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The Detective and the Author: City ofGlass Madeleine Sorapure The form trusts too much in transcendent reason. - Geoffrey Hartman, "The Mystery ofMysteries" Readers of detective fiction typically admire the interpretive skill of the detective, who, in the midst of mysterious, misleading, and disparate clues, is able to discern logical and necessary connections leading invariably to the solution of the mystery. Part of the strong appeal of detective fiction, critics have suggested, is that readers can identify with the detective and achieve interpretive victory alongside him, or closely on his heels. Glenn W. Most, for example, comments that the detective serves as "the figure for the reader within the text, the one character whose activities most closely parallel the reader's own" (348). In the method he applies to the puzzling text that confronts him, the detective is indeed a kind of exemplary reader, correctly interpreting ambiguous or misleading signs and establishing what Frank Kermode has described as a tight "hermeneutic fit" (187). And yet, the emphasis on the correctness ofthe detective's interpretation clearly indicates that it is the author who functions in detective fiction as the exemplary figure, the true master. The author constructs the puzzle that the detective eventually solves, and while we are guided by the detective and may marvel at his superior interpretive skills, the detective 's success is, of course, measured by the accuracy with which he recuperates the "transcendent reason" ofthe author, composing the events he has experienced into a comprehensive plot that matches that of the author. Often in detective fiction we see precisely this at the end of the story: the detective recaps the entire proceedings, charting the true significance of the clues and characters he has encountered. Establishing 72 Madeleine Sorapure causality and eliminating ambiguity, the detective presents his own "authorial " ability to unite disparate elements into a formal coherence. Indeed , we can say that the detective is successful only insofar as he is able to attain the position of the author, a metaphysical position, above or beyond the events in the text. No doubt, the satisfaction of reading traditional detective fiction - of both the classic British and the "hard-boiled" American type - derives from the implicit assurance that detective and reader will eventually ascend to the position ofthe author. Recent anti-detective fiction, however, denies this satisfaction and instead portrays the detective's frustrated pursuit of authorial knowledge. William Spanos, in "The Detective and the Boundary," describes the anti-detective story (and its psychoanalytic analogue) as "the paradigmatic archetype of the postmodern literary imagination"; its purpose is "to evoke the impulse to 'detect' ... in order to violently frustrate it by refusing to solve the crime" (154). In Thomas Pynchon's The Crying ofLot 49, for example, Oedipa Maas doggedly pursues leads, constructs plots, analyzes seemingly insignificant clues. In short, she does everything a good detective should do, but is unable to solve the mystery, and is left at the end to simply wait for a solution that mayor may not present itself. This novel, like most anti-detective fiction, calls into question not the abilities or efforts of the individual detective, but rather the methodology of detection itself, a methodology that valorizes the powers ofreason in the face ofmystery, that validates the hermeneutic enterprise, and most importantly, that allows for an authoritative position outside the events themselves from which omniscient knowledge is attainable: in short, the position and knowledge of the author, toward which detective and reader strive.1 Spanos and others have elaborated the critique, offered in anti-detective fiction, of the methodology and presuppositions of the traditional detective nove1.2 Paul Auster's City ofGlass, the first novel in The New York Trilogy, refocuses this critique on the function of the author in the discourse of detective fiction. Like other reflexive or self-conscious novels, City of Glass incorporates a formal and thematic questioning of authorship and authority, analyzing what Michel Foucault, in "What Is an Author ?," has described as the "author-function," the particular position the author occupies within a discourse and the particular kinds ofknow1edge made available by the author's position and activity. City ofGlass could be awkwardly described, then, as a "meta-anti-detective " story. Within the novel are several characters who are simultaneously authors and detectives, or more precisely, who are authors who choose to play the role of detective. This configuration - professional author-amateur detective - is not unusual. Indeed, we perceive a certain continuity between the activities ofwriting and investigating, which may...

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