openpalm

City of Glass is described on its back cover as “a wonderful whodunnit for metaphysicians”. Auster has a character reading another character’s scholarly work on Milton’s Paradise Lost… I offer this wonderful passage as intriguing in itself (with no desire to check his scholarship)

In Milton’s Paradise Lost, for example, each key word has two meanings — one before the fall and one after the fall. To illustrate his point, Stillman isolated several of those words — sinister, serpentine, delicious– and showed how their prelapsarian use was free of moral connotations, whereas their use after the fall was shaded, ambiguous, informed by a knowledge of evil. Adam’s one task in the Garden had been to invent language, to give each creature and thing its name. In that state of innocence, his tongue had gone straight to the quick of the world. His words had not been merely appended to the things he saw. they had revealed their essences, had literally brought them to life. A thing and its name were interchangeable. After the fall, this was no longer true, Names became detached from things; words devolved into a collection of arbitrary signs; language had been severed from God. The story of the Fall, therefore, not only records the fall of man, but the fall of language.”

Now back to “who dunnit”.