McCarthy, Amy ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2183-3816 (2019) ‘Entering the Labyrinth’: Walking the streets of New York in Paul Auster’s City of Glass (1985) and Jay McInerney’s Bright Lights, Big City (1984). In: Place and Community Colloquium, 24 May 2019, University of Sheffield. (Unpublished)

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Abstract

Jonathan Raban explains in his book Soft City: ‘the soft city of illusion, myth, aspiration, nightmare, is as real, maybe more real, than the hard city one can locate on maps, in statistics, in monographs on urban sociology and demography and architecture’ (Raban, 1974, p.2). Both Paul Auster’s City of Glass and Jay McInerney’s Bright Lights, Big City are set in New York; however, they both depict different experiences of the city. Although both Auster and McInerney map ‘the city’s streets by use of real names’, the city is not developed in the texts by real-life locations but rather ‘the grotesque and hauntological spaces encountered’ by the protagonists (Short, 1991, p.xvi).

To create Raban’s soft city, McInerney’s unnamed protagonist and Auster’s Daniel Quinn walk around the streets of New York to create their own personal boundaries and settlements in the city. I argue that walking in the city differs from driving or taking public transport. The vehicle is restricted to the roads – particularly limiting in New York’s grid system – and public transport removes the freedom of travelling to a destination as someone else is in charge of movement. Walking, unlike using a vehicle, allows for non-linear detours and the exploration of the hidden areas within the monitored and well-structured system. Walking the streets of New York – I argue - prevents the pedestrian from leaving the grid-system and encourages the embracement of consumer culture applied to the real city. Walking in New York in City of Glass and Bright Lights is not a liberating act; it is, in fact, a prison leading to the consumption of a physical or mental ideology which results in the destruction of the character’s psyche.

Item Type:	Conference or Workshop Item (Paper)
Status:	Unpublished
Subjects:	P Language and Literature > PS American literature
School/Department:	School of Humanities
URI:	https://ray.yorksj.ac.uk/id/eprint/6429

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