The Self/Other in the City of Glass <27> The un-homing that Quinn experiences in the postmodern city is notably

heightened by the structures or buildings that he confronts during his excursions through New York. If New York is a "city of glass" as Auster's title suggests, it is so in a dual sense, that is according to both a modernist and postmodernist architectural logic that co-exist in most contemporary cities. On the one hand, as Anthony Vidler argues, modernity was "haunted...by a myth of transparency; transparency of the self to nature, of the self to the other, of all selves to society, and all this represented...by a universal transparency of building materials" (217), i.e., glass. These new transparent materials were to produce a "new and modern subject" capable of "spatial penetration" (220, 217), much as this subject was thought to be capable of penetrating the mysteries of the universe as well as the human psyche. Access to the transparent buildings reproduced a feeling of knowledge, knowledge of the inner workings of both machines and humans. Furthermore, "Transparency, it was thought, would eradicate the domain of myth, suspicion, tyranny, and above all else the irrational" (168). The detective, obviously, would thrive in such a space, the fiction of transparency being amenable to the panoptic gaze under which surveillance is perpetuated and maintained. In postmodernist architecture, on the other hand, while transparent materials remain prominent, they signify something quite different than the ability to penetrate and know the space one inhabits. Once we move into the postmodern, we discover that what appeared to be unmediated access is yet another spatial illusion. As Vidler notes, glass also acts as a deterrent, a boundary that forbids access rather than granting it; thus, transparency "quickly turns into obscurity (its apparent opposite) and reflectivity (its reversal)" (Vidler 220). One of the best examples of this is the Los Angeles Westin Bonaventure Hotel of which Jameson has written at length. Sheathed in mirrored glass, the Bonaventure, as Jameson describes it, possesses a "great reflective glass skin" that "repels the city outside" (42). Jameson suggests that this glass skin "is not even an exterior, inasmuch as when you seek to look at the hotel's outer walls you cannot see the hotel itself but only the distorted images of everything that surrounds it" (42). Synecdochic of the larger postmodern city of glass to which Auster calls our attention, the Bonaventure by evoking former transparent glass structures simultaneously both invites the subject to

look inside, to uncover the meaning beneath the surface, and refuses that very possibility. In the postmodern city, what once appeared as architecture of transparency "allows us neither to stop at the surface nor to penetrate it, (arresting us in a state of anxiety)" (Vidler 223). This is the liminal space inside which Quinn is suspended, perpetually on the verge of uncovering some great mystery, while remaining interminably on the surface, not so much looking in as looking back at a distorted image of himself and the space he inhabits. <28> Quinn's predicament becomes most apparent when, after his extended stay in the alley, he sees himself in the mirror on the facade of the building and, again, does not recognize the image as himself. "Feature for feature, he studied the face in front of him and slowly began to notice that this person bore a certain resemblance to the man he had always thought of as himself...He tried to remember himself as he had been before, but he found it difficult. He looked at this new Quinn and shrugged. It did not really matter. He had been one thing before, and now he was another. It was neither better nor worse. It was different, and that was all" (143). While Quinn does not feel the anxiety of which Vidler speaks, a point to which I will return, his experience is certainly that of someone being suspended somewhere between penetration, of both space and self, and reflection, or better yet deflection. He is compelled to look deeper as if he will discover some kernel or essence that will assure him of his existence, yet what he finds in the mirror is always other, the other by which, ironically, he "knows" himself. As Lefebvre explains, The mirror is a surface at once pure and impure, almost material yet virtually unreal; it presents the Ego with its own material presence, calling up its counterpart, its absence from-and at the same time its inherence in-this 'other' space. Inasmuch as its symmetry is projected therein, the Ego is liable to 'recognize' itself in the 'other,' but it does not in fact coincide with it: 'other merely represents 'Ego'...Here what is identical is at the same time radically other, radically different -- and transparency is equivalent to opacity. (185) While urban space is haunted by the modernist ideology of transparency, just as it is haunted by the specter of the detective who participates in the production of transparent space, ultimately this is the space of a former logic. <29> Auster's commentary on the uncanny effect of postmodern architecture dramatizes a

shift in the logic of surveillance, which Vidler suggests is "no longer panoptical" (160). Vidler quotes Alice Jardine who argues that we are "no longer in the system of the panopticon described so accurately by Foucault...we are rather in a mode of selfsurveillance: we watch ourselves as someone else" (160). In other words, the city of glass has not so much facilitated the observation of the other as it has culminated in the observation of the self (a self to which the subject has no access). Auster's trilogy highlights this very point when it reveals that Quinn has been tracking only himself all along. He is the person who has gone missing, yet when he appears to rediscover himself, in the mirror, it is as if he were watching someone else, the other, as if he were condemned to monitoring himself while at the same time being denied entrance, unable either to resist seeking what is inside or to penetrate the surface. This is, in fact, the primary theme of Ghosts, in which Blue watches a virtually identical man, Black, in a virtually identical room for days on end: "in spying out at Black across the street, it is as though Blue were looking into a mirror, and instead of merely watching another, he finds that he is also watching himself" (172). The startling revelation for Blue is that, as Black tells him, he "needs" Black, the other "to prove he's alive" (216), just as Quinn needs the mirror to prove he still exists after vacating the alley. Again, though, full access is denied; both men are suspended on the surface of a city of glass, knowledge remaining other.