Nowhere and everywhere in City of Glass

Principia Discordia, p.00054

In the beginning of City of Glass, the pained protagonist Quinn lives modestly and alone, having lost his family and having retreated from his friends. He has little impact on the world, especially as compared to his earlier aspirations as a poet; his only even marginally significant impact is through the mystery novels he writes, and even those are published with a tightly-guarded pseudonym and feature Max Work, a protagonist so antithetical to his own being that one could imagine him as negating Quinn's person through overcompensation. The pop-science notion of matter and antimatter would seem applicable to a scenario in which Quinn and his creation meet, annihilating each other with a handshake.

Physically, Quinn occupies only a small apartment and a variety of semi-random meandering routes that he walks through New York City. He moves to move, experiencing the environment abstractly, just as J.B. Jackson's "Hot-Rodder" did on the open road. (205) New York City is notorious for its density and variety, and it is the combination of these qualities that cause the landscape to change so rapidly for the pedestrian (especially at a New York pace) that makes it impossible for Quinn "to dwell on any one thing for very long." (8) Compared to the open countryside that one drives through, the dense city environment is so noisy (for all of the senses) that one need only travel through it at a walking pace to reduce it to an undifferentiated blur, to the drowning-out and disorienting formlessness of white noise.

JBJ notes that when motoring, "to the perceptive individual, there can be an almost mystical quality to the experience; his identity seems for the moment to be transmuted." (205) When this is combined with the active quality of movement (for the motorist, this is rather more abstract than for the pedestrian, as the actual motion is mediated by the car) and "the shifting focus of a moving, abstract world", one can perceive a perhaps coincidental connection to the walking meditation famously practiced by Theravada Buddhists. (205) The way Quinn experiences New York City exemplifies a perverse use of whatJBJ identified as transmutation of identity, a furthering of his escape from the world, into nowhere. To be nowhere is the only thing Quinn desires. (9) His walks take him beyond the mundane nowhere-ness of merely being unknown to the world: for Quinn, escaping the Hegelian notion that self-consciousness exists only for another—only in being acknowledged—is not enough to be "nowhere"; for having escaped the recognition of others, Quinn seeks also to escape his sense of place. He still has an apartment, still has a (superficial) relationship with the man at the lunch counter, mediated by baseball and theMets , and by virtue of even the narrow limits of his hermitage he can still see that he occupies space: just as a point is defined by its coordinates on a Cartesian grid, Quinn perceives his environment defining and affirming his self, and despairs.

It is Quinn's desire to annihilate the self that drives him to annihilate his environment in his walking, and is perhaps even an encouraging factor in his self-destructive pursuit of a haphazard mystery, burying his own identity under those that he knows are not his own, those of the mystery novel detective in general, and specifically those of Max Work, Paul Auster , and (to an extent) the elder Stillman. Just before Quinn decides to pursue his "fate" by pressing on with the hopeless case, he writes in his journal, considering a clarinetist: "To be inside that music, to be drawn into the circle of its repetitions: perhaps that is a place where one could finally disappear." (167) He completes his entry with Baudelaire, and his interpretations: "It seems to me that I will always be happy in the place where I am not. Or, more bluntly: Wherever I am not is the place where I am myself. Or else, taking the bull by the horns: Anywhere out of the world." (168) He subsequently abandons the little that he had before, even the rudimentary senses of place and time of his old life, to lose himself entirely in a stake-out in an alley for an event that never comes.  As everything falls away from Quinn during the stake-out—his money, his few contacts, his apartment, his purpose for staking out—Quinn disappears, almost. He manages, somehow, to survive in the alley while never alerting anyone to his presence: "It was as though he had melted into the walls of the city." (178) He even escapes the narrative of the novel itself, leaving the narrator to speculate as to his actions and methods and the time spent on the stake-out. Like the starlight that Quinn contemplates, wondering if the star "was still there, or if it had not burned out long ago," Quinn becomes himself a speculative figure, aSchrödinger's cat, but instead of being suspended between life and death, he is suspended between existence and nonexistence. (180) Quinn's only traces during this time are the waste that he leaves in the alley, and though one might derive a presence were they to consider the waste, if the only record Quinn leaves is one that nobody is going to read, then like a star whose light does not reach Earth, he remains undiscovered, effectively nonexistent.

Quinn, however, still feels a need "to record certain facts", and the notebook bearing his initials continues to be filled. (165) Even after he does not recognize his reflection, afterAuster tells him of the elder Stillman's suicide, after he loses his own apartment, after he re-enters the younger Stillman's abandoned apartment and begins to gradually fall into the state that was the younger Stillman's childhood—alone, naked, in the dark, fed with a tray from a mysterious hand (whose? Perhaps it was the wrong Stillman that died, perhaps the other had merely been biding his time after all, preparing for a new experiment—but who can say?)—Quinn continues to write, moving gradually from the specifics pertaining to the case, to himself and to Stillman, and ultimately entirely losing interest in himself, feeling "that his words had been severed from him, that they were now a part of the world at large, as real and specific as a stone, or a lake, or a flower." (200) Finally Quinn disappears. Even what he writes is no longer authored by himself, no longer a trace of his own existence, but instead existing only for itself, as itself. The words have become things unto themselves, and Quinn has discovered Adam's language.

The novel's final pages leave us with Quinn's ultimate disappearance, his vanishing without a trace, save the notebook. This disappearance is discovered by the novel's narrator, who only now appears for the first time in the story. The narrator tells us that he wrote the story by interpreting the red notebook Quinn left behind. There are many passages throughout the book, however, that could not have been gleaned from the notebook, such as the numerous dreams that Quinn supposedly always forgets. A potential hint towards the Quinn's disappearance and the narrator's appearance lies in the transformation Quinn experiences in his writing: "It [the case] had been a bridge to another place in his life, and now that he had crossed it, its meaning had been lost." (200) What the narrator describes here is not only the disappearance of Quinn (i.e., his identity), but also a transformation into something else, something whose words are indistinguishable from form. The most substantial hint, however, lies in the character Paul Auster's bizarre theory about the authorship of Cervantes' Don Quixote: that Don Quixote himself is the author. Don Quixote, not mad after all, orchestrated what Quinn calls "an elaborate hoax" because, according to Auster, "he wanted to test the gullibility of his fellow men. . . . to what extent would people tolerate blasphemies if they gave them amusement? The answer is obvious, isn't it? To any extent." (154)

Once we suspect that Quinn and the narrator are one and the same, playing a hoax on Paul Auster and ourselves, "clues" come out of the woodwork. The most obvious, if only because it is mentioned repeatedly, is that Quinn's initials, D.Q., are the same as Don Quixote's, but others include Quinn's wondering at "why Don Quixote had not simply wanted to write books like the ones he loved—instead of living out their adventures", when he himself has lived out the adventures in the books he loved to read—his being mysteries. Another is when Quinn confronts the woman in what was once his apartment: when she acknowledges that a writer used to live there, he blurts out "That's me! . . . I'm the writer!"—the end of her response, read in this context, is quite funny: "I've never seen a bigger mess in all my life." (190) This, and other "clues" that could be taken to support this view, are like the "letters" Quinn himself sees Stillman creating with his meandering walks: they may not be clues at all, just as the letters may not have been letters at all, appearing to us as such only because we want them to. Indeed, Quinn wonders if the letters are merely "a hoax he had perpetrated on himself." (113)

Of course, despite the potential hoax within the context of the novel's narrative, we must remember that it is only within this context, and that the novel's author remains Paul Auster, just as the potential hoax in Don Quixote still does not deny Cervantes' authorship. What it does imply, however, is that within the context of the novel, Quinn's disappearance and transformation is disappearance as a character and transformation into narrator—for within the confines of the novel, the narrator's words are equivalent to form: they are the entire "world at large", in Quinn's own words, "real and specific". (200) Quinn the character cannot know the answer to his final statement, "What will happen when there are no more pages in the red notebook?", but the narrator steps into the narrative immediately afterward, continuing from a self-aware first-person perspective. A late and telling "clue" to the relationship between author, narrator, text, and reader lies in the narrator's first reference to himself, in which he mentions his return from Africa. Cid Hamete Benengeli, Cervantes' fictional storyteller, was a Moor. In Auster's conception of Don Quixote, Cid Hamete Banengeli is a fiction dreamed up by the central character, Don Quixote himself, who takes on his role of narrator. This whole construct, however, is created by Cervantes, the author—according to the interpretation of Paul Auster, the reader. It is the reader who connects the dots, it is the reader who links the clues together, it is the reader who invents the mystery, and it is the reader who solves it.