The pragmatics of detection: Paul Auster’s City of Glass

Abstract

This article considers the agreed conventions that underlie linguistic interaction. In particular, it treats literary texts as a form of language in use, dependent on the same principles of interaction as any other discourse. An analysis of Paul Auster’s City of Glass demonstrates that presuppositions operating between characters in the novel, and between the novel and the reader, are liable to failure, without catastrophic effect on the discourse. Generic conventions (in this case those of detective fiction) are defined as a set of presuppositions, in that they consist of agreed parameters or ‘limits’ for the discourse. Auster’s novel suggests that generic conventions and presuppositions in discourse are equally normative; as such their stability is not guaranteed. This approach problematizes Sperber and Wilson’s (1995: 261) implication that the search for relevance in human interaction is involuntary in that it suggests that the process by which meaning is constructed in discourse is normative, and can therefore be suspended.