New York was an inexhaustible space, a labyrinth of endless steps, and no matter how far he walked, no matter how well he came to know its neighbourhoods and streets, it always left him with the feeling of being lost. Lost, not only in the city, but within himself as well. Each time he took a walk, he felt as though he were leaving himself behind...reducing himself to a seeing eye...
On his best walks he was able to feel that he was nowhere. And this, finally, was all he ever asked of things, to be nowhere. New York was the nowhere he had built around himself.
The real protagonist of Paul Auster' s City of Glass, the first book in The New York Trilogy, is New York, a huge, mental and labyrinthine metropolis which appears and disappears between the pages of the book, as do the characters who inhabit it. The story revolves around Quinn, a mystery writer who mistakenly receives a phone call meant for detective Paul Auster and assumes his identity, He becomes embroiled in a case. It was a wrong number that started it. After receiving the phone call, he starts tailing and old man, Stillman.
Everyday, Queen-Auster follows Stillman in his strange wanderings through New York, within a
narrowly circumscribed area, bounded on the north by 110th Street, on
the south by 72nd Street, on the west by Riverside Park, and on the
east by Amsterdam Avenue. The old man always brings a bag with him which he fills with the objects he picks up off the ground: as far as Quinn could tell, the objects Stillman collected were valueless. They seemed to be no more than broken things, discarded things, stray bits of junk.
The discovery of the mysterious and disquieting collection is the real hub of Quinn's investigation.
At a certain point, he starts drawing the paths traced by Stillman in his personal notebook:
for no particular reason that he was aware of, Quinn turned to a clear page of the red notebook and sketched a little map of the area Stillman had wandered in. ... He began to trace with his pen the movements that Stillman had made on a single day... The result was as follows: ... Quinn was struck by the way Stillman had skirted around the edge of the territory, not once venturing into the centre... the diagram ... might also have been a zero or the letter "O". So, day by day, he links all the steps together and finds out that the maps on his notebook form the letters in the words "
tower of Babel ". Stillman's maniacal activity assumes a remote biblical significance. Only after having read the book written by Stillman, can Quinn-Auster partly clarify his ideas.
The old Stillman is moved by paranoid and prophetic convictions in which the broken objects and the language are the two faces of a coin. The connection between things and words lies in their common destiny to crumble and become useless to mankind, like the bricks of the tower of Babel:
for our words no longer correspond to the world. When things were whole, we felt confident that our words could express them. But little by little these things have broken apart, shattered, collapsed into chaos. And yet our words have remained the same. They have not adapted themselves to the new reality. Hence, every time we try to speak of what we see, we speak falsely, distorting the very thing we are trying to represent.
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