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Detective Fiction and the Problem of Knowledge pp 149–190Cite as

Palgrave Macmillan

Paul Auster’s The New York Trilogy

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Abstract

This chapter examines Auster’s The New York Trilogy through the lens of the legacy of psychogeography and situationism. An analysis of the Trilogy is also a good place to start discussing important traits of the metacognitive genre such as the figure of the detective-writer, the doppelgänger, locked rooms, transparent mirrors, reflective windows, and, of course, the city background which frequently makes the detectives feel, in Baudelaire’s terms, “anywhere out of the world.”

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Here Nicol refers to Borges’s conception of the reader of detective stories.

  2. 2.

    Brassett defines “cartography” as a method which “does not merely outline what it finds sitting on the surface, it does not just trace. Cartography fills, feels the space it moves in; it does not tie up loose ends and constructs no ultimate, universal frames of references. […] Think of Cartography as a vast map-making machine” (1994, 9).

  3. 3.

    The dérive was defined in the following terms: “A mode of experimental behavior linked to the conditions of urban society: a technique of rapid passage through varied ambiences. The term also designates a specific uninterrupted period of dériving” (Knabb 2006, 52).

  4. 4.

    A clear reference to Poe’s doppelgänger eponymous short story.

  5. 5.

    Another intertextual subtlety since Fanshawe is the title of Hawthorne’s first novel published anonymously in 1828. For more information regarding this affiliation, see Marling (Marling 1995).

  6. 6.

    “Anywhere Out of the World/N’importe où hors du monde” was published in Le Spleen de Paris (1869).

  7. 7.

    As James Peacock pointed out, although Blue’s seclusion is ironically similar to Thoreau’s , their situations do not have the same implications since “this solitude is for Thoreau a political as well as poetic act, a means of reassessing American notions of individuality and one’s relationships with others in a democratic, rapidly industrializing nation” (2010, 66).

  8. 8.

    Fanshawe’s and then the narrator’s experience in an isolated house in the south of France echoes not only the life of Thoreau at Walden Pond but also the personal life of Auster, who worked as the “caretaker of a farmhouse” in 1973, in southern France (Auster 1997, 344–348).

  9. 9.

    Interestingly, this man calls himself Peter Stillman, another metatextual reference between the novels of the Trilogy.

  10. 10.

    For a discussion of the role of women in metacognitive mystery tales, see Sweeney’s recent article published in French “Traces gothiques dans le roman policier métaphysique” (Sweeney 2016).

  11. 11.

    Merivale shares the same point of view about Auster’s novel, which she defines in terms that clearly confirm Poe’s legacy:

    His Trilogy is a fugue on the collapsing of personalities into identities, of identities into a single uncertain, shifting identity base, and of that, in turn, into the game or play of the postmodernist text, a process first adumbrated a century and a half ago in Poe’s always-already postmodernist hermeneutic allegory of the inaccessibility of the dark secrets in our hearts. (1999, 112)

  12. 12.

    In the same way, Molloy feels that he has to keep on telling his story: “What I need now is stories, it took me a long time to know that, and I’m not sure of it” (Beckett 2009, 9).

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  1. University of Liège, Liège, Belgium

    Antoine Dechêne

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Dechêne, A. (2018). Paul Auster’s The New York Trilogy. In: Detective Fiction and the Problem of Knowledge. Crime Files. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-94469-2_6

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