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The Detective in Search of

the Lost Tongue of Adam: Paul
Auster's City of Glass
Norma Rowen

York University , USA

Published online: 09 Jul 2010.

To cite this article: Norma Rowen (1991) The Detective in Search of the Lost Tongue
of Adam: Paul Auster's City of Glass , Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, 32:4,
224-234, DOI: 10.1080/00111619.1991.9933811
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00111619.1991.9933811

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The Detective in Search of the Lost Tongue

of Adam: Paul Austers City of Glass
NORMAROWEN
w h e n the volumes of Paul Austers New York trilogy began to appear, reactions were confused. Reviewers were interested and curious, even excited,
but puzzled and rather wary. Rebecca Goldstein in the New York Times
Book Review described Ghosts, the second work of the trilogy, as a mystery novel-of-sorts, a kind of metamystery (13); and other reviewers
noted the presence of such disturbing elements as complex interplays of
doubles and a wilful confusion of fact and fiction that added more mystery
to the basic mystery of the detective story form. Some bookstores, on the
other hand, showed less readiness to speculate. They simply placed the book
on the detective-fiction shelves.
In fact, all three works of the trilogy are examples of the genre now
known as the metaphysical detective story, which has been shaped by a
number of modern writers from Borges to Pynchon and Nabokov. Its defining characteristic is its transmutation of the traditional detectives quest
into something more elusive and complex. In it, the relatively straightforward business of identifying a guilty person, bringing him or her to justice,
and restoring social order is ineluctably subverted into a larger and more
ambiguous affair. The identity in question becomes as often as not the detectives own, and justice and order dissolve into chimeras in a struggle with
a reality that has become increasingly ungraspable. In this postmodernist
version of the detective genre, rather than the final working out of the initial
puzzle, we are left with what Stefan0 Tani in The Doomed Detective describes as the decentering and chaotic admission of mystery, of nonsolution (40).
The parts of The New York Trilogy are set in such a universe of chaos
and non-solution, and the Auster detectives find themselves decoyed into
a quest of a very different kind from the one they contracted for.
But Auster comes up with another and very original twist by adding a CIUcial language theme. Many who write about the detective story have pointed
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out that the detective is a kind of reader, a decoder of signs, of the clues that
the scenario of the crime throws up. Peter Huhn in his article on this topic
characterizes the similarities. Continual rearrangement and reinterpretation
of clues he says, is, of course, the basic method of reading and understanding unfamiliar texts (455). Todorov in The Poetics of Prose is even
more succinct. Author:reader = criminal:detective (49), he states, citing
S. S. Van Dyne. In the postmodern world, however, things have become
more complicated. Clues no longer point to anything certain; signifiers have
drifted away from what they signify; and what Peter Huhn refers to as a
general lack of confidence in the efficacy of reading has arisen (462).
This lack of confidence in the efficacy of reading forms the major
theme of The New York Trilogy. Alison Russell, in her article Deconstructing The New York Trilogy: Paul Austers Anti-Detective Fiction,
identifies the central crime, and also the central quest of the three books,
as logocentrism, the search for a Derridean presence, an ultimate
referent or foundation, which is outside the play of language itself (72).
Locating such a presence may ultimately restore something of the lost efficacy of reading.
Although this search is a major preoccupation of all the New York
novels, the first one, City of Claw, perhaps presents this theme with the
most force and clarity. In this opening work, the detectives quest becomes
overtly and inextricably mingled with the search for the prelapsarian language, the tongue of the innocent Adam by which alone things can be reunited with their right names.
For centuries this quest had been a concern of biblical scholars, who speculated that the prelapsarian tongue might be a form of Hebrew; and as John
Irwin has demonstrated in his book American Hieroglyphs, it also haunted
the works of Poe and Whitman and other nineteenth-century American
writers. Whether Daniel Quinn, Austers twentieth-century representative
of American consciousness in City of Glass, ever finds the prelapsarian
tongue and-perhaps more important-whether he should, are matters that
the book leaves open. However, during the search, interesting questions are
raised about the capacities of language and the role of story in the postmodern world.
As befits a work centered on language, Quinn, the central questor, is not
a detective but merely a writer of detective stories. His obsessive interest in
the genre (he is a committed reader of them as well) arises from a profound
sense of loss of a rationally ordered universe that the conventional detective
story so reliably projects. As Quinn himself explains it:
In the good mystery there is nothing wasted, no sentence, no word that is
not significant. . . . Since everything seen or said, even the slightest, most
trivial thing, can bear a connection to the outcome of the story, nothing

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must be overlooked. Everything becomes essence.

everywhere. (15)

. . . The center . . . is

Quinns own world, we soon learn, has been radically decentered. The
deaths, some years ago, of his wife and son, unexplained and apparently arbitrary, have dislocated every certainty and have banished forever all idea
that the universe makes sense. For him, then, the detective story is a refuge
from the metaphysical chaos that he finds around him.
Quinns broken condition, rooted in the deaths of his wife and child, is in
one sense particular to him. But throughout the work, we are made to see
that this experience is also representative, one form of a general latetwentieth-century malaise. This is perhaps best illustrated in an early scene
in a diner. Quinn converses, with marked fluency and coherence, with the
owner, an old acquaintance. The conversation, however, is restricted to
baseball, another example of an artificial world of order in a chaotic universe. Subsequently, we learn that the owner has a concentration camp
number tattooed on his arm.
Here, then, is the postholocaust universe, in which the only coherent
stories, ones with beginnings, middles, ends, and comprehensive solutions,
are told in protected, carefully set-up areas of the consciousness, far removed from the terrible heart of contemporary experience.
That such refuge in games and avoidance exacts its price, however, is soon
demonstrated. Writing his detective stories has caused Quinn in some measure to disintegrate, to split into a triad of selves whose relationship to each
other he can describe only in a curious metaphor of ventriloquism. In his
eyes, the actual writer of the works is no longer himself but a kind of double
called William Wilson. The speaker of the words is the fictional detective,
Max Work. The self closest to Quinn, because it bears his name, is the dummy, the insensate block in the middle. The dangers of this psychological situation are obvious. As a self, Quinn has lost control of his words. They originate with and issue from someone else. He has become a puppet through
which they pass, and hence they no longer seem to belong to him. He did not,
we are told, consider himself to be the author of what he wrote (9).
The relationship to language indicated here gains even more significance
as a comment on Quinns alienated state of mind when we remember that in
his earlier days he was a poet, the kind of writer who presumably is very
close to his own words and the self from which they issue. Reversing the implications of his first name (the biblical Daniel was a dream reader), he determinedly suppresses his dreams, just as he refuses to deal in the language
in which his inner reality might be expressed. Like Paul Austers own
father, as he is described in The Invention of Solitude, Quinn has become
a block of impenetrable space in the form of a man (7).
Quinn is roused from this invisible existence when a midnight phone call
gives him a chance, like Don Quixote whose initials he shares, to inhabit
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and make real one of his own fictions. Don Quixote manages to turn himself into a medieval knight; Daniel Quinn is given the opportunity to play
the detective. Like Don Quixote, he is able to do so only by first assuming
another identity. The fact that by an amusing trick, this identity is apparently that of Paul Auster himself, the writer of the novel, illustrates the extent
to which elements of instability and of self-reflexive fictionalizing have invaded all ideas of self and its manifestations in the postmodern world.
Quinns case seems at first to take him into the world of Chandler or
Macdonald. All the conventional elements of their detective fiction are present. The bizarre crime, in which a member of a rich and distinguished family has locked up and abused his young son, creates an appropriate ambience of money, madness, and damage. A number of familiar genre figures
soon make their ritual appearances: the loyal retainer, the voluptuous, ambiguously available wife. Quinn himself moves smoothly into his appointed
role, adopting a manner and way of speaking that turn him into a kind of
Philip Marlowe:
Quinn smiled judiciously. . . . Whatever I d o or d o not understand, he
said, is probably beside the point. Youve hired me to d o a job, and the
sooner I get on with it the better. From what I can gather the case is
urgent. . . .
He was warming up now. Something told him that he had captured the
right tone, and a sudden sense of pleasure surged through him. (41)

Soon, in typical detective style, he is tailing the father, Peter Stillman,

Sr., newly released from confinement, through the streets of New York. At
this point, however, elements emerge in the case that suggest that a story
may be developing that is different from the one that Quinn thinks he is in.
To begin with, Stillmans seemingly random wanderings appear to be tracing out hieroglyphic shapes that may or may not make certain words. Second, the motive for the crime is untypical to say the least: The father locked
up his son in accordance with an old theory that an infant insulated from
the world in this fashion would start speakiag the language of unfallen man,
thus making it available again. Most disturbing of all, as Quinn follows this
strange figure, the trail shifts its nature and direction to lead not outward to
the world around him but inward to his own self. All the figures and situations in the case turn out inexorably to be in various ways his own reflections, and his wide divagations through the labyrinth of New York only
bring him back to the inner world that he has been so assiduously avoiding.
Thus, the central situation of the case immediately confronts Quinn with
an image of his own. Here, too, a son has been lost and destroyed and a
father set adrift in the world. Now, however, the situation has taken on a
more intense and horrific coloring. In this version of father-son estrangement, the father is unequivocally guilty and the son openly hostile and frightened. Quinns own situation has been given the dimensions of nightmare.
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227

As individuals, the Stillmans have a reflexive function, embodying

aspects of Quinns own nature and forming part of the complicated interplay of doubles that confront him. Perhaps most important for the themes
of the book, they each embody aspects of Quinns relationship to language.
The speeches of Peter, Jr., victim and puppet as he is, reflect Quinns own
estrangement from language. Their reliance on cliche and their contrived
and mechanical delivery express in extreme form Quinns sense, underlying
all his fluency, that the language he is using is not his own:

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No questions please, the young man said at last. Yes. No. Thank
you. He paused for a moment. I am Peter Stillman. I say this of my
own free will. Yes. That is not my real name. No. (26)

Peter Stillman, Sr., seems to represent the other side of the coin. His aim
is to find the non-alien tongue, the first language of Adam that, by giving
everything its right name, will heal this breach between speaker and word,
subject and object. In having this attitude, he recalls the earlier Quinn, the
poet Quinn. Austers article on Charles Reznikoff (The Decisive Moment in The Art ofHunger) explicitly connects poetry and the attempt to
rediscover the prelapsarian language. In the fallen world, Auster suggests,
only through the practice of poetry can this language be regained even
momentarily (16).
If Stillmans interest in the prelapsarian language recalls the poet, the
uses to which he seeks to put this language reveal him to be another version
of the detective. He is seeking a solution, and a solution on a cosmic scale.
Fuelled by a biblical sense of the creative power of the word and by the
millenarian zeal of his Puritan culture, he sees the recovery of the Adamic
tongue as the means by which the whole world can be redeemed and restored to its original order. He had argued for this idea earlier, under the
guise of the seventeenth-century clergyman Henry Dark, in his book on the
Tower of Babel and the fall of language it involved.
If the fall of man also entailed the fall of language, was it not logical to
assume that it would be possible to undo the fall, to reverse its effects by
undoing the fall of language, by striving to recreate the language that was
spoken in Eden? (76)

Earlier in this article it was pointed out that in the metaphysical workings
of the detective story, the detective-reader often is in difficulties because
clues and the things they point to, signifiers and the signified, no longer
match up. In repossessing the prelapsarian tongue, Stillman aims to clear up
these difficulties. By giving things their right names again, calling back to its
signifier the wandering signified, he finally will be able to achieve a reliable
reading of the world and formulate, once and for all, the correct, clear, accessible, and unified text of reality. This vision still works in him as, old and
broken himself, he now wanders through the city, trying to find the right
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names for all the broken things he finds there and thus making whole again
the fragmented Tower of Babel of the late-twentieth-century cosmos.
Such is the monomaniacal visionary whom Quinn tracks through the
wilderness of the city. Quinn, himself a Don Quixote figure, has encountered another one, more obsessive, more powerful, and madder than he,
whom, like Sancho Panza, he now must follow and serve. Thus over the
next few weeks Quinn reduplicates Stillmans every move, going where he
goes and trimming his own stride and behavior to Stillmans. Soon we begin
to realize that this shadowing is not only physical. Noting down every detail
of his quarrys behavior in a special new red notebook, trying in orthodox
detective fashion to penetrate his mind and manner of thinking, Quinn begins to be drawn into Stillmans obsessive world. He starts to perform actions that are hard to explain in rational terms. He insists on always using
the pen given him by a deaf-mute. If we remember that one school of
thought adhered to the theory that the prelapsarian language was preverbal,
a language of signs, we can see that, without perhaps being aware of it,
Quinn is becoming involved in Stillmans search. This is further suggested
by his obsessive concern about how to hold the red notebook while he tails
Stillman. Eventually he hits on a method that will enable him to [see] the
thing and [write] about it in the same fluid gesture (100-101). This unimpeded melding of subject and object, in which word and thing perfectly
coalesce, is again characteristic of language in the prelapsarian world.
Despite these ircidental oddities of behavior, Quinn, for the moment,
plays the part required of him by the detective story he is engaged in. Then a
series of incidents occurs that shatter Quinn. Although for a while he remains unaware of the fact, these incidents cause the story he is in to collapse
around him; another story that decisively shifts the direction of the quest
takes shape from the wreckage.
The first of these incidents is the disappearance of Stillman; the follower
is deprived of what he has been following. The second is Quinns encounter
with another double in the person of Paul Auster, the characte? (obviously himself a kind of double of Paul Auster the author of the work)
whose identity Quinn had previously assumed. This double, however,
works in the opposite way from the ones previously encountered. Unlike the
Stillmans, who presented him with nightmare images of his situation as it
now is, the Paul Auster figure presents an image of his unfallen world, as
it was in the idyllic past. The visit to Auster brings him face-to-face with
Austers wife and son and poignantly resurrects the warm and close-knit
family life, the connectedness that Quinn has lost. The boy, close to the age
that Quinns own child would have been, increases the sense of inexorable
doubling by bearing Quinns own first name, Daniel.
This vision of his past, which also, ironically, is a vision of his present,
totally unhinges Quinn. From now on his actions seem completely mad, alSUMMER 1991, VOL. XXXII, NO. 4

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though at first he advances careful rationales for them. On leaving

Austers place he forsakes his home and daily life and stows himself
away in a garbage can outside the residence of the junior Stillmans. During
the several weeks of his stay there he systematically reduces his bodily needs
to almost nothing. His pretext for these actions is that it is his duty as a
good private eye to maintain a constant watch over his clients. In fact he has
by now lost all contact not only with the case but also with the story of
which it was a part. Although at this point he is not yet aware of it, he has
started to move into the other story. Viewed from the perspective of this
superseding story, his actions make a kind of sense.
Quinn, deeply upset by the vision of his own unfallen world, is taking
upon himself the quest that Stillman Sr., left behind. He now is in search of
the lost paradise, the world of innocent wholeness that Adam knew, and the
prelapsarian language through which it might be recovered. This quest will
take over his attention and direct his actions for the rest of the book.
From this context, his immersion in the garbage can has a number of complex meanings. On the simplest level, it is an attempt to make his outward
state reflect the inward one, to link up word with thing. After his encounter
with Paul Auster, Quinn realizes that he was nowhere now . . . he knew
nothing, he knew that he knew nothing (159). By reducing himself to rubbish, Quinn tries to express this nothingness. Deeper motives are also involved. The language of innocence can issue only from the mouth of innocence. Such innocence requires rebirth, and to be reborn one first must
die.
Something of this pattern and this necessity is revealed to Quinn by his
namesake, Paul Austers little boy. As has been noted, Quinn resolutely
forgets his dreams, but this new Daniel is true to the implications of his
name. An unconscious reveder and interpreter, he brings to the surface the
knowledge and desires that are now beginning to work in the depths of
Quinns psyche. This is what occurs in the incident with the yo-yo. Presented with the toy by the child, Quinn finds he can make it go down but cannot
find a way to make it go up. His comments and the childs, however, make
clear that one direction may be part of the other.
A great philosopher once said, muttered Quinn, that the way up and
the way down are one and the same.
But you didnt make it go up, said the boy. It only went down.
You have to keep trying. (156)

Up and down are parts of the same process; one cannot be without the
other. This perception, in part, fuels Quinns aggressive pursuit of his own
nothingness, -his determination to seek rock bottom, to throw himself thoroughly away. Only from this near obliteration of the self may a new one
arise. Only by becoming garbage can one hope to be recycled.
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Quinns actions in the concluding part of the novel, after he has emerged
from the garbage, conform to this death-rebirth pattern. Finding the case in
disintegration around him, and the doors of his previous life almost literally
shut against him, he moves into Peter Stillman, Jr.s room. The movement
is both physical and symbolic. Physically, he ensconces himself in a room in
the now-deserted Stillman apartment and reproduces almost exactly the
conditions of Peters childhood incarceration-the total silence and sequestration in which he spent his first years. Symbolically, he tries to become
what Peter then was, the child, the unmarked innocent, pure of all contact
with the outer world, through which the language of unfallen man may
issue. Thus he divests himself of his clothing, making himself completely
naked like the child just emerged, or about to emerge, from the womb.
In this condition we catch our last glimpse of Quinn, sleeping intermittently, eating occasionally, and writing steadily in his red notebook as the
darkness falls. A narrator, editor figure, who earlier has given hints of his
existence, emerges at this point and takes control of the story. Subsequent
investigation, he tells us, has revealed no more of Quinn than the red notebook, left lying on the floor of the room. Quinn himself has completely
disappeared.
What are we, as readers and detectives ourselves, to make of this conclusion? Has Quinn found the prelapsarian tongue? Has he achieved anything,
or have his endeavors ended in absurdity? The narrator-editor seems to take
a gloomy view of Quinn and his life. He refers to him as a man . . . obviously in trouble, blames Auster (character or author?) for his treatment
of him, and ends his comments on a lugubrious note. My thoughts remain
with Quinn, he says. And wherever he may have disappeared to, I wish
him luck (201). However, in a late-twentieth-century text that continually
stresses the subjective element in all experience, we need not take this
authorial view as authoritative. Certain aspects of the final phase of
Quinns story require more consideration. During this period he produced
writing of a very different kind from his previous detective works. It is described as follows:
He wrote about the stars, the earth, his hopes for mankind. He felt that
his words had been severed from him, that now they were a part of the
world at large, as real and specific as a stone, or a lake or a flower. . . . He
remembered the moment of his birth and how he had been pulled gently
from his mothers womb. He remembered the infinite kindnesses of the
world and all the people he had ever loved. Nothing mattered now but the
beauty of all this. (200)

Much in this account reminds us of Austers description of the works of

Charles Reznikoff, a poet who he seems to feel came close in his use of language to finding the freshness and creative clarity of prelapsarian speech.
Auster sees in ReznikofPs writings such a perfect coalescing of words into
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things that they seem to penetrate the pre-history of matter (Art of

Hunger 16). As a poet, he seems to be seeing rather than speaking, or speaking from his eye (16). Influenced by the imagists, he has learnt from
them the value-the force-of the image in itself, unadorned by the claims
of the ego (18). Into these images the poet disappears. He becomes transparent and invisible (19).
Such qualities are recalled in the description of Quinns final writings.
Here are words that turn into things, images of such force and clarity that
they seem able to take their place in the world of objects, to become matter.
And here, too, is a.testament to his invisibility and transparency-in the
sense of his words becoming severed from himself. Earlier he felt that his
words had become severed from himself because they were not his own.
Here, the feeling of severance seems to arise from the fact that he has effaced himself in them.
Perhaps then, in some measure, Quinn achieved his quest. He made his
difficult way back to languages unfallen core and gave it utterance. However, he achieved nothing on the scale envisioned by his mentor, Stillman,
Sr. He was not able to come up with the correct text of reality. He did not
importantly alter reality. Above all, he did not achieve any cosmic solutions. Fragmented, fallen, the world at the end of Quinns quest remains in
much the same plight as it was at the beginning. Quinns contact with the
pure prelapsarian word has been partial, momentary, and personal. He was
granted only a series of glimpses. In giving utterance to these glimpses, however, Quinn again laid hold on his vocation as a poet; in the process he became reconciled to the world he could not save and sensitive again to what it
has of beauty.
Much in both City of Glass and in Austers other works suggests that this
partial, glimpsed achievement of truth is the only possible and genuine one
in the difficult world of the twentieth century. Throughout the book we are
continually reminded of the unknowable nature of this world. In the Babel
of New York, things stream across the eye in a series of disconnected atoms,
and subject and object blur each others image until we feel trapped in a
universe of mirrors, a city of glass indeed. As the novel pointed out, in
Poes tale of the journey of Arthur Gordon Pym, the hieroglyphs that the
hero discovers and that might be a form of the first tongue of Adam,
though undecipherable, are inscribed on solid rock. The hieroglyphs that
Stillmans wanderings seem to inscribe upon New York are inscribed in air
or may simply be a figment of Quinns imagination. Over the intervening
century, the decipherment of the world has become so much more difficult.
To seek for absolute knowledge and final solutions is, therefore, a form of
madness. The career of Stillman, Sr., bears this out. The effects of his totalitarian vision are fearful. In the end, they destroy everything human, all connection, all community, and life itself.
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Discussing Hunger by b u d Hamson, Auster suggests that a truly modern art, the only one relevant to our current condition, begins with the
knowledge that there are no right answers and cites Samuel Becketts
statement that this art must be of such a type that it admits the chaos and
does not try to say that the chaos is something else (Art of Hunger 13). For
Auster, the profound and unassuageable metaphysical insecurity of twentieth-century man is symbolized in the condition of the hero of the novel.
Perpetually hungry, he obtains only enough food to stop him from starving,
never enough to satisfy him. In the same way, modem man can know only
enough to see him through the day, to enable him to go on feeling his way
along. Metaphysically speaking, in the late twentieth century, there is no
such thing as a complete meal. Quinns crucial understanding of this fact is
perhaps demonstrated by his refusal, in his last confinement, to eat more
than a small portion of the lavish trays of food that appear before him like
mysterious temptations.
At the end the text we are left not with Quinns final pieces of writing, the
examples of vision achieved, but the story of the search for that vision, the
novel City of Glms itself. Perhaps this is a reflection of Austers sense of the
nature of the modem condition. Austers reworking of the detective story as
a quest for the definitive language finally tells us that it is not the correct
and final text of reality but a text about the text that is the most appropriate
one for the postmodem world. Stories about stones, books not of answers
but of questions: these are the forms in which the difficult reality of our
time finds its best embodiment.

YORKUNIVERSITY

NOTES
1. The view of the reader as a decoder of signs is central to modem theories of narrativity.
See, especially, Shlometh Rimmon-Kenan, pp. 117-129.
2. During the course of this paper, 1 will refer to Paul Auster the character in quotation
marks to distinguish him from Paul Auster the author.

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1985. The City of G l w . New York: Viking Penguin, 1987.
1982. The Invention of Solitude. London: Faber, 1988.
Goldstein, Rebecca. The Man Shadowing Black Is Blue. New York Times Book Review 29
June 1986:13.
Huhn, Peter. The Detective as Reader: Narrativity and Reading Concepts in Detective Fiction. Modern Fiction Studies 33 (1987):451-456.
Irwin, John T. American Hieroglyphs. New Haven: Yale UP, 1980.

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Rimmon-Kenan, Shlometh. Narrafive Fiction: Contemporary Poetics. London: Methuen,

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Tani, Stefano. The Doomed Defecfive.Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1984.
Todorov, Tzvetan. The Poetics of Prose. Trans. Richard Howard. Oxford: Blackwell, 1971.

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