Lacan, Shadow Feminism, and Paul Auster’s City of Glass

Abstract

This essay engages Paul Auster’s novel from 1985, City of Glass, with Lacan and feminism, in order to venture beyond the more business-as-usual formal aspects of postmodernism and propose that the ambiguous resistance of the text can be situated in a decidedly social and ideological context. The protagonist Daniel Quinn is presented as embarking upon a bewildering anti-detective odyssey that gives voice/language to a wish to confront, expose and pull down the traditional law-of-the-Father in order to clear the stage for what can or would come next. The Lucanian psychosexual rebirth of Quinn is followed through its stages (imaginary and symbolic), culminating in the blank white room of erasure at the end. Close attention is given to the enigmatic nature of the job Quinn accepts in the name of protecting the son from the father, seeing it as a repudiation of the fallacy of Peter Stillman Sr.’s wish to access the impossible realm of the real. The text’s unconscious, antisocial longing for the antidote to America’s deeply embedded patriarchal pathology is found in the mystical release of the lost Quinn into the very brickwork of the city, a baffling postmodern revolution in dream-mode, a shadow-feminism resistance through self-annihilation.