The question of genre in Paul Austers "The New

York Trilogy"
De Lu Lostie el martes, 29 de noviembre de 2011 a la(s) 21:46

ABSTRACT
The aim of this work is to offer a brief analysis of the question of genre in Paul Austers The
New York Trilogy, and illustrate how he challenges traditional detective fiction by taking some of
its stereotypical features to create a new particular form of post-modernist detective fiction. In
order to analyse this novel, we base our study on John M. Swales definition and
characterization of genre. Our main concern is to classify The New York Trilogy according to
Swales working definition and his critical observations. A contrast will be made between the
main features of standard and post-modernist fiction in order to see which of them do apply
and which are transgressed in Paul Austers work.

INTRODUCTION
Paul Auster's The New York Trilogy, published in one volume for the first time in England in
1988 and in the U.S. in 1990, has been widely categorised as detective fiction among literary
scholars and critics. There is, however, a striking diversity and lack of consensus regarding the
classification of the trilogy within the existing genre forms of the detective novel. Among others,
Auster's stories are described as: "meta anti-detective-fiction;" "mysteries about mysteries;" a
"strangely humorous working of the detective novel;" a "metamystery.
In order to clarify this question of genre we take into account Swales contribution to the
definition and classification of genre. According to this author:
A genre comprises a class of communicative events, the members of which share some set of
communicative purposes. These purposes are recognized by the expert members of the parent
discourse community, and thereby constitute the rationale for the genre. This rationale shapes
the schematic structure of the discourse and influences and constrains choice of content and
style. Communicative purpose operates to keep the scope of a genre as here conceived
narrowly focused on comparable rhetorical action. In addition to purpose, exemplars of a genre
exhibit various patterns of similarity in terms of structure, style, content and intended audience.
(Swales, 1990: 58)
The literary scholars and critics, based on a traditional view of genre, have acclaimed for Paul
Austers creation of a new genre, mixing elements of the standard detective fiction and
postmodern fiction. However, they fail to highlight the importance of purpose in the
characterization of genre. In this work we aim at discovering whether The New York
Trilogystands for a fusion of both genres main features or it is embedded in a new genre with a
different communicative goal.

The richness and diversity of Auster's detective trilogy is that his work does not seem to fit
neatly into any category. We would rather place The New York Trilogy within a more general
postmodern detective fiction given that the novels main goal is to mirror the twentieth century
mans reality through mystery. This classifies Paul Auster as an American writer who is part of
the generation that immediately followed the 'classical literary movement' of American
postmodernism' of the 60s and 70s. His writing demonstrates that he has been influenced by
the revolutionary and innovative postmodern concepts. He may, however, be distinguished from
a 'traditional' postmodern writer through certain coherence in the narrative discourse, a neorealistic approach and by showing a certain responsibility for social and moral aspects going
beyond mere metafictional and subversive elements. The experiences of Paul Austers fictional
characters reflect the problems of the 20th century man like alienation, rootlessness and
loneliness. Questions of identity are also raised as the plots twist and turn on themselves.
Many of the ideas of postmodernism and open literary form were formulated in theoretical
literary texts of the 60s and 70s and based on formal experiments including the attempt of
corrupting the ability of language to refer truthfully to the world, and a radical turning away from
coherent narrative discourse and plot. These ideas seem to have been internalized by the new
generation of postmodern writers of the 80s to such a degree that the ideas themselves turn
into objects of investigation and experiment.
METHODS
In order to analyse the question of genre in this trilogy, we base upon Swales perspective of
genre and its characterization through a series of critical observations. Taking his approach as
a starting point, we enumerate the defining characteristics of standard detective fiction, and
compare and contrast them with Paul Austers postmodern novel. More specifically, we deeply
explore the mystery of the stories through the development of plots, the characters and
recurrent themes such as living in their imaginary worlds, issues that deal with the classic
problems of postmodernist criticism. At the same time, we try to apply these notions to the
differences among genres suggested by John M. Swales.

SWALES WORKING DEFINITION OF GENRE

Swales provides five characteristics for the definition of genre which have to be fulfilled if a text
is to be included in a given genre
1. A genre is a class of communicative events.
A communicative event is one in which language and/or paralanguage play both a significant
and an indispensable role.
Swales conceives a communicative event of as comprising not only the discourse itself and its
participants, but also the roles of that discourse and the environment of its production and
reception, including its historical and cultural associations.

2. The principal criterial feature that turns a collection of communicative events into a
genre is some shared set of communicative purposes.
Except for a few interesting exceptional cases, genres are communicative vehicles for the
achievement of goals.
It is no uncommon to find genres that have sets of communicative purposes.
There remain, of course, some genres for which purpose is unsuited as a primary criterion.
Poetic genres are an obvious example. Poems, and other genres whose appeal may lie in the
verbal pleasure they give, can thus be separately characterized by the fact that they defy
ascription of communicative purpose.
3. Exemplars or instances of genres vary in their prototypicality.
Genre membership is based on communicative purpose. Besides, it is also based on the
definitional approach (traditional categorization) and the family resemblance approach.
(Cognitive categorization). While the former asserts that it is possible to produce small set of
simple properties that are individually necessary to identify all the members and only the
members of a particular category from everything else in the world, the latter
gives rise to a prototype or cluster theory designed to account for our capacity to recognize
instances of categories. The most typical category members are prototypes. There are
privileged properties, which are insufficient for picking out all and only the class members, and
hence family resemblance description is still required.
Communicative purpose has been nominated as the privileged property of a genre. Other
properties, such as form, structure and audience expectations operate to identify the extent to
which an exemplar is prototypical of a particular genre.
4. The rationale behind a genre establishes constraints on allowable contributions in
terms of their content, positioning and form.
Established members of discourse communities employ genres to realize communicatively the
goals of their communities. The shared set of purposes of a genre is thus recognized by the
established members of the parent discourse community. Recognition of purposes provides the
rationale, while the rationale gives rise to constraining conventions. The conventions, of course,
are constantly evolving and indeed can be directly challenged, but they nonetheless continue to
exert influence. The rationale thus determines the schematic structure of the discourse and
also constrains lexical and syntactic choice.
5. A discourse communitys nomenclature for genres is an important source of insight.
Knowledge of the conventions of genres and their rationale is likely to be much greater in those
who routinely or professionally operate within that genre. In consequence, active discourse
community members tend to have the greatest genre-specific expertise. One consequence is

that these active members give genre names to classes of communicative events that they
recognize as providing recurring rhetorical action. Particular attention therefore needs to be
given to the genre nomenclatures created by those who are most familiar with and most
professionally involved in those genres.

THE NEW YORK TRILOGY: ON CHARACTERS AND THEIR SEARCH FOR IDENTITY.
We can state a similarity between the standard detective fiction and the novel of search. In both
of them the search is about a crime and its culprit. Thus, the main goal of mystery novels is to
entertain the reader through the creation of suspense. Throughout the novel the reader is
provided with a number of clues that allows him to reach a conclusion and be able to find out
whodunit. However, in Paul Austers trilogy the characters are concerned with discovering not
a culprit but their own identities, and this implies a detachment from the prototypical member of
the traditional detective fiction.
The New York Trilogy is a story of characters confrontation with themselves. This confrontation
is an attempt to try to deal with their past traumatic experiences and repressed memories, and
it introduces a state of uneasiness and fear.
In this novel, detectives identify themselves with the criminals to discover facts. The central
paradox is that the detectives start with an identification of themselves with their counterparts,
or doubles, only to perceive later their differences. The struggle for solution transforms into a
quest for the self, but the only outcome to such quest is disintegration and dissolution.
The appearance of the strange double in the novel is the major source of terror: it suddenly
emerges obstructs the protagonist and apparently vanishes to return even more intensely. This
is shown in the three novellas, as follows.
The first novella, City of Glass, introduces the reader to a complicated world of characters and
double identities. The hero, Daniel Quinn, is a writer of detective novels, whose fiction
becomes reality when his life is turned upsidedown when he answers a mysterious telephone
call for help. This is the climax of the intertextual play with characters names, doubles and
identities. He creates and is doubled with his own fictional character, Max Work, a private-eye
narrator.
On the other hand, the boundaries between the fictional and the real world become blurred.
The story explores layers of identity and reality. For example, Paul Austers voice is expressed
through three different personae: the real writer of the novel, the protagonist of the novel,
Quinn, pretending to be Paul Auster, and Paul Auster as the private eye character.
The only possibility for Quinn to exist together with himself is to identify with his double. This is
precisely what Auster characters do: they dissapear into the process of writing, become
invisible and naked both spiritually and physically, while writing and looking for their true selves.
In Ghosts, the second novella of the trilogy, the names of the characters are merely colours
and the story doubles several themes introduced in the first book, City of Glass. The central
character is also a privete detective, Blue, hired by a man named White to watch Black. Blues
strange connection to Black becomes more and more highlighted through weird coincidences
and phantasmal experiences. As he spends hours and days observing Black from the opposite

apartment, he comes to the realization that the person he observes exactly mirrors him: For in
spying out at Black across the street, it is a though Blue were looking into a mirror () He finds
that he is also watching himself (Auster 172). The rare feeling Blue experiences is due to the
paradoxical connection between Black and himself. The encounter between Blue and Black
brings about the anxiety in this situation, as they may represent two opposite but indivisible
forces, who embody two different entities of the same person. Bluess confrontation with his
double is a confrontation with himself, and this is the plot of the story: not the search for a crime
but himself.
The last novella, The Locked Room, is narrated in the first person through an unnamed
character. All we know about him is that he is an old friend of Fanshawe, a writer who
dissapears without leaving a trace. He recalls memories from his childhood and adolescence
with Fanshawe describing his personality and their friendship. When Fanshawe disappears the
writer publishes his work and replaces him in his family. This is all done with Fanshawes
permission; he is the only one who knows that Fanshawe is alive as he receives a letter from
him. Fanshawe gradually conquers the mind and the inner world of the narrator, who writes
Fanshawes biography. The more the narrator immerses himself in this writing, the more he
becomes one with him; Fanshawe fulfills all the repressed desires of the narrator, he feels that
Fanshawes identity dominates his own, he feels like being trapped and he hates Fanshawe
because of this. The relationship between the narrator and his friend recalls the same sense of
anxiety which occurred in the other two novellas, more specifically in the case of Blue and
Black in Ghosts: They also can be seen as two mirroring entities of one and the same person.
As in the other two novellas, the protagonist is not able to have access to his own identity.
Neither can he reach any reasonable conclusion, and the whole story seems to be a vicious
circle. The restoration of certainty can never be fulfilled, as the narrator destroys the red
notebook given by Fanshawe, in which everything is explained and the truth is revealed.
Eventually, we realise that not only dont characters know anybody else but neither do they
know themselves. The narrator says: We exist for ourselves, perhaps, and at times we even
have a glimpse of who we are, but in the end we can never be sure, and as our lives go on, we
become more and more opaque to ourselves, more and more aware of our own incoherence
() no one can gain access to himself.
In this last story, the narrator shows how not only the three stories are thematically related, but
that they represent a single, cohesive work rather than three repetitive novellas. He claims:
These three stories are finally the same story () each one represents a different stage in my
awareness of what it is about. I dont claim to solve any problems. As opposed to traditional
detective fiction, where the crimes are always solved in the end, Austers literary work shows
that such satisfying closure is impossible, for as much as we think we know someone, we know
in fact nothing.
DETECTIVE FICTION AND MYSTERY NOVEL
Detective fiction, also known as mystery, is generally driven by a single protagonist and follows
the process of detection. Mystery is a genre of fiction in which a detective, either an amateur or

a professional, solves a crime or a series of crimes. This genre invites the reader to engage in
the process of detection, most commonly of a murderer, through the interpretation of clues.
Because detective stories rely on logic, supernatural elements rarely come into play. The
detective may be a private investigator, a policeman, an elderly widow, or a young girl, but he or
she generally has nothing material to gain from solving the crime. Mystery novels are satisfying
to many readers because they know that everything will be resolved in the end. In Swales
terms, our previous schemata enable us to expect and recognize the aforementioned elements
when reading a detective novel.
Due to the lack of fulfillment of some of the following features of mystery novels, we shall not
include Paul Austers novel in this genre.
Rules for Mystery Writing
Even more than writing in other genres, mystery writing tends to follow standard rules. This is
because readers of mysteries seek a particular experience: they want the intellectual challenge
of solving the crime before the detective does, and the pleasure of knowing that everything will
come together in the end.
1. In mystery writing, plot is everything.
Because readers are playing a kind of game when they read a detective novel, plot has to
come first, above everything else. Make sure each plot point is plausible, and keep the action
moving.
2. Introduce both the detective and the culprit early on.
As the main character, the detective must obviously appear early in the book. As for the culprit,
the reader will feel cheated if the antagonist, or villain, enters too late in the book to be a viable
suspect in their minds.
3. Introduce the crime within the first three chapters of your mystery novel.
The crime and the resulting questions are what call the readers attention.
4. The crime should be sufficiently violent, preferably a murder.
For many readers, only murder really justifies the effort of reading a book while suitably testing
your detective's powers. However, some types of violence are still taboo including rape, child
molestation, and cruelty to animals.
5. The crime should be believable.
While the details of the murder; how, where, and why it's done, as well as how the crime is
discovered, are the main opportunities to introduce variety, the crime should be plausible. The
reader will feel disappointed if the crime is not something that could really happen.
6. The detective should solve the case using only rational and scientific methods.
7. The culprit must be capable of committing the crime.

The reader must believe the villain's motivation, and the latter must be capable of the crime,
both physically and emotionally.
8. In mystery writing, the reader should not be underestimated
The detective should not commit the crime. All clues should be revealed to the reader as the
detective finds them.
9. Wait as long as possible to reveal the culprit.
Readers seek to find out, or figure out, whodunit. If you answer this too early in the book, the
reader will have no reason to continue reading.

PAUL AUSTERS PARTICULAR FORM OF POSTMODERN DETECTIVE FICTION

The New York Trilogy has been allegedly presented as detective fiction but in fact it has to be
described as meta-detective fiction or anti-detective fiction. Austers work does not seem to
fit neatly into any one category. However, this novel resembles much of the characteristics of
post-modern fiction in terms of structure, style, content and intended audience
In contrast to detective narrative, postmodernist fiction rejects the notion of universal truths and
plays with the possibilities of interpretations, multiple perspectives, uncertainties, and
contradictions. A postmodern novel does not profess to be a coherent whole, and subverts both
the expectations of narrative closure and of the disclosures previously provided by the narrator.
We do not have a story with a plot; a beginning, a conflict, resolution and an end; instead just
as it seems the problems are beginning to be deciphered, new possibilities emerge. Nothing is
ever known, and inevitably we come to a place quite different from the one we set out for. As
Paul Auster himself puts it, mystery novels give answers, my work is about asking questions.
All these notions concerning structure challenge the prototypically of the traditional detective
fiction genre.
As regards content, the novel is often referred to in terms of postmodernism and it certainly
seems to have many of the elements associated with postmodern literature. For instance, it is
self referential, with the author, Paul Auster, apparently appearing as a character, but
confusingly not as the narrator. Moreover, it can be seen as a piece of literature about literature,
with writers such as Quinn, Fanshawe and the narrator of The Locked Roomappearing through
out the trilogy. On the other hand, the three stories share a particularly important feature of
postmodernism as well: a strong theme of identity running through them.
A further feature of Austers work in relation to content, that differentiates it from the traditionally
hard-boiled novel, is that nothing is grasped in its all, whilst detective novels generally deal with
the search for answers, and for truth. Whereas the goal of detection is to uncover the whole
story, neither in City of Glass, Ghosts nor in The Locked Room are the cases closed:
calculations and representations lead to no final illumination, no climatic discovery.
Another characteristic of standard detective fiction that does not apply to Paul Austers trilogy, is
that the former tends to have conservative structure with a moral outcome, in which harmony is
restored with a highly intellectual detective, ethically responsible for fulfilling the desires of both,

society and the reader. In the trilogy, however, the author has in mind a different audience with
distinct values and expectations. As a consequence, he makes no attempts to provide any
conventional methods to restore harmony. In fact, Austers main concern is that not such
harmony exists. All is discordance and fragmentation. The process of discovering clues to the
cases in all three stories results in being futile. This is due to the fact that characters
themselves go through devastating crisis of identity, each of them feeling his own self fused
with their counterparts identity or disintegrating almost completely.

CONCLUSION
This study has shown that The New York Trilogy deviates from the prototypical standard
detective fiction in terms of John M. Swaless definition of genre. Besides, it cannot be
considered as a detective novel in the traditional sense of the genre either, but a subversion of
it, as it certainly resembles the structure, style, content, intended audience, and mainly the
purpose of postmodern literature.
All three stories employ and deconstruct the conventional elements of the detective story,
resulting in a recursive linguistic investigation of the nature, function, and meaning of language.
The trilogy also parodies and subverts the Romance realistic fiction, and autobiography,
thereby exploding the narrative traditions related to these genres. Moreover, it denies
conventional schematic structure of fictional discourse, such as linear movement, realistic
representation, finding of the culprit and closure.
Having analysed all the main features of both, standard detective fiction and postmodern
novels, we conclude that The New York Trilogy is a particular form of postmodern detective
fiction which still uses well known elements of the detective novel, but also creates a new form
that links the traditional features of the genre with experimental, metafictional and ironic
features of postmodernism.

BIBLIOGRAPHY
Auster, P. (1988). The New York Trilogy. Great Britain: Faber and Faber Limited.
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Swales, John M. (1990), The concept of genre, Chapter 3. In: Swales, John M.,Genre
Analysis. Cambridge Applied Linguistics: CUP.
Waite, M., Hollingworth, L., Marshall, D. (2006) Oxford Paperback Thesaurus . Oxford:
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