Cervantes in ’s New York Trilogy

ULLA MUSARRA-SCHRØDER Katholieke Universiteit Leuven / Radboud Universiteit Nijmegen

City of Glass, part I of The New York Trilogy, includes an interpretation of Don Quixote, in which the traditional relations between narrative instances and narrative levels are turned inside out. According to this interpretation, voiced by a certain “Paul Auster”, the author inside the book, it is Don Quixote who has invented Cervantes’ . In City of Glass this reversal of the roles of author and character occurs in the relation between “Auster” and Daniel Quinn, the main character of the novel, but even the roles of Quinn and that of the "real" Paul Auster (the author outside the book), will, to some degree, be interchangeable. The Don Quixote interpretation has the function of a mise en abyme, that reflects techniques and motifs characteristic not only of City of Glass, but also of the entire Trilogy. Also parts II and III, Ghosts and The Locked Room, are tales full of mirror images: every character is a double, the “Doppelgänger” of someone else. In The Locked Room the relation between the two main characters, the first person narrator and his friend Fanshawe, is comparable to that between Sancho Panza and Don Quixote. In the entire trilogy, just as in Don Quixote, the frontiers between “reality” and “fiction”, “truth” and “fantasy”, are erased.

Paul Auster’s The New York Trilogy (1987),1 like most of Auster’s other (, , Illusions), is full of mirrors, doubles, disguises, ghosts, vanishing, disappearing, and sometimes unexpectedly re-appearing characters. It is a book in which the frontiers between reality and fiction are continually undermined, and the traditional hierarchical relation between author and character subverted. Furthermore, the narration is interwoven with numerous

1 The single novels which constitute the trilogy were originally published by Sun and Moon Press, Los Angeles: City of Glass in 1985, Ghosts and The Locked Room in 1986. The complete trilogy was first published by Faber and Faber, London, in 1987. I refer to the reprint from 1999. 220 | ULLA MUSARRA-SCHRØDER quotations and allusions to other books, texts, and authors. In this intertextual network, characteristic for Auster’s novels, the most prominent figures are Hawthorne, Melville, and Poe, but it also includes European writers such as Rimbaud, Mallarmé, Chateaubriand, Hölderlin, Marco Polo, Giordano Bruno, and certainly not least: Cervantes. The famous Spanish author’s text is among the most important intertexts of the trilogy. Part I, City of Glass, includes an important discussion of Don Quixote. This discussion suggests a typically postmodernist interpretation of Cervantes’ novel voiced by a certain “Paul Auster”, who, notwithstanding his name, is not identical with the author.2 This interpretation may be considered “postmodernist” insofar as the traditional relations between narrative instances and narrative levels are turned inside out: here it is the character Don Quixote who is the one that has “invented” Cervantes’ novel.3 The main character of City of Glass is Daniel Quinn, an author of mystery novels, who writes under the pseudonym of William Wilson (the name of the “Doppelgänger” in Edgar Allan Poe’s short story William Wilson); the detective in Quinn’s novels is Max Work, an adventurous and (as suggested by his name) dynamic character, with whom Quinn tends to identify himself. One night Quinn receives a phone call from a certain Virginia Stillman, who mistakes him for private detective “Paul Auster” (head of the “Auster Detective Agency”). After having told her that she has dialled a wrong number, Quinn hangs up. Virginia Stillman, however, insists in calling him again, and in the end Quinn, who has become interested in the case, decides to play along, feigning himself to be “Auster”. Virginia Stillman wants to hire private detective “Auster” to prevent her husband Peter Stillman junior from falling victim to the murderous

2 The name of this character will subsequently be put between quotation marks. 3 In the case of Don Quixote this hierarchical order could be summarized as follows: “I, Cervantes, publish a Spanish translation of an Arabic manuscript, written by a certain Hamete Benengeli”. A partial reversal of this order has been proposed by Italo Calvino in one of his literary essays: “Cervantes represents a sort of synchronic relation between the narrated facts and the creation of the Arabic manuscript, by which Don Quixote and Sancho realize that their adventures have been written down by Benengeli and not by Avellaneda in his apocryphal second part of Don Quixote” (Calvino 1995: 389).