Mapping Authorship: Overhead Cartography in Paul Auster’s City of Glass

Abstract

In 1994, nearly ten years after the publication of Paul Auster’s postmodern detec- tive novel City of Glass, Avon Books released Neon Lit: Paul Auster’s City of Glass, a graphic novel adaptation. Another ten years later, in 2004, Picador published a new version of the graphic novel with an introduction by Art Spiegelman, who, in dis- cussing the challenges of adapting Auster’s novel, calls City of Glass “a surprisingly nonvisual work” (n.p.). The contrast between Spiegelman’s pronouncement and the rather insistent attempts over the last twenty years to represent the work pictorially suggests that one of the novel’s more general concerns, the postmodern difficulties associated with reading the world and constructing identity based on those readings, is a problem rooted in the relationship between the visual and the nonvisual. More specifically, the novel’s interest in the visual strategies of mapping points to how the cartographic impulse, the desire to create maps, both alleviates these postmodern problems and further complicates them through the visual perspective necessary for satisfying such an impulse in the first place.