Subject of Lack: a Žižekian Reading of Subjectivity in Paul Auster’s City of Glass

Dr. Omid Varzande1

Dr. Nasser Dashtpayma2

Shirzad yousefi Azar3

Abstract

The concept of lack being the apex of today’s human being’sstratums of a dithered Truth is an equivocated issue in thecontemporary postmodern era. As is for the amalgamation ofpostmodern approaches toward subjectivity, the subject isdecentred, displaced, and/or pluralized; for Žižek, on thecontrary, the very lack is inherent in the very core ofsubjectivity. In Paul Auster’s City of Glass, a juxtaposition ofboth the postmodern approach and that of Žižek’s Neoclassicalrevisiting of subjectivity is presented. The protagonist, who isa detective in this novella acts as if he lags behind someinternal realty. for Paul Auster, the detective genre is not theconventional one; that of the classical detectives who search forclue as a means to reach to causality to work out the case, it israther a genre so confusing that the detective not only does notyield any definite result, but with his ebullient sentimentsexculpate himself as a detective from coming to any logicaldeduction. Taking City of Glass as the center for the presentdiscussion, this paper, in an analytic approach, is to render arereading of the novella now from a Žižekian perspective.

1 Assistant professor, Islamic Azad University, Sanandaj Branch, Iran.2 Assistant professor, Islamic Azad University, Tabriz Branch, Iran.3M.A candidate, Faculty of Persian Literature and Foreign LanguagesDepartment of English, Azad University of Tabriz.Email: Shirzadyousefiazar@gmail.com

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Key words: double identity, desire, subjectivity, lack, superego, void

Introduction:

The issue of subjectivity can be deciphered from twoprovincial, at the same time, prominent and inalienablehypothesis; that of postmodern reading and that of Žižek’s. Basedon the postmodernists believe, there is an inexorable concept ofrelativism and nihilism for whatever we may think of; the onlymedication for which is to return to a modern subject byresorting to Enlightenment principles. Progenitors for this claimmight be the meticulous reading of texts by various literaryschools, which finally reason a notion of colonialism, or logo-centrism, or finally and in most cases ‘phalogocentrism’,embedded within our society. For Žižek, postmodernism is adevious way of thinking apropos of the concept of subjectivity.In For They Know not What They do Žižek comes to introduce his ilk ofthoughts as such:

This is also where all the postmodern-deconstructionist-poststructuralist variations on how the subject is always-already displaced, decentred, pluralized . . . somehow missthe central point: that the subject "as such" is thename for a certain radical displacement, a certain wound,cut, in the texture of the universe, and all itsidentifications are ultimately just so many failed attemptsto heal this wound (26).

For Slavoj Žižek subjectivity is doomed to an irredeemable Lackfor which there seems to be no cure. There within every one of usresides a void that in a way controls our deeds; we are nothing

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without it and identify with this notion of nothingness. Žižek’sattempts to explain subjectivity might be categorized as follows:1- Inspired by Descartes, Kant differentiates between

transcendental and material aspects of identity Later on, thisdifferentiation became the criteria based on which Hegel,Fitches, Schelling, and Lacan constituted their theories.Johnston agrees that Kant does not suppose any materialidentification for Identity; rather, psychological reading ofidentity is the sketches of a material image of subjectivity.

2- Transcendental sketches of subjectivity are prerequisites tomaterial identity. Whether to be free or controlled is in therealm of transcendental aspect of identity

3- Material aspect of identity is what Žižek has in mind todefine by employing Lacan, Kant, Hegel, and others.

To put it even more pointedly, Žižek’s central brainwaves can belike these: 1- It is demonstrable that only a Lacanian model ofsubjectivity, which matches the present detective identityresearch, enables us to describe the complexities of contemporarysubjectivity and its interpellation.

2- Pursuing the very idiosyncratic approach toward the issue ofsubjectivity, it will allow us to frame all kind of meaningfulcritique of contemporary modes of, as Sharpe calls it, socialreproduction.

3-a return to the Lacanian notion of subjectivity will enlightenthe readers to understand why and how hegemonic socio-politicalsystems necessarily lean on ideological misrepresentations.

German Ideology, one of the elemental foundations for Žižek’sdebates on contemporary philosophy, is the main point of thepresent analysis. Žižek’s interpretation of German Ideology as themain criteria for his expositions throughout his oeuvre is appliedon interpreting the enigmatic riddle in which Quinn is caught. Oneof Žižek’s most startling claims is his assertion that the

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Cartesian conception of subjectivity, especially radicalized byKant, Schelling, and Hegel, is contrary to the contemporaryintellectual consensus.

Pau Auster, the postmodern American novelist has writtenseveral books basically on the issue of identity. in many of hisnovels, there is a protagonist who is in charge of a detection asmeans to detect someone who has done or is approaching to do acrime, but that the detectives attends to find the Truth comes tovanity and, in a sardonic notion, it comes to split his identity.In City of Glass for instance, Quinn, the protagonist is the detectivein search for Stillman. Stillman is coming for his son and is tokill him. Quinn’s duty is to thwart such a crime. The result forhis detection is not like his previous detective who would findthe vital clue and finally would arrest the villain; Quinn becomesobsessed with the gyration of changing identities and lacks hissense of self.

Thus, by pointing to the very fact that Paul Auster portraitsdetective that engage in a game of splitting identity, alluding toŽižek’s analysis of the concept of subjectivity predicaments seemsdiscussable. This paper in a qualitative way is to read the veryconcept of subjectivity in Paul Auster’s City if Glass by wearingŽižek’s lenses of analysis.

Discussion

As a substantial trophy of German Ideology, an excruciating issueof lack in the subject roams among all the precursors beginningfrom Descartes. They all account for the belief that a failure

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inside the subject comes first. In The Ticklish Subject Žižek comes tosay that those under the influence of Kant often accusedeconstructionists and their ilk of promoting an incoherent andnihilistic relativism for which the only remedy is a return to themodern subject and its accompanying set of Enlightenmentprinciples (25). The primordial Void is brilliantly portrayed byPaul Auster in City of Glass as such: “He had, of course, long agostopped thinking of himself as real. If he lived now in the worldat all, it was only at one remove, through the imaginary person ofMax Work” (9). It can be rendered with greater specificity that inLacanian parlance, the subject is nothing more than a puppet ofthe big Other, a mere slave of the Symbolic Order. In City of Glass,Quinn feels bereaved of society and is condemned to solitude. Hewithdraws into his small apartment and hides from the outsideworld behind the mask of his pseudonym.

Quinn recluses himself to find his lost Self, such that“Quinn was no longer that part of him[self] that could writebooks, and although in many ways Quinn continued to exist, he nolonger existed for anyone but himself” (9). On the other hand,subjectivity, in Hegelian sense of the term, as argued by Beiserin Cambridge companion to Hegel is eclipsed and overshadowed, by apurely objective geist4 (69). What is crucial concerning subjectivityis the conception that the albeit Split in the very beginning oflife of the protagonist is elemental and inevitable for allcontributors to German Idealism. In a closer look, in thebeginning pages of City of Glass, Quinn’s predicament as an individualin what Auster claims, “a labyrinth city” (4), is represented asfollows:

[Quinn is] lost, not only in the city, but within himself as well.Each time he took a walk, he felt as though he were leavinghimself behind, and by giving himself up to the movement of thestreets, by reducing himself to a seeing eye, he was able to

4 Spirit, spirituality

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escape the obligation to think, and this, more than anything else,brought him a measure of peace, a salutary emptiness within (4).

The purpose of changing identity is to empty his interiorbeing and to remain only on the surface of his inventedcharacters. In such criticism, Lacan dwells on the emptiness ofsubjectivity as an empty-natured being. Now Bringing the Lacaniantenet of a split between moi5 and the je6 to the floor seemrelevant; in response to students of Philosophy apropos of theobject of Psychoanalysis, Lacan cautions his audience to be waryof the danger of a reduction of the subject to the ego (109).

As an exemplary illustration for subjectivity, Lacan putsforward the image of an onion and claims that a sedimentary Voidexists in the stratum of ego, and that after the removal all thelayers of the onion there remains a nothingness which is the exactequivalent for our ego. From this vantage point, as is observed,Quinn’s identity is always rendered along with another ego; inthis case, the other ego is his pen names, William Wilson, maxwork, (his detective identity in his novels), and Peter Stillmanto whom Quinn sympathizes as his just discovered ego. Quinn is sosusceptible to disclosure of his real identity that he does noteven reveal his pen name identification notes in his novels:

William Wilson, after all, was an invention, and even though hehad been born within Quinn himself, he now led an independentlife. Quinn treated him with deference, at times even admiration,but he never went so far as to believe that he and William Wilsonwere the same man. It was for this reason that he did not emergefrom behind the mask of his pseudonym. He had an agent, but theyhad never met. Their contacts were confined to the mail, for whichpurpose Quinn had rented a numbered box at the post office. Thesame was true of the publisher, who paid all fees, monies, androyalties to Quinn through the agent. No book by William Wilsonever included an author’s photograph or biographical note. William

5 Me6 I

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Wilson was not listed in any writers’ directory, he did not giveinterviews, and all the letters he received were answered by hisagent’s secretary. As far as Quinn could tell, no one knew hissecret (Auster 5).

This wrapping the real self is for Žižek, in parallel with Lacan,nothing other than emptiness in an etymologized perspective rootedwithin the subject himself. Žižek argues that the true subject isnothing other than this nothingness itself, this void, or emptyspot remaining after the inner visages of the ego (onion) havebeen removed. Now by doing so, a solitude is imperatively broughtto the floor in City of Glass as a means of showing the very voidpalpable, if malignant and diaphanous nothingness.

Malden Dollar, Žižek’s coauthor, objects Žižek in asserting thisimmediate nihilism. In Beyond Interpellation Dollar wittinglyformulates it: “the subject is precisely the failure to become thesubject” (12). Subjectivity is ultimately, in Dollar’s view, thepermanent tension between the phenomenal, experientiallyconstituted ego and the quasi-nominal, inexpressible Lack of beingin relation to which every determinate identity construction is adefensive and dramatic response (77). In balance with suchdefensive approach toward identity, despite all his resources as ameans of huddling his innermost void, Quinn, at the end of theinstallment, finds that all these schemes could do nothing buttemporarily deludes him, and toward the end of the novel, he isstalking toward his initial nothingness. He is again alone as iftraversing toward the dark hell of nothingness:

Little by little, Quinn was coming to the end. At a certainpoint, he realized that the more he wrote, the sooner the timewould come when he could no longer write anything. He began toweigh his words with great care, struggling to express himself aseconomically and clearly as possible (Auster 128).

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The innermost void signified as the Lacanian matheme $7, thebarred or split subject, signifies the primordial failure, thislost cause of the search for selfhood; as Žižek puts it “The splitsubject. . .can never fully become himself, he can never fullyrealize himself” Enjoy Your Symptom (181). Readers conversant withŽižekian metapsychological reading of subjectivity, find a curiousinterpretation of Hegel in Žižek’s oeuvre. To be sure about theincessant correlation among the German Idealist philosophersapropos of subjectivity, Žižek, brings to the fore a Hegelianapproach toward cotigo8. According to Žižek’s own reading of thehistorical development of the concept of the subjectivity fromDescartes through Hegel, the step that Hegel takes is simply toontologize9 Kant's epistemological image of subjectivity. That isto say, as is argued by Žižek in The Indivisible Remainder the subjectis literally, in its very being, nothing other than the void ofnegativity forever irreducible to every instance of determinaterealization (205). But what allures the subject to pursue himselfin searching for a complete knowledge, in Lacanian perspective,purported by Žižek, is an irrepressible desire. A desire rooteddeeply within subject himself; a desire which is uncontrollable.This notion of pursuing knowledge, in order to strengthen one’saccount of fullness, incredibly matches the features of detectivegenre where the private eye accounting for his obfuscating casescrambles throughout all determinant available or hidden data soas to unravel the enigma beyond the case.

Traditional detective novels portray the detective as anastute protagonist who pursues the case for which there is adetermined end. Those written by Agatha Christi and Canon Doyle,convey the gist for the present analysis. In this sort of novels,the detective follows the very testimonial particles and in the

7 The void in Self8 I think9 A particular theory about the nature of being or the kinds of things that have existence (Merriam-Webster Dic)

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end concludes into a resolution. The question as to whether thistypical detective has a drastic desire to follow the case to gainknowledge does not seem congenial here regarding the very factthat Auster’s detective trilogy is a postmodern detective fiction.In Austerian detective novel, things are different. Whereas AgathaChristy and Canon Doyle’s detectives render no sense of nihilismthroughout their case, Auster’s detective consummates the casenot as his goal to reach an objective conclusion of the riddle-like case, rather he follows the case to gain knowledge as if heloses something within his psyche. Quinn pursues Stillman notleast because he means to workout Peter’s problem, rather he beganpursuing this obscurant issue reasoning that the case is of profitfor him: “Perhaps he could have found out something about thecase, perhaps even have helped in some way. “I must learn to thinkmore quickly on my feet,” he said to himself” (7). There issomething lacking in Quinn, and coexisting with other selves, nomatter real or fantastic, will sooth his lack of identity, in thuscritic, subjectivity lack. It is revealing and characteristic topay enough attention to the features of the other selves. It loomslarge throughout City of Glass that the more Quinn becomes aware ofStillman’s whereabouts, the more he loses his grip of the riddle.It emphasizes the Kantian finitude roaming in the subject. AsAdrian Johnston puts it in his Žižek’s Ontology “Kant makes the notionof finitude absolutely foundational in philosophical thought,placing it at the center of his account of the “I” in all itsvarious dimensions” (14).

Nothing is out of bounds for Žižek; He believes in suchfundamental lack which remains unsettled forever. For Žižek, as isfor Kant and Lacan, no matter how much the subject endeavors tofind Truth, it is beyond his grip. Johnston agrees that “This isdue to the limits of possible experience, all attainable knowledgeis necessarily and irremediably incomplete, since the presumeddomain of noumenal fullness beyond the scope of phenomenalawareness and conscious cognizance forever withdraws itself from

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the subject's reflective grasp” (1). After absolute failure ofQuinn’s chasing of Stillman, Auster comments on his state:” Quinnwas nowhere now. He had nothing, he knew nothing, and he knew thathe knew nothing. Not only had he been sent back to the beginning,he was now before the beginning, and so far before the beginningthat it was worse than any end he could imagine” (102).

Another aspect of Paul Auster’s ruminations throughout City of

Glass is his deployment of double identity and/or double

identities. The protagonist of City of Glass reaches to kind of

doublness with his victim throughout his detection. The double, in

the first encounters seems by no means as Quinn’s match and

double, rather he is a man who seems like incomplete creature. As

Quinn say: The body acted al-most exactly as the voice had: machine-like,

fitful, alternating between slow and rapid gestures, rigid and yet

expressive, as if the operation were out of control, not quite

corresponding to the will that lay behind it. It seemed to Quinn

that Stillman’s body had not been used for a long time and that

all its functions had been relearned, so that motion had become a

conscious process, each movement broken down into its component

sub-movements, with the result that all flow and spontaneity had

been lost. It was like watching a marionette trying to walk

without strings (Auster 15).

This sense of solitude, as it seems to be, is pathetic for

Quinn, but he feels there must be a way out and a solution for all

his grievous past. He has lost his family, his wife and son in a

car accident and is now concluding that this solitude may avail.

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The result, on the contrary, is completely the opposite. His

solitude not only worsens his problem, rather it makes Quinn apt

to encounter further problems. Quinn loses himself within the

search and often cross the outline of his Self and becomes

multiple:

The effect of being Paul Auster, he had begun to learn, was notaltogether unpleasant. Although he still had the same body, the

same mind, the same thoughts, he felt as though he had somehow

been taken out of himself, as if he no longer had to walk around

with the burden of his own consciousness. By a simple trick of the

intelligence, a deft little twist of naming, he felt incomparably

lighter and freer. At the same time, he knew it was all an

illusion. But there was a certain comfort in that (Auster 50).

The concept of solitude, being the elemental trait spotted by

German Idealism, is clearly persisted in not only Auster’s New York

Trilogy, and throughout other American literary originators, in this

case, Edgar Allan Poe. In The World that is the Book, Varvogli asserts:

“Auster bemoans the loss of a ‘philosophical dimension’ from

recent American writing; he sees it in Melville, Hawthorne,

Emerson, Poe and Thoreau, but finds that it has all but

disappeared from contemporary fiction in his country” (4). In City

of Glass, everything seems fragmented. The idea of fragmentation is

fundamental in Žižek’s conceptualizations. In City of Glass we read:

“the brokenness is everywhere, the disarray is universal” (77). As

Žižek puts it in his documentary video, Žižek: “What would be my

spontaneous attitude toward the world is a very dark one. The

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first would have been a kind of total vanity; there is nothing

basically, I mean it quite literally, like … ultimately there are

just some fragments, vanishing things. If you look at the

universe, it is a one big void” (Žižek 2003).

Paul Auster devices a model so as to account for a strange

language. The language applied in the trilogy seems to be

engineered, that is, both Stillman and his jailed son Peter use a

language which is so contrary to the language that Quinn has ever

practiced. It seems that Stillman is innovating a new language by

which he could approve the idea that the language taught to Adam

by God is not a flexible one (76). The language we use lags behind

the nowadays usage that is, when for example an umbrella is

broken, our language does not help to use another word for it,

since it’s no longer an umbrella. Two characters in City of Glass

deploy this weird language. First, Quinn in his incommensurable

language says these words:

Wimble click crumblechaw beloo. Clack clack bedrack. Numb noise,

flacklemuch, chewmanna. Ya, ya, ya. Excuse me. I am the only one

who understands these words. “Later and later and later. So they

say. It went on too long for Peter to be right in the head. Never

again [. . .] I lived in a hospital. Little by little, they taught

me how to be Peter Stillman. They said: you are Peter Stillman.

Thank you, I said. Ya, ya, ya. Thank you and thank you, I said

(Auster 17).

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Second is Stillman, the father; Stillman is a scientist and is

pursuing his theory of prelasperian language. His invention of a

new language is a gift to his son, Peter, but a language which the

boy has to learn in vacuum deprived of communications in society.

The outcome becomes so malignant that the child, as Quinn

narrates, seems like a lunatic or a crazy man:

If some saw the Indians as living in prelapsarian innocence, there

were others who judged them to be savage beasts, devils in the

form of men. The discovery of cannibals in the Caribbean did

nothing to assuage this opinion [. . .] It was not until 1537,

with the papal bull of Paul III, that the Indians were declared to

be true men possessing souls (Auster 42).

Žižek, in Defense of Lost Causes speaks of language as a phenomenon

that puts the subject into a dystopia of his environment because

of its oppressing attributes (32).Implicit in this argument is the

notion that in City of Glass, Truth is conceived not through the eyes,

rather, through the Self and Identity; that is Truth is perceived

insofar as it is engaged in an idiosyncratic pattern with Self,

say, ego (8-9). The protagonist of City of Glass, seems to follow his

trouble with a kind of weird desire; an uncontrollable wish over

which Quinn seem to has no sense of bridling. As he continues his

poor detective, Quinn concludes that he is endangering his health

and his sense of sanity and is annihilating himself into mere

animal that jeopardizes his life for not availing goals. The

eccentric treatment of Quinn toward himself is, as Lacan acclaims

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in The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis the consequence of what

he names desires. Lacan argues:

I have done so by virtue of having produced the only conceivable

idea of the object, that of the object as cause of desire, of that

which is lacking. The lack of the lack makes the real, which

emerges only there, as a cork. This cork is supported by the term

of the impossible and the little we know about the real shows its

antinomy to all verisimilitude (Lacan 11).

Auster’s detectives also work alone and have represented no sense

of autobiography. In Ghosts this is particularly true with Blue

being an idiosyncratic detective, with a name that signifies

nothing; he is merely a color, one dimensional like the other

characters in this story. David Pinder describes the literary

detective, in Ghostly Footsteps, as follows:

The figure of the detective has long been associated with the

complexity of modern urban life. It rests on the idea of

confronting the city’s apparent unknowability in its infinite

spread and diversity, and of following clues to tame and make

intelligible its secrets and scrambled paths. It embodies a

realist epistemological claim about the potential of knowing the

city and of mastering a labyrinthine urban reality (Pinder 4).

There are also elements of Auster’s work suggesting that New

York Trilogy is not a traditional novel. Perhaps the most remarkable

of these elements is the very fact that, although Detective novels14

deal with the search for answers and Truth, in Auster’s work,

nothing is grasped at all. No sense of Truth matters for Austerian

Detectives. What actually matters is to fulfill the Split in

Subjectivity. In Žižek’s Pervert’s Guide to Cinema right at the

beginning of the video he proposes as such: “The problem for us in

not that our desires are satisfies or not. The problem is ‘how do

we know what we desire’. There is nothing spontaneous, nothing

natural about human desires. Our desires are artificial. We have

to be taught to desire” (Žižek 2008).

With regard to Žižek, as in his last sentence where he says

“we need to be taught to desire”, In City of Glass what is so palpable

concerning the novella’s predicament is the patronizing question

as to whether Quinn decides for himself or someone does it for

him. On the account of the very fact that Quinn, in the very

beginning of the novella, identifies with his client, he does

nothing accept following the rules. In City of Glass the protagonist

is taught to desire as the only way out. But who teaches Quinn? In

a hermeneutic aspect, it is Paul Auster giving directions. In a

Žižekian reading, the commanding agent is always seen in an

extraordinary angle. Suffice it to quote Žižek’s commentary to

present the case more clearly. Here in The Ticklish Subject his purport

is as much to clarify superego:

If one follows Lacan, one can thus account for the basic paradox

of the superego, which lies in the fact that the more I follow the

orders of the ego ideal, the more guilty I am-Lacan's point is

that, in following the demands of the ego ideal, I am in effect

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guilty-guilty of betraying my fundamental phantasmic passionate

attachment. In other words, far from feeding off some ‘irrational’

guilt, the superego manipulates the subject’s actual betrayal of

his fundamental passionate attachment' as the price he had to pay

for entering the socio-symbolic space, and assuming a

predetermined place within it. (Žižek 268).

The aftermaths of such perversion in Auster’s protagonist are well

conceived as one of the postmodern traits. For Auster’s

detectives, nonetheless, there are no resolutions. In City of Glass,

for example, Quinn never solves the case he is responsible for.

His method of detection is condemned to fail. For instance Quinn’s

plan to follow Stillman’s trajectory is condemned to fail and is

bereaved of any fruit.

The end of the story does not give the prerequisite answers.

As Quinn disappears and the identity of the narrator remains a

mystery, it insinuates the obscure formula of identity as the

first nomination in the rich German Idealism revived by Žižek.

Auster’s detectives also lack self-confidence. It is not so that

Auster’s detective does not care for their surrounding

intentionally, on the contrary, the desire to share a double

attitude throughout the Trilogy makes the detectives unwitting

stocked. In City of Glass, the concept of selves spreads throughout

the installment, such that from the commence of the novella to the

end, the merging selves interact and impact on each other, and at

the end they are scattered into no certain whereabouts, say,

dystopia. By way of it, Auster’s idiosyncratic postmodern

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detective City of Glass is the right place to comment on double

identities, sort of like the way that Žižek calls Partial Objects.

Apart from serving to announce early in the book, the concept of

the doubles that runs throughout the Trilogy, this reference is as

an indication of Auster’s allegiance to a particular school of

detective fiction which begins with Poe and culminates with the

great hard-boiled stories of what Varvogli in The World that is the Book

names Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler (24). As the novel’s

protagonist, Daniel Quinn, is a writer with the literary pseudonym

William Wilson, Auster alludes to Edgar Allan Poe’s William Wilson

that deals with duality.

In The Ticklish Subject Žižek asserts: “If the Kantian Ding an

sich10 corresponds to the Freudian-Lacanian Thing, anstoss11

is closer to objet petit a, to the primordial foreign

body that sticks in the throat of the Subject, to the

object-cause of desire that splits it up” (45). The first

thing that strikes the eye concerning this strange desire is the

notion that for William Wilson, something within his psyche tends

him to seek his desire:

I am the descendant of a race whose imaginative and easily

excitable temperament has at all times rendered them remarkable;

and, in my earliest infancy, I gave evidence of having fully

inherited the family character. As I advanced in years it was more

strongly developed; becoming, for many reasons, a cause of serious10 The thing in itself.11 Any of the six successive steps by which the ego attains complete knowledge.

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disquietude to my friends, and of positive injury to myself. I

grew self-willed, addicted to the wildest caprices, and a prey to

the most ungovernable passions. Weak-minded, and beset with

constitutional infirmities akin to my own, my parents could do but

little to check the evil propensities which distinguished me

(Žižek 2).

These identifying selves, (Quinn introduces himself as Paul

Auster on the phone which is the name his client desperately

needs), is palpably discerned by Žižek in How to Read Lacan. Žižek

claims; “This gap between my direct psychological identity and my

Symbolic identity (the symbolic mask or title I wear, defining

what I am for and in the big Other) is what Lacan (for complex

reasons that we can here ignore) calls Symbolic Castration”

(34).

For Quinn, The point is not that he feels sympathized with

another wretched as Peter Stillman, it is, rather that the subject

sympathizing desires insofar as it experiences the other as

desiring. It is the site of an unfathomable Desire as if a dismal

and enigmatic Desire is demanding him. In a sense, it also

confronts Quinn with the fact that he does not know what he really

desires. In short, in the desperation reclusion, as the aftermath

of chasing Stillman’s case, while feeling as if he has found his

double, Quinn faces an end beyond his expectations:

The next time there was light; he could only manage two sentences.

He began to skip his meals in order to devote himself to the red

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notebook, eating only when he felt he could no longer hold out.

But the time continued to diminish, and soon he was able to eat no

more than a bite or two before the darkness came back. He did not

think of turning on the electric light, for he had long ago

forgotten it was there. This period of growing darkness coincided

with the dwindling of pages in the red notebook. Little by little,

Quinn was coming to the end. At a certain point, he realized that

the more he wrote, the sooner the time would come when he could no

longer write anything. He began to weigh his words with great

care, struggling to express himself as economically and clearly as

possible (Auster 129).

Quinn lives an inhuman life as if something like an alien is

the motive for his reclusion. In How to Read Lacan, Žižek calls this

inhuman intruder something that negates our understanding of human

being. More significantly, Auster says that approaching toward the

end of Quinn’s chasing, and after he finds that Peter has

committed suicide, for no clear reason, daytime become so

transient that Quinn affords to write only two sentences a day: “.

. . it seemed to him that these periods had been reduced to a

matter of minutes. Once, for example, he nished his food andfi

discovered that there was only enough time to write three

sentences in the red notebook. The next time there was light; he

could only manage two sentences” (128).

Summoning the German Idealism, (in this case Kant) to find a

convincing answer to the unusual darkness seems inevitable. Based

on this school of thought, darkness is embedded in the very core

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of subjectivity. As Žižek asserts: “in German Idealism the

metaphor for the core of subjectivity is Night “The Night of the

World” The Ticklish Subject (55). In the pre-Kantian universe, when a hero

goes mad he is deprived of his humanity, and animal passions or

divine darkness take over. With Kant, madness signals the

unconstrained explosion of the very core of a human being (47).

Based on Žižek’s argument, there resides in Quinn’s core of

subjectivity, a partial object, which Lacan names object petit a; a

fantasmatic other controlling his deeds. This partial object

summons him in the very beginning of the novel, and persuades him

to reverse his formally supplanted identity to Paul Auster, and at

the end of the chasing, abandons him by inhuman desires. To convey

the principles for the present analysis, naming three fundamental

twists are instrumental:

1: Quinn is, all the way throughout his duty, beyond a palpable

present of a dead-alive desiring entity for which Žižek in Iraq: the

Borrowed Kettle, brilliantly puts forward an explanatory nomination:

he names it unknown known:

In March 2003, Donald Rumsfeld engaged in a brief bout of amateur

philosophizing about the relationship between the known and the

unknown: There are known knowns. These are things we know that we

know. There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things

that we know we don't know. But there are also unknown unknowns.

There are things we don’t know we don't know.' What he forgot to

add was the crucial fourth term: the 'unknown knows' things

we don't know that we know - which is precisely the Freudian

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unconscious, the knowledge that doesn't know itself', as Lacan

used to say, the core of which is fantasy. If Rumsfeld thinks

that the main dangers in the confrontation with Iraq are the

unknown unknowns, the threats from Saddam or his successors about

which we do not even suspect what they may be, what we should

say in reply is that the most dangers are, on the contrary,

the 'unknown knowns', the disavowed beliefs and suppositions we

are not even aware of adhering to ourselves, but which nonetheless

determine our acts and feelings (Žižek 9).

2: Quinn avails fantasy as the screen that protects him from

encountering the Real of his life (his past trauma): regarding

Quinn’s crippled end, this brings us to the conclusion that

keeping in mind that Žižek analyzes Lacan’s counterparts

concerning fantasy, if what we experience as reality is

structured by fantasy, and if fantasy serves as a screen to

protect us from being directly overwhelmed by the raw Real, then

reality can function as an escape from encountering the Real. In

How to Read Lacan, Žižek draws our attention to an example to

illustrate the foremost point here:In the opposition between dream and reality, fantasy is on the

side of reality, and 1t 1s (sic) m dreams that we encounter

the traumatic Real . . . reality itself is for those who cannot

endure (the Real that announces itself in) their dreams.

This is the lesson Lacan draws from the famous dream reported by

Freud in his Interpretation of Dreams, dreamt by the father who

falls asleep while keeping watch over his son’s coffin . . . So

why did the father wake up? So it was not the intrusion from

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external reality that awakened the unfortunate father, but the

unbearably traumatic character of what he encountered in the dream

in so far as ‘dreaming, means fantasizing in order to avoid

confronting the real to avoid confronting the Real, the father

literally woke up so that he could go on dreaming, (Žižek 57).

3: What Žižek calls it “the foreign body” in The Ticklish Subject (45)

is not something beyond the death-life cycle; it’s a desire that

split the subject up. In The Ticklish Subject, Žižek comes to claim

that “there is no subject without desire, without the collision

with an element of irreducible objectivity and contingency the I

is supposed to encounter something foreign within itself. (45)

City of Glass, the first volume of New York Trilogy, treats identity

under the cover of a whodunit which some critics call an anti-

detective novel. The person in focus is Quinn who takes on himself

multiple identities. Quinn seems to be involved in a constant

search for identity after a tragic event in his personal life. He

repeatedly tries to find an answer to the question ‘Who am I?’ and

‘Where is my place in the social hierarchy?’ Is he still a husband

and father when his wife and child died five years ago? What is

the definition of a husband and father? Does the death have such a

power to dissolve his marriage and fatherhood?

He is frustrated by his inability to answer these questions

and he looks for refuge in both his walks in anonymous urban

setting and his invented selves which are new for him. He even

proves several attributes of split identity. The purpose of his

changing identity is to empty his interior being and remain only

22

on the surface of his invented characters. When he writes his

mystery novels, he transforms into William Wilson, not a mere pen

name but a separate personality for him. Moreover, William Wilson

presents an intertextual reference to Poe’s short story of the

same name which explores a plot of doppelganger. The tradition of

Kant’s finitude which resides in subjectivity apt for the

predicaments of Quinn in City of Glass where a notion a Lack prevails

the city for wherever he steps in.

The American tradition of solitude, remarkable in Thoreau,

Emerson, and Hawthorn becomes the seminal arch for Auster’s novel,

that is, all his protagonists in the trilogy face a king of weird

solitude as a means to find the truth behind the curtains. The

problem for them, in Žižek’s argument the predominant solitude is

everywhere. For Žižek, commenting on Quantum physics, the world is

a total vanity, such that, there is nothing. Žižek unintentionally

equates his ideas with that of Emerson’s fragments of the world;

so, if the world in both philosopher’s views is fragmented, then

solitude is the only condition that human, in this analysis Quinn,

can choose.

the concept of double is another oft-repeated one in

Asuetrian novels which is well commented on from the German

Idealism tradition as desires and drives putting forward the

subject toward his/her alter ego as in city of glass, Quinn

charged with strong desires and drives follows his double

regardless of the very fact that this alter ego is no one other

than his rival, and that he must remove him in order for his life

23

to return to its former condition. The last argument of the

present chapter was the night of the world; for a subject, to

agree with Žižek argumentative comments on the German Idealism, as

he is beyond complete knowledge, the end of his chasing the truth

comes to nothing other than a dark end.

24

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Beiser, Fredrick c. Cambridge Companion to Hegel. London: Combridge UniversityPress, 1993. pdf file.

Pervert’s Guide to Cinema. Dir. Žižek, Slavoj, 2008. pdf file.

Dolar, Malden. Beyond Interpellation. United Stated: University of Nebraska Press, 1993. pdf file.

Johnston, Adrian. Žižek's Ontology: A Transcendental Materialist Theory of Subjectivity.USA: North western University Press, 2008. pdf file.

Lacan, Jacques. trans.Alan, Sheridan. The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis. USA: W. W. Norton & Company, 1977. pdf file.

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Žižek, Slavoj. Enjoy Your Symptom. London: Rutledge, 1992. pdf file.

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Žižek, Slavoj. The Indivisible Remainder. London: verso, 1996. pdf file.

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