Calling City of Glass postmodern is like calling The Maltese Falcon hardboiled.  It seems obvious.  And yet the question remains: If so, then how so?  It’s not enough to say Auster’s book simply is postmodern.  It needs to be demonstrated.  But to do so requires a working definition of a historical period/philosophical approach/artistic movement that is still in the process of defining itself.  Lacking the faculty of time travel, I can only point to several widely acknowledged characteristics, as established by contemporary experts in the field, which I find most convincing about and representative of what we currently view as postmodernism.  In specific, three of these will be my framework for discussing City of Glass as a postmodern novel: intertextuality, antifoundationalism, and ontological questions.

First, City of Glass (CoG) is postmodern novel because it is immensely intertextual.  As defined by Geyh, Leebron, and Levy, this is “the explicit relationships of a text to other texts” (xxii).  Put another way, Auster is drawing upon the existence of other books, and the reader’s familiarity with them, to construct his narrative.  The premise of his book itself is an example of this.  One of the things CoG is doing is playing a game with the reader.  The object is to see “to what extent would people tolerate blasphemies if they gave them amusement” (Auster 154).  In other words, how long will people keep reading a book that is patently ridiculous if it’s also very fun to read?  In order to draw readers into this game, Auster makes use of a vast body of genre fiction already in place: the detective novel.  Because the conventions of classic whodunnits? are already in place, Auster can begin the book with an absurd phone call that instigates a preposterous investigation.  Instead of reeling back in disbelief and indignation, the reader simply acknowledges that, yes, of course, Quinn will now go on a series of implausible adventures in a which a slow revealing of clues will unravel a fantastic mystery.  It’s only because authors of detective fiction like Edgar Allan Poe, Dashiell Hammett, and Raymond Chandler established certain rules that Auster can get away with this.  CoGwould not work if not for its relationship to earlier texts that lie outside of it.  Since these texts represent mass culture (detective fiction is inextricably linked with pulp magazines and film noir), this demonstrates another way in which CoG is postmodern: It breaks down the barrier between high/literary and low/popular culture (Geyh, Leebron, and Levy xviii).
   
There is a far more explicit way in which CoG is intertextual.  There is the matter of Don Quixote. In order to elaborate indirectly on CoG, Auster stops the narrative to wax philosophical about why Cervantes claimed he was not the author of his own book.  This is only possible because of the close relationship between CoG and Don Quixote.  Both books feature the adventures of people who become the object of the fiction most familiar to them (Don Quixote reads about knights and “becomes” a knight; Daniel Quinn writes about detectives and “becomes” a detective).  More importantly, both books are written by authors who cast doubt on their own claim to authorship within the narrative itself.

Which leads to the next characteristic that marks CoG as a postmodern novel: its antifoundational stance.  As Geyh, Leebron, and Levy explain:

In my own words, this means that a postmodern novel challenges the idea that any one rule/truth/belief/understanding can be applied to all situations.  A postmodern novel challenges accepted rules and sheds doubt on long held assumptions on a fundamental level.  For Auster, this comes in the form of questioning the notion of authorship.  The traditional understanding of authors has been that they are people who are endowed with a certain level of authority.  They not only give us the books we read, but they are the first and final word on what those books mean.  Further, the traditional assumption is that the author exists outside the book.  The author does not inhabit the book as part of its fiction.  There is a clear demarcation between fact and fiction.

However, by casting himself as one of the characters in his novel, Auster has removed the barrier between fiction and reality.  It is not just that he uses his own name (shedding doubt on whether the word can ever be the thing, one of the running themes of his book) – it’s that the Paul Auster inside CoG is described in the true-to-life details of the Paul Auster outside it.  With this incredibly self conscious act, Auster has challenged us to ask new questions about authors.  One of those questions, provided by Octaviano Gutierrez, Kashena Konecki, and Jack Sickels in class is, “Is it possible to be self-referential and not autobiographical?”  This kind of inquiry would not be provoked by a straight forward, traditional narrative.  Furthermore, Auster removes himself as an authorial figure by making himself just another character.  This shifts much of the responsibility of meaning to the reader.  The reader gets to “see” Auster in a disempowered state, within the text itself, a fiction open to our interpretation, instead of outside the text as a solid fact, an absolute ruler.
   
This leads to the last characteristic that makes CoG a postmodern novel.  As a text, it poses questions on the nature of being, what it means to exist, otherwise known as ontology.  The critic Brain McHale explained that this kind of interrogation is the one defining feature of postmodern fiction.  For an example of a typical ontological question, Geyh, Leebron, and Levy offer: “what constitutes identity?” (xviii).  McHale adds, “What happens when different kinds of world[s] are placed in confrontation, or when boundaries between worlds are violated?” (10).  Both of these questions are explored in depth in Auster’s novel.  They are the foundation upon which the whole narrative is built.
   
One way CoG asks the reader to think about “what constitutes identity?” is through the actions of Quinn.  Is he an author or a detective?  How do we define him?  Does writing a series of detective novels qualify him to perform the function of private investigator in a real situation?  After all, what exactly constitutes a detective?  As Quinn himself notes, “In effect, the writer and the detective are interchangeable” (Auster 15).  They are both people who look, listen, and move through events in search of an idea that will make sense of all things (15).  It can even be argued that Quinn operates reasonably well in his capacity as detective up until he loses all grip on reality, shortly after his encounter with Auster.  But does the mere act of detecting render Quinn a detective?  Or is he only an author?  These questions may not have an answer, for they are the story itself, “and whether or not it means something is not for the story to tell” (Auster 7).
   
Another way CoG explores identity is by keeping the reader constantly in doubt about who is being referred to at anytime in the novel.  There are two Peter Stillmans, two Daniels, and two Paul Austers.  In fact, any attempt to discuss this book in depth requires endless clarification over who Paul Auster is.  Is he the author who wrote CoG, or the character in it?  Are both Auster’s the same person?  If so, can a real human being exist in a fictional world?  In this way, McHale’s ontological question is explored: “What happens when different kinds of world[s] are placed in confrontation, or when boundaries between worlds are violated?”  The two different worlds are the world inside CoG and the one outside it, which are confused in the reader’s mind as Auster repeatedly intrudes on the text.  The result is that people begin to doubt Auster wrote the book at all.  (For example, the question posed by the group who presented on Sorapure in class: How is Auster the author when Quinn writes the notebook and the editor compiles the materials?)

Through its use of intertextuality, antifoundationalism, and ontological questions, City of Glass marks itself as a perfect example of what we presently define as postmodernism.  The overall effect of this novel is that it raises large questions about what constitutes an author, how we look at them, and what their role is; and finally, about what it means to be a reader.  Depending on the reader’s level of familiarity with all the texts in direct relationship with City of Glass, the book will have very different meanings.  What will remain the same is the opportunity Auster has provided for new understandings of the form of the novel.

Copyright 2003 Abel Diaz.  Essay used with author's permission.
This essay may not be reproduced in any form without the express written consent of the author.