocent. These detective characters who are not infallible are found more often in later detective novels, and are more human, and easier to identify with, which puts them closer to the characters in postmodern fiction.
Most postmodern fiction takes place in cities and, as Stefan Brandt writes, deals “with the complex and oftentimes contradictory modes of representation of the American metropolis in postmodern practice” (Brandt 553). This use of urban settings is, at least partly, because the city is a very familiar place to many readers and simultaneously a place they will never truly know, filled with unfamiliar faces and streets they have never visited, which ties in with the postmodern, contradictory sense that it is equally familiar and unfamiliar. However, this does not need to be at odds with the rural setting of many detective novels, since the previous chapter already established that the countryside was a common aspect of some early detective novels, rather than a rule. The The same counts for the use of closed societies, which is merely a tool some authors of detective novels chose to use. To complete this list, murder is not an intrinsic part of postmodern novels. However, just like murder is not actually necessary in detective novels, there is no rule that prohibits the use of murder in postmodern fiction.
McHale's theory about dominants actually discusses the detective genre as well as postmodernism. Where the postmodernist dominant is ontological, he argues, the detective novel focuses on epistemology, “as the detective story is the epistemological genre par excellence” (McHale 16). Detective novels are not interested in the self, or an understanding of it. Instead, the
entirety of the novel is devoted to a question of knowledge, the who, how, and why of the criminal. The question of who the criminal is has a slight ontological element, developed more in some novels than in others. Father Brown himself, for instance, takes on the role of murderer in his mind, blurring the boundary between him and the actual murderer, as well as blurring any ontological certainty in the books. Miss Marple similarly blurs these boundaries by comparing other characters to people she once knew, thereby becoming better able to understand who they are and which one of them is the criminal. Other detective novels might go even further into ontological territory, however they do so, but even this only leads to the more foregrounded epistemological question of how to find out about the murder. After all, it is not the criminal's being that the detective character is interested in, but their relation to the crime. Still, despite this difference between the dominants of postmodern fiction and detective fiction, the gap can easily be bridged. As McHale points out, “push ontological questions far enough and they tip over into epistemological questions” and the other way around (McHale 11).
For all their differences, postmodernism and the detective genre are also similar in a few regards. The protagonists in postmodernist novels might not possess the detective character's superior deductive capabilities, but they do enjoy a perspective which is often different from that of the other characters and which allows them to “achieve a better understanding and acceptance of the postmodern world and a clearer sense of their own identities within that world” (Cullum 15). The postmodern protagonist mostly seems average, but still ends up either being confronted with a world view that does not quite fit, or already having this view, and having to find a way to deal with it. The detective character uses his or her unique perspective to see beyond what others see, and is therefore the only one who, for example, realizes that the victim did actually not commit suicide. Where the detective sees into the world around, and sees more than others, the postmodern protagonist looks at the self, and asks more than others.
is different, as pointed out earlier, and only the detective novel answers these questions. Again, there are exceptions, though. In Scott Turow's Presumed Innocent, the reader never gets the satisfaction of knowing for sure who the murderer was. That having been said, it must also be admitted that Presumed Innocent stands on the edge of the detective genre spectrum. Other detective novels might raise questions beyond those pertaining to the crime, but while these novels may be part of the detective genre, these questions are not an element of that same genre.
Most of these elements are already quite obvious in Auster's The New York Trilogy. In City of Glass, to use the first of the three stories as example, there is no murder or other crime which needs to be solved. However, the threat of crime is introduced through the presence of Stillman Sr., who had already sent a death threat to his son years before. The protagonist, Quinn, also consciously assumes the role of a detective character, or at least tries to. As Quinn offers his services as a private investigator, and acts out his own fictional character, Max Work, the reader is tricked into expecting something resembling a traditional detective narrative. However, no mystery appears for Quinn to solve, and the greatest mystery in the novel revolves around the eventual disappearance of Quinn himself. Nevertheless, Quinn's conviction that he is acting like a detective character allows him to look at the world differently, if not always correctly. City of Glass also starts off with a more epistemological focus, as Quinn tries to figure out Stillman Sr.'s motives and plans, but never uncovers them. Meanwhile, ontological questions are foregrounded as Quinn struggles with holding together several different identities, and keeping them separate from the identities of other characters. Most importantly, and noticeably, the novel ends without any closure. The reader is left wondering what happened to Quinn as well as to Virginia and Peter Stillman. Even Stillman Sr.'s death only adds to the questions, as it offers no insight into his motivations. The narrator takes away his own reliability as well, as he admits that “any inaccuracies in the story should be blamed on me. There were moments when the text was difficult to decipher” (City of Glass 130). This lack of closure ties in with the postmodern trend to end stories without providing answers, made even
more salient by the reader's expectation of an ending in the style of the detective genre.
The first of the articles that will be considered in this chapter is Vanessa Guignery's “'Colonel Mustard, in the Billiard Room, with the Revolver': Jonathan Coe's What a Carve Up! as a postmodern whodunnit”. Guignery discusses and tries to explain the workings of the postmodern detective novel by considering Coe's novel, much as this thesis does with The Book of Illusions. She argues “that postmodernist novels have appropriated and transformed detective fiction to such an extent that it has become a paradigm of postmodernism, which entails both ontological and epistemological questionings” (Guignery 1). This argument goes against McHale's view that the detective novel stands as representative of modernist fiction, or, rather, it goes against the view that the detective novel can only stand as representative of modernist fiction. She also states that postmodern detective fiction “combines ontological and epistemological concerns”, which was how McHale, too, viewed any novels bridging modernism and postmodernism.
Most of the basic theory concerning the postmodern detective Guignery discusses has already been dealt with in this chapter, including the view that “the decenteredness of the postmodern world of detective fiction [stands] as opposed to the resolution provided by the modernist universe of mystery fiction” (Guignery 5). However, she also introduces the notion that in the novel she discusses, as well as other postmodernist novels, “the genre to which the book belongs (autobiography? chronicle? detective fiction?) becomes uncertain. In a postmodern way, the main story ramifies into a multiplicity of adjacent stories and forking paths” (Guignery 6). This same phenomenon can also be found in City of Glass and The Crying of Lot 49, where the former at certain points takes on the appearance of a supernatural novel, a romance, or a travel narrative, beside the mystery novel, and the latter delves into the realms of thriller and absurdism.
One large difference between What a Carve Up! and the postmodern detectives discussed so far in this chapter, as well as The Book of Illusions is that What a Carve Up! does actually feature a murder mystery, as well as a narrative where attempts are made to solve it. This being the case, the
novel stands closer to the traditional detective novel, and it is more aware of its status as a postmodern detective novel even than City of Glass. Neither book solves the crime, but City of Glass does not even have a crime to solve.
Richard Swope considers a different aspect of the postmodern detective novel: “the question is no longer simply how the detective can know the world but has shifted to the question of what world the detective is in, or even to the question of which self is to solve that world” (Swope 209). Although the traditional detective character stands outside the world, a strong awareness of the world and its workings allow this detective character to solve the mysteries he or she is confronted with. However, when the postmodern detective, as Swope posits, cannot understand the world in which the mystery dwells, solving the mystery might not help the detective character restore balance to the world. As Swope explains, the role of the traditional detective character is not only to solve the mystery, but mainly to restore the balance and integrity of the world. Swope uses Eco's The Name of the Rose as an example, where the detective character's discovery of the criminal “not only fails to provide the epistemological certainty it ought to restore, but actually creates, or more accurately exposes, more mystery”, and causes part of the monastery to burn down as well (Swope 208).
Swope goes on to discuss the phenomenon of the missing person in postmodern detective literature, where the detective character not only fails to solve the mystery, but loses himself along the way, as happens in all three parts of The New York Trilogy, and also happens in The Crying of Lot 49, although it could also be argued that she loses not herself, but the different male characters in the book who could have given her support. As Swope points out, this phenomenon was already present in many traditional detective novels, even if it never formed a problem for those detective characters. In solving crimes, “they were able to do so only because of their status as outsiders”, but this same status meant that most of them had no family they could return to in between solving mysteries. Sherlock's only companion is Watson, just like many other traditional detective
characters only had their sidekick to rely on, who often acted as the bridge between the detective character and the world they operated in, putting the sidekick in a similar, though not identical, situation in this regard. The detective character who loses himself is not that far removed from the traditional detective character.
Allan Andrew Burke's essay on The New York Trilogy corresponds to what has just been described with regards to postmodern detective fiction, arguing that the detective character's difficulty in solving the mystery stems not from the mystery itself, but from the world around it, “Even if the event can be accurately perceived, there remains the difficulty of properly contextualizing it, framing it in order to assign the event a comprehensible meaning” (Burke 15). In City of Glass, Quinn has spent years living separately from the outside world, living instead inside the detective novels he writes. When he returns to the world outside his window, he tries to make sense of it through the logic of detective novels, and the city in which he lives is already large, beyond the scope of any full understanding. Both Quinn and the reader become lost as the world of City of Glass, and those of other postmodern detectives, hold no satisfactory answers. Furthermore, the protagonists of these novels will never realize this fact until it is too late, for if the narrative is based on a detective character who does not understand the world he or she is looking in on, then a detective character who understands there are no answers in that world must admit defeat. After all, if the postmodern detective character's greatest barrier lies in a lack of understanding of the world, and the nature of the world in postmodern novels is to have no satisfactory solutions, any understanding would become paradoxical. As Quinn says, “There was no way to know: not this, not anything” (The New York Trilogy 56).
Although Alison Russel's “Deconstructing The New York Trilogy: Paul Auster's Anti-Detective Fiction” adds little new to the discussion of the postmodern detective, it reinforces several theories. Concerning the postmodern interpretation of the closure that is almost representative of the detective genre, she writes that “By denying closure, and by sprinkling his trilogy with references to
other end-dominated texts, Auster continually disseminates the meaning of this detective story” (Russel 73). Even if she only discusses these elements with regards to The New York Trilogy, and spends very little time discussing the postmodern detective as a whole, she uses arguments that are similar to those of the other academics in this chapter. Like Guignery, Russel also discusses postmodernism as using a transformed version of detective fiction, and points out how The New York Trilogy at times seems to shift into narratives other than the detective narrative. She also considers the openness of the endings in this novel, and the protagonists' loss of the self.
Postmodern detective fiction, then, is more easily identifiable than postmodern fiction. This is largely to do with the fact that postmodern detective fiction is only one branch of postmodernist literature, and was influenced by a genre which features a clear narrative. Allowing room for exception, considering the articles and the conclusions drawn from considering the previous chapters together, it seems that the postmodern detective has several distinct features. Unlike traditional detective fiction, the need for a crime or a criminal seems almost non-existent. The mystery for the detective character can lie in anything, as long as the detective character feels the drive to try to solve it. However, the detective character is doomed to failure through a pervasive inability to solve the problem, even if the mystery turns out to be solvable and the detective character manages to hold on to their identity. Aside from some other changes to the format, the greatest change from the detective genre seems to be the lack of success the detective character has in understanding and influencing the postmodern world, and the rest seems to stem from a postmodern re-appropriation of the detective genre.
2.1 Paul Auster's Work
The last three chapters have built up to an understanding of what the postmodern detective is, looking both at articles and novels in an attempt to map out this genre, or this branch of postmodernist novels. Having finished that, it is time to move on to Paul Auster's work, as the aim of this thesis is still to consider the postmodern detective in The Book of Illusions. First, though, it would also be useful to consider Auster's work more broadly, as many of his novels share similar features, and his The New York Trilogy is already widely acclaimed as a series of postmodern detective novels. As such, before this thesis moves on to a close reading of The Book of Illusions, this chapter will briefly discuss several of Auster's books besides The New York Trilogy and The Book of Illusions.
As mentioned before, these novels share certain features, devices that Auster has a tendency to use in his work, and a discussion of one of Auster's novels as a postmodern detective therefore extends, to a certain extent, to the rest of his work. In his article “The Strange Case of Paul Auster”, Barry Lewis discusses the recurring detective narratives in Auster's work, where “The typical detective story can be divided into three basic components: the presentation of the mystery, the process of detection, and the solution towards which the whole narrative moves” (Lewis 53). In the first part of The New York Trilogy, the protagonist is presented with the mystery of the Stillman case, and spends the greater part of the story attempting to figure out Stillman Sr's intentions. The solution to which Lewis alludes never becomes reality, as Quinn loses track of Stillman Sr. and everyone else involved, including himself. This ending is as should be expected of a postmodern detective story. As the narrator of the last part of the trilogy points out, referring to City of Glass and Ghosts, as well as the story being narrated, “These three stories are finally the same story”, and each of these stories indeed follow this same narrative Auster 288). In Ghosts, the mystery lies in the identities, or identity, of Black and White, and while Blue partially solves the mystery and kills White, or Black, seeing as they are the same person, this only ties in with Black's wishes. As it turns
out, Blue never had agency until he walked through the door at the end. The mystery in The Locked Room is in the whereabouts of Fanshawe, who orchestrated his own disappearance. Although the protagonist finds Fanshawe, he does not get the meeting he was hoping for, and Fanshawe disappears again, “'I don't want to go,' I said. 'We still have things to talk about.' (The New York Trilogy 306).
Yet where the mystery is introduced to be easily recognizable in the different parts of The New York Trilogy, this is not necessarily the case for the rest of Auster's novels. As Lewis writes about Moon Palace's protagonist, “His manic reading of Uncle Victor's books seems to indicate that he is looking for clues, but the real mystery is that, as yet, no mystery to solve” (Lewis 56). The most obvious interpretation of the mystery, which covers all of the protagonist's attempts at detecting the truth, would be the mystery behind the protagonist's family. His uncle was his last known relative, and the remainder of the book is spent uncovering the identity of the rest. Unfortunately, this protagonist is also not blessed with a satisfactory ending, as both his father and his grandfather die before he gets a chance to know them as such. His chance at a new family is likewise shot, as his relationship with Kitty becomes irreparably damaged.
The mystery in The Brooklyn Follies is again more straightforward, as the granddaughter of the protagonist's sister suddenly shows up on the doorstep, unwilling to utter a single word. More so than the other novels, this one ends with what seems to be a happy ending. The protagonist is reunited with his daughter, his nephew gets married, and his niece is saved from her abusive, cultist husband. However, the second-to-last paragraph introduces the fall of the Twin Towers to the events of the book. This being the case, if the characters find a semblance of happiness, there is no guarantee it will last. Even though the book seemed to have closure, in almost the same amount as traditional detective novels, Auster's brief mention of 9/11 again introduces questions, and these are not answered.
