The Spatial Poetics and the "Murder of the Real"in Paul Auster's City of Glass*

Abstract

Paul Auster's City of Glass is here singled out as representative of the writer's The New York Trilogy. All throughout his novelistic career, Auster has been working on a pseudothesis that adheres to a certain aesthetic of disappearance. The study engages this Austerian aesthetic apropos of certain theoretical stretches such as the Emersonian "Not Me", the Thoreauvian "interval" or "nowhere", the Deleuzian "nomadic trajectory", the Derridian "grammè" or "specter", and the Baudrillardian "disappearance". The city of the novel's titling is here seen as the trope of all that which has already disappeared, and hence it is seen as the space (mise en scène) where the perfect crime of the murder of the real is to be thoroughly redramatized and re-thought. The writer's use of the assets of the detective genre in its postmodernist nuances is also seen as a genuine part of this endeavour.