City of Glass and the postmodern (anti-)detective story--

"The Detective and the Author: City of Glass" by Madeleine Sorapure

In traditional detective fiction, the detective is a representative of the author, unravelling the clues and analyzing the plot that the author has constructed.

Postmodern literature that takes up this genre is "anti-detective fiction", calling into question the ability of the individual detective to assume the authorial position of masterful reason, and by implication also questioning the possibility of a transcendent authorial position.

City of Glass can be called a "`meta-anti-detective'" story, since it calls attention to, and by its very form implicitly reflects on, the postmodern conditions of detective fiction, portraying author-characters who are "forced to radically revise their understanding of authorship and detection" (73).

Quinn, Stillman, "Auster", and the narrator all fail to apply the logic of the traditional detective story. Instead of a meaningful causal series of events, we have a beginning that is pure chance and subsequent chance events which are "not redeemed by eventual fulfillment in a final, well-plotted solution" (74).

At the end it is revealed that the apparent omniscient narrator is actually a first-person narrator, a character in the story whose knowledge is thus limited. This narrator presents himself as having attempted "to tell Quinn's story in the mode of a hard-boiled detective novel" (76).

The implication of Sorapure's analysis is that in this sense City of Glass is a philosophical extension of some of the features of the hard-boiled genre. The absurdity that Quinn comes up against is that of the seeming impossibility of a stable and consistent self.

There are also linguistic and literary-theoretical elaborations of this point. Language is revealed to be in a fallen state, after the Tower of Babylon, hiding as well as expressing meaning. And the conventional notion of authorship is questioned: the possibility of finding the "true" author within the work, as an aspect of its fiction, is asserted. Yet at the same time it is suggested that the concept of this author, who appears to be the sole possessor of the work's ultimate meaning, may be nothing but a hoax, a fundamental irony of a literature that remains indeterminate.