lllllllllllIlllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllH|||llll|||

31293 00898 2179

This is to certify that the

thesis entitled

The ketafictional Novel:
A Comparative Study

presented by

Matthew J. McDonough

has been accepted towards fulfillment
of the requirements for

M.A. degree in English

 

    

Major professor

Date ag/zfit/

0-7 639 MS U is an Affirmative Action/Equal Opportunity Institution

 

 

LIBRARY
MIchIgan State
Unlverslty

 

 

 

PLACE IN RETURN BOX to remove thin checkout from your record.
TO AVOID FINES return on or before date due.

DATE DUE DATE DUE DATE DUE

J
I l
Z—t‘ 7

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

MSU Is An Affirmative Action/Equal Opportunity Institution

CWfl'lfl-pd

..._‘

 

 

 

THE METAFICTIONAL NOVEL: A COMPARATIVE STUDY
By

Matthew J. McDonough

A THESIS

Submitted to
Michigan State University
in partial fulfillment of the requirements
for the degree of

MASTER OF ARTS

Department of English

1991

03’7- /68:9

ABSTRACT
THE METAFICTIONAL NOVEL: A COMPARATIVE STUDY
By

Matthew J. McDonough

My basic aim is to explicate and illumine the metafictional novel
through a comparative study of six authors and a sustained
consideration of contemporary theory. In the first chapter I
establish a theoretical framework for understanding metafiction in
terms of Mikhail Bakhtin's theory of the novel (as elaborated in The
Dialogic Imagination) and the poststructuralist theories of Michel
Feucault and Jacques Derrida. In the following chapter I examine
the origins of the metafictional novel in two early masterpieces,
Miguel de Cervantes' Don Ouijote and Laurence Steme's Tristram
Shandy. The third Chapter is a discussion of Gabriel Garcia
Marquez's Cien Afios de Soledad and John Barth's The Sat-Weed
Factor as exemplars for a brand of parodic, pseudohistorical
metafiction which is heavily indebted to Don Ouijote. l n the final
Chapter I discuss the ludic, deconstructive and postmodernist
propensities of Julio Cortazar's Rayuela and Robert Coover‘s The

Universal Baseball Association.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I would like to extend my gratitude to three professors at
Michigan State who assisted me in my studies in various ways:
Philosophy professor Douglas Peterson, who gave me excellent
advice on the first chapter; Robert Fiore, a Spanish and Italian
professorand Don Ouijote scholar, to whom I owe the pleasure of
my first encounter with Cervantes' great masterpiece (and who
responded extensively to the second chapter); and my thesis
director, English professor Jim McClintock, to whom I am perhaps
most indebted, not only for the guidance he provided in the way of
critical commentary, but for sparking my initial interest in
metafiction in his graduate seminar on contemporary American

literature.

A NOTE ON THE TRANSLATIONS

A cursory glance at the body of this thesis will alert the reader
to the fact that in addition to the passages from novels in English,
there are direct quotations from Spanish texts, intended for the
enrichment of those readers who, like myself, are fluent enough in
Spanish to understand them. However, I have no intention of
excluding readers who don't know Spanish; consequently, l have
included translations for all Spanish passages, including words and
phrases quoted in the middle of English sentences.

I would also like to acknowledge my use of several superb
translations. Since I am by no means perfectly fluent in Spanish, I
found it useful to measure my own translations against those of
Gregory Rabassa, whose One Hundred Years of Solitude and
Hopscotch are unsurpassed and virtually "perfect“ translations of
Garcia Marquez and Julio Cortazar. I found Walter Starkie's
translation of Don Ouijote to be less commendable; on the whole I
think he renders Cervantes' language, which appears astonishingly
modern in Spanish (a more stable language over its history, I think,
than English), in overly archaic English. Nevertheless, he provides
reliable English equivalents for some of the more esoteric words in
the Ouijote.

In general, where its idiomatic peculiarities allowed, I sought a
more direct translation of the Spanish than did the translators that
l consulted. A linguistic crutch which was especially useful for the
translations which were necessary to do on my own (such as
quotations of critical commentary in Spanish) was Mario A. Pei's

WWW-

TABLE OF CONTENTS

1. Formalist and Poststructuralist
Perspectives on Metafiction

2. Early Exemplars: Miguel de Cervantes' Don Ouijote
and Laurence Steme's Tristram Shandy

3. Pseudo-History and the Literature of Hermetic
Excess: Gabriel Garcia Marquez's Cien Arias de
Soledad and John Barth‘s The Sot- Weed Factor

4. Serious Play: Fiction-Making Games in
Julio Cortazar's Rayuela and Robert
Coover‘s The Universal Baseball Association

Notes

Bibliography

27

56

81

107

118

Chapter 1

Formalist and Poststructuralist
Perspectives on Metafiction

The term ”metafiction" can be traced to a 1970 essay by William
Gass (Waugh 2), a period of intense formal experimentation and
avant-gardism when probably more specimens of the genre were
being produced than at any time before or since. Nevertheless, I
have purposely avoided in my thesis those novelists whose work
represents metafiction in its most reactionary and extremist
aesthetic stance, for I hope to controvert the tendency to view
metafiction as a mere symptom of late sixties and early seventies
radicalism.

Contrary to this view, a number of seminal studies have
demonstrated that, far from constituting a marginalized,
short-lived aberration, metafiction actually typifies the inherent
potential of all fiction for self-reflexive commentary and flaunting
of technical artifice. As Patricia Waugh states at the beginning of
her superb study, Metafiction, ”This form of fiction is worth
studying not only because of its contemporary emergence but also
because of the insights it offers into both the representational
nature of all fiction and the literary history of the novel as genre.
By studying metafiction, one is, in effect, studying that which gives
the novel its identity (p. 5).”

Other critics have come to a similar conclusion in expanding the

scope of metafiction to encompass the history of the novel itself.
For instance, Robert Alter, in his landmark study, Partial Magic: The
Novel as a Self-Conscious Genre, isolates the nineteenth century as
the era in which the self-conscious novel was ”eclipsed," and
demonstrates how it flourished in the seventeenth, eighteenth and
twentieth centuries in such masterpieces as Don Quijote, Tristram
Shandy, and the novels of Nabokov. Indeed, the so-called "triumph
of realism" in the nineteenth century effaces another tradition
more skeptical of the novel's ability to offer a verisimilitous
representation of ”reality.” This literary-historical schism
outlines a basic tension which is present in all fiction, but which is
accentuated in the metafictional novel through a construction of
narrative artifice on the one hand, and on the other, its
self-critical unraveling or exposure (Waugh 6).

Despite the notorious difficulties in arriving at a definition of
literary realism, the metafictional theories stemming from the
work of Alter and Mikhail Bakhtin simplify the matter by allowing
us to view realism as the natural antipode of metafiction.
Theorists of realism who grapple with the inherent paradox of a
mode which purports to represent life in a novel as it is ”in
reality,” clearly would benefit from an understanding of
metafiction, which openly embraces and highlights this vexing
, duplicity at the heart of narrative technique. In sum, novelists
operating in a realist mode tell a story as if characters were not
merely words on a page chosen by an author, but real, autonomous

people operating within independent ontological frames,

unrestricted by the narrative and stylistic conventions which give
them life beyond their linguistic flatness on the page. As Gass
wryly notes, ”That novels should be made of words, and merely
words, is shocking, really. It's as if you had discovered that your
wife were made of rubber: the bliss of all those years, the fears . . .
from sponge" (as quoted on p. viii of Partial Magic ).

Mikhail Bakhtin is one of the most relevant and useful theorists
for an expansion of metafiction's provenance to embrace the history
of the novel itself, for his theory of the novel demarginalizes
metafictional forces or effects, positing them as the very ground
for the novel's uniqueness as a genre. Although he never uses any
term resembling the word "metafiction,” it is clear that the
”dialogic potential" of the novel refers to a form of novelistic
discourse which is characteristically self-conscious and
self-referential. Moreover, he argues that the natural tendency'for
the novel is to relativize distinct stylistic and generic voices
within a multivocal and heteroglot text. The novel is not a “genre”
so much as a crucible and melting pot for diverse genres, a space
where various ”languages" compete for mastery over the text. One
need only think of Don Ouijote, with its incorporation of the
picaresque novel, the chivalric romance, the pastoral lyric and
novel, arabic tales, etc., to realize the extent to which the novel
absorbs and assimilates canonic, already completed genres within
its sprawling framework.

Moreover, the heteroglot composition of the novel is handled in

such a way as to question the authority of the canonical genre

4

structures which it incorporates into its dialogic form of
discourse. In other words, the novel, in Bakhtin's view, is not a
merely passive form of eclecticism or pastiche, but an active
interrogation and critique of canonic forms within a "profane," or
radically "other"1 structure of dialogic skepticism. Michael
HolquiSt seizes upon this aspect of Bakhtin's theory of the novel
very lucidly in his introduction to The Dialogic Imagination:

The majority of literary scholars are most at home when dealing with canons,
which is why Bakhtin said that literary theory is helpless to deal with the novel.
Rather, ”novel“ is the name Bakhtin gives to whatever force is at work within a
given literary system to reveal the limits, the artificial constraints of that
system. Literary systems are comprised of canons, and 'novelization' ls
fundamentally anticanonical. It will not permit generic monoloque (p. xxx).

The words, ”reveal the limits, the artificial constraints of that
[literary] system,” are very close to the way most critics have
sought to define metafiction. As Waugh states in Metafiction,
"Metafictional novels tend to be constructed on the principle of a
fundamental and sustained opposition: the construction of a
fictional illusion . . . and the laying bare of that illusion (p. 6)." A
dual focus on the history of the novel (as conceived by Bakhtin) and
the fundamental nature of metafiction, lends support to the
contention that the novel is inherently or essentially metafictional.

Another aspect of metafiction articulated in Bakhtin's theory is
the impulse to self-critique. Bakhtin sees the novelistic
appropriation of older generic forms (the "novelization' of epic, for
example) as a way ofparodying andcriticiiing these outmoded and

brittle forms, in keeping with his view that genres are essentially

organic forms, whose monologic appearance in contemporaneity is
attributable to the fact that the already completed genres are
actually generic "skeletons.“ By contrast, the novel is a fluid and .

still developing genre:

The study of the novel as a genre is distinguished by peculiar difficulties. This
is due to the unique nature of the object itself: the novel is the sole genre that
continues to develop, that is as yet uncompleted. The forces that define it as a
genre are at work before our very eyes: the birth and development of the novel
as a genre takes place in the full light of the historical day. The generic skeleton
of the novel is still far from having hardened, and we cannot foresee all its
plastic possibilities (p. 3).

This explains in part the heteroglot and anticanonical appearance
of the novel, but it is further distinguished from other genres by its
impulse to criticism, its treatment of generic stylization as an
object for critical representation. The novel assimilates generic

forms, but only in order to parody them:

Parodic stylizations of canonized genres and styles occupy an essential place
in the novel. In the era of the novel's creative ascendency--and even more so in
the periods of preparation preceding this era-literature was flooded with
parodies and travesties of all the high genres (parodies precisely of genres, and
not of individual authors or schools)--parodies that are the precursors,
"companions” to the novel, in their own way studies for it. But it Is
characteristic that the novel does not permit any of these various individual
manifestations of itself to stabilize (p. 6).

Don Ouijote, the archetpyal and paradigmatic exemplar for the
novel in so many respects, furnishes us with a perfect illustration
of Bakhtin's theorization, for the very raison d'étre of Cervantes'
masterpiece, as the author himself tells his readers in the
prologue, is the satirization of the cabal/arias, the chivalric

romances so popular throughout Europe in the sixteenth century.

6

Indeed, one essential aspect of the metafictional fabric of
Cervantes' novel is the way in which it imitates a popular genre,
not out of reverence, but in the spirit of parody and criticism. It is
a form of textual appropriation which opens up a critical distance
between the object of representation (the chivalric romances) and
the way these books are contextually represented in the novel
itself. Cervantes' never directly criticizes the books of chivalry,
but by accentuating the distance between their characteristic mode
of representation (embodied in the imagination and utterances of
don Quijote) and their contextual appearance in a comic, picaresque
novel, he is able to simultaneously fictionalize and criticize. (As
we shall see in the next chapter, metafictional self-criticism
functions in Don Ouijote in a remarkable variety of ways.)

Of course, it is important to note that the novel does not smugly
criticize the genres it assimilates, reserving a sort of
master-style or language for itself which would be free from
parody and critique. As Bakhtin notes, ”the novel does not permit
any one of these various individual manifestations of itself to
stabilize." The novel is not merely critique, but self-critique,
mercilessly dialogizing all of its generic stylizations into a

heteroglossic and open-ended form:

To a greater or lesser extent, every novel is a dlalogized system made up of
the images of ”languages,“ styles and consciousnesses that are concrete and
inseparable from language. Language in the novel not only represents, but Itself
serves as the object of representation. Novellstlc discourse is always
criticizing itself (p. 49).

This explains why the novel is characteristically metafictional,

not merely metalinguistic. Metalanguage, as formulated in
structuralist thought, can be defined as a language system whose
object of representation is another language. The concept is a
cornerstone of structuralist and New Critical methodology, and
allows the critic a strategic, objective distance from which to
analyze a text, encoding its meaning in a "master-text” itself
impervious to criticism. A poststructuralist critique of this
concept attacks the privileged status that this form of discourse
reserves for itself, and demonstrates how all modes of critical
discourse open themselves to deconstruction by the very rhetorical
plays that constitute their critical position. Christopher Norris

elucidates this point in Deconsnuction: Theory and Practice:

The endpoint of deconstructive thought, as Derrida insists, is to recognize that
there is no end to the interrogatlve play between text and text. Deconstruction
can never have the final word because its insights are inevitably couched in a
rhetoric which itself lies cpen to further deconstructive reading. Criticism can
only be deluded in its claim to operate (as Eagleton puts it) 'outslde the space of
the text' on a plane of scientific knowledge. There is no metalanguage (p. 84).

Bakhtin's theory leads us to the same conclusion, but in the
context of the novel. There can be no privileged generic stylization
in the novel because the process of dialogic subversion, of
"novelization," is so pervasive and complete that every mode of
generic representation is itself an object of representation, every
parodic stylization itself an object of parody. Every novel submits
itself to novelistic self-critique. In other words, all novels are
metafictional, excepting those which strive against their natural

grain to become monologic, submitting the plurivocity of novelistic

discourse to the ”dominant 'voice' of the omniscient, godlike author
(Waugh, p. 6).”

As I stated earlier, metafiction functions by exploring a
fundamental duplicity inherent in all fiction--the tension and
difference between the author's striving after realistic illusion and
the appearance of narrative veracity on the one hand, and on the
other, his awareness that books are merely printed matter,
material and linguistic objects having no immediate or intrinsic
relation with the reality they seek to represent. For Bakhtin, this
ambivalence and discordance typifies the novelistic mode of

representation:

The Image of another's language and outlook on the world, simultaneously
represented and representing, is extremely typical of the novel; the greatest
novelistic images (for example, the figure of Don Quixote) belong precisely to
this type. These descriptive and expressive means that are direct and poetic (in
the narrow sense) retain their direct significance when they are incorporated
into such a figure, but at the same time they are ”qualified“ and 'externallzed,”
shown as something historically relative, delimited and incomplete-4n the

novel they, so to speak, criticize themselves (p. 45).

To expand upon Bakhtin's example of don Ouijote, I would
assert that Cervantes' character is a direct image of the .
chivalric knight and the pastoral lover/poet whenever he voices
the language of chivalric romances and pastoral poetry, and
indeed, a large percentage of Cervantes' novel is given over to
this form of direct, generic appropriation. This is not merely in
order to set up earlier generic forms for parodic treatment, for
Cervantes is' in part paying tribute to his predecessors and

demonstrating his skill in handling traditional literary forms

9

(this dual stance toward tradition is analogous to the more
fundamental ambivalence at the very heart of metafiction). But
the language and figure of don Quijote are also framed in a
context which "qualifies” and ”extemalizes" his identity as a
gallant knight. ,

The implications of this are not merely that don Quijote is
"really” a middle-aged man driven mad from reading too much
popular literature (as realist interpretations of the novel would
emphasize), but that he is also a linguistic fiction. Alter seizes
upon this quality of bifurcation in don Quijote's character in
Partial Magic, relating it to novelistic self—consciousness in the

book as a whole:

. . . Don Quixote . . . exists simultaneously on two very different planes of
being. On the one hand, the gaunt knight on his emaciated hack rides in the
mind's eye across the plains of a very real La Mancha. appearing as a possible if
bizarre figure of his time and place who in fact succeeds in becoming a general
image of mankind in all the stubbornness of its idealism and the hopeless futility
of its blind misdirections. Cervantes takes pains, on the other hand, to make us
aware of the fact that the knight is merely a lifelike model of papier-maché, a
design in words, images, invented gestures and actions, which exists between the
covers of a book by Miguel de Cervantes (p. 4).

The point I am emphasizing is that Bakhtin’s notion of a dialogic,
self-critical discourse does not refer to an ontologically unified
plane of representation. The distanced image of another's language,
in Bakhtin's terminology, does not simply cast that language in an
ironic and parodic hue in the mouth of an ontologically whole and
unified character, for the language is so thoroughly ”bracketed” and
set apart that the character becomes little more than a generic

abstraction. In other words, the diverse forms of generic

10

stylization in the novel are not merely relative to the identity of
various realistically fleshed-out characters that embody them in
speech; rather, they transcend character and engage directly in a
heteroglossic, dialogic discourse which problematizes the
ontological status of the novel as a verisimilitous representation

of reality and foregrounds its status as a linguistic object. Bakhtin
expresses this metafictional or dialogic level of novelistic

discourse in relation to Pushkin's Eugene Onegin:

The author represents Onegln's “language” (a period-bound language
associated with a particular world view) as an Image that speaks, and that is
therefore preconditioned. Therefore, the author is far from neutral in his
relationship to this image: to a certain extent he even polemicizes with this
language, argues with it, agrees with it (although with conditions), interrogates
it, eavesdrops on it, but also ridicules it, parodically exaggerates it and so
forth--in other words, the author is in a dialogical relationship with Onegln's
language; the author is actually conversing with Onegin, and such a
conversation is the fundamental constitutive element of all novelistic style. . . .
The author represents this language, carries on a conversation with it, and the
conversation penetrates into the interior of the language-image and dialogizes it
from within. And all essentially novelistic Images share this quality: they are
internally dlalogized images. . . (p. 46).

From the standpoint of narrative realism, there are several
disturbing elements in this passage. Not only does realist fiction
deny, for the sake of ontological unity, interaction between the
author and his characters, but the notion of ”an image that speaks"
(rather than the character himself) highlights the status of
dialogue as literary discourse and effaces its function as living
speech in the mouths of the novel's characters. Again, we can see
how persistently Bakhtin portrays metafictional
self-consciousness and self-referentiality as the very ground of

the novel's identity as a genre. Also, Bakhtin's notion of an

11

"internally dialogized image” reminds us of how thoroughly
metafictional self-critique is activated in the novel. In terms of
poststructuralism, one might say that fictional self—consciousness
functions ”at the level of the sign.” Although metafictional
self-reflection has to do primarily with self-consciousness about
narrative devices and conventions, even in a noVel as early as Don
Quijote we find evidence that the novel as genre exhibits
self-referentiality at the structural linguistic level.

In the first chapter of Partial Magic, Alter provides a lucid and
penetrating explanation of the historical and material causes
behind this shift in the structure of fictional discourse. Drawing
upon Walter Benjamin's brilliant essay, ”The Work of Art in the Age
of Mechanical Reproduction,” Alter links the growth of novelistic
self-consciousness with the increasing awareness of the book as a
material object, stripped of its cultural “aura,” its qualities of
uniqueness, irreproducibility, and authenticity, in an era of cultural

mass production:

Ever since Gutenberg, when technology first intervened decisively in the
reproduction of artifacts, the rapid expansion and development of Western
culture have progressively sharpened a basic ambiguity. The artist, with new
means at his disposal, could imagine enormous new possibilities of power in the
exercise of his art. At the same time, the conditions of mechanical reproduction
made it necessary for the individual artist to swim against a vast floodtide of
trash out of all proportion to anything that had existed before in cultural

history; and the reproduced art object itself, in its universal accessibility,

could be cheapened, trivialized, deprived of its uniqueness, stripped of any
claims it might have to be a model of value or a source of truth. . . . The novel as
a genre provides a specially instructive measure of a culture caught up in the
dynamics of its own technological instruments because it is the only major
genre that comes into being after the invention of printing, and its own
development—structural and thematic as well as economic-is intimately tied

up with printing (pp. 1-2).

12

This "cultural materialist” interpretation of the history of the
novel goes a long way in explaining why it is inherently
metafictional. Novelists are acutely aware of the materiality of
their own work, and consequently, its status as a structure of
words, because the mass production and distribution of literature
has stripped it of its ancient aura as a conduit for transcendental
meaning and truth. Bakhtin cites a similar historical contingency in

defining the uniqueness of the novel as a genre:

All of these genres, or in any case their defining features, are considerably
older than written language and the book, and to the present day they retain
their ancient oral and auditory characteristics. Of all the major genres only the
novel is younger than writing and the book: it alone is organically receptive to
new forms of mute perception, that is, to reading (p. 3).

Certainly "writing and the book" are much older than the printing
press, but they clearly become more obtrusive and imposing
entities as the printed word begins to proliferate in the
Renaissance. It may seem a statement of the obvious to link the
novel with writing and the dissemination of books, but it is
precisely this material dimension of writing that realist fiction
systematically represses and forgets in its imitation of older, oral
traditions of narrative.

In this respect, Bakhtin articulates something similar to the
guiding theme of Jacques Derrida's project, the contention that all
Western literature and philosophy since Plato has been dominated
by a "logocentric" metaphysics of presence which systematically
represses writing, subjugating it to the perceived authority of a

”self-present" voice. Like Derrida, Bakhtin asserts that all

13

language, whether it is oral or written, embodies a multiplicity of
meanings contrary to the illusion of univocity and self-presence
which the intimacy of the human voice confers on most forms of
discourse.

However, for Bakhtin, it is the novel (rather than the
theoreticaVcritical project of deconstruction), the first genre to
be ”organically receptive . . . to reading,” which liberates the
dialogic imagination, along with its qualities of semantic alterity
and self-referentiality. In the dialogic novel, as in metafiction
itself, the ”voice" of the author is made ineluctably aware of its
own "otherlanguagedness' through the very nature of the medium of
fiction. Novellstlc representation, according to Bakhtin, is always
a kind of bracketing of the direct word, a reflection of its

strangeness in the context of polyglossia:

Ungulstlc consciousness [in the novelluparodylng the direct word. direct
style, exploring its limits, its absurd sides, the face specific to an
era-constituted itself outside this direct word and outside all its graphic and
expressive means of representation. A new mode developed for working
creatively with language: the creating artist began to look at language from the
outside, with another‘s eyes, from the point of view of a potentially different
language and style (p. 60).

Metafiction typically involves this practice of "bracketed“
narrative. As I noted earlier, a character‘s language may be framed
as a highly generic, stylized, or artificial form of utterance,
thereby foregrounding the fictionality of the character through his
speech, which acquires the status of discursive rhetoric, rather
than real words spoken by a real person. Examples of this kind of

metafictionanialogic bracketing are abundant in a novel such as

14

Tristram Shandy, especially in the interpolated stories, which are
framed narratives, tales embroidered within the larger context of
the novel. The fictionality of most framed tales is made
conspicuous by the fact that a fictional character does the
narration, and the presence of a fictionalized narrator inevitably
intrudes upon our reading of the tale.

Yet whereas most framed narratives have a clear ontological and
discursive separation within the text (the fictionality of the
character's tale does not spill over into the "reality” of the frame
narrative, even though both are in actuality part of the same
fictional weave-~the novel as a whole), Steme's interpolated
stories are not clearly separated from the fictionalizing activity of
the immediate author, whether it is Sterne himself or one of his
characters. In fact, the mingling or “transgression" of fictional
frames occurs at three levels (that of the author himself, his
characters, and their characters), reinforcing a central
preoccupation of the book, which is the process of fiction-writing
itself. Thus, the laying bare of artifice in Tristram Shandy, the
bracketing of the direct word, make it a novel about writing a novel.
As Bakhtin notes, it is important to distinguish the dialogic novel
in which the mere presence of story-telling characters suggests
self-consciousness on the part of the author in a mute,
unthematized manner,2 from those novels which "test" literary
discourse by openly and directly thematizing the writing of the

novelhseh:

15

The second type of testing introduces an author who is in the process of
writing the novel (a ”laying bare of the device," in the terminology of the
Formalists), not however in the capacity of a character, but rather as the real
author of the given work. Alongside the apparent novel there are fragments of a
"novel about the novel” (the classic exemplar is, of course, Tristram Shandy)
(p. 413).

This is probably the most familiar and easily recognizable of all
metafictional devices, though certainly there is a wider range of
effects contingent upon the bracketing or framing devices that
. Bakhtin describes. With all of his rhetoric concerning 'voice' in
novelistic discourse, it is interesting to note how authorial voice
itself can become bracketed, depersonalized and viewed from a
distance. A perfect example of this can be found in some of John
Barth's fictions, such as ”Echo” (from Lost in the Funhouse ), in
which the very concept of authorial voice is placed in parentheses

and viewed with skepticism, to disconcerting effect:

One does well to speak in the third person, the seer advises, in the manner
of Theban Tiresias. A cure for self-absorption is saturation: telling the story
over as though it were another's until like a much-repeated word it loses sense.
There's a cathartic Tiresias himself employs in the interest of objectivity and to
rid himself of others' histories-~Oedipus's, Echo's-which distract him fore
and aft by reason of his entire knowledge (p. 98).

"Telling the story over as though it were another's," Barth's
narrator suffers from a crisis of identity, as a profusion of
authorial voices breaks into the text, without any single voice
establishing authority over the narration of the story. Moreover the
story itself is about this struggle, and thus it is perfectly
self-reflectional, parodying and baring the illusion of authorial
univocity, while reflecting upon its own narrative interiority. The

sum effect is a heaping of artifice upon artifice, as the notion of

16

authorial voice is both indirectly and directly bracketed and
thematized. A

With Bakhtin, l have attempted to demonstrate the extreme
versatility of his theory for the novel. The comprehensive scope of
his conception of novelistic dialogism is useful for reversing the
perception of metafiction as a radical and marginalized tendency in
fiction, and for exploring the truly astonishing range of
metafictional effects that characteristically display themselves in
the novel. By contrast, my analysis of Derrida and Michel Foucault
will focus more on metafiction as a contemporary development
within literature. My application of poststructuralist theory to the
study of metafiction has a two-fold purpose-to illustrate in
theoretical terms some of metafiction's characteristic effects and
devices, but also to show how poststructuralist thought itself
implements an advanced form of 'metacritical" self-consciousness
and textual/linguistic self-reflexivity. In other words,
poststructuralism illuminates metafiction directly, but also by way
of comparison, suggesting that together they constitute a more
generalized development in contemporary literature and
literary-critical discourse--or perhaps in an even larger context in
our culture as a whole, such as the phenomenon of ”postmodernism"
(a question which will receive some treatment in the fourth
Chapter). '

For instance, in his essay, ”What is an Author?” Foucault traces
the evolution of the ”author-function” from the Middle Ages to the

present, but doesn't confine the scope of his speculations to

17

literary discourse. Foucault sees the conception of what
constitutes the authority in a literary text as a broad function of
culture, cutting across all of the humanistic disciplines and
affecting all forms of discourse. Even so, his bold and highly
figurative description has particular resonance with respect to the
characteristics of poststructuralist thought and metafiction.
Foucault seizes upon the breakdown of authorial univocity (which I
noted in Barth's "Echo') as a key characteristic of contemporary
discourse in general:

For the time being, I wish to restrict myself to the singular relationship
that holds between an author and a text. the manner in which a text apparently
points to this figure who is outside and precedes it. . . . Beckett supplies a
direction: “What matter who's speaking, someone said, what matter who's
speaking." In an indifference such as this we must recognize one of the

fundamental ethical principles of contemporary writing (pp.115-116,
Language, counter-memory, practice).

The disintegration of authorial voice into a play of multivocal
presence and absence which Foucault locates in Beckett is a salient
characteristic of contemporary metafiction, as we have seen with
Barth. Whether one interprets this development in the Derridean
sense of effaced presence,3 or as Barthes and Foucault are wont to
express it, as the ”death of the author,” it is clear that
contemporary discourse has submitted the traditional function of
the author as a univocal "presence” to a radical skepticism and
self-criticism (or as Bakhtin might note, this monologic authorial
presence, the “living breath” of an author, seems to reach back in a
nostalgic gesture to an ancient oral narrative tradition, which

continues to cast a repressive net over the forces of dialogism in

18

the novel). Foucault divides this critical shift in the author
function into two main themes--the overt thematization of the
author's death, and the aforementioned "indifference” towards
authorial presence, an attitude which reverses at the structural
level writing's traditional role as the direct expression of the

author's thoughts and emotions:

For the sake of illustration, we need only consider two of Its major themes.
First, the writing of our day has freed itself from the necessity of "expression";

it only refers to itself, yet it is not restricted to the confines of inferiority. On

the contrary, we recognize it in its exterior deployment. This reversal
transforms writing into an interplay of signs, regulated less by the content it
signifies than by the very nature of the signifier. Moreover, it implies an

action that is always testing the limits of its regularity, transgressing and
reversing an order that it accepts and manipulates. Writing unfolds like a game
that inevitably moves beyond its own rules and finally leaves them behind.
Thus, the essential basis of this writing is not the exalted emotions related to the
act of composition or the insertion of a subject into language. Rather, it is
primarily concerned with creating an opening where the writing subject
endlessly disappears (p. 116).

There are several elements here which have distinct resonance with
respect to metafiction. For instance, the notion of writing as ”an
interplay of signs, regulated less by the content it signifies than by
the very nature of the signifier," is a veritable definition of what I
refer to as linguistic self-reflexivity «metafictional activity at

the level of the sign. As for the ”exterior deployment" of this
extremely self-referential writing, we can refer to the examples of
Beckett and Barth, whose characters frequently lack clear identr'ty
and speak as though out of a discursive void, yet are not confined to
the bounds of their own interiority (the proof of this is that

Beckett's plays, regardless of how disembodied their text becomes,

still function as drama). Finally, Foucault's reference to

19

contemporary writing as a game which continually transgresses its
own rules is very similar to the way that many metafictions are
deliberately constructed. As Waugh notes in Metafiction:

Metafiction draws attention to the process of recontextualization that occurs
when language is used aesthetically-when language is . . . used 'playfully'. . . .
Freedom is the moment when the game or the genre is being discarded, but the
rules of the new one are not yet defined and are therefore experienced as the
'waning of former mles' (ibid.). Metafiction is in the position of examining the
old rules in order to discover new possibilities of the game (pp. 36, 42).

As we shall see in the fourth chapter, Robert Coover's The
Universal Baseball Association and Julio Cortazar's Fiayuela
(”Hopscotch”) are both constructed around the idea of a game, and
thus directly thematize the "ludic' dimension of metafiction. Yet in
principle, all metafiction functions according to a ”process of
recontextualization.” For instance, ordinary language such as
dialogue may be taken out of its realistic context and revealed as
artifice or fictional rhetoric. Indeed, in its concern with revealing
the rhetorical structure of its own narrative artifice, metafiction
bears an intriguing relation with deconstruction. As Cristopher
Norris notes in Deconstruction, the deconstructionist method has
more in common with literary qualities of rhetorical playfulness
than the philosophical tradition which is its primary target for

ahack:

Once alerted to the rhetorical nature of philosophic arguments, the critic Is in a
strong position to reverse the age-old prejudice against literature as a debased
or merely deceptive form of language. It now becomes possible to
argue--indeed, impossible to deny--that literary texts are less deluded than

the discourse of philosophy, precisely because they implicitly acknowledge and
exploit their own rhetorical status (p. 21).

20

If literary language in general is characterized by an implicit
acknowledgement of its own basis in rhetoric, then metafiction can
be viewed as the least deluded of all discursive modes, since it
explicitly and systematically flaunts its status as a highly
rhetorical, artificial form of discourse. Moreover, like
deconstruction in the context of the metaphysical tradition,
contemporary metafiction implicitly postures itself as a reaction
against literary realism. In fact, one could say that where the
logocentric, metaphysical tradition perpetuates a myth of truth as
self-presence, or as a ”transcendental signified"4 beyond the bounds
of language, literary realism supports an analogous conception in
its attempt to capture ”reality" in its novelistic discourse.

This is not to say that metafiction has no concern for expressing
its own version of "reality" or ”truth”, but as Waugh adroitly notes,
metafiction accomplishes this, with characteristic irony, by
fictionalizing reality itself:

, Frame analysis and play theory are areas of contemporary social investigation
which illumine the practice of metafiction and show the sensitivity of its
response to cultural change. They are each, however, aspects of a broader shift
in thought and practice whereby reality has increasingly come to be seen as a
construct. . . . Metafiction suggests not only that writing history is a fictional
act, ranging events conceptually through language to form a world-model, but

that history Itself is invested, like fiction, with interrelating plots Mfich
appear to interact independently of human design (p. 49).

Fictional parody of historical narrative is characteristic of many
metafictional novels (as we shall see with Don Quijote, The
Sot- Weed Factor, and Cien Ar'los de Soledad ), and as a general

narrative strategy and technique, it provides yet another key for

21

differentiating realist fiction from metafiction. Through

parodistic imitation and apprOpriation, metafictional writers
reveal the artificial fictional ruses and constructs which
historians themselves employ in their narration of historical
events but conceal in the guise of objectivity and impersonality.
Foucault levels a Nietzschean critique at the traditional historian,
who in a scientific pursuit of knowledge of the past, masks a will

to power which is rooted in self-interested passions and instincts:

In appearance, or rather, according to the mask it bears, historical
consciousness is neutral, devoid of passions, and committed solely to truth. But
if it examines itself and if, more generally, it interrogates the various forms of
scientific consciousness in its history, it finds that all these forms and
transformations are aspects of the will to knowledge: instinct, passion, the
inquisitor's devotion, cruel subtlety, and malice (p. 162).

In a shrewd reversal of the historian's pretension to scientific
objectivity and plain-spoken reason, pseudohistorical metafiction
exposes the rhetorical plays and artificial narrative devices of the
A traditional historian. For instance, a novel such as Cien Ar‘ios de
Soledad weds the fictional ruses of repetition and rhetorical
superabundance to a pseudohistorical narrative voice, and through
its comic exuberance and celebration of narrative invention it
suggests, not merely that history is like a novel, but that it is
deliberately constructed through fictive means. The Sot- Weed
Factor elaborates a similar verdict on historical narrative, but
parodizes it in an even more direct manner.

However, it should be noted that, in spite of their comic, parodic

treatment of traditional historical narrative, these novels do not

22

dispense with the notion of history altogether. It is characteristic
of the large majority of metafictions that they devote as much
energy to the actual spinning of narrative webs as to their
self-critical unraveling or exposure, and similarly, Cien Ailos de
Soledad and The Sot- Weed Factor manage to present unique and
cohesive visions of history at the same time that theycritique and
problematize the very idea of historical narrative. As Cristopher
Norris remarks (in relation to a historical study by Karl Marx), the
disruptive essence of narrative, its tendencies toward digression
and discontinuity, continually undermines the efforts of historical
discourse to transcend the bounds of its own rhetoricity, though
other properties of narrative, such as the technique of "repetition,"

yield valuable insights into the interpretation of history itself:

Like the novellst--but to an even higher pitch of obsession-«Marx fills in
every circumstantial detail to underline the Nephew's role as 'farcical
repetition' of the Uncle. The text's sheer density of documentation is oddly
reinforced by a pattern of narrative links that lends it a kind of perverse
authenticating logic. Textual strategies become, paradoxically, a means of
explaining the absurd contingencies of historical happening. That this
explanation issues in parodic or 'repetitive' form is precisely a measure of its
power to convince (p. 89).

Certainly this is the kind of effect we find in Cien Afios, with
its bewildering repetition of personal names and historical events
(all of the colonel's wars and the successive Aurelianos and Jose
Arcadios coalescing in a deliberate blur), whose sum effect is
indeed the suggestion of a fictive basis for ”the absurd
contingencies of historical happening."

A'similar framework for understanding history in fictive terms

23

is elaborated in Don Quijote, and moreover, the implications of this
for a metafictional structuring of the novel are quite explicit. As I
shall argue in greater depth in the next chapter, Cervantes' use of a
pseudohistorical mode of narration for parodic effect suggests that
the pretension to historical veracity maintained so formally in the
chivalric romances merely disguises their status as fictions.
Moreover, Cervantes' critical balance in parcdizing and critiquing
the caballerias, while simultaneously appropriating their
rhetorical and narrative structure for his own self-conscious and
ostentatious fictionalizing, defines metafiction's essential mode of
operation in the context of historical narrative.

This brashly ludic and polemic stance before the tradition of
historical narrative is characteristic of a broader mode of
treatment in metafiction, the way that it represents and utilizes
external textual sources in general. Metafiction's concern with the
various intertextual strands in its own eclectic composition
(expressed by Bakhtin as polyglossia in the novel), is thematized
and represented in its relationship with books of the past. Foucault
describes this thematization in an essay on The Temptation of Saint
Anthony, in which he seizes upon Flaubert as the paradigmatic
exemplar for contemporary literature and draws an analogy with
Manet in painting:

Flaubert is to the library what Manet is to the museum. They both produced

works in a self-conscious relationship to earlier paintings or textsuor rather

to the aspect in painting or writing that remains indefinitely open. They erect

their art within the archive. They were not meant to foster the

lamenlations--the lost youth, the absence of vigor, and the decline of
inventiveness-through which we reproach our Alexandrian age, but to unearth

.24

an essential aspect of our culture: every painting now belongs within the
squared and massive surface of painting and all literary works are confined to
the indefinite murmur of writing. Flaubert and Manet are responsible for the
existence of books and paintings within works of art (pp. 92-93).

According to Foucault, the presence of past works in modern
literature (in the form of references, quotations, stylistic and
generic imitation, etc.) does not signal a nostalgia for a lost great
tradition, nor an ”anxiety of influence" (to paraphrase Harold
Bloom), but a self-conscious and deliberate form of intertextual
appropriation which ultimately causes literature to transgress the
categories of both "work" and "author.” lntertextuality in novels, in
the form that Foucault recognizes, tends naturally to a
metafictional critique or deconstruction of those traditional
categories which seek to fence off the "work,” with its
self-contained form and meaning, from the disruptive differential
and allusive effects of écriture ("writing’ in its most general
sense), and which strive to prevent the author from becoming
cannibalized by his own work.5 In Foucault's blunt but colorful
formulation:

Where a work had the duty of creating immortality, It now attains the right to

kill, to become the murderer of Its author. . . . If we wish to know the writer of

our day, it will be through the singularity of his absence and in his link to
death, which has transformed him into a victim of his own writing (p. 117).

As I noted earlier, some of the metafictions of John Barth both
implicitly and explicitly focus on the exploration and thematization
of this event. His metafictional dramatization of the author's death
and continuing absence is most cleverly and directly expressed in

an story like ”Autobiography: A Self-Recorded Fiction.” Intended for

25

live tape performance, this piece both rhetorically and explicitly
highlights the author's absence, which conStitutes the basic
condition of his textual existence, despite the illusion of presence
conferred by the residual persistence of authorial voice after his
"death.” As in some of Beckett's work (Flockaby, What Where, etc.),

a disembodied voice muses on the absurdity of its own existence:

My situation appears to me as follows: I speak in a curious, detached
manner, and don't necessarily hear myself. . . . Are you there? If so I'm blind
and deaf to you, or you are me, or both're both. One may be imaginary; I‘ve had
stranger ideas. I'm a fiction without real hope. Where there's a voice there's a
speaker. . . . I must compose myself (pp. 35-36).

Barth is engaged in a metafictional reflection on that curious
duplicity of textual narrative in which authorial voice sustains,
through a generalized discursive strategy, the illusion of presence,
stubbornly refusing to submit itself to the endlessly variegated
though basically undifferentiated,6 self-proliferating weave of
textuality which poststructuralism asserts as the basic character
of writing in general. .

There are more ”extreme" examples of contemporary metafiction,
such as Christine Brook-Rose's Thru, which does not merely
dramatize the effects of absence, lntertextuality, and difference,
but abolishes the constructs which tend to obscure them, and
submits the narrative to an entirely self-referential discursive
weave. Yet the Barth stories have the admirable quality of artistic
balance which, I would argue, characterizes the best metafiction.
Like Cervantes and Sterne and the other authors represented in this

study, Barth does not radicalize metafictional discourse to the

26

point where it ceases to function as narrative.

Indeed, postructuralist thought itself alerts us to metafiction's
dual focus and activity, its simultaneous obligation to narrative and
self-critique. As Foucault reminds us, ”the writing of our day. . . is V
not restricted to the confines of interiority. On the contrary, we
recognize it in its exterior deployment (p. 116).” Similarly, most
metafiction does not seek to completely out itself off from
traditional narrative constructs and devices, but merely
externalizes what was previously (in realist fiction) the disguised,
artificial interior of a narrative discourse committed to a curious

silence and forgetfulness about its own status of fictionality.

Chapter 2

Early Exemplars: Miguel de Cervantes' Don
Quijote and Laurence Steme's Tristram Shandy

In looking at Don Quijote and Tristram Shandy as early
exemplars for the metafictional novel, I must admit a certain
amount of apprehension in treading critical ground which Robert
Alter has covered so lucidly and definitively in Partial Magic. Of
course, Alter does not exhaust the possibilities for this type of
study, but he does define its essential parameters. According to
Alter, Don Quijote, a work so frequently seized upon as an exemplar
for literary realism, is also the initiator of a radically other

tradition, that of the ”self-conscious novel”:

One measure of Cervantes' genius is the fact that he is the initiator of both
traditions of the novel; his juxtaposition of high-flown literary fantasies with
grubby actuality pointing the way to the realists, his zestfully ostentatious
manipulation of the artifice he constructs setting a precedent for all the
self-conscious novelists to come (pp. 34).

Some of the stylistic and narrative devices in Don Quijote which
call attention to its purely fictional status are more pervasive than
others. Certainly there are a few key episodes in both parts of the
novel which call into question the predominantly realist coloring
which critical posterity has given Cervantes' masterpiece, but
there are also characteristic turns of phrase and rhetorical stances

which more consistently signal an extreme self-consciousness on

27

28

Cervantes' part in the very act of writing fiction.

Perhaps the most important set of metafictional cues are all of
the highly rhetorical passages referring to the historical veracity
of the novel itself. Cervantes repeatedly reminds us that we are
reading a "tan verdadera como puntual historia" [a truthful and
assiduous history], or variations on this phrasing, though he is
obviously satirizing this very pretension, which is conventionalized
in the cabal/arias. It is important to note the inevitable duplicity
of the word historia, which ambiguously carries both the sense of
”story” and ”history.” Indeed, Cervantes ironically highlights this
fundamental duplicity in the very opening lines of the novel: "En un
lugar de la Mancha, de cuyo hombre no quiero acordarme. . . (p. 97)"
[In a place in la Mancha, whose name I don't want to recall. . .1.

The first clause is a line from a ballad and is accordingly set off
from the subsequent text. That is to say, it is bracketed in the
text and flaunted as an obvious convention. It is but an extension of
this stylistic duplicity to recognize, as Alter emphasizes, that don
Quijote himself ”exists simultaneously on two planes of existence.”
On the one hand he is more “realistic,“ more complex and
multidimensional than Amadis of Gaul or don Belianis, but he is also
conventionalized by Cervantes in a highly self-conscious way.

Cervantes' pseudohistorical parody of the conventional
"historical” narrative embodied in the cabal/arias is perhaps most
audaciously and ostentatiously represented in Chapter VIII of the

first part, where don Quijote is engaged in a furious battle with a

29

Biscayan squire. The narration becomes increasingly
conventionalized until the very climax of the scene, at which point
Cervantes freezes the action, with the explanation that no further
manuscripts detailing the knight's adventures could be found in the
archives of la Mancha.

On one level, the truncation of the story at this point is
perfectly plausible, provided that we accept Cervantes' assurances
that this is indeed a ”true history" of a famous knight of la Mancha.
Yet it is obvious that Cervantes is playing with literary convention
in a disorienting, highly ostentatious manner,1 and from the
standpoint of literary realism he effects a quite disturbing
”violation” and transgression of ontological frames. Don Quijote is
suspended precariously in an uncertain ontological space, as his
author searches for the ”second author's" manuscripts which will
again animate him and allow him to finish the episode with the
Biscayan. A stylistic analysis of the narration leading up to this

startling interruption of the story's action is itself revealing:

Venla, pues, como se ha dicho, don Quijote contra el cauto vlzcalno, con la
espada en alto, con determinacién de abrirle por medic, y el vizcaino le
aguardaba asimesmo levantada la espada y aforrado con su almchada, y todos los
circunstantes estaban temerosos y colgados de lo que habla de suceder de aquellos
tamanos golpes con que se amenazaban; y la senora del coche y las demas criadas
suyas estaban hacienda mil votos y ofrecimientos a todas las imagenes y casas de
devoclén de Espana, porque Dios Iibrase a su escudero y a ellas de aquel tan
grande peligro en que se hallaban (p. 152-153).

[Don Quijote, as we said before, advanced toward the wary Biscayan, his
sword raised on high, determined to cleave him in two, and the Biscayan, on his
part, waited for him with his sword also raised and protected by his cushion,
and all the bystanders were frightened and suspenseful as to the outcome of those
prodigious blows with which they threatened eachcther; and the lady in the coach
and her womenservants were making a thousand vows and offerings to all the

30

statues and places of devotion in Spain, that God might deliver them and their
squire from that terrible peril in which they found themselves.)

The phrase, ”con determinacién de abrirle por medic” [determined
to cleave him in two], recalls the conventionalized battle scenes of
the cabal/arias, where every blow of the mighty Cid or Roland's
sword would cleave a Moor to the belt, and the ”circunstantes . . .
temerosos y colgados de lo que habia de suceder" [bystanders
frightened and suspenseful as to the outcome], appear as
spectators, as removed from the action as the readers of Cervantes'
tale. The sum effect is a mounting sense of artificial,
conventionalized representation as the story's frame is exposed,
and one gets the sense of looking at a painting, and indeed
Cervantes explicitly evokes this quality in the following chapter
when he describes an actual picture of the battle scene in the
manuscript which the ”second author“ acquires in a Toledan
marketplace.

At one level, Cervantes is merely satirizing the formal
conventions of the caballerr’as, but it is also clear that in the same
stroke he is employing, with astonishing technical ease and grace,
the essential methods of metafiction. That is to say, he is
deliberately laying bare the artificial framing devices, the
rhetorical and stylistic conventions which structure the episode
with don Quijote and the Biscayan.

Once the frame of the painting has been exposed,2 so to speak,
Cervantes can openly explore a number of tantalizing questions

concerning fictional technique. As I noted in the introduction,

31

metafiction characteristically exposes itself to self-critique in

the very act of fictionalizing, in a kind of ludic juggling act.
Cervantes' consummate skill as a self-conscious author is
exemplified by the artistic grace and balance with which he makes
the transition from the truncated action of the eighth chapter to

the resumption of don Quijote's ”history” in the following chapter.
Consider the rhetorical control of the last paragraph in the eighth

chapter:

Pero esta el dafio de todo estc que en este punto y termino deja pendrente el
autor desta historia esta batalla, disculpandose que no hallo mas escrito destas
hazal'las de don Quijote de las que deja referidas. Bien es verdad que el segundo
autor desta obra no quiso creer que tan curiosa historia estuviese entregada a las
leyes del olvido, ni que hublesen sldo tan poco curiosos los ingenios de la
Mancha, que no tuvlesen en sus archlvos c en sus escritorios algunos papeles que
deste famoso caballero tratasen; y asi, con esta imaginacidn, no se desespero de
hallar el fin desta apacible historia, el cual, siendole el clelo favorable, le hallo
del modo que se contara en la segunda parte (p. 153).

[But it is most unfortunate that at this point the author of this history
leaves the battle In mid air, with the escuse that he couldn‘t find any more
writings pertaining to these great deeds of don Quijote than those already
related. It is true that the second author of this work refused to believe that so
curious a history could be consigned to oblivion, or that the wits of la Mancha
could have been so lacking in curiosity, that they would not have in their
archives or in their registries some writings pertaining to this famous knight;
and thus, with this belief, he did not despair of finding the ending of this
delectable history, which, by the favor of Heaven he did find, as shall be related
in the second part.)

Cervantes is employing the rhetoric of the historian against the
very notion of historical veracity in a work of fiction. He is of
course satirizing the historical pretensions and conventions of the
cabal/arias, where the heroes all have historians to record their
exploits for posterity, but the critical space that this opens up in

the text makes it a commentary as well on some of the technical

32

pecularities inherent in pure fiction. As Barth does in his story,
"Echo," Cervantes shows how the sense of presence and univocity
which narrative voice confers on itself is really a skillful illusion.
Even at this early point in the novel, Cervantes has indicated that
there are no fewer than four authors of don Ouijote's ”history”--the
unidentified first and second authors, Cervantes himself, and Cide
Hamete Benengeli, an arabic scribe introduced in Chapter IX (not to
mention the morisco [a Christianized Moor] who translates Hamete
Benengeli's text into Spanish!).3

The authorial interruption of the episode with don Quijote and
the Biscayan is merely the most extended and ostentatious of
countless passages in the novel where Cervantes uses stylistic
parody to open the text up to a self-critical awareness, and in the
process problematizing conventions of narrative pace and voice, as
well as the ontological status of his characters. As Alter notes, it
is conspicuous that nearly all of the characters in Don Quijote
reveal themselves to be readers of the caballerlas, and don Quijote
has extensive literary discussions with several characters (Sansén
Carrasco in ll. 34, the canon in I. 47-48, and don Lorenzo in II. 18).

Not all of these passages are truly self-referential, for some
only obliquely acknowledge the work Don Quijote itself.
Nevertheless, though Don Quijote is not as obtrusively or
insistently a ”novel about writing a novel” as Tristram Shandy, an
episode such as don Ouijote's encounter and discussion with Sansdn

Carrasco is as audacious a break with literary realism as any

33

example from contemporary metafiction. In the second chapter of
the second part, Sancho comes to his master (who is bedridden,
still recovering from his adventures in Part I) with some startling

news:

. . . ancche llego el hijo de Bartolomé Carrasco, que viene de estudiar de
Salamanca, hecho bachiller, y yendole yo a dar la bienvenida, me dijo que andaba
ya on libros la historia de vuestra merced, con nombre de El lngenioso Hidalgo
don Quijote de la Mancha; y dice que me mientan a mi en ella con mi mesmo
nombre de Sancho Panza, y a la sellora Dulcinea del Toboso, con otras cosas que
pasamos nosotros a solas, que me hice cruces de espantado cémo las pudo saber el
historiador que las escribio.

Yo te aseguro, Sanchoudijo don Quijote... que debe de ser algt'rn sabio
encantador el autor de nuestra historia; que a las tales no se les encubre nada de
lo que quieren escribir (pp. 43-44).

[" . . . last night Bartolome Carrasco's son arrived, coming from his studies in
Salamanca, which he just recently finished, and as I went to welcome him, he

told me that already there are books recounting your grace's history, with the

title of The Ingenious Gentleman don Quijote of la Mancha; and he says that they
mention me in it by my very own name, Sancho Panza, as well as the lady
Dulcinea of El Toboso, along with other things that happened to us alone; and l
bless myself in amazement at how the storyteller could know these things that
wrote them down.”

"I assure you, Sancho,“ said don Quijote, ”that the author of our history
must be some wise enchanter, for to such as they are, nothing is hidden that they
want to write about."]

Again, there is a level on which Cervantes is merely sustaining
the parody of historical narrative, but it is important to note that
this passage effects a fundamental shift in the ontological status
of don Quijote and Sancho which isn't overtly signaled in Part I of
the novel. For instance, when in the second chapter of Part I, don
Quijote implores, 'iOh tu, sabio encantador, quienquiera que seas, a
quien ha detocar el ser coronista desta peregrine historia, ruégcte
que note olvides de mi buen Rocinante, compaiiero eterno mic en

todos mis caminosl (p. 106)" [Oh thou wise enchanter, whoever thou

34

may'st be, whose duty it will be to chronicle this strange history, I
implore thee not to forget my good horse, Rocinante, eternal
companion of all my travelsl], he does not cease to be a flesh and
blood knight riding his hack on the plains of la Mancha, despite the
fact that the self-referential overtones of his words point to his
other ”plane of being," that of a purely fictitious character dreamed
up in the fertile imagination of his author, Cervantes.

By contrast, the actual material presence of Part I in the second
part of Don Quijote plays havoc with the ontological frames which
are so rigidly ordered in strictly realistic fiction. Given that only a
month or so has passed between the end of don Ouijote's first two
sallies and his meeting with Sanson Carrasco, an impossibly brief
span of time for a historian to record and circulate an account of
his ”famous” exploits, the reader is jarred into a consciousness of
don Quijote and Sancho's status as purely fictive creations when he
is informed that Don Quijote de la Mancha is a literary sensation
throughout Spain. In fact, the characters themselves seem to have
an uneasy sense of being mysteriously followed by their ”historian,”
the omniscient, godlike author who seems to be omnipresent yet is
essentially absent from the text. As in the episode with the
Biscayan, where we are shown the conventional framing devices of
the scene until it seems like a static picture, the reader is suddenly
made aware of the purely fictional status of don Quijote and Sancho
when they themselves unexpectedly confront their literary alterity

in an astonishingly material form.

35

As Patricia Waugh notes in Metafiction, this process of
"frame-breaking” is the basic procedure by which metafiction
exposes its own artifice and examines the limitations of

conventional fictive constructs:

One method of showing the function of literary conventions, of revealing
their provisional nature, is to show what happens when they malfunction.
Parody and inversion are two stategies which operate in this way as
frame-breaks. The alternation of frame and frame-break (or the construction
of an illusion through the lmperceptibillty of the frame and the shattering of
illusion through the constant exposure of the frame) provides the essential
deconstructive method of metafiction (p. 31).

Metafictional frame-breaking in Don Quijote occurs within
varying contexts, and at times the framing structures are so
complicated and interwoven that their transgression induces a
sense in the reader akin to vertigo. For instance, if we pursue the
ontological implications in the episode with Sansén Carrasco in II.
2, we see the beginning of a kind of Chinese box effect,4 for don
Quijote and Sancho are confronted with a book in which they are
literary characters (Part I of Don Quijote) and begin to wonder if
they are themselves mere fictions, begin to sense the frame which
encloses them (Part II of the novel).

Some of the most exquisite and subtle metafictional games
played out in the novel center on the tension between appearance
and reality encapsulated in the concept of desengar‘fo
[disillusionment]. The ordinary acceptation of this baroque
key-word is of a coming to one's senses, a return from chimerical

madness to some ground level of reality, a stripping away of false

36

appearances, etc., and certainly this is the sense adumbrated in the
final chapter, where don Quijote returns to his former self and
announces, ”Yo fui loco, y ya soy cuerdo: fui don Quijote de la
Mancha, y soy agora, como he dicho, Alonso Quijano el Bueno (pp.
575-576)."5 [I was mad, and now I am sane: l was don Quijote of la
Mancha, and now I am, as l have said, Alonso Quijano the Good]
Yet throughout the novel, and at crucial moments in terms of don
Ouijote's effort to distinguish between appearance and reality,
various characters reinforce his illusions, paradoxically by openly
flaunting and acting out the literary conVentions which structure
don Ouijote's ”madness.“ Consider the ornate artificiality of
Dorotea's speech when she adopts the role of the princess

Micomicona:

«De aqul no me levantare, l oh valeroso y esforzado caballerol, fasta que la
vuestra bondad y cortesia me otorgue un don, el cual redundara en honra y prez
de vuestra persona y on pro de la mes desconsclada y agraviada doncella que el
sol ha visto. Y si es que el valor de vuestro fuerte brazo corresponde a la voz de
vuestra inmortal fama, obligado estais a favorecer a la sin ventura que de tan
Iuel‘les tierras viene, al olor de vuestro famoso nombre, buscandoos para
remedio de sus desdlchas (p. 362).

[From here I will not rise. oh valorous and lnvincble knight, until your
goodness and courtesy shall grant me a favor, which will redound to your honor
and renown, and benefit the most disconsolate and injured damsel that ever the
sun beheld. And if the valor of your mighty arm be equal to what is heard of
your immortal fame, you are obligated to succor a luckless woman that from
such a faraway land comes, drawn by the scent of your famous name, seeking
from you a remedy for her misfortunes]

The curate, Dorotea and the others are of course making don
Quijote the unknowing butt of a sustained joke, but there are

moments when he demonstrates a remarkable lucidity and a kind of

37

reluctant awareness that the chimeras of his imagination are
precisely that, elaborately gilded, artificial literary constructions.
In this respect, the role-playing games that Dorotea, the curate and
the barber play with don Quijote are like formalized chivalric
masques in which all of the participants are collectively
"quixotized.’ In this respect, it is important to note that the
rhetorical structure of Dorotea's eloquent supplication before don
Fernando in l. 36 is not really very distinct from that of her
language when she is playing the princess Micomicona before don
Quijote (even the gesture of supplication is repeated). Indeed, the
ostentatious formality of the scene and the improbability of its
plot both call attention to its artificiality, and as in the
interpolated tales, we have the sense that the story is constructed
with an extremely self-conscious awareness of literary convention.
Don Quijote himself, in moments of piercing self-awareness,
clearly recognizes his literary flights of imagination as artificial
constructs rather than an objective reality independent of the
rhetorical structure of his chivalric orations. In II. 11, Sancho and
don Quijote are approached by a very convincing apparition of
archetypal dramatic characters, a group of actors representing a
royal ”Parliment of Death,” and don Ouijote's reaction is quite
distinct from the mad flights of fancy which provide so many of the

memorable comic episodes in the first part of the novel:

--Por la fe de caballero andante «respondio don Ouijote--, que asl como
vi este carro imagine que alguna grande aventura se me ofrecla, y ahora digo que
es menester tccar las apariencias con la mano para dar lugar al desengallo.

38

Andad con Dios, buena gente, y haced vuestra fiesta, y mirad si mandais algo en
que pueda seros de provecho; que lo hare con buen animo y buen talante, porque
desde muchacho fui aficionado a la caratula, y en mi mocedad se me iban los ojos
tras la faréndula (p. 105).

["By the faith of a knight-errant,“ answered don Quijote, ”that as I saw this
cart I imagined that some great adventure was at hand, but now I do declare that
it is necessary to test appearances with your hand in order to undeceive
yourself. God speed you, good people, and carry on your festival, and mind you.
if there is anything in which I may be of service to you, I will perform it
willingly, because from childhood I have always been fond of the masquerade,
and in my youth I had a longing for the stage.']

On the surface, this would seem to be yet another stage in
Alonso Ouijano's gradual ”return to his senses” which culminates in
the final chapter in the repudiation of his chivalric alter-ego, don
Quijote. But this is a crucial misreading of don Ouijote's character
prior to his death-bed conversion, a puzzling scene which
commentators as diverse as Nietzsche6 and Alter have viewed as
incompatible with his essential identity as it is manifested
throughout the novel. In this scene with the acting troupe, Don
Quijote demonstrates a shrewd self-awareness in referring to his
acting ambitions and in his recognition of dramatic artifice as
precisely that-a carefully contrived construct designed to create
an illusion. It is curious that don Quijote cannot (perhaps elects
not to) distinguish between a barber's basin and a gold helmet (I.
21), or some wineskins and a giant (I. 35), and yet he discems with
perfect lucidity that the actors are not the figures they represent.

The scene as a whole signals an inversion of fancy and fact
which has shaken don Quijote out of his normally unself-conscious
role-playing, and which begins in the previous chapter with the

”enchantment" of Dulcinea, where Sancho playfully insists that a

39

swinish labradora [peasant woman] passing by on an ass is in fact
the lady Dulcinea. Don Quijote can't believe his eyes, and concludes
rather warily that the evil enchanters which persistently plague

him have changed Dulcinea's appearance to that of a common village
wench. The scene is a crucial one, for in the previous chapter (ll. 9,
where don Quijote and Sancho enter el Toboso to seek out Dulcinea)
don Quijote signals an awareness of the artificiality of his

conception of Dulcinea, in effect confessing that she is simply an

ornate mental construct which he has concocted in his imagination:

--Habla con respeto, Sancho, de las cases de mi selIora «dijo don
Quijote--, y tengamos la fiesta en paz, y no arrojemos la soga tras el caldero.

--Yo me reportare --respondio Sancho--, pero goon que paciencia podre
llevar que quiera vuestra merced que de sola una vez que vi la casa de nuestra
ama. la haya de saber siempre y hallarla a media noche, no hallandola vuestra
merced, que la debe de haber visto millares de veces?

"Tu me hares desesperar, Sancho-dijo don Quijote~. Ven aca, hereje:
am to he dicho mil veces que en todos los dlas de mi vida no he visto a la sin par
Dulcinea, ni jamés atravese Ios umbrales de su palacio, y que sdlo estoy
enamorado de oldas y de la gran fama que tlene de herrnosa y discrete? (pp.
89-90)

['Speak respectfully, Sancho, of the affairs of my lady,” said don Quijote,
“and let us keep our least in peace. and not throw the rope into the well after the
bucket." '

”I'll keep my peace,“ replied Sancho, “but how can I have the patience to
listen to your worship saying that you expect me, after only one glimpse of my
lady's house, to recognize it always and to find it in the middle of the night, when
you yourself can't find it, who must have seen it a thousand times?”

“You will drive me to despair, Sancho,” said don Quijote. ”Look here. you
heretic: Have I not told you a thousand times that never once in my life have I
seen the peerless Dulcinea, nor have I ever crossed the threshold of her palace,
and that I am enamored only by hearsay and the great fame she possesses of
beauty and wit?]

As Alter adroitly notes, ”Don Quixote is utterly clear about the
fact that Dulcinea is his own invention yet deadly serious about his

unswerving devotion to the ideal fiction he has made for himself (p.

40

25),” and that as early as the thirteenth chapter of Part I, ”his
words call our attention to her status as a fiction, to the fact that
she is woven out of those impossible and chimerical attributes by a
bookish mind that has come to believe in the possibility of their
literal existence (p. 28).” I

What I am trying to suggest with the passages l have drawn from
Part II of the novel is that the process of desengarfo eventually
becomes for don Quijote a way, so far from repudiating, of
consciously accessing the resources of his distinctly literary
imagination and recognizing the deliberate artifice through which
their constructions are woven. In other words, desengar'fo in
Cervantes' novel is both a metaphor and device for the
metafictional exposure of artifice. If we keep this sense of the
word firmly in mind, don Ouijote's words before the group of actors
take on a striking resonance in a way quite distinct from the
ordinary sense of becoming ”disillusioned.” For instance when he
says, "es menester tocar las apariencias con la mano para dar lugar
al desengaho,” the obvious surface meaning of ”seeing the truth
behind the appearances” yields to something like ”managing or
handling the artifice in order to lay it bare."7

As this analysis of the dual function of desengafio demonstrates,
Cervantes exemplifies what Waugh and others have identified as the
basic activity in metafiction-the weaving of fictional artifice and
its deliberate exposure or unraveling, or in different terms, the

affirmation of the powers of the fictive imagination on the one

41

hand, and an impulse to self-critique on the other. As Alter notes,
an obvious cue that Don Quijote, and in particular, the interpolated
tales are constructed with a self-conscious attention to artifice is
the fact that at various points characters interrupt with critical
commentary. The instances he cites are the cUrate's remarks about
the trite conventionality of the captive's tale and don Ouijote's
interruption of don Pedro's puppet show to comment on the
inverisimilitude of a plot element, but a no less provocative
instance of critical self-commentary occurs in II. 2. John Jay Allen
comments very pointedly on the irony of this passage in the
introduction to his Cétedra edition of Don Quijote, Part II:

Don Quijote. Sancho y Sansdn comentan y critican el Iibro en el Capltulo 3.
conversando sobre el talento y las motivos del sabio Gide Hamete, y de lo verldico
del relato. En el capltulo anterior anticipa Cervantes esta nueva yuxtaposicldn
de literatura y vida con un dialogo entre Sancho y don Quijote sobre la reaccidn
de la gente del pueblo a sus hazal‘las: "--En lo que toca «prosiguio Sancho-- a
la valentla, cortesia, hazafias y asunto de vuestra merced. hay diferentes
opiniones: unos dicen: 'Loco, pero gracloso'; otros: 'Valiente, pero desgraciado';
otros: 'Cortés. pero impertinente." (Fag. 43.)

Estas tres altemativas abarcan casi toda la vasta extensidn de la crltica do
350 anos: don Quijote sera "loco, pero gracioso' para la mayorla de los Iectores
durante casi dos siglos despues de su publicacién y para algunos criticos del siglo
xx; sera 'valiente, pero desgraciado.‘ para toda la crltica desde el Romanticismo
que idealiza al Caballero de la Fe; sera 'cortés. pero impertinente,” para los que
vislumbran una lecciOn moral en la vida del protagonista (p. 12).

[Don Quijote, Sancho and Sansdn comment upon and critique the book in Chapter
3, discussing the skill and motives of the sage Clde Hamete, and the
verisimilitude of the story. In the previous chapter Cervantes anticipates this
new juxtaposition of literature and life with a conversation between Sancho and
don Quijote about the reaction of the townspeople to his exploits: “As to your
worship's valor, courtesy, exploits and affairs, there are. different opinions:
some say: 'Mad, but amusing'; others: 'valiant but unfortunate’; others:
'Courteous but saucy."

These three alternatives encompass almost all of the vast extent of 350
years of criticism: don Quijote will be "mad, but amusing“ for the majority of
readers for almost two centuries after its publication and for some
twentieth-century critics; he will be 'valiant, but unfortunate," for all of the

42

critics after Romanticism, who idealiza the knight-errant of the faith; he will
be ”courteous, but saucy,” for those who envisage a moral lesson in the life of
the protagonist]

There is a curious kind of ontological bifurcation evoked in the
scenes Allen refers to. On the one hand, we have the sense that don
Quijote and Sancho are more complex and inscrutable than the way
they are characterized by readers and critics of Cervantes' novel,
who would reduce don Ouijote's character to the tension between
polarized pairs of adjectives (their critique in the third chapter of
the verisimilitude of Hamete Benengeli's account adds to this sense
of their depth and complexity as characters). The
self-referentiality and self-consciousness of their discussion of
Part I of the novel elevates Sancho and don Quijote to the same
level of awareness and autonomy as Cervantes, who ironically and
coyly responds to his critics through Sancho's comments.

Yet there is also a quite contrary effect, a disturbing sense that
don Quijote and Sancho are flattened whenever they demonstrate an
awareness that they are literary characters. When Sancho voices
Cervantes' amusement with respect to critical opinion and openly
refers to the novel as a work of pure fiction dreamed up in the
imagination of its author, we are reminded once again, in the words
of Alter, that don Quijote is ”merely a lifelike model of
papier-maché, a design in words . . . which exists between the
covers of a book by Miguel de Cervantes (p. 4).”

As I emphasized at the beginning of this chapter, the basic
rhetorical mode through which Cervantes sustains this

43

metafictional duplicity of character is his satirical appropriation
of the language and conventions of the cabal/arias. In this respect,
the final words (before the poetic epitaphs) of Part I of the novel

are a veritable tour do fOrco of rhetorical balance and double

BHIBDtO I

Y los [epitafios y elogios do la vida do don Quijote] que so pudieron leer y
sacar on Iimpio fueron los que aqul pone ol fidodigno autor desta nueva y jamas
vista historia. El cual autor no pide a los que la leyeren, en premio del inmenso
trabajo que lo costo inquerir y buscar todos los archivcs manchegos, por sacarla
a luz, sino que le den el mesmo crédito que suelen dar los discretos a los libros
do caballerias, que tan validos andan en el mundo; que con estc so tondra por bien
pagado y satisfocho, y so animara a sacar y buscar otras, si no tan verdaderas, a
lo monos do tanta invencidn y pasatiempo.

Las palabras primeras que estaban escritas en el pergaminc que so hallo en
la caja do plomo eran estas. . . (p. 592).

[And such {epitaphs and eulogles of don Ouijote's life} as could be dociphered
and interpreted the trustworthy author of this original and matchloss history
has set down here, and he asks no recompense from his readers for the immense
pains it has cost him to search and investigate all the archives of la Mancha to
drag it into light. All he asks is that they give him as much credit as sensible
men are wont to give to the books of chivalry, which are held in such high
esteem in the world; and with this he will consider himself well paid and
satisfied. and will be encouraged to go in search of others. if not as truthful as
this one, at least as inventive and entertaining.

The first words that were written on tho parchment scroll found in tho
loaden box were these. . . .]

As he does throughout the novel, Cervantes here uses the
outmoded and brittle rhetoric of the caballerlas to controvert the
notion of historical veracity in fiction. Yet he doesn't completely
dispense with the idea of history, and critics who see in Don
Quijote merely a satirical rejection of the caballerias have taken
Cervantes too much at the surface meaning of his words, when he
announces in various guises throughout the novel that he intended it

as an invectivo against the books of chivalry.

44

On the contrary, the rhetoric of historical veracity, of tattered
manuscripts detailing the true histories of famous heroes, is
revived and translated through a form of parodistic appropriation
which allows Cervantes to declare a new level of creative autonomy
as an author.8 The emergent novel form, as inVented so confidently
by Cervantes, is not ”tan verdadera" [as truthful] as the cabal/arias
purport to be, but casts its verisimilitude in the form of 'invencién
y pasatiempo" [invention and entertainment]. This essentially ludic
stance in the Quijote before the idea of history, pointing toward
the notion that history is itself a fictional narrative, sets a
masterful precedent for such confidently pseudohistorical novels as
Cien Afios do Soledad and The Sol-Weed Factor, as we shall see at
further length in the third chapter.

Tristram Shandy draws upon this new sense of authorial
autonomy to similar parodic and comic effect, and in many ways it
provides an even more exemplary precedent for the metafictional
novel than Don Quijote. In Tristram Shandy, Sterne abuses history
and books of the past so systematically and ostentatiously that he
foregrounds the very act of writing. It is in this sense that
Tristram Shandy becomes "a novel about writing a novel.”

. However, as Chrisopher Ricks notes in his introduction to the book,
Sterne does not altogether dispense with plot and a world external

to the novel's discursive weave:

Steme's greatnoSs is not simply that he wrote a novel about writing a
novel; his triumph is due to the fact that (unlflte most of his imitators) he gave
as much of his genius to his invented world (the characters of Mr. Shandy and

45

Toby) as to the theme of inventing it (p. 24).

The ways in which Sterne maintains this bifocal attention recall
some of Cervantes' ontological inversions. As I noted earlier, there
is a paradoxical dual sense of depth and flatness whenever Sancho
and don Quijote become aware of their status as fictional
characters, for we perceive that they are more linguistic
A constructions, but also that behind those fiat abstractions lie
complex and ultimately inscrutable personalities. In fact, I would
argue that it is an author's open acknowledgement of his characters‘
inscrutability which guides the metafictional impulse to abandon
realistic portraiture, opting instead for an ostentatiously artificial
form of representation. Consider the following description of Mrs.
Shandy, in which the narrator (Tristram) moves quite fluidly from

realistic to metafictional description:

My mother was going very gingerly in the dark along the passage which led
to the parlour, as my uncle Toby pronounced the word wife.- 'Tis a shrill
penetrating sound of itself, and Obadiah had helped it by leaving the door a little
ajar, so that my mother heard enough of it, to imagine herself the subject of the
conversation: so laying the edge of her finger across her two lips-holding in
her breath, and bonding her head a little downwards, with a twist of her
neck--(not towards the door, but from it, by which means her car was brought
to the chink)--sho listened with all her powerszutho listening slave, with the
Goddess of Silence at his back, could not have given a finer thought for an
intaglio.

In this attitude I am doterrninod to let her stand for five minutes: till I
bring up the affairs of the kitchen (as Rapln does those of the church) to the
same period (pp. 352-353).

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, an intaglio is a
”figure or design incised or engraved; a cutting or engraving in

stone or other hard material . . ." and certainly this is the kind of

46

image we get when Tristram decides toleavo his mother in a
frozen, comic eavesdropping gesture for five minutes while he
takes care of other narrative business.9 As in Don Quijote
(especially in the frozen battle scene at the end of the eighth
chapter, Part I), we have the sense that the narrative framing
device has been exposed, and moreover, that this process is overtly
thematized in the idea of an actual frame enclosing a static,
painting-like scene. '

Another interesting way in which frame-exposure is thematized
(rather than merely activated) is in the metaphor of the novel as a

theatrical stage:

I beg the reader will assist me here, to wheel off my uncle Toby's ordnance
behind the scenes,--to remove his sentry-box, and clear the theatre, if
possible, of ham-works and half moons, and get the rest of his military
apparatus out of the way;--that done, my dear friend Garrick, we'll snuff the
candles bright,--sweep the stage with a new broom,--draw up the curtain, and
exhibit my uncle Toby dressed in a new character, throughout which the world
can have no idea how he will act. . . (p. 438).

There is a kind of inverted parallel between this description and
don Ouijote's encounter with the acting troupe (ll. 11). In both
instances acting and theater props and conventions function as a
metaphor for the novelist's use of artifice and illusion in
delineating character, but in Don Quijote we have the impression
that the knight has a very real encounter with the actors, and the
effect of metafictional self-reflection stems from the double
entente with which Cervantes imbues don Ouijote's words. By

contrast, Sterne/Shandy is a much more intrusive narrator, and by

47

directly appealing to the reader to assist in constructing the Scene,
our impression of uncle Toby as a linguistic fiction is much more
pronounced.

In fact, one of the most common of all metafictional devices is
the adoption of a rhetorical stance which exposes and plays upon
the role of the reader. In realistic fiction readers are customarily
addressed as though they were in the narrator's presence, although
in actuality they are merely rhetorically invoked. Novellstlc
discourse is essentially a monologue posing as a dialogue between
writer and reader. Sterne is acutely aware of the paradoxes
embodied in narrative voice, and at one point he teasingly invites
the silent reader to participate in the writing of his novel, leaving

a blank page where he can depict the widow Wadman as he pleases:

To conceive this rlght,--call for pen and lnk--here's paper ready to your
hand.--Sit down, Sir, paint her to your own minduas like your mistress as
you can--as unlike your wife as your conscience will let you--'tis all one to
me--please but your own fancy in it (p. 450).

This manner of directly addressing the reader can be rather
unsettling, insofar as it draws attention to the discursive distance
which tends to estrange the writer from his audience. But on the
other hand, Steme's tone in this passage is warmly humanizing, for
it embraces the reader in the best rhetorical tradition of pathos (in
classical terms, the mode of persuasion which influences the
audience's frame of mind). In this sense, Sterne dialogizes the
novel by breaking down the passiVIty of the reader.

But there is also a way in which this rhetoric of familiarity

48

simply underscores a metafictional irony. Consider the following
passage, in which Sterne overtly claims to be catering to his
readers by providing an abundance of details concerning his ”life
and Opinions”:

I know there are readers in the world, as well as many other good people in
it, who are no readers at all,--who find themselves III at ease, unless they are
let into the whole secret from first to last. of everthing which ccncems you.

It is in pure compliance with this humour of theirs, and from a
backwardness in my nature to disappoint any one soul living, that I have been so
very particular already. As my life and opinions are likely to make some noise
in the world, and, if I conjecture right, will take in all ranks, professions, and
denominations of men whatever . . . I find it necessary to consult every one a
little in his turn; and therefore must bog pardon for going on a little further in
the same way: For which cause. right glad I am, that I have begun the history of

myself in the way I have done: and that I am able to go on tracing every thing in
it, as Horace says, ab Ova (pp.37-38).

The acute irony of this passage is that in promising to tell
everything to the minutest detail, StemolShandy continually loses
himself in endless digressions which all but obscure the novel's
plot behind a labyrinthine web of allusions to his father's scholarly
texts and his uncle Toby's books on military fortification.
Moreover, his satisfaction over having started his history ab Ovo
("from the egg") is shot through with multiple irony and comic
relish, for the very opening of the book is a hilariously oblique
description of the circumstances leading up to the moment of his
concepfion.

That Mr. Shandy is interrupted at this crucial juncture by his
wife's reminder to set the clock is an ironic precedent for the way
Tristram will go about writing his autobiographyucontinually

interrupting the flow of his narrative with intrusive digressions

49

which reveal more about his hyperactive imagination than his life
history. In fact by the thirteenth chapter of the fourth volume,
Tristram has only proceeded in his narration to the end of his first
day of life. Yet the way in which he confesses this loss of
narrative control to his readers is anything but chaotic in its

rhetorical balance and mastery of self-referential technique:

I am this month one whole year older than I was this time twelve-month;
and having got, as you perceive, almost no farther than to my first day's
lifou'tis demonstrative that l have three hundred and sixty-four days more life
to write just now, than when I first set out; so that instead of advancing, as a
common writer, in my work with what I have been doing at it-ocn the contrary,
I am just thrown so many volumes back-~was every day of my life to be as busy
3 day as this-And why not?--and the transactions and opinions of it to take up
as much description--And for what reason should they be cut short? as at this
rate I should just live 364 times faster than I should write-4t must follow, an'
please your worships, that the more I write, the more I shall have to
write-and consequently, the more your warships read, the more your
worships will have to read.

Will this be good for your worships' eyes? (p. 286)

Sterne highlights the absurdity of the autobiographer's task with
a comic paradox, suggesting that it is impossible to live a life and
write it at the same time, because the narration gets bogged down
in endless digression and regression, as the author traces causes
outward and backward in an ever widening network in which origins
are never revealed. This image of eternal regression holds a unique
fascination for modernist and metafictional writers. As Waugh
remarks, "Images of infinite regression remind the reader of the
fictive nature of the chronology assumed by realism (p. 142).”

Since any attempt to represent the temporal flow of events in

their totality is doomed to a cycle of infinite regression, realist

50

narrative conceals a basic artifice in its attempt to suggest a
verisimilitous chronology of events. By contrast, Sterne makes the
reader aware of the basic tension foregroundod in all metafiction
by reminding us that a book is essentially different from the reality
it seeks to represent. As a structure of words, the novel is
unrestricted in its ability to extend its network of textual

references and allusions, yet quite limited in its capacity to convey
a truly verisimilitous sense of character and chronology.

As I noted earlier, Stemo does not try to resolve this tension on
one side or the other of language and ”reality," nor does he vacillate
schizophrenically between realistic description and metafictional
self-reflection. As Ricks notes in his introduction, ”his gaze is
genuinely bifocal even if that often means a comic squint (p. 27).”
Consider the following passage, in which Sterne comically flaunts

and satirizes conventions of narrative pace:

It is about an hour and a hall's tolerable good reading since my uncle Toby
rung the bell, when Obadiah was ordered to saddle a horse, and go for Dr. Slop,
the man-midwifo;--so that no one can say, with reason, that l have not allowed
Obadiah time enough, pootically speaking, and considering the emergency too,
both to go and ocme;----though, morally and truly speaking, the man, perhaps,
has scarce had time to get on his boots.

If the hypercritic will go upon this; and is resolved after all to take a
pendulum, and measure the true distance betwixt the ringing of the bell, and the
rap at the door;--and, after finding it to be no more than two minutes, thirteen
seconds, and three fifths,--should take it upon him to insult over me for such a
breach in the unity, or rather probability, of time;--I would remind him, that
the idea of duration and of its simple modes, is got merely from the train and
succession of our ldeas,--and is the true scholastic pendulum, ----and by
which, as a scholar, I will be tried in this matter, «abjuring and detesting the
jurisdiction of all other pondulums whatever (pp.122—123).

Once again we find Sterne stepping back from his novel and

51

examining its inner workings, like a watchmaker examining minute
gears and springs under a lamp. With his characteristic sensitivity
to the predicament of the reader, Sterne reminds us that Obadiah
has been gone for as long as it has taken us to read the textual
interval of his absence. Of course, his "genuinely bifocal” gaze is
also fixed on the sense of time suggested by the events in the story
itself, but this apparent concern with a realistic chronology of
events is merely another pretext for a digression on technique.

Likewise, his reference to Locke's philosophy of perception is
not so much a justification of an implausible chronology in the
actual story as it is a key to his self-reflexive technique of
spinning a web of textual allusions which flit in and out of the
story, but are not organized by any contingency in the plot. For
instance, the allusions to military fortification are related to Uncle
Toby's books, but their connections with other texts is clearly a
result of the activity of the narrator, Tristram (or Stemo). Like
Cervantes, Sterne highlights the activity of his own imagination
and self-consciously flaunts his narrative technique, but to such a
manic and systematic degree that he effaces the story and its
characters beneath a kind of textual game which is more nearly the
novel's "plot" than Tristram's birth and Uncle Toby's courting of the
Widow Wadman.

This is not to repudiate Ricks' contention that Sterne maintains
an exquisite rhetorical balance and a ”bifocal gaze,” but there are

many passages in which the purely textual existence of the

52

characters is clearly foregroundod. A particularly subtle instance
of this kind of ontological shift can be seen in Mr. Shandy's

”discussion" with Rubenius on the topic of Tristram's clothing:

After my father had debated the affair of the brooches with my mother,--he
consulted Albertus Rubenius upon it; and Albertus Rubenius used my father ten
times worse in the consultation (if possible) than even my father had used my
mother: For as Rubenius had wrote a quarto express, De re Vestiarfa
Vetenrm,-- it was Rubenius's business to have given my father some
lights.-On the contrary, my father might as well have thought of extracting the
seven cardinal virtues out of a long beard,--as of extracting a single word out of .
Rubenius upon the subject.

Upon every other article of ancient dress, Rubenius was very
communicative to my fathor;--gave him a full and satisfactory account of

The toga, or loose gown.

The Chlamys. . . (p. 424).

The sustained irony of this passage consists in the fact that

' although Mr. Shandy is consulting a book by Rubenius, Sterne fully
extends the playful suggestion that they are having a conversation.
Applying Bakhtin, I would say that Sterne brings Mr. Shandy and
Rubenius into a dialogic relationship, rocontextualizing and
bracketing Rubenius' language to such an extreme that they actually
seem to be conversing. Or in poststructuralist terms, there is a
perfectly intertextual relationship between all of the books that
Tristram cites and the novel itself, such that the boundaries of ”the
work" are freely transgressod. At one level Rubenius is the author
of a book on ancient clothing in Mr. Shandy's library, but just as the
"real" characters in Tristram Shandy can become flattened
whenever Sterne highlights their status as fictionalized word
structures (as in the description of Mrs. Shandy as an intaglio)

characters and dead authors can interact with their ”living“ readers

53

by transcending the arbitrary textual boundaries of the works which
ordinarily confine them. ‘

I don't mean to make too much of this one passage, but it is a
clear example of a metafictional thematization which Sterne
activates throughout the noveI--the sense that the ordinary
constructs, both material and ontological, which distinguish a book
from the world which contains it are uncomfortably transgressod
both inside and outside the novel. In other words, Steme's
awareness that language ultimately and ineluctably structures our
understanding of ”world” and "reality” allows him the bifocal vision
of the both the fictionality of literary characters and the
materiality of fictional books. This latter quality is apparent in
Tristram's divulgence to the reader that he has torn out the

twenty-fourth chapter, as well as in the following passage:

We'll not stop two moments, my dear Slr,--only, as we have got through
these five volumes. (do, Sir, sit down upon a setnthoy are better than nothing)
let us just look back upon the country we have passed through.- (p. 397)

The highlighting of the book as a material object is an important
metafictional device, especially if it is recognized by characters in
the novel itself, for it activates an ontological inversion which
reaches out to include the reader himself. Jorge Luis Borges
describes this effect quite succinctly in ”Partial Magic in the
Quijote" (as quoted by Alter in his book):

Why does it disturb us that Don Quijote be a reader of the Quixote and
Hamlet a spectator of Hamlet? These inversions suggest that if the characters
of a fictional work can be readers or spectators, we, its readers or spectators,

54

can be fictitious (p. 1).

John Barth has much the same thing in mind when in an essay
entitled, ”How to Make a Universe," he suggests that by analogvaod
is an author (and we his characters), since authors routinely create
miniaturized universes of their own through themedium of fiction.
Of course, he does not mean to infer by this that authors have an
omniscient and omnipotent artistic control over their novels;
rather, he ironically suggests that perhaps we are God's first go at
creating a universe, since he seems to have botched it in so many
respects!

A quality in Sterne which Barth obviously emulates is his
self-deprecation as a novelist, and as Waugh notes, one of the most
characteristic attitudes in metafictional narrators is ”a
celebration of the power of the creative imagination together with
an uncertainty about the validity of its representations. . . (p. 2)."

As I remarked earlier, Stemo, like Cervantes, operates at a new
level of creative autonomy, flaunting and exploiting the conceivably
unlimited technical resources of the novel at a time when it is just
emerging as a genre. But as Ricks remarks in his introduction,

Sterne was also acutely aware of the novel's inherent limitations:

Certainly the rise of the novel was a great achievement, but Sterne seems to
. have been one of the first to realize that a novelist, just because he was indeed
creating, might be tempted to think himself ondued with godlike powers of
scrutiny. So instead of the omniscient, omnipotent narrator humorously
deployed by Fielding, Stemo substitutes the vague half-knowledge and
frustrated impotence of Tristram (p. 13).

As we have seen in Don Quijote and Tristram Shandy, the

55

"godlike” omniscience and omnipotence so characteristic of the
realist mode of narration is bracketed and parodiod in metafiction,
as when Cervantes, with pseudohistorical, ironic relish, has don
Quijote implore his ”chroniclor" to remember his good horse, even
though he is alone on the planes of la Mancha (though not within the
discursive weave of the novel, which is indefinitely peopled with
fictions, including the dialogized ”voice" of the author). Yet the
paradox of this essentially ludic narrative strategy is that in
rhetorically questioning the validity of its own representations, it
simultaneously declares the author's autonomy in manipulating the
very artifice which structures his discourse of self-criticism. The
metafictional novel's profound entrenchment in the wiles and
double entente of its own rhetoric and the bifurcated referentiality
of its technical artifice already align it with the strategies of
deconstruction, several centuries before its incipient appearonce in
the stylistic implosions of Nietzsche. In this respect, Cervantes
and Sterne can be viewed as the initiators of a genre and aesthetic
so profoundly expansive and self-aware that, like the world of
Shakespeare's plays, their novels seem to embrace the whole of

modernity from the vantage of its very threshold.

Chapter 3

Pseudo-History and the Literature of Hermetic
Excess: Gabriel Garcia Marquez's Cien Arias de
Soledad and John Barth's The Sat-Weed Factor

I have chosen to couple these two novels in my analysis
primarily because they both use a pseudohistorical rhetoric as the
basis of their metafictional activity, and in this sense they are
heavily indebted to Don Quijote. Yet there are other ways in which
these contemporary masterpieces recall the techniques and
resources of Cervantes' great exemplar for the novel-Cien Arias de
Soledad in the encyclopedic variety of its narrative fabric, its
stylistic and ancecdatal superabundance, and The Sat-Weed Factor
in its relentless satirizing of the pretensions of historical fiction
(present in a more subtle manner in Glen Ar‘ios as well).

Moreover, it is relevant to note that both of these works were
produced in the 1960s, a period in which American and Latin
American novelists were experimenting with the form of the navel,
challenging its traditional generic parameters and questioning its
capacity to accurately render the new reality of the electronic,
cybernetic culture of information and technology. Many novelists
expressed a collective sense of stylistic and formal exhaustion, as
both critics and authors began to wonder if they had witnessed the
”death of the novel," but by the same token, they were also

invigorated and liberated by the atmosphere of avant-garde

56

57

exporimentalism which became more highly charged in the late
sixties and early seventies (Barth vii-viii, Lost in the Funhouse ).
That they should turn their attention to the roots of the genre is
hardly surprising if we consider that the novel first emerged in a
period of formal transition and experiment. Moreover, as Barth
reminds us in his essay on the ”literature of exhausted possibility,”
the novel has always been conscious of itself as a derivative and
”decadent“ genre, appropriating older literary forms through parodic
imitation:
Suppose you're a writer by vocation» a “print-oriented bastard,” as the
McLuhanites call us--and you feel, for example, that the novel, if not narrative
literature generally, if not the printed word altogether, has by this hour of the
world just about shot its bolt, as Leslie Fiedler and others maintain. . . . If you
were Borges you might write Labyrinths: fictions by a learned librarian in the
form of footnotes, as he describes them, to imaginary or hypothetical books. And
I'll add that if you were the author of this paper, you'd have written something
like the Sat-Weed Factor or Giles Goat-Boy: novels which imitate the form of
the Novel, by an author who imitates the role of Author.

If this sort of thing sounds unpleasantly decadent, nevertheless it's about
where the genre began, with Quixote imitating Amadis of Gaul, Cervantes
pretending to be the Cid Hamete Benengeli (and Alonso Quijano pretending to be
Don Quixote), or Fielding parodying Richardson. “History repeats itself as

farce”--meaning of course, in the form or mode of farce, not that history is
farcical (pp. 71-72).

It is not coincidental that each of the works considered in this
thesis is a comic masterpiece, a farcical sendup of traditional
historical narratives, or a ludic transgression of novelistic
conventions. Yet as Barth clearly recognizes, the representation of
history as a ”farcical repetition' does not turn it into a meaningless
farce, but merely insists that its inevitable embodiment in a
textual narrative confines its form to the comic recursiveness and

convolution so characteristic of self-conscious novelists. As I

58

noted in the first chapter, the traditional historian's solemn
pretensions to scientific objectivity are part of a rhetorical ruse
which systematically denies its own basis in narrative rhetoric. By
contrast, a novelist like Garcia Marquez is acutely and ironically
aware of this fundamental duplicity, continually undercutting the
rhetoric of his own historical narrative in the same gesture with
which he weaves it.

The very opening lines of Cien Ar‘ios do Soledad, like those of the
Quijote, highlight with ironic relish an awareness of their own

farcical basis in pseudohistorical rhetoric:

Muchos alias despues, fronto al pelatén do fusilamiento, el coronel Aureliano
Buendia habia do recordar aquella tarde remote en que su padre lo llevo a
canocor el hielo. Macondo era entonces una aldea do veinte casas do barro y
canabrava construidas a la orilla do un rlo do aguas diafanas que se precipitaban
par un lecho do piedras pulidas, blancas y enormes coma huevos prehistéricos.
El mundo era tan reciento, que muchas casas carecian do nombre, y para
monolonarlas habia que sehalarlas can ol dedo (p. 59).

[Many years later, In front of the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendia
was to remember that remote afternoon when his father brought him to discover
ice. Macondo was at that time a village of twenty adobe houses built along the
banks of a river of clear water that ran along a bed of polished stones, which

were white and enormous, like prehistoric eggs. The world was so recent that
many things lacked names, and in order to indicate them it was necessary to

point]

In passages like this, Cien Ar‘ios reads like a parody of the bible,
with its rhetoric of mythic origins and a distanced narrative voice
which suggests a panoramic perspective on history as a whole. The
bible offers a unique framework for highlighting the narrative and
rhetorical basis of history because it frames historical time within
the parameters of the book itSelf. The world begins with Genesis

and ends with Revelation, and so does the book which renders it.

59

Garcia Marquez shrewdly recognizes in this structure an expression
for some of the curious properties of the novel--the way in which
the narrator abruptly enters a historical continuum of action in the
beginning and arbitrarily truncates it at the end. In an ironic
departure from the realist convention of beginning the novel in
medias res, Garcia Marquez acknowledges that the purely textual
existence of his characters is initiated on the first page of the
noveL

Another metafictional cue in this opening passage is the curious
sense of spatial and temporal displacement suggested by the
rhetorical structure of the first sentence. The phrase is repeated
in the opening of a later chapter, and in both instances it is clear
from the context of the metafictional structure of the novel as a
whole that Garcia Marquez is signalling a textual displacement of
consciousness.1 Through a metafictional complicity with the
author, the characters have access to different areas of the text, as
the temporal progression of traditional oral narrative acquires a
spatial quality which characterizes its textual reality in a novel.2
For instance, the Colonel Aureliano, just before he is to be
executed, expresses a sense of deja vu and omniscience which
ironically signals his awareness of his status as a character in

Garcia Marquoz's novel:

Estaba enterado do las pormenores do la casa: el suicidio do Pietro Crespi, las
arbitrariedades y el fusilamiento do Arcadia, la impavidez do Jose Arcadia
Buendia bajo el castano. . . . Desde el momenta en que entro al cuarto, Ursula so
sintio cahibida par la madurez do su hijo, por su aura do dominio, por el
resplandor do autoridad que irradiaba su piel. So sorprendio que estuviera tan
bien informado. ”Ya sabe ustod que soy adivino,‘ bromoo ol. Y agrogo on sorio:

60

”Esta manana, cuando me trajeron, tuve la impresién do que ya habia pasado por
todo esta” (p. 174-175).
[He knew all about the details of the house: Pietro Crospi's suicide, Arcadio's
arbitrary acts and his execution, the dauntlessness of Jose Arcadia Buendia
underneath the chestnut tree. . . . From the moment in which she entered the
room, Ursula felt inhibited by the maturity of her son, by his aura of command,

' by the glow of authority that radiated from his skin. She was surprised that he
was so well informed. "You already knew that I was prescient,” he joked. And he

added in a serious tone, "This morning, when they brought me hero, I had the
impression that I had already been through all this before."]

The irony of Aureliano's words is that he has indeed "been
through all this before,” but only in the sense that his
reminiscences on the afternoon before his execution are announced
in the opening lines of the novel. His serene awareness that his
execution is preordained signals his metafictional complicity with
his ”omniscient” author (in actuality, Garcia Marquez undercuts the
pretension to authorial omniscience with a pseudohistorical
rhetoric of uncertainty concerning certain facts in the narration,
just as Cervantes does in referring to the "lost manuscripts” which
record don Ouijote's adventures).

This interpretation might seem rather tenuous, given only the
preceding passage, but in fact it is a technique Garcia Marquez uses
in several instances in Cien Arias do Soledad, and in his more
recent novel, Cronica de una Muerte Anunciada [Chronicle of a Death
Foretold]. The death is indeed foretold, not by Santiago Nasar's
prescient mother, who misreads his dream, but by the author
himself in the opening lines of the novel: "El die en que lo iban a
matar, Santiago Nasar so levanto a las 5.30 . . ." [On the day they
were going to kill him, Santiago Nasar got up at 5:30. . .1.

A comically physical ”intervention" on the author's part occurs

61

late in the novel, as the final Aureliano begins to decipher the

cryptic manuscripts left by the ancient gypsy, Melquiades:

Divertidos par la impunidad do sus travesuras, cuatro nil‘los entraron otra
mafiana en el cuarto, mlentras Aureliano estaba en la cocina, dispuestos a
destruir las pergaminos. Pero tan pronto coma so apoderaron do sus pllegos
amarillentos, una fuerza angelica los levanto del suolo, y las mantuvo
suspendidos en el aire, hasta que regreso Aureliano y Ies arrebato las
pergaminos. Desde entonces no volvieron a molestarlo (p. 404).

[Amused by tho impunity of their mischief, four children entered the room one
morning while Aureliano was in the kitchen, preparing to destroy the
parchments. But as soon as they seized hold of the yellowed sheets, an angelic
force lifted them off the ground and held them suspended in the air, until
Aureliano returned and took the parchments away from them. From then on they
did not bother him.)

As in the Quijote, when don Quijote and Sancho learn about their
author through Sansén Carrasco (ll. 2), this passage effects a
vertiginous transgression of the narrative frame which customarily
separates an author from his characters. The ”angelic force”
prevents the children from destroying the manuscripts because, as
is revealed in the novel's stunning, virtuosic conclusion, the
parchments are the very ”history" of the Buendia family which we
are reading, and their destruction would presumably terminate the
novel itself.

In this respect, Melquiades is a kind of surrogate author figure,
and in much the same way that Cide Hamete Benengeli functions as
a vehicle for many of Cervantes' most ostentatious metafictional
games and transgressions (as in the truncation of the action in I. 8),
Melquiades is a key to understanding the metafictional structure of
the novel as a whole. At one point in the penultimate Aureliano's3

assiduous, impacable decipherment of Melquiades' parchments, the

62

final Jose Arcadia asks him how he can have such extensive
knowledge of matters beyond his personal experience, and Aureliano
replies crypticly, 'Todo so sabe (p. 407)” [Everything is known],
signalling a metafictional complicity with the author, whose
static, panoramic perspective on the text "reveals" all events
within the time frame of the novel.

In another instance of temporal displacement, Melquiades reads
certain portions of his manuscripts aloud to Arcadia, and although
he never fully camprehends their meaning, he finds the episode

mysteriously compelling just before his death:

Atlas despuos, fronto al pelatén de fusilamiento, Arcadia habia do acordarse del
temblor can que Melquiades le hizo escuchar varies paginas do su escritura
Impenetrable, que por supuesto no entendlo, pero que al ser leidas en voz alta
pareclan enciclicas cantadas (p. 126).

[Years later, facing the firing squad, Arcadia was to remember the trembling

with which Melquiades made him listen to various pages of his impenetrable

writing, which of course he didn't understand, but which upon being read aloud
seemed like encycllcals being chanted]

Significantly, the beginning of this sentence is rhetorically
identical to the opening lines of the novel, and like that passage
(and several others that l have noted) it is Garcia Marquoz's playful
signature as a self-conscious novelist, an emblem of the plotting
author who writes the fate of his characters in the same textual
movement in which pretends to record their actual history
(ironically, we learn in the final chapter that Melquiades' "chanted
encycllcals" are actually the ”prophesy” of ArcadiO's death). As we
shall see with The Sat-Weed Factor, Barth fashions a similar

image of himself as author, an overly clever spinner of plot lines

63

who manipulates his characters and yet brings them into a
metafictional awareness of their own encoded, textual nature.

The brilliance and audacity of Garcia Marquez is that he not only
wryly and obliquely signals his activity as a fictional artificer, but
constructs the novel as a whole according to a mind-teasing
metafictional frame structure which is revealed in the final chapter
when the penultimate Aureliano finally manages to decipher

Melquiades' parchments:

Aureliano no habia sido mas lacido en nlngtin acto do su vida . . . porque
entonces sabla que en las pergaminos do Melquiades estaba escrito su destino .
. . y no tuvo serenidad para sacarlas a la luz, sino que alll mismo, do pie, sin Ia
menor dificultad, coma si hubieran estado escritas en castellano bajo el
resplandor deslumbrante, empezo a descifrarlos en voz alta. Era la historia do
la familia escrita par Melquiades hasta en sus dotalles mas trivialos, can cien
alias do antlclpacién (p. 446).

[Aureliano had never been more lucid in any act in his life . . . because then he
knew that his destiny was written In Melquiades' parchments . . . and he didn't
have the calmness to bring them out into the light, but right there, standing,
without the slightest difficulty, as if they had been written in Spanish beneath

a dazzling resplendence, he began to decipher them aloud. It was the history

of the family, written by Melquiades down to the most trivial details, one
hundred years ahead of time]

The frame structure in this passage suggests a deceptively
simple paradox. While it resembles the Chinese box schemes which
frequently govern metafictional tale cycles (stories within stories
within stories) it is actually like a M6bius strip, or the
cosmological snake which oats its own tail. On the one hand, the
novel frames and contains the parchments, but since Melquiades'
manuscripts are identical to the contents of the novel, they actually
frame eachcther, like two face to face mirrors, with each mirror

reflecting an infinite regression of frames within frames.

64

In fact, this very image is evoked on the final page of the navel:

Macondo era ya un pavoroso remolino do polvo y escombros contrifugado par la
calera del huracan blblico, cuando Aureliano salto once paginas para no perder el
tiempo en hechos demasiado oanocidos, y empozo a descifrar el instanto que
estaba viviendo, descifrandola a medida que lo vivia, profetizandose a sf mismo
en el acto do descifrar la Ultima pagina do las pergaminos, coma si estuviera
viendo en un espejo hablado (p. 447). .

[Macondo was already a fearful whirlwind of dust and rubble being spun about
by the wrath of the biblical hurricane, when Aureliano jumped ahead eleven
pages so as not to lose time on facts too well known, and began to decipher the
moment he was living, deciphering it as he lived it, prophesying himself in the
act of deciphering the last page of the parchments, as if he were looking into a
talking mirror.]

The vertiginous moment in which Aureliano is reading his own
present is a kind of textual epiphany, an ontological Pandora's box
which invalidates all of the novel's frames (how can the novel
frame Aureliano, if the text he is reading is that very frame?,
etcetera). Moreover, it consolidates a metafictional aesthetic
which we have seen alluded to rhetorically throughout the
naveluGarcia Marquez's awareness that his novel, as a static
structure of written words, operates in a kind of "absolute present”
(Marco 53).

In this sense, Aureliano's encounter with his own fictionality not
only lays bare the pseudohistorical rhetoric which is
self-consciously maintained throughout the novel as a formal ruse,
but radically negates the very idea of historical narrative, even as
it extends a parody of its structure and conventions. As I stated
with regard to its opening, the entire novel reads at a certain level
like a parody of the bible,.where the beginning and the end of the
book coincide with the beginning and end of time and of the world

65

itself. In a conclusion suggestive of Revelation, the world of '
Macondo is consumed in the apocalyptic fury unleashed by

Aureliano's decipherment of Melquiades manuscripts:

Entonces dio otra salto para anticiparse a las predicciones y avorlguar la fecha y
las circunstancias do su muerte. Sin embargo, antes do llogar al verso final ya
habia comprendido que no saldria jamés do ese cuarto, pues estaba previsto que
la ciudad do las espejos (a las espejismos) serla arrasada por el viento y
desterrada do la memoria do las hombres en el Instante en que Aureliano
Babilonia acabara de descifrar las porgaminos. . . (pp. 447-448).

[Then he jumped ahead again to anticipate the predictions and ascertain the date
and circumstances of his death. However, before arriving at the final verse, he
had already understood that he would never leave that room, since It was
foreseen that the city of mirrors (or mirages) would be wiped out by the wind

and exiled from the memory of men at the moment In which Aureliano Babilonia
would finish deciphering the parchments. . . .]

Garcia Marquez's pretension that Melquiades' manuscripts are the
actual history of the Buendia family is a metafictional ruse which
recalls Cervantes' playful insistence that don Ouijote's history is
transcribed from ancient arabic parchments. In both instances it is
clear that they are calling attention in an ironic and oblique way to
their own powers of invention as novelists. Another way this is
signalled and thematized is in the phrase, ”ciudad do las espejos (a
espejismos)” [city of mirrors (or mirages)], an image which recalls
the crucial moment at which Aureliano begins to read his own
present in Melquiades manuscripts, dissolving the frame of the
novel and that of the parchments within an ambiguous ontological
space. In fact, there are numerous passages throughout the novel in
which Garcia Marquez rhetorically suggests that traditional
framing devices are arbitrary conventions, and that their

transgression in a self-conscious novel engender a kind of fantastic

6 6
reality for its characters:

Era coma si Dias hublera resuelto paner a prueba toda capacldad do asombro, y
mantuviera a las habitantos do Macondo en un pennanente valven entre el
alborozo y el dosencanto, la duda y la revelacidn, hasta el extrema do que ya
nadie podla saber a ciencia cierta dande estaban las llmites do la realidad. Era un
intricado frangollo do verdades y espojismos, que convulsiano do impaciencia al
espectro do Jose Arcadia Buendia bajo el castal‘la y _lo obligo a caminar por toda la
casa aun a pleno dla (p. 268).

[It was as if God had decided to put to the test every capacity for surprise and

was keeping the Inhabitants of Macondo In a permanent altematlon between
excitement and disappointment, doubt and revelation, to such an extreme that no
one knew for certain where the limits of reality lay. It was an intricate stew of
truths and mirages, that impatiently canvulsod the ghost of Jose Arcadia Buendia
under the chestnut tree and compelled him to wander all through the house even

in broad daylight]

This is the kind of passage which has given impetus to the label
”magic realism," so frequently attached to Garcia Marquez's fiction.
Certainly, a novel in which the ghost of a dead patriarch roams
nonchalantly through the house of his descendants (not to mention
that a young girl is assumed directly into heaven, or that a
chimerical beast with angel's wings inexplicably falls to earth) is
suggestive of a strange and fantastic reality, and some critics have
concluded that it is inspired by the chaotic, volatile political and
social climate of Garcia Marquez's native Colombia.4

I do not call into question the usefulness of this sociohistorical
perspective on literature, but it is important to note that all of
Garcia Marquez's fantastic and chimerical dislocations refer also to
their own structure as layers of novelistic artifice. Not only is
Macondo, the nostalgic recreation of Garcia Marquez's childhood
village in Colombia, "un intricado frangollo do verdades y

espejismos" [an intricate stew of truths and miragos], but also the

67

novel itself.5 It is but a brief extension of this wry metafictional
subtext to see this passage as a thematization of the author's
God-like powers of manipulation in altering the textual and
fictional reality of his characters.

In fact, Garcia Marquez's skill in maintaining (to paraphrase
Christopher Ricks' praise of Sterne) a "genuine bifocal gaze"
operates as exquisitely at the structural linguistic level as at the
level of rhetorical double entente. In an essay entitled, ”Garcia
Marquez's Crdnica do una Muerte Anunciada as Metafiction,” Jorge
Olivares discusses the ways in which that novel elaborates a
subtextual, allegorical glass on poststructuralist theories of
reading and writing. According to Olivares, Garcia Marquez
thematizes the death of the author in Santiaga's murder and Angela
Vicario's rape. As an analogue for textual inscription, the rape
casts Angela in the “role“ of the text, and she vicariously kills her

author when her brothers stab Santiago to death:

The sexual suggestiveness of the description is noteworthy because. since Pedro
and Pablo Vicario function as Angola's "vicarios" (her 'vlcars", her deputies),

it is she who in effect stabs Santiago to death. In other words, Angela
“vicariously” penetrates Santiago, not with one but with two 'cuchillos roctos.‘

A violent pen etration involving more than one metaphoric pen(is), Santiaga's
execution can be seen as a triple inscription, as a congress of violence, sex, and
writing. A text no longer In need of Its author, Angela eliminates Santiago: she

in a sense writes him cit (p. 490).

As I remarked in the first chapter (p. 20), some of Barth's
stories resonate with this theme of the author's death, the
paradoxical absence yet ubiquity of authorial voice which is

characteristic of postmodernist and poststructuralist writing. A

68

similar kind of textual liberation is effected in the allegorical

subtext of the final pages of Cien Ar‘ios do Soledad. As the reader
of his own history, Aureliano represents an extraordinary
conjunction of author, text, and reader. Ho ceases to be a passive
reader the moment he begins to decipher the manuscripts, authoring
the text (himself) through an inverted structural hierarchy which
undermines the very concept of textual ”authority.” A moment of
pure equilibrium is attained when he skips ahead in his reading to
his own present, where an impossible conjunction of "text" and
"world” dissolves the contextual boundaries of both into a
self-referential play of signifiers.

More important than a structural linguistic reading of the novel's
conclusion, however, is a recognition of the overarching
metafictional frame structure which it exposes, a scheme which is
cleverly alluded to throughout the novel and which illuminates
Garcia Marquez's basic aesthetic as a novelist. In another scene
framing the activity of a reader, Aureliano Segundo and Ursula

discuss the verisimilitude of an author's narration:

Aureliano Segundo estaba abstralda en la lecture do un Iibro. Aunquo carecla do
pastas y el tltulo no aparecia par ninguna parte, el nifio gozaba con la historia do
una mujer que so sentaba a la mesa y sala camla granos de arroz que prendia can
alfileres, y con la historia del poscador que lo pldlo prestado a su veclno un
plomo para su red y el poscado can que lo recompense mas Iarde tenia un
diamante en el estomago, y con la lempara que satisfacla las doseos y las
alfombras que volaban. Asombrado, le pregunto a Ursula si todo aquella era
verdad, y ella le contesto que sf, que muchas atlas antes las gitanos llevaban a
Macondo las lamparas maravlllosas y las esteras voladoras.

'Lo que pasa,‘ suspiro, ”es que el munda so va acabanda poco a poco y ya no
vlenen esas casas" (p. 230).

[Aureliano Segundo was absorbed In reading a book. Although it had no cover and
the title did not appear anywhere, the child was enjoying the story of a woman

69

who sat at a table and ate nothing but kernels of rice that she picked up with a

pin, and the story of the fisherman who asked to borrow a weight for his not

from his neighbor and the fish with which he later repaid him had a diamond in

its stomach, and the one about the lamp that fulfilled wishes and about flying

carpets. Surprised, he asked Ursula if all that was true, and she replied yes,

that many years ago the gypsies brought magic lamps and flying mats to
acanda

“What's happening,“ she sighed, “is that the world is slowly coming to an
end and those things don't come here any more.”]

Ursula's reply and the variegated mythical fabric of Aureliano
Segundo's book illustrate together a basic tension which structures
the novel as a whole. On the one hand, Cien Ar'los do Soledad is an
intertextual compendium of fabulatary elements from all of Garcia
Marquez's previous fiction, replete as well with veiled references
to other Latin American novelists of his generation (Gallagher 463).
Yet it is also a structurally hermetic text, a fable of mythic origins
which ends by consuming itself (the final lines proclaim that
everything in the parchments-4.9., the navel itself--is 'irrepotible
desde siempre y para siempre” [unrepeatablo since time immemorial
and forever more]).

In this respect, it is a masterful synthesis of what Barth, in his
celebrated twin essays, has termed the ”literature of exhaustion"
and the "literature of replenishment." In the former essay, he cites
Samuel Beckett and Jorge Luis Borges as exemplars for a form of
late modernism which stems from a sense of exhausted
possibilities, a largely self-referential literature obssessed with
the entropic dispersal of its own creative resources (this is an
appropriate characterization, incidentally, of Barth's own stories in
Lost in the Funhouse ). However, as he emphasizes in both essays,

literature replenishes itself in precisely this way, through parodic

70

imitation and an extreme self-consciousness with respect to
tradition.

Indeed, the narrative and stylistic extravagance of both Cien
An’os de Soledad and The Sol-Weed Factor should be understood in
the same context as Cervantes' innovations in Don Ouijote-- as
strategies for utilizing and overcoming the sense of generic
exhaustion and ossification which marks the novel's extensive
prehistory. As Barth remarks in a conversation with John Hawkes,
"We remember Beckett: 'that silence out of which the universe is
made.‘ Plot and perhaps over-ingeniousness are a share against that
silence Beckett speaks of (p. 15, Anything Can Happen )."6

"Plot and perhaps over-ingeniousness" are extravagantly and
hilariously deployed in The Sat-Weed Factor, an energetic parody of
such seventeenth century comic novelists as Fielding and Defoe, and
a baldly abusive portrayal of an actual historical figure, the
Maryland poet Ebenezer Cooke. As Barth confesses in his
introduction to the navel, he takes enormous liberties in his
portrayal of Cooke and his mock-epic poem about the comic
tribulations of a New World tobacco trader (a ”satweed factor“),
attributing the bawdy misadventures of the poem's narrator and

protagonist to the poet himself:

Toward the end of my literary apprentice days, I conceived the ambitious,
Boccacho-like project of writing one hundred tales about my marshy homo
county at all periods of its recorded history; in the course of my researches, I
came across Ebenezer Cooke's ”Sat-Weed Factor“ poem and drafted a few tales
based on the premise that its misfortunate narrator was the poet himself, whom

I imagined arriving in the colony with the innocence, though perhaps not the
programmatic optimism, of Voltaire's Candide (p. v).

71

Barth thus abandons from the outset a "verisimilitous”
representation of this historical period, even though his novel is
crammed with actual personagos and place names. In much the
same way that Garcia Marquez does in Glen Ar’fos do Soledad, with
its interspersal of such actual historical names and places as Sir
Francis Drake and Riohacha in the fabulatary stew of the narrative
as a whole, Barth thematizes the metafictional tension between
technical artifice and worldly referent by openly and
self-consciously weaving the illusion of historical verisimilitude.

As he admits in an essay entitled, ”Historical Fiction, Fictitious
History, and Chesapeake Bay Blue Crabs, or, About Aboutness,” the
historical data in The Sat-Weed Factor is employed in the
construction of novelistic artifice, rather than an actual history of

Ebenezer Cooke's ordeals in late seventeenth-century Maryland:

The fact is, I am about to publish a novel called LETTERS that happens to
involve the Chesapeake Bay area and to some extent its history . . . and twenty
years ago I published a novel called The Sat-Weed Factor, sot mainly in Colonial
Maryland. Both are more or less ”historical“ fiction, and for both I did a
respectable amount of homework on the historical periods involved. But it was a
novelist's homework, not a historian's, and novelists are the opposite of
icebergs: Eight-ninths of what I once knew about this region's history, and have
since forgotten, is in plain view on the surface of those two novels, where it
serves its fictive purposes without making the author any sort of authority.

Since The Sat-Weed Factor Isn't finally “about“ Colonial Maryland at all . . . I'm
already uncertain which of their historical details are real and which I dreamed
up (pp. 180-181, The Friday Book ).

Much of The Sat-Weed Factor is in fact about the author's own
activity in writing the novel. In this sense it is an example of
metafiction in the classic mold of Tristram Shandy, and indeed

Barth consciously and masterfully imitates the convoluted,

72

ironically self-referential style of Sterne and eighteenth-century
novelists generally, a reminder that there flourished an earlier
novelistic tradition more skeptical than the nineteenth-century
realists of the novel's ability to create a verisimilitous sense of
character and historical occurrence. Although Barth uses an
omniscient, third person narrator who doesn't signal his
self-consciousness as systematically or overtly as Tristram does
in Steme's novel, there are passages in which Barth wryly and

obliquely refers to the parodic function of his narrative:

By age eighteen he had reached his full height and ungainliness; he was a
nervous, clumsy youth who, though by this time he far excelled his sister in
imaginativeness, was much her inferior in physical beauty, for though as twins
they shared nearly identical features, Nature saw fit, by subtle alterations, to
turn Anna into a lovely young woman and Ebenezer Into a goggling scarecrow,
just as a clever author may, by delicate adjustments, parody a beautiful style

(p. 8).

This self-conscious deprecation of his own powers as a novelist
is a theme which is announced quite early in Barth's fiction,7 and
which informs his aesthetic sensibility as a whole. In The
Sat-Weed Factor, Barth weds this tone with a systematic parody of
the rhetoric of historical fiction in a a sprawling narrative
framework which subtly exposes the artifice of its own
construction. As I noted in the first chapter, the textual profusion
and repetition of proper names and historical events which
Cristopher Norris recognizes in some of Karl Marx's writings,
suggests in Cien Arias do Soledad and The Sat-Weed Factor as well
a fictive basis for ”the absurd contingencies of historical happening
(Norris 89).”

73

In Barth's novel the parodic approximation of historical
occurrence through an overactive construction of plot is overtly
thematized by the manner in which various characters switch
identities, and by their implication in a kind of grand conspiratorial
scheme, the plot itself, which is spun by an author who "knows"
more than any of his individual characters. At one point Harvey
Russecks, one of several dozen or more of the novel's minor

characters, voices a praise of convoluted, extended narrative:

”No pleasure pleasures me as doth a well-spun tale, be't sad or merry,
shallow or deepl If the subject's privy business, or unpleasant, who cares a
fig? The road to Heaven's beset with thistles, and methinks there's many a
cow-pat on't. As for length, fie, flel" He raised a horny finger. ”A bad tale's
long though it want but an eyeblink for the telling, and a good tale short though it
take from St. Swithin's to Michaelmas to have done with't. Hal And the plot is
tangled, d'ye say? ls't more knotful or bewildered than the skein 0' life, that a
good tale tangles the better to unsnarl?" (pp. 588-589)

Although this mildly self-referential praise of narrative
complication hardly eradicates the framing device which separates
Barth from his characters, or flattens them into the discursive and
linguistic weave of the novel itself, it refers to a metafictional
strategy which is deployed with remarkable virtuosity throughout
The Sat-Weed Factor-- the generation of a remarkably dense and
tangled plot as a self-conscious and parodic approximation of
history's recursive and ”absurd” form, as well as a reiteration of
history in the form of novelistic discourse.

As the bewildered protagonist of Barth's comic extravaganza,
Ebenezer Cooke is in a position similar to the reader's, for this

energetic and ambitious framework suggests that plot can serve as

74

a kind of metafictional code in which the novel's characters can
”read” their inscription in a textual network of signification.
Ebenezer's best friend and tutor, Henry Burlingame, continuously
and treacherously shifts his identity, while the poet's treasured
"innocence” is sacrificed to Barth's ingenious plot, a series of
comic tribulations not unlike Jose Arcadia Buendia's alchemical
miscalculations or don Quijote's disastrous forays into knight
errantry.

Indeed, ridiculous and satirical elements are drawn out to
hyperbolic exaggeration in a novelistic discourse whose very excess
calls attention to the artificiality of its construction. This is
particularly evident in some of the hilarious interpolated tales
which constitute the journal of Henry Burlingame's obscure,
long-lost grandfather. Consider the following passage, which
describes the elder Burlingame's triumph in an eating contest with
a corpulent Indian, after which he is to enjoy the sexual favors of

Pokatawertussan:

The while this wondrous feast was being eat, Wepenter did pownd 8 stryke
Burlingame upon the backe 8 bellie, to settle his stomacke, and Attonces aides
did likewise him smite. After that each course was done, they did both ope there
mouths wide, and Wepenter thrust his finger downe Burlingames crawe, 8
Attonce his owne likewise . . . so that they did vomitt what was eat, and cleare the
holds for more. The Salvages did leap and daunce the while, and Pokatawertussan
twist 8 wrythe for verie lust upon the rugg, at two such manlio man.

When at last this Attonce did get him selfe to his redd berries, wch was the
final dish, that the Salvages had prepar'd, and he did put one in his mawe, and
drop out two therefrom, for want of room, his lieutenant smote him one last
blow on the gutt, whereat Attonce did let file a tooling fart and dy'd upon the
instant where he sat. And was too stuff'd, to fall over.(p. 564).

Bawdy, scatalogical humor is employed throughout the novel as a

75

sort of counterpoint to Ebenezer's pious reverence for cultured
verse and his naive faith in the virtue of Maryland's raucous
inhabitants, but as l have noted, it also functions similarly to the
rhetorically hyperbolic prose of Cien Arias do Soledad, where the
mythic elements are foregroundod as novelistic, artifice. As in Don
Quijote, the interpolated tales in The Sat-Weed Factor have an
even more artificial, framed quality than the prose which surrounds
it, and as chapters in the lost journal of Burlingame's grandfather,
they recall the common metafictional play of the ”found
manuscript” which is employed so skillfully by Cervantes and
Garcia Marquez.

That Burlingame's journal ultimately illuminates and unites
disparate elements of the novel's plot is an self-conscious emblem
of the author's art in weaving fiction. A curious juxtaposition with
relation to Burlingame's journal is the fact that on its reverse side
is a record of the villain John Coade‘s illegal activities and
conspiracies against Lord Baltimore, governor of the province. As

Inger Christensen points out in The Meaning of Metafiction,
. Burlingame is in many ways a mirror image of Coodo (whom he
often impersonatos), and ultimately they both symbolize Barth's
activity as an author in constructing his novel: ”Alan Holder shows
how Burlingame is not concerned with questions of good or evil in
the ferocious contest between warring parties in Maryland: His
chief concern . . . is to match Coade's ceaseless energy in staging a
plot (p. 61 )."

By the novel's serpentine, ostentatiously orchestrated finale, we

76

have the impression from Burlingame himself that both Baltimore
and Coodo are more fictions in an elaborate plot, and Ebenezer's

reply elucidates quite directly a Barthian metafictional aesthetic:

Henry shrugged . . . “albeit 'tis hard for me to think such famous wlghts are
pure and total fictions, to this hour I've not laid eyes on either Baltimore or
Coodo. It may be they are all that rumor swears: devils and domigods,
whichever's which; or it may be they're simple clotpolls like ourselves, that
have been legend'd out of reasonable dlmenslon; or it may be they're naught but
the rumors and tales themselves.“

“If that last is so,“ Ebenezer said, 'Heav'n knows 'twere a potent life
enoughl When I reflect on the weight and power of such fictions beside my own
poor shade of a self, that hath been so much disguised and counterfeitod,
methinks they have tenfold my substance! (pp. 705-706)

As Barth intimates in this passage, a character's existence in a
work of fiction is given substance and reinforced by his reiteration
in purely fictive terms. Paradoxically, Coodo and Baltimore are
more ”real" than Burlingame and Ebenezer, because they have been
transcribed in more purely textual and fictive terms in the
discursive weave of the novel itself. The very fact that their
identities are subject to continual, chaotic shifts and reversals is
indicative of Barth's activity as an author in quite literally writing
them into existence in his novel. Barth's revelation of the purely
textual and fictive nature of his characters is sometimes so abrupt
as to seem like a literal whisking away of the integuments of
narrative artifice to reveal their underlying structure. Consider the

following passage from the title story of Lost in the Funhouse:

She still sat forward; Ambrose pushed his glasses back onto the bridge of his
nose with his left hand, which he then negligently let fall to the seat cushion
immediately behind her. He even permitted the single hair, gold, on the second
joint of his thumb to brush the fabric of her skirt. Should she have sat back at
that instant, his hand would have been caught under her.

77

Plush upholstery prickles uncomfortably through gabardine slacks in the
July sun. The function of the beginning of a story is to introduce the principal
characters, establish their initial relationships, set the scene for the main
action, expose the background of the situation if necessary, plant motifs and
foreshadowings where appropriate, and initiate the first complication or
whatever of the ”rising action“ (pp. 76-77).

Stylistioally, this could be characterized as a passage of
realistic description which through an abrupt transition slips into
metafictional self-commentary. But in fact, an extreme
self-consciousness with regard to technique is already signalled in
the first paragraph, where the "negligence" of Ambrose's gestures
is anything but nonchalant or casual. The story as a whole is a
technical tour de force and an exemplary display of Barth's
fundamental narrative aesthetic, insofar as what appears to occur
within a ”realistic” context of worldly reference, Ambrose's trip to
an amusement park funhouse, is also a metaphor and metafictional
springboard for a self-referential exploration of narrative
technique. In other words, Barth's metafiction displays the
admirable qualities of rhetorical balance and ”bifocal attention"
which are so virtuosically handled in Don Quijote and Tristram
Shandy.

A metafictional play which Barth appears to borrow from both
Cervantes and Stemo is a reference within the narrative frame of

the novel itself to its structuring according to chapters:

Only Captain Cairn remained calm. "Twere folly to wait for their
tortures,“ he declared soberly. ”We're all dead men at the end of the chapter,
why should we suffer ten times o'er for their heathen pleasure?“ (p. 540)

The conventionality of their situation is in a sense

78

self-ovident--their capture by Indians is the kind of catastrophe so
storied throughout the provinces that they have been conditioned to
think of it in terms of fiction. Yet in highlighting the framed

quality of the narrative, as well as its material dimensions as
chapters in a book, Captain Cairn's remarks also trace Barth's hand
in authoring the text. In fact, one measure of the sophistication of
Barth's metafictional sensibilities is his persistent recognition of
how the frame structures of conventional, popular stories are
themselves conducive to a self-conscious illumination of narrative
technique and artifice.

As I commented with respect to Cien Arias do Soledad, Garcia
Marquez's novel is a masterpiece of literature of exhaustion and
replenishment, a book in which the elements of formal and stylistic
decadence are used to extend a host of literary traditions
indefinitely against their own entropic demise. The Sat-Weed
Factor exemplifies this same dual movement through a form of
narrative superabundance which is prompted by an awareness of its
own provisional basis in literary parody. To put it differently, all
narrative presupposes continuity (Marco 30), and self-conscious
fiction blanohos before the contemplation of its own demise, an

idea thematized in the words of Ebenezer as he prepares to drown:

When he and Anna chose their deaths [In play], drowningualong with bumlng,
slow crushing, and similar protracted agonies--was disqualified at once, and the
news that anyone had actually suffered from such an end would thrill them to the
point of dizziness. But in his heart the fact of death and all these sensuous
anticipations were to Ebenezer like the facts of life and the facts of history and
geography, which, owing to his education and natural proclivities, he looked at
always from the storytellers point of view: nationally he admitted its finality;
vrcariously he sported with its horror; but never, never could he really

79

embrace either. That lives are stories, he assumed; that stories end, he
allowed-how else could one begin another? But that the teller himself must
live a particular tale and die-«Unthinkablel Unthinkablel (pp. 270-271)

In a sense, all of Barth's fiction is a variation on Scheherazade,
the doomed storyteller whose narration indefinitely forestalls her
death (Chimera is merely his most overt appropriation of the
frame-structure of the famous arabic tale cycle). As a novel which
disposes enormous narrative energy in the complication and
ultimate resolution of a labyrinthine plot and which
simultaneously traces the dissipation of its own resources (which
at bottom are merely the parodic reiteration of well-heeled
literary conventions), The Sat-Weed Factor conforms to a
structural trajectory in many ways very similar to Cien Afios do
Soledad. Barth's novel does not exactly end by consuming itself, but
it does collapse in the epilogue into a kind of formal resignation in
which the parodic, pseusohistorical rhetoric which structures the
discursive weave of the novel as a whole is openly flaunted. In a
passage whose rhetorical mastery and self-conscious irony is
comparable to the closing of the first part of Don Quijote (see page

14 of the first chapter), Barth ”apologizes to his readers":

Lest It be objected by a certain stodgy variety of squint-minded
anthuarlans that he has In this lengthy history played more fast and loose with
Clio, the chronicler's muse, than ever Captain John Smith dared, the Author
here posits in advance, by way of surety, three bluechip replies arranged In
order of decreasing relevancy. In the first place be it remembered, as
Burlingame himself observed, that we all Invent our pasts, more or less, as we
go along, at the dictates of Whim and Interest; the happenings of former times
are a clay in the present moment that will-we, nlll-we, the lot of us must
sculpt. Thus Being does make Positivists of us all. Moreover, this Clio was
already a scarred and crafty trollop when the Author found her; it wants a
nice-honed casuist, with her sort, to separate soducor from seduced. But it,
despite all, he is convicted at the Public Bar of having forced what slender

80

virtue the strumpet may make claim to, then the Author joins with pleasure the
most engaging company imaginable, his fellow fomicators, whose ranks include
the noblest in poetry, prose, and politics; condemnation at such a bar, in short,
on such a charge, does honor to artist and artifact alike, of the same order of
magnitude as election to the Index Lrbromm Prohibitorum or suppression by
the Watch and Ward (p. 743).

Barth's characterization of the historical muse as a strumpet is
a hilariously bawdy justification of his extremely liberal and
abusive appropriation of Ebenezer Cooke, his epoch, and the
rhetorical modes of eighteenth-century literature. Barth's shrewd
recognition that history is structured according to historical texts,
and is thus bound to a fictional treatment,8 informs his confident
parody of historical fiction in The Sat-Weed Factor, and as in Cien
Arias do Soledad, the novel ends with a self-conscious declaration
of the author's creative autonomy. Together, these two novels
demonstrate the extraodinary narrative resources which can be
generated by a pseudohistorical rhetoric of generic and stylistic

parody, strategies first deployed systematically in Don Quijote.

Chapter 4

Serious Play: Fiction-Making Games in J ulia
Cartazar's Rayuela and Robert Coover's
The Universal Baseball Association

As I mentioned in the first chapter, one way of understanding
metafictional framebreaking is as a kind of Iudic conflation of
literary conventions, a textual game in which the rules are
arbitrarily modified in order to explore the parameters of the novel
as a genre, an impulse consistent with metafiction's basic dual
concern--the generation of a fictional illusion and the simultaneous
examination of the artificial conventions which support that
illusion (Waugh 6, 36, 42). Although the generic parameters of the
novel are, as Bakhtin argues, remarkably elastic, many of the most
”playful" metafictional novels elicit the question of whether they
are infect "anti-novels.” In his introduction to Rayuela, Andres
Amorés discusses the possibility that it engages itself in an
evente-gerde polemic against the novel's identity as a genre, citing

a note by Cortazar's vaguely surrogate author, Morelli:

En unas notes sueltas, apunta Morelli la posibilidad do incarporar al relato las
contradicclones lnternas, al modo del Zen: "A cambio del bastonazo en la cabeza,
una novela absolutamente antinovelesca, con el escéndalo y el choque
consiguiente, y quize con una aperture para las mas avisados.‘

gAnti-novela? 5Nueva novela? En otro lugar parece contradecirse,
Morelli; on realidad. precise can ejemplar claridad: 'Provocar, asumir un texto
desalinado, desanudado, incongruente, minuciosamente antinovellstlco (aunque
no antinovelesca)” (79).

No es puro juego do palabras. Lo que rechaza es cierta tipo do novela, do
trucos narrativos convencionales, no la novela. SI no fuera asl, (para que

81

82

escribir otra novela mas? (pp. 47-48).
[In some loose jottings, Morelli notes the possbllity of incorporating
internal contradictions into the story. in the manner of Zen: ”In contrast to a

blow to the head, a novel absolutely entinovelistic, with the consequent shock
and scandal, and perhaps an opening for the more judicious.“

Anti-novel? New novel? Elsewhere Morelli seems to contradict himself:
in actuality, he ascertains with exemplary clarity: "To provoke, to assume a
text that is disordered, untied, inoongruent, minutely antinovelistic (but not
antinovelish)” (79). .

This isn't pure wordplay. What he rejects is a certain kind of novel, with
its conventional narrative plays, not the novel itself. If this weren't the case.
why write just another novel?]

The formal and stylistic innovations of Rayuela transgress the
canonical boundaries of the "traditional” novel, while effirrning and
regenerating its basic aesthetic of generic all-inclusiveness. As
its name implies, the novel is committed to ”novelty,” and from Don
Qurj'ote on it is clear that a literary form which can incorporate
genres and stylistic registers as diverse as chivalric romance,
picaresque fiction, and arabic tale cycles is never really in danger
of exhausting its own resources, even if the theme of formal
decadence and the sense of writing in the gray shadow of an ‘
exhausted tradition are at the heart of the novel's image of itself
as a genre.

The most obvious technical innovation which Cortazar deploys in
Rayuela is the inclusion of additional chapters which are to be read
in conjunction with chapters from the first two sections according
to a ”tablero do direccién" [table of instructions] at the front of the
novel. Although it indicates an apparently random ordering of the
chapters, it is actually a kind of recursive loop whiCh modifies our
reading of the conventionally ordered narrative in the first two

sections. In his discussion of this ludic perspectivelism in the

83

novel's overall structure, Amorés cites Carlos Fuentos' remark that
”esta segunda lecture abre la puerta a una tercera y, sospechamos,
al infinito do la verdadera lecture (p. 23)" [this second reading
opens the door to a third and, we suspect, to a veritable infinity of
readings].

Indeed, the ”ending" of the novel is a textual joke which
encapsulates the idea of an infinite reading. The final chapter on
Cortazar's table of instructions is #131, yet #131 refers us to #58,
which in turn sends us back to #131, and so on ad infinitum. 1 Thus,
Rayuela is a novel which thematizes and enacts a literature of
replenishment to a remarkable extreme, an encyclopedic narrative
whose open-ended structure, in sharp contrast with the hermetic
density of Cien Arias do Soledad and The Sat-Weed Factor,
encourages the reader to participate in creating structure and
meaning in the text. As a semantically and structurally
indeterminate text which inscribes itself in a network of
supplementary and deferred meaning, Rayuela exhibits remarkable
affinities with some of the main characteristics of
deconstruction.2 Horacio Oliveire, who serves as a comic
mouthpiece for Cortazar's aesthetic principles throughout the

novel, expresses this affinity in passages such as the following:

“A ml en realldad no me puede suceder nI media,“ pensaba Ollvelra. 'No me
va a caer jamés una maceta en el coco." ¢Por que entonces Ia lnquletud. si no era
la manida atraccidn de las contrarias, la nostalgia do la vocaci6n y la accidn? Un
anelisls do Ia lnquletud. en la medlda do lo posible, aludla siempre a una
descolocacién, a una excontracion con respecto a una especie do orden que
Oliveira era incapaz de precisar (p. 584).

(”Nothing ever really happens to me,“ thought Oleivera. "A flowerpot is

84

never going to fall on my noggin.“ Then why the unrest, if It was not the stale
attraction of opposites. the nostalgia for vacation and action? An analysis of this
unrest, as far as is possible, would always allude to a dislocation, to an
excentration with regard to a kind of order that Oliveira was incapable of
defining]

Much of the linguistic playfulness in the novel hinges on this
sense of ”dislocation” and "excentration," which is a veritable
analogue for the way in which Cortazar's language functions at the
level of the sign—deferring meaning in a "writerly' network of
textual allusion which calls attention to its own rhetorical artifice
and highlights the effects of difference, dispersal, and absence. Of
course, this metacommentary on the structural linguistic function
of the text does not render Cortazar's novel a strictly
self-referential meditation on its own processes of inscription and
signification, for in most respects it appears to be a conventionally
structured narrative. Nevertheless, like Sterne in Tristram Shandy,
Cortazer has the artistic balance and critical acumen to fashion the
story apparently ”external" to the structure of the text into a
running allegory on his own techniques and activity as a novelist.

For instance, in one of the most hilariously chaotic chapters in
the novel (#36, which closes the first section, set in Paris),

Horacio falls in with a Parisian street urchin and is arrested for
public drunkenness and exposure, and yet the entire chapter is
structured around Horacio's mental refrain of the ”kibbutz del
deseo” [the kibbutz of desire]. The chaotically orchestrated closing
of the chapter is a stream-of-consciousnoss coalescence of such
elements as "Heraclitus the Obscure" (who apparently liked to bury

himself in shit), two homosexuals peering through a kaleidoscope,

85

and mental imagery associated with the game of the rayuela

(similar to hopscotch):

Todo estaba tan bien, todo llegaba a su hora, Ia rayuela y el calldoscoplo, el
pequetlo pederasta mirando y mirando, oh Jo, no voo nada, mas luz, mas luz, Jo.
Tumbado en el banco, Horacio saludo al Oscuro, la cabeza del Oscuro asomando en
la piramide do bosta . . . y por las mocos y ol semen y el olor do Emmanuele y la
bosta del Oscuro so entrarla al camlno que Ilevaba al Kibbutz del desoo, no ya
subir al Cielo . . . sino caminar can pesos de hombre par una tierra de hombres
hacia el kibbutz alla lejos pero en el mismo plano, como el Cielo estaba en el
mismo pleno que la Tierra en la acera rofiosa do los juegos, y un dla quiza so
entrarla en el mundo donde decir Cielo no seria un ropasador manchada do grasa,
y un dla alguien verie Ia verdadera figure del mundo, pretty as can be, y tel vez,
empujando la piedra, acabarla par entrar en el kibbutz (pp. 368-369).

[Everything was so perfect, everything happening right on time, rayuela and

the kaleidoscope, the smaller fairy looking and looking, oh Jo, I don't see

anything, more light, more light, Jo. Collapsed on the bench, Horacio greeted

the Obscure one, the head of the Obscure one sticking up through the pyramid of
manure . . . and through the snot and the semen and the odor of Emmanuele and
the shit of the Obscure one you would come onto the road leading to the kibbutz of
desire, no longer rising up to heaven . . . but walk along with the pace of a men
through a land of men towards the kibbutz far off there but on the same plane,

just as Heaven was on the same plane as the Earth on the dirty sidewalk where
you played the game, and one day perhaps you would enter that world where
speaking of Heaven did not mean a greasy kitchen rag, pretty as can be, and
perhaps, pushing the stone along, you would end up entering the kibbutz]

The "kibbutz” is a vague, inaccessible object of desire, and like
the heaven represented in the rayuela, it is "attainable” only as a
kind of ubiquitous referent which the text circles in a peripheral
ceremony or game. In poststructuralist terms, we could consider
the "kibbutz of desire” as a ”real” or authentic object of experience
which the novelist tries to confine and present in language, though
in contrast to a realist author, who would assume a relatively
stable correspondence between the signifier and its worldly
referent, Cortazar highlights the disrUptive textual effects of

difference and the arbitrary nature of the Sign, submitting his

86

discourse to a self-referential free play of signifiers
(metaphorized in the idea of the rayuela ). This is not to say that
worldly referents are excluded from Cortazar's language, for
beneath the frenetic activity of the narrator is a story whose
”origin” is recognizably external to the text, but which is
introduced into the discursive weave of the novel through "a
linguistic sleight of hand'3 in which the various narrative elements
reflect and play off eachcther, mimicking at the narrative level a
deconstructive dislocation of sign and referent, as the description
whirls vertiginously to an arbitrary resolution in the notion of the
"kibbutz.”

The disruptive and disorienting effects of Cortazar's mode of
novelistic deconstruction illuminate the contrast between
modernist innovations in the structuring of novelistic artifice and
the recognizably postmodernist aesthetic exemplified in Rayuela
(a contrast particularly evident in the passage just cited). As Alter
notes in Partial Magic, the kind of self-conscious narration present
in Joyce's Ulysses, while participating in a
stream-of-consciousness orchestration of seemingly disparate and
peripheral mental impressions which exhibit connections with the
fictional artifice which structure them, ultimately is merely a
highly aesthetic framework for the reconstitution of a stable
reality independent of the text: "In Joyce, Faulkner, Proust, and
Virginia Woolf, the stuff of reality . . . threatens to crumble into
emptiness, and so the play of consciousness becomes a sustained

act of desperate courage . . . creating form and substance where

87

perhaps there would be nothing (p. 142)."

By contrast, Cortazar's language in Rayuela openly and
systematically thematizes and activates the deconstructive
subsuming of worldly referents into a textual play of signifiers,
translating the reputed stability of an external or objective reality
into a discursive field of continually shifting signs. Nevertheless,
the self-referentiality of the text manages to direct itself to
structural "openings” in which coherent narrative elements may
reconstitute themselves in a sort of textual mimicry of a reality
external to the text itself (Foucault describes this process in a
passage I cited on page eighteen of the first chapter). This
poststructuralist and postmodernist inversion of the structural
hierarchy of sign and referent, such that the signs themselves,
referring to themselves, generate meaning and the illusion of a
world external to the text, is quite overtly declared in the

following passage:

Puede ser que haya otra mundo denim de este, pero no lo encontraremos
recortando su slluete en el tumulto fabuloso do las dlas y las vldas, no lo
encontraremos nl en la atrofia nl en la hipertrofia. Ese munda no existe, hay

que crearlo como el fonix. Ese mundo existe en este, pero como el agua existe en
el ongeno y el hidrdgeno. . . . Dlgamos que el mundo es una figure, hay que
leerla. Par leerla entendamos generarla (p. 540).

[Perhaps there Is another world Inside this one, but we will not find It cutting

out its silhouette from the fabulous tumult of days and lives, we will not find it

in either atrophy or hypertrophy. That world does not exist, one has to create it
like the phoenix. That world exists in this one, but the way water exists In
oxygen and hydrogen. . . . Let us say that the world is a figure, it has to be read.
By read let us understand generated] '

The textual reiteration of worldly referents functions both at

the level of the sign, as my analysis thus far has emphasized, but

88

also at the narrative level, through the activity of metafictional
frame-breaking. By referring to the "world [that] exists in this

one,” Cortazar's highlights the material and structural properties of
his novel as a whole, a textual world which appears to encase a real
one. Underscoring the essentially arbitrary nature of fictional
constructs, Cortazar dissolves his discourse into a variegated but
continuous intertextual weave, a "transgression" which Ultimately
problematizes the ontological status of his characters. As in Don
Quijote and Cien Afios do Soledad, where characters confront their
existence as fictive, textually inscribed entities through a
transgression of the narrative frames which in realist fiction

formally maintain the ontological separation of the author and his
fictional characters, Horacio at one juncture hints at his status as

a character in Cortazar's novel:

Ustedes, che, a lo mejor son ose coagulante do que hablabamos hace un rato.
Me da par pensar que nuestra relaciOn es casi qulmlca, un hecho fuera do
nosotros mismos. Una especie do dibujo que se va hacienda (p. 439).
[You people, well, you're probably that coagulant we were talking about a while

back. It makes me think that our relationship is almost chemical, something
outside of ourselves. A sort of sketch that is being done.]

Again, Cortazar invokes the idea of a figure, and as in Tristram
Shandy, we are given a sense of the characters as broadly sketched
etchings in the textual fabric of the novel. Yet Cortazar's
insistence on the textual qualities of a fictional character go much
further than a self-conscious acknowledgement of the novel's
status as a structure of words. The notion of the world as a figure,

as a form of textual inscription, does not merely imply that it is

89

reiterated in terms of a novelistic discourse, but that our
experience of reading and actively interpreting a text offers an
analogue for a perspectival experience of reality and being in
general,4 an idea which was perhaps first authoritatively

formulated in portions of Friedrich Nietzsche's Nachlass (his notes,
posthumously published as The Will to Power). Joan Granier
recognizes this aspect of Nietzsche's philosophy in an essay

entitled, "Nietzsche's Conception of Chaos":

One of the principal themes in Nietzschean thought is “the interpretive
characterof all that happens. No event exists In Itself. Everything that happens
consists of a group of phenomena that are gathered and selected by an
interpretive being [Krdner]." For Nietzsche, these phenomena are not masks
attached to a thing in itself, some lesser beings, or nothingness, or facts; their
being belongs to an interpretive process. . . . Being is text (p. 135, The New
Nietzsche).

The idea that reality in its rawest form is a continuously
shifting, essentially perspectival matrix of sense-impressions
which attains a fixed form only after it has been structured through
an act of the interpretive imagination, is variously and repeatedly
adumbrated in Rayuela, and helps to account for its indeterminate,
open-ended structure.5 Cortazar, in a manner similar to Steme's in
Tristram Shandy, solicits his reader's participation in structuring
the text from a loosely ordered portfolio of episodes and
impressions, and in generating meaning in the interpretive spaces
left by his ludic, deconstructive textual plays. Just as the world
itself is a figure, intelligible only through an act of interpretation,
the world of Cortazar's novel is a kaleidoscopic dance of shifting

impressions and freely interacting signs until it is read, and "by

90

read, let us understand generated.”

This profoundly creative and interactive role of the reader in his
encounter with the text is a theme which is brilliantly elaborated
in Cortazar's 'Continuidad de las parques" [Continuity of Parks], a
very short metafictional exercise which thematizes the reader's
participation in ”liberating" the text, hinging on the idea of a
character that ”comes to life” and prepares to murder the reader of
the novel from which he has just sprung. The idea derives its
elegance and its complexity from the fact that the action occurs
both inside and outside the novel, but is perfectly unified; hence,
the title of the story. The metafictional structure of the story as a
whole is revealed in the final sentences, as the killer, having
entered the plantation house, goes into a room in which a man is

reading a novel:

El mayordomo no estarla a esa hora, y no estaba. Subio las tres peldallos del
porche y entro. Desde la sangre galopando en sus oldos le Ilegaban las palabras
do la mujer: primero una sale azul, despues una galerla, una escalera
alfombrada. En la alto, dos puertas. Nadie en la primera habitacidn, nadie en la
segunda. La puerta del saldn, y entonces el putial en la mano, la luz do las
ventanales, el alto respaldo do un silldn do terciopelo verde, la cabeza del
hombre en el silldn onendo una novela (p. 12,

Ceremonies ).

[The steward would not be there at that hour, and he wasn‘t there. He climbed
the three steps of the porch and entered the house. From the blood galloping in
his ears came the women's words: first a blue parlor, then a gallery, a carpeted
staircase. At the top, two doors. Nobody in the first room, no one in the second.
The parlor door, and then the dagger in his hand, the light in the high windows,
the high back of a green velvet chair, the head of the man in the chair reading a
novel.]

In terms of its structure, a narrative which consumes itself

when a character reads the very text which frames him as a fiction,

91

as well as its allegorical subtext on the liberation of purely textual
forces when fictive constructs and framing devices are dissolved,
"Continuidad do los parques" anticipates the elaborate

metafictional paradox activated in the chaotic yet virtuosically
orchestrated ending of Cien Arias do Soledad. An emblem of
Cortazar's calculated loss of narrative control is the sentence, 'El
mayordomo no estarla a esa hora, y no estaba" [T he steward would
not be there at that hour, and he wasn't there]. The ”steward" in a
traditional realist story could be construed as those narrative
conventions and constructs which assure the reader that the text
has been thoroughly ”written" by the author, that its overall

meaning has been encoded in a fixed structural matrix which can be
”read” with an antiseptic lack of interference with the semantic
content of the text, as well as the rhetorical security of an
omniscient narrator who walks the reader through the various
scenes while continually interposing himself between the reader
and the world of the fictional characters.

With this ”steward" absent from the narrative, Cortazar's
enframed reader unwittingly activates an intertextual
transgression of ontological frames, and with his conventional set
of assumptions about reading (signalled by the naive way in which
he gives himself over to the novel's illusionism), he is “imperiled“
in his encounter with, and within, the metafictional superstructure
of Cortezar's story. For those who would quarrel with my
interpretation, and question whether the "allegorical subtext" of

Cortezars story can be so particular on the topic of a textually

92

interactive reading, i would indicate a passage in Rayuela such as

the following, a selection from "Morelli's" notebooks:

En alguna parte Morelli procuraba Justificar sus incoherencias narratives.
sosteniendo que la vida de los otros, tal como nos Ilega en la Ilamada realidad. no
es cine sino fotografia, es decir que no podemos aprehender la accion sino tan
sclo sus fragmentos eleaticamente recortados. . . . Morelli pensaba que la
vivencia de esas fotos, que procuraba presenter con toda la acuidad posible, debia
poner al Iector en condiciones de aventurarse, de participar casi en ei destino de

sus personajes (p. 646).

[At one point Morelli tried to justify his narrative incoherencies,
maintaining that the life of others, such as it comes to us in so-called reality, is
not a movie but still photography, that is to say, that we cannot grasp the action,
only a few of its eleaticaily recorded fragments. . . . Morelli thought that the
existence of those pictures, which tried to present all that with the most acuity
possible, must have placed the reader in conditions ripe for taking a chance, for
participating, almost. in the destiny of characters.]

As I emphasized in relation to Cervantes and Sterne, the
metafictional impulse to abandon realistic portraiture in favor of
more artificial representation of character simultaneously
foregrounds a character's flatness as a linguistic abstraction on the
page and emphasizes the depth of true personality which is
necessarily excluded from its purely textual embodiment in a work
of fiction. Morelli's conviction that in life itself “we cannot grasp
the action, only a few eleaticaily recorded fragments . . ." suggests
that the metafictional deconstruction of character into its purely
textual basis is actually the most stringent kind of ”realism”
possible, at least in the sense of verisimilitude. In contrast to a
realist text, in which the reader is confined to a passive,
voyeuristic perspective on a narrative whose plot is dissimulated
as a continuous stream of action, Cortazar/Morelli emphasizes the

empty semantic and descriptive spaces left in the interstices of

93

novelistic artifice which allow the reader a hand in generating the
illusion of genuine character, while self-consciously recognizing
the essentially arbitrary and artificial nature of its construction.6

In emphasizing the poststructuralist and deconstructive
tendencies of Cortazar's writing, I have tried to show how Rayuela
paradoxically draws on its own qualities of self-referentiality and
interiority in ”opening” the text, or rather, to recall Foucault's
formulation, in guiding the text to its own structural openings, a
self-reflexive ”exterior deployment” which parodically mimicks the
conventional narration of character and plot. While the playful
Mobius structure of the book's "final" chapters is one of the more
overt indications of Rayuela' s aesthetic of ludic liberation from
realist conventions in the novel, the more apparently conventional
ending of the novel's first two sections elaborates the same
aesthetic in its rhetorical undercutting of any traditional sense of
chronology and tapering of plot. At the insane asylum where
Horacio, Traveler, and Talita are ”employed“ (there is little in their
behavior to distinguish them from the patients), Horacio leans
precariously out of his third-story bedroom window, savoring the
inexplicable ordering of emotions suddenly reflected in the rayuela

chalked on the sidewalk below:

Era asl, la armonia duraba increiblemente, no habia palabras para contestar a la
bondad de esos dos ahi abalo, mirandolo y hablandole desde la rayuela. porque
Talita estaba parada sin darse cuenta en la casilla tres. y Traveler tenla un pie
metido en la seis, de manera que lo unico que él podia hacer era mover un poco la
mano derecha en un saludo timido y quedarse mirando a la Maga, 3 Mann,
diciéndose que al fin y al cabo algun encuentro habia, aunque no pudiera durar
mas que ese instanto terriblemente dulce en ei que lo mejor sin lugar a dudes
hubiera sido inclinarse apenas hacia afuera y delarse lr, paf se acabo (p. 509).

94

[That‘s the way it was, the harmony lasted incredibly long, there were no words
that could answer the goodness of those two down there below, looking at him and
talking to him from the rayuela, because Talita had stopped in square three
without realizing it, and Traveler had one foot in six, so that the only thing left

to do was to move his right hand a little in a timid salute and stay there looking a
La Maga, at Manu, telling himself that there was some meeting after all, even
though it might only last just for that terribly sweet instant in which the best

thing without any doubt at all would be to lean over just a little bit farther out

and let himself go, paff the end]

Many critics have seen in seen in this ambiguous conclusion the
suggestion that Horacio commits suicide, but as Amorés relates in
his introduction, Cortazar has emphatically denied any such

nihilistic interpretation of Horacio's character and the novel itself:

Conazar niega tajantemente este tipo de lnterpretaclones: 'Yo creo que es un
iibro profundamente optimista. porque Oliveira, a pesar de su caracter broncoso

. . . su mediocridad mental, su incapacidad de ir mas alla de ciertos llmites, es un
hombre que se golpea contra la pared, la pared del amor, la pared de la vida
cotidiana, la pared de los sistemas filosdficos, la pared de la politica. Se golpea

la cabeza contra todo eso porque es un optimista en el fondo. porque él creo que
un dla, ya no para él pero para otros, algun dla esa pared va a caer y del otro lado
esta el kibbutz del deseo. esta el hombre verdadera, ese proyecto humano que él
imagina y que no se ha realizado hasta este momenta.“ (pp. 36-37)

[Coriazar sharply denies this kind of interpretation: ”i think it is a profoundly
optimistic book, because Oliveira, in spite of his boorish character . . . his

mental mediocrity, his inability to move beyond certain limits, is a man who

throws himself against the wall, the wall of love, the wall of daily life, the wall

of philosophical systems, the political wall. He beats his head against all that
because he is at bottom an optimist, because he believes that some day, no longer
for him but for others, some day that wall is going to fall and on the other side is
the kibbutz of desire, and the authentic man, that human project which he
imagines and which hasn’t been realized until this moment.']

As Amorés adroitly remarks, the phrase ”del otro lado” [from the
other side] is a key to Cortazar's narrative strategies. As the title
of the book's first section, it suggests of the novel's overarching
structure what Cortazar's deconstructive method of confronting and

activating semantic alterity implies at the discursive and

95

structural linguistic leveluthat the ludic aesthetic which
permeates the novel at all strata is not a nihilistic negation of
order, structure, or form, but an essentially idealistic quest for a
transcendent identity which lies beyond the confines of present
language systems.7

With this perspective in mind, we should read the closing
episode of the novel's second section not as an image of Horacio's
desperation and desire for some ”final exit” from his chaotic mental
frustration, but as a textual opening which brings to fruition the
language games which have generated the narrative itself. The
novel "closes" at this point, not as in a realist mode, by tapering its
narrative rhetoric, but through a kind of textual disappearing act, a
moment of recursive harmony which brings the reader to the limits
of novelistic discourse, because the experience of "the other side”
lies beyond the novel's expressive means.

As we have seen, Cortazar does not deploy the rayuela in his
novel as a mere metaphor for its ludic aesthetic sensibility and
unconventional structure, but as a model for generating a narrative
framework sensitive to its own indeterminacy, expansive style, and
creative complicity with its readers. in a similar manner, Robert
Coover‘s The Universal Baseball Association, Inc., J. Henry Waugh,
Prop., structures and indeed creates itself according to the idea of
a game which is part of the novel's subject matter. i might add that
this structural inversion and conflation of the novel's subject
matter and form, with" its complex and ostentatious array of

framing devices, typifies the metafictional novel's tendency to

96

analyze the processes and artifice of its own construction. As we
shall see, Coover's rendering of Henry Waugh's fictional baseball
league (the fiction within a larger fiction) moves beyond a
metaphorical reflection on his own narrative technique, into an
exposure of the very codes and aesthetic principles which structure
and generate the novel as a whole. Consider the following passage,
an allusion to Henry's baseball league as kind of holographic

framing of the novel itself:

The smart thing would be to baby Damon through the remaining fifteen or
twenty innings he needed, pitching him against weaker teams, using him in
one-inning relief stints in which, according to the rules, he would pitch as an
Ace, so as to make sure he made that all-important leap next year, without
which no great career was possible. Otherwise, pitching him regularly, the
bottom could suddenly fall out. it had before with other bright young Rookies,
many times. So why shouldn't Bancroft do it, why shouldn't he baby him?
Because Barney Bancroft didn't know what Henry knew. He didn't know about
the different charts (p. 39).

We find in this passage the familiar metafictional ruse, deployed
for memorable comic effect in Don Quijote and Cien Afios de
Soledad, of ”allowing” the novel's characters to glimpse their
fictional and textual existence from a perspective outside the text
itselfuas it were, from the point of view of the author or reader.
Also, as in Glen Arias de Soledad and The Sot- Weed Factor, the text
or plot is referred to as a kind of metalinguistic code (Henry's
"different charts” are the probability tables which, in conjunction
with the rolling of the dice, determine the outcome of all of the
league's games, as well as biographical statistics which help to
flesh out the personalities of the players).

As I mentioned on pages six and seven of the first chapter, the

97

idea of a metalanguage, a text which encodes and determines
another text but is itself hermetically impervious to any influence
outside of its own discursive circle, is inevitably deconstructed by
the novel's profound entrenchment in polyglossia and dialogic
self-criticism. Nevertheless, the allegorical suggestion that from
the perspective of the characters themselves fictional encoding
resembles a metalinguistic code does not imply that fictional texts
are totalizing and self-contained repositories of transcendental
meaning, for the kind of framing schemes employed in Cien Alias de
Soledad and The Universal Baseball Association suggest that all
texts are intertextually and contextually encoded in the
metafictional novel within an overarching frame structure. What is
viewed as a rigid and deterministic code from one perspective (the
”destiny” of the UBA's characters inscribed in Henry's official
league records) can reveal itself as the creative activity of a
fictional artificer within a different narrative frame (that of
Coover's novel).

indeed, a basic tension which extends through the novel
manifests itself in Henry's struggle between the conflicting
aesthetic impulses of a probabilistic determination of his fictional
world and a kind of authorial determinism (a conflict settled in
Rayuela unequivocally upon the side of indeterminacy and play).
Because of his total emotional absorption within his fictional
creation, Henry wants to ”intervene” in the destiny of his
characters, yet he realizes that this type of willful determinism

has its own drawbacks and limitations:

98

And could Henry sit Idly by and watch the kid get powdered. lose hope of
becoming an Ace? He had to. Oh, sure, he was free to throw away the dice, run
the game by whim, but then what would be the point of it? Who would Damon
Rutherford really be then? Nobody, an empty name, a play actor. Even though
he'd set his own rules, his own limits. and though he could change them
whenever he wished, nevertheless he and his players were committed to the
turns of the mindless and unpredictable--one might even say.

irresponsible-dice. That was how it was. He had to accept it, or quit the game
altogether (p. 40).

The ”irresponsibility" of the dice reveals itself when Damon
Rutherford, an incredibly talented young pitcher, is struck instantly
dead by a beanball in his first outing after a perfect game. It seems
quite improbable that such a tragicomic irony could result from the
throw of the dice, and indeed with Damon at the plate Henry
dismisses the event, albeit nervously, as such a remote possibility
that even with the statistically rare ”Extraordinary Occurrences
Chart” in play, he continues the game. Paradoxically, aftenivards it
strikes Henry as inevitable that he should roll triple ones and kill

one of the greatest Aces in UBA history:

The dice felt sticky in his hands. He got a plastic cup out of the cupboard. A
glass fell and broke. He put the dice in the cup, shook it. Cold hollow rattle.
Casey stretched. The sun beat down, or maybe it was just the lamp-anyway it
threw a withering glare off the papers on the table, made Henry squint his eyes.
and he felt somehow he was up to something sinister. That's it. he chided
himself, pile it on, you'll feel like a fool when nothing--he listened to the
rattle, to the roar, held his breath, pitched the dice down on the table.

He knew even before he looked: 1-1-1.

Damon Rutherford was dead (p. 73).

The oxymoronic sense of statistical determinism in Henry's
method of generating his fictional baseball league has a broad
theoretical parallel with quantum mechanics, in which probabilistic

wave functions determine quantum numbers and account for the

99

stability of the atom with much more accuracy than the mechanical
determinism of classical physics. In fact, Coover's aesthetic of
authorial indeterminacy can be viewed in terms of a larger cultural
movement against ”classical" methodology generally, that
mechanistic, determistic world-view and rationalist discourse of
the industrial age which by the turn of the century had begun to
exhibit signs of bankrupcy and formal exhaustion. As Waugh notes,
the emergence of metafiction should be viewed in the context of a
general movement towards cultural self-consciousness and
skepticism with regard to the validity of the world-view and
language systems (including mathematical models) of classical

science and literary realism:

The present increased awareness of 'meta' levels of discourse and
experience is partly a consequence of an increased social and cultural
self-consciousness. Beyond this, however, it also reflects a greater awareness
within contemporary culture of the function of language in constructing and
maintaining our sense of everday 'reality'. The simple notion that language
passively reflects a coherent, meaningful and 'objective' world is no longer
tenable. Language is an independent, self-contained system which generates its
own 'meanings‘. its relationship to the phenomenal world is highly complex,
problematic and regulated by convention (p. 3).

If Henry were framed in any kind of realistic context within
Coover's novel the wild improbability of Damon's death would strike
the reader as absurd and unbelievable, but as a metafictional
commentary on Coover's aesthetic as a novelist, the episode sheds
light on the structural ”codes" which organize the entire novel and
generate its self-critical discourse. Henry's confusion between the
lamp in his apartment and the sun over the ballpark may seem on

the surface to be only a mildly self-referential convention which

100

highlights the ontological bifurcation of fictional discourse into I

the self-aware sign and its referent, yet Coover's ingenious method
of framing a fiction-making game within the larger ”game“ of the
novel itself makes the formal and rhetorical structure of his
metafictional discourse more complexly layered. On the one hand,
Henry's awareness of the artificiality of the UBA is perfectly
plausible in a realistic context, but the way in which Coover frames
this situation in the novel makes it clear that we are looking at an
image of the self-conscious author, and the effect is like holding a
mirror up to narrative art, but within a fictional framework which
includes the mirror.

There is a parallel with this construction in the closing episode
of Cien Anos de Soledad, where Garcia Marquez brings the text of
the novel face to face with its own image and converts his
novelistic discourse into a commentary on a commentary on a
commentary of itself, in a endlessly regressive cycle of
self-reflection which paralyzes narrative movement and dissolves
the novel's framing devices into a kind of funhouse room-of-mirrors
relativism. Yet whereas Garcia Marquez was sealing the hermetic
world of his novel through a kind of metafictional self-destruction
device, Coover does not employ such a rigid construction in The
Universal Baseball Association, and maintains in his portrait of
Henry and the UBA the appearance of worldly referentiality.

Nevertheless, as in Rayuela, whose self-reflexive narrative
generates the illusion of extra-textual reference through a

structural network of intertextual allusion and deferral, Coover's

101

novel turns its inside out by crossweaving narrative frames and
showing how fictional self-consciousness Operates at all levels of
novelistic discourse. in other words, one of Coover's most powerful
themes is expressed in his understanding that language in the
metafictional novel is not simply bifurcated into two opposing
frames of awareness, a ”worldly referent camp" and a
self-referential plane of discourse, but is governed at all
discursive levels by a self-conscious dialectic which relativizes
the novel's contextual frames and encodes itself through a kind of
ubiquitous indeterminacy. Henry expresses this aesthetic as he
ruminates on signs that the UBA is beginning to disintegrate from
the disruptive shock waves generated by the Damon Rutherford

catastrophe:

Waiting for the bus, he saw that storefront across the street--Thornton's.
Well, that's right, Barney surely had the right to bring up a replacement for
Damon. Injuries were one thing, but a dead ballplayer was another.
Unprecedented, but the Association was bound to approve it. So why not
Thornton Shadweil? The thought cheered him some, and then on the bus. he had
other ideas. First of all, that the circuit wasn't closed, his or any other: there
were patterns, but they were shifting and ambiguous and you had a lot of room
inside them (p. 143).

In a manner similar to Cortazar's in Rayuela, Coover champions
the idea that the novel should embrace structural indeterminacy,
recognizing that while this constricts the author's vaunted
autonomy in imposing his creative will on the raw materials of the
imagination, it actually engenders a more verisimilitous, if more
openly artificial sense of the characters as inscrutably complex and

autonomous entities, and removes the reader from his bloodlessly

102

voyeuristic perspective on the text. Coover's ”probabilistic"
narrative techniques are characteristically metafictional insofar

as they foreground the artifice involved in conferring a sense of
autonomy and individuality on fictional character, actively
polemicizing and controverting the realist pretension to a perfectly
”objective” vantage on the text (characterization in the realist
mode is actually the most subjective, authoritarian, and
deterministic conceivable).

The notion that the all of the determinants of plot and
characterization in the novel are generated according to
distribution functions and statistical tables designed to produce a
kind of bounded indeterminacy is represented in the character of
Penn McCaffree, the UBA's crypticly detached chancellor, who
spends most of his time at television monitors surveying the league

and tabulating data:

”You see, Woody. it's one thing to say that each of these players and each of
these teams is interested in maximizing its expected utility, and another to
know--even for them to know--what that utility really is.”

"How's that, Penn?” Went right by him. Conversations with Fenn
McCaffree these days got pretty one-sided. He was forever yakking about
distribution functions, the canonical form of M, compound decision problems,
relations of dominance; like Fenn had somehow forgot the game was baseball (p.
146).

As the "chancellor" of Henry's league, Fenn is an intermediary and
surrogate for Henry himself, just as Henry is a broad caricature of
Coover in his role as author, a metafictional convention which
recalls the surrogate author figures of Hamete Benengeli in Don
Quijote and Melquiades in Cien Afios de Soledad. And like

103

Aureliano in the final chapters of Garcia Marquez's novel, Fenn
appears to transcend the league's contextual frames, entering into a
metafictional complicity with Henry, whose authorial perspective

on the UBA reveals the artificial and essentially arbitrary codes
which generate its very existence. .

Nevertheless, while it is a rendering of his metafictional
awareness of the fact that he is merely a fiction inscribed in the
"text" of the UBA, Fenn's basically "paranoid” connection with
Henry's statistical methodology is also emblematic of Coover's
postmodern aesthetic sensibility. As an absent author who
operates the secret controls in his funhouse creation,8 ”giving over"
his creative authority to the whimsical indeterminacy of language
games, and in his manipulation of a text whose information
functions in excess of system9 (represented by Fenn's paranoid
surveillance of every aspect of the UBA's operations, doomed to
failure since he is a part of the system he is trying to understand
and control), Coover shows a basic affinity with many of his
recogizably postmodernist contemporaries, such as Thomas Pynchon
and Donald Barthelme. As Patrick O'Donnell notes in an article on
Don Delillo's Running Dog, paranoia (in a formalized sense of the
word) is one of the basic paradigms which permeates and

characterizes postmodernist culture:

In the 19603, during the height of the Vietnam war, the disease of
preference amongst liberals and radicals of every stripe was paranoia. . . .
Subsequently assimilated into the cultural mainstream in the post-Vietnam era,
paranoia has become a' social bond, a way for the American body politic to assert
its fragile and fictive unity over against [sic] the various forms of
disintegration and indeterminacy it is experiencing in an era of late capitalism.

104

Conspiracies. real and imagined. abound, their nets so far-flung as to create a
kind of hermeneutic comfort for the common reader: ”everything is connected”;

"it all makes sense.“ Alignments seem to shift from day to day, contexts change.
but one of the more strident factors of present-day American life is that there

are always more connections than one expected. . . . The old networks dissolve,
creating some disorientation, but new connections are welcomed for the ease
with which they can be assimilated into, confirm, and expand rapidly growing
systems of communication and exchange (p. 56, The Centennial Review, Volume

XXX/V NO. 1 ).

Parodoxically, the systemic, totalizing impulse of paranoia
becomes a way of coping with and understanding a fragmented
matrix of conflicting codes and language systems, a strategy
represented and reiterated at various levels in Coover's novel--for
instance, in Fenn's attempt to understand the statistical
methodology of his creator, in Henry's attempt to adapt to the
stifling and dehumanizing, bureaucratic mechanism of his job as an
accountant (his boss's name is Zifferblatt, German for 'clockface"),
and in Coover's whole conception of history as a fictive net masking
itself as a monolithic, intelligible continuity.10 in place of the
systematic unity, totalized meaning, and structural determinism of
traditional realist and modernist texts, Coover deploys a game of
chance, playfully suggesting not only that narrative indeterminacy
and textual heterogeneity activate a metafictional awareness of
frame structures, but that the frames which structure our
understanding of history and extratextual reality are themselves
shifting conventions, the arbitrarily defined interstices of
competing language systems.

In this respect, the final chapter, in which Henry abandons the
dice in order to replay Damon. Rutherford's final game exactly as it

originally unfolded (but with players several generations younger),

105

is not merely a metafictional dramatization of a self-aware
character's nightmarish experience when confined within a
perfectly deterministic narration, but an allegory on our present
cultural impasse in the dying “wake" of modernity and our inability
to think outside of its brittle modes of representation. As the
players begin to adopt their predetermined roles, they gradually
slip into an attitude of tragic fatalism. For instance, Paul Trench
ruminates on the absurdity of his situation, which has him slated to

impersonate Damon Rutherford's catcher, Royce lngram:

Beyond each game, he sees another. and yet another, in endless and hopeless
succession. He hits a ground ball to third. is thrown out. Or he beats the throw.
What difference, in the terror of eternity, does it make? He stares at the sky,
beyond which is more sky, overwhelming in its enormity. He, Paul Trench. is
utterly absorbed in it, entirely disappears, is Paul Trench no longer, is nothing
at all: so why does he even walk up there. . . . Each day: the dread. And when,
after being distracted by the excitement of a game, he returns at night to the
dread, it is worse than ever, compounded with shame and regret. He wants to
quit--but what does he mean, 'quit"? The game? Ute? Could you separate
them? (p. 238)

The fact that this grim ritual is to be acted out once a year (it is
already "Damonsday CLVll") makes it an alarming image of the
endless reiteration of a kind of tragic inevitability in certain forms
of modern discourse, a totalizing structuralism which ossifies the
living present within a monolithic vision of history and paralyzes
any metaconscious inquiry into the arbitrary and self-delimiting
interstices of posmodernist discourse. Moreover, its presence in
the structurally indeterminate and ludic framework of Coover's
novel underscores the potential of novelistic dialogism,

heteroglossia and metafictional frame transgression in activating a

106

formal and systematic deconstruction of the old methodology. In
keeping with the metafictional novel's tradition of formal

self-criticism, technical self-awareness, and generic elasticity,
Rayuela and The Universal Baseball Association both draw upon the
expansive structural possibilities opened by a ludic aesthetic
sensibility in radically critiquing and appropriating brittle forms of
discourse, much as Don Quijote had at the very dawn of the modern

age.

Notes

Chapter One

1. i am borrowing and echoing the familiar poststructuralist coinage (as in Derrida's
The Ear of the Other), but there is also an intended resonance with Bakhtin's concept of

'other-languagedness" [inajazycie ].

2. There are many excellent examples of novelistic poems and books from the Middle
Ages which are framed-narrative tale cycles (Boccaccic's Decameran, Don Juan
Manuel's El Conde Lucanor, Juan Ruiz's Libra de Buen Amar, etc.), but a framed
narrative such as Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales never overtly flaunts Its own
narrative artifice. Even where the description of the story-telling characters is highly
rhetorical and artificial (as much of Chaucer's poetry is) the ontological and narrative
frames separating the characters from their stories and their own author (Chaucer)
are never deliberately or overtly transgressed. Nevertheless, as complex narrative
frameworks encompassing several levels of fictionality and narrative rhetoric. they
should be considered as important precursors to the novel and its metafictional
tendencies.

3. The 'effacement of presence” is signified in the sous rature (”under erasure”)
practice of writing and then crossing out a key word, such as Being, and retaining both
the word and the mark of its ”erasure.“ A textual play which Derrida adapts from
Heidegger, it signifies the trace of an absence, the necessity of writing a concept
enmeshed in the myth of self-presence and logocentrism while simultaneously negating
its mythical origin, etc. In terms of Beckett's disembodied ”voices.“ one could say that
the text “speaks.“ signifies the trace of authorial voice, but effaces its origin in an

actual author by stripping itself of the antecedent pronoun.

4. The “transcendental signified“ is a entity, such as Being, which preconditions and is
presupposed by all language, but is itself independent of any particular signifier. it is
"ontotheologicai' insofar as it merges the idea of Being (onto) with that of God (theo)
and the logos (-logy), respectively, into a mythical structure of self-presence,
omnipresence, and the embodiment of truth in the word (the essence of 'logos'). A
deconstruction of this concept would hinge upon the arbitrary nature of bath sign and
referent. demonstrating that the notion of a signified meaning ”beyond” language is
merely another metaphorlc extension of the logocentric privileging of oral discourse
over writing.

5. Both of these consequences of lntertextuality are described in a similar manner by
Derrida in Of Grammatalagy. Of the transgression of the category ”work” or “book", he
writes: "The idea of the book is the idea of a totality, finite or infinite. of the signifier;

this totality of the signifier cannot be a totality, unless a totality constituted by the
signified preexists it, supervises its inscriptions and its signs, and is independent of it

in its ideality. The idea of the book, which always refers to a natural totality, is
profoundly alien to the sense of writing. It is the encyclopedic protection of theology
and logocentrism against the disruption of writing, against its aphoristic energy, and,

as I shall specify later. against difference in general. If I distinguish the text from the
book, i shall say that the destruction of the book, as it is now under way in all domains.

107

108

denudes the surface of the text (p. 18).“ And though he does not refer to the ”death of
the author" in contemporary writing, Derrida does allude to a similar relationship
between writing and death: 'But however important it might be. and were it in fact
universal or called upon to become so, that particular model which is phonetic writing
does not exist. . . . Even before speaking, as i shall do further on. of a radical and a
priori infidelity, one can already remark its massive phenomena in mathematical

script or in punctuation, in spacing in general, which it is difficult to consider as

simple accessories of writing. That a speech supposedly alive can lend itself to spacing
in its own writing is what relates it originarily to its own death (p. 39).”

6. "Endlessly variegated. though basically undifferentiated . . ." refers to Foucault's
notion of ”repetition' as a discursive mode which extends itself indefinitely,
paradoxically duplicating itself in an undifferentiated, acategorlcal though assymetrlcal
manner. In ”Language to infinity,“ Foucault states that ”Writing, in Western culture,
automatically dictates that we place ourselves in the virtual space of

self-representation and reduplication; since writing refers not to a thing but to speech,

a work of language only advances more deeply into the intangible density of the mirror,
calls forth the possible and impossible infinity. ceaselessly strives after speech,
maintains it beyond the death which condemns it, and trees a murmuring stream . . . (p.
56).“ In 'Theatrum Philosophlcum' he describes repetition's abandonment to the
dissolution of categories: 'At a stroke we risk being surrounded not by a marvellous
multiplicity of differences. but by equivalences, ambiguities. . . . To think within the
context of categories is to know the truth so that it can be distinguished from the false;
to think 'acategorically' is to confront a black stupidity (pp. 188-189).“ Foucault

thus describes a type of discourse characterized by the double movement of replication
and difference. acategorization and stupefaction, recursion and infinite extension.

Chapter Two

1. This dual quality in metafiction of disorientation and a laying bare of artifice is
encapsulated in Victor Shkiovsky's notion of ”defamiliarization.“ Lee Lemon and Marion
Reis explain this concept in Russian Formalist Criticism in the following manner:
”When reading ordinary prose. we are likely to feel that something is wrong if we find
ourselves noticing the individual words as words. The purpose of art, according to
Shkiovsky, is to force us to notice. Since perception is usually too automatic, art
develops a variety of techniques to impede perception or, at least. to call attention to
themselves. Thus 'Art is a way of experiencing the artfulness of an object; the object is
not important'. . . . According to Shkiovsky, the chief technique for promoting such
perception is 'defamiliarlzation.‘ it is not so much a device as a result obtainable by
any number of devices. A novel point of view, as Shkiovsky points out, can make a
reader perceive by making the familiar seem strange. Wordplay, deliberately
roughened rhythm, or figures of speech can all have the same effect (pp. 4-5)." The
systematic deployment of this technique in Tristram Shandy led Shkiovsky to the
surprising conclusion that it is “the most typical novel in world literature,“ meaning, I
suppose, that the process of defamiliarization is characteristic of the novel (just as,

for Bakhtin, the novel is inherently dialogic).

2. There is an intriguing, if oblique, parallel between the static, painterly quality of

this scene in Don Quijote and the final shot in Federico Fellini's Fellini Satyrican. As
the camera pulls back from Encolpius and his companions. their faces gradually merge
with identical images in a fresco painting on a partially destroyed wall. This final

109

poetic image is suggestive of the fractured distance over which we perceive the
characters of the Satyricon (a Roman “novel“ which is extant only in fragments). As
Cervantes does with the battle scene between don Quijote and the Biscayan, Fellini
exposes the framed quality of his cinematic narrative in his remove to a critical and
self-conscious distance from its characters (Fellini is well known for his
“metacinematic' films, especially “81/2“).

3. In actuality, the number of narrators implied by Cervantes is indeterminate, for his
references to them are rather ambiguous. John Jay Allen. in a footnote to his Oatedra
edition of the novel, places the number of narrators at only two (Cervantes and Hamete
Benengelfl, presuming that the “second author“ mentioned at the end of l. 8 is a
reference to Cervantes himself.

4. Other instances of a Chinese box frame structure can be dlscemed in the various
interpolated tales, which are fictions with the larger fiction of the novel itself. In fact,

at one point in the captive's tale there are as many as five contextual frames enclosing
eachcther in concentric fashion (Zoraida and her father are conversing in Arabic, and
their dialogue is translated and related by the captive, whose tale is in turn rendered in
Hamete Benengeli's chronicle and translated by the Toledan morisco for the “second
author,“ and finally related by Cervantes in his novel). Although the frames in this
structure are not transgressed. it nevertheless indicates the sophistication of
Cervantes' narrative technique, his acute awareness of the importance of framing
devices in structuring the readers perception of a tale.

5. Cervantes actually offers the reader several variants of don Ouijote's former name

in the course of the novel. For instance in I. 5. Cervantes has a minor character refer

to him as 'Seftor Ouijana,“ to which Allen (the editor) appends the following footnote:
“Ouejana, segun 'conjeturas verosimiles,‘ y Ouijada segun 'los autores.‘ don Quijote dira
mas adelante que desciende 'en linea recta de varon' de Gutierre Ouijada (I, 49), pero en
su lecho de muerte se Ilamara Alonso Quijano (p. 125).“ [Quejana, according to
“plausible conjectures.“ and Ouijada according to “the authors,“ don Quijote will say

later on that he descends “in a direct male line“ from Gutierre Ouijada (I. 49), but on

his deathbed he will call himself Alonso Quijano]

This raises the question of what may be termed “the problematlcs of the personal
name,“ which Foucault discusses in the following terms: “Obviously not a pure and
simple reference, the proper name (and the author's name as well) has other than
indicative functions. it is more than a gesture. a finger pointed at someone; it is, to a
certain extent. the equivalent of a description. . . . The proper name and the name of an
author oscillate between the poles of description and designation, and, granting that they
are linked to what they name. they are not totally determined either by their
descriptive or designative functions (p. 121).“ John Barth describes a similar
duplicity of the proper name in “Ambrose his Mark," a story in Mum:

“As toward one's face, one's body. one's self, one feels complexly toward the name he's
called by, which too one had no hand in choosing. it was to be my fate to wonder at that
moniker, relish and revile it, ignore it, stare it out of countenance into hieroglyph and
gibber, and come finally if not to embrace at least to accept it with the cold neutrality of
self-recognition, whose expression is a thin-Iipped smile. Vanity frets about his

name, Pride vaunts it. Knowledge wretches at its sound, Understanding sighs; all live
outside it. knowing full well that l and my sign are neither one nor quite two (p. 34).“

My point is that Cervantes highlights a textual duplicity by playing on don Ouijote's
various names. Couched in the chivalric rhetoric of historically indeterminate names
or multiple titles of nobility, the multiplicity of personal names suggest don Ouijote's

110

complexity as a character. but also his essentially arbitrary fictive identity. .

6. Walter Kaufmann describes Nietzsche's references to don Quijote in a footnote in his
book, Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist: “Nietzsche loved Don Quixote
and tended to identify with him. He censured Cervantes for having made his hero look
ridiculous. . . . Nietzsche protests: 'Yes, he does not even spare his hero the dreadful
illumination about his own state at the end of his life. . . .' In another note he again
refers to Don Ouixote's 'horrible and and comments: 'Mankind is ever threatened by

this ignominious denial of oneself at the end of one's striving (p. 71)." It would
appear that Nietzsche subscribed to the Romantic conception of don Quijote as a tragic
figure, and objects to his “ignominious“ end on the grounds that it is too demeaning and a
senseless repudiation of his stoic “quixotism,“ rather than any sense that the
metafictional duality which has bifurcated don Quijote's personality throughout is
inexplicably settled on the side of a realistic “disillusionment.“

7. There is a remarkable image in the “novela del curiosa impertlnente“ [story of the
ill-advised curiosity] which suggests this complex dual movement within the

experience of desengario: “También alabo este segundo soneto Anselmo coma habia hecho
el primero, y desta manera iba afiadiendo eslabcn a eslabdn a la cadena con que se
enlazaba y trababa su deshonra, pues cuando mas Lotario le deshonraba. entonces le
decia que estaba mas honrado. Y can estc, todos ics escalones que Camila bajaba hacia el
centro de su menosprecio, los subia, en la opinidn de su marido. hacia la cumbre de la
virtud y de su buena fama (pp. 416-417).“ [Anselmo praised this sonnet as he had the

first, and in this manner he continued to add link on link to the chain that he was

forging for his own dishonor, for the more Lotario dishonored him, the more he

convinced himself of his spotless honor. And likewise. the deeper Camila sank in her
gradual descent into infamy, the higher she rose in her husband's estimation toward the
topmost pinnacles of virtue and renown] The image is quintessentially baroque in its

its contrapuntal play on the multiple senses of desengafio. Anselmo is sinking deeper

and deeper into illusions. but this is also the artifice In which he depicts Camila as the
pinnacle of virtue; and conversely, Camila is thoroughly disillusioned, but continues to
weave the artifice of her husband's deception by pretending to be virtuous. The sum

effect is a contrapuntal pattern of crossweavings between truth and illusion, which can

be related to another baroque keyword which figures prominently in the storyuel

laberinto [the labyrinth].

8. Foucault offers a powerful framework for understanding this historical shift in the
autonomy of the author in his essay “What is an Author?“: “. . . the 'author-function' is
not universal or constant in all discourse. Even within our civilization, the same types
of texts have not always required authors; there was a time when those texts which we
now call 'Iiterary' (stories. folk tales, epics, and tragedies) were accepted, circulated.
and valorized without any question about the identity of their author. Their anonymity
was ignored because their real or supposed age was a sufficient guarantee of their
authenticity (p. 125).“ This is precisely what we observe in the Ourjote, where
Cervantes adopts the brittle rhetoric of the cabal/arias as ancient, “true histories,“
though the authenticity of his work clearly resides In the narrative and rhetorical
invention of its author.

Chapter Three
1. The chapter begins as follows: “Alias despues. en su lecho de agonia, Aureliano

111

Segundo habia de recordar la lluviosa tarde de junio en que entre en el dormitorio a
conocer a su primer hijo. Aunque era languldo y lIoran, sin ningun rasgo de un

Buendia, no tuvo que pensar dos veces para ponerle nombre. 'Se ilamara Jose Arcadio.'
dijo (p. 228).“ [Years later, on his deathbed, Aureliano Segundo would remember the
rainy afternoon in June when he went into the bedroom to meet his first son. Although

he was languid and weepy, with no mark of a Buendia, he did not have to think twice
about naming him. “We'll call him Jose Arcadia.“ he said.]

In addition to the temporal/textual displacement suggested by the rhetoric of the
opening sentence. the fact that they name him Jose Arcadia, “without having to think
twice,“ is a metafictional signal that the characters themselves understand the text's
structuring according to a recursive language of excess and repetition. In his
introduction to the novel, Joaquin Marco explains the function of the repetition of
proper names in the following manner: “Como indica Graciela Maturo, 'la historia de las
Buendia funciona. si, e nivel de la narraclcn, como expreslcn esquematlzada del
desarrollo de la humanidad a lo largo del tiempo, y mas restrictamente. como historia
. del Pueblo Eiegido desde su Alianza fundacional hasta el Final profetlzado. No obstante
tal interpretacidn, el clan Buendia, que algunos criticos han reconstruido
trabajosamente indagando sus derivaciones, variantes y repeticiones, sera objeto de una
consideracién no-cronoldgica y por lo tanta no-genealdglca.‘ La estructura se organlza
asi en un presente absoluto en el que las personajes se organizan en relaciones binarias
o temarias (p. 53).“ [As Graciela Maturo points out, “the history of the Buendia
family functions at the level of the narration, to be certain, as a schematic expression
of humanity's development over the course of time, and in a more restricted sense, as
the history of the Chosen People since their foundational alliance until their prophesied
end. Notwithstanding this interpretation, the Buendia clan. which some critics have
reconstructed, laboriously investigating its derivations. variants and repetitions. could
be the object of a non-chronological, and therefore, non-genealogical study.“ In this
manner, the structure organizes itself in an absolute present in which the characters
organize themselves in binary or ternary relations.) As Maturo and Marco recognize.
the “history“ of the Buendia family at a certain level reveals its fundamental
anachronism, a level which I recognize as a metafictional perspective on the static.
“spatial“ qualities of the text as a whole.

2. There is a passage in the final pages of the novel which explicitly descrfiaes this
metafictional vantage on the text as a static whole. At one point in Aureliano's
decipherment of Melquiades parchments, he discovers that the events they describe are
organized according to an unusual scheme: “La proteccian final, que Aureliano empezaba
a vislumbrar cuando se deja confundir por el amor de Amaranta Ursula, radicaba en que
Melquiades no habia ordenado ics hechos en el tiempo convencional de los hombres, sino
que concentrc uh siglo de episodios cotidianos, de modo que todos coexistieran en un
instante (p. 446).“ [The final protection, which Aureliano had begun to glimpse when
he let himself be confused by the love of Amaranta Ursula, was based on the fact that
Melquiades hadn't put events in the order of man's conventional time, but had
concenirated a century of daily episodes in such a way that they all coexisted in one
instant.

In view of the novel's systematic concern with the artifice of Its own construction,
the metafictional double entente of this passage is unmistakable. The illusion of
narrative action is sometimes so convincing that we may forget that the novel is
ultimately a static stmcture of written words, a reality which Aureliano's encounter
with his purely textual and fictive existence underscores.

3. The final Aureliano, the offspring of Aureliano and Amaranta Ursula's incestuous

112

affair, meets a gruesome end just before Aureliano's decipherment of Melquiades
parchments causes the novel to literally consume itself: “Y entonces vio aI nllio. Era un
pellejo hinchado y reseco, que todas las hormigas del mundo iban arrastrando
trabajosamente hacia sus madrigueras por el sendero de piedras del jardin. Aureliano
no pudo moverse. No porque lo hublera paralizado el estupor, sino porque on equal
instante prodigioso se le revelaron las olaves definitivas de Melquiades, y vio el
epigrafe de los pergamlnos perfectamente ordenado en el tiempo y el espaclo de los
hombres: El primero de la estirpe esta amarrado en un arbol y al ultimo se lo estan
comiendo las honm'gas (p. 446).“ [And then he saw the child. it was a dry and bloated
bag of skin that all the ants in the world were laboriously dragging toward their holes
along the stone path in the garden. Aureliano couldn't mave. Not because he was
paralyzed with horror but because at that prodigious moment Melquiades' final keys
were revealed to him, and he saw the epigraph of the parchments perfectly placed in the
order of man's time and space: The first of ”to line is tied to a tree and the last is being
eaten by ants. ] The structure of the prophesy mirrors that of the novel as a whole--an
hermetic, self-consuming cycle. Also. the incestuous nature of the final Aureliano's
parentage suggests a closed genetic system which, like the novel itself, generates its
own destruction.

4. i am thinking in particular of D. P. Gallagher, who comments on this dimension of
Garcia Marquez's fiction in his essay on Latin American literature in Spain: A
Companion to Spanish Studies: “Very often interpreters and critics of Latin American
writing merely assert that most Spanish American novelists at some point or other
draw on fantasy in their writing, but they do not usually ask themselves why. The
influence of surrealism is sometimes offered as a crucial factor. Yet, barring Asturias,
fantasy as deployed by Spanish American novelists does not on the whole have surrealist
roots any more than that of say, Kafka. does. . . . At one point in Cien arias a strike in an
American banana plantation is violently crushed. and the corpses of the strikers are
whisked away by train, never to be seen again. Worse. it is subsequently asserted in
school textbooks not only that the strike never took place but indeed that the banana
plantation never existed. Here at last, then, we have a context in which the presence of
fantasy in Spanish American fiction can be understood. For where governments and
foreign companies can cavalierly change reality, who can say what is real any longer?
And is not the reality of Colombia more fantastic than any fairy-tale? The novel's
descriptions of the interminable Colombian civil wars leave no doubt that it is (pp.
463464).“

Although I have chosen not to focus on the sociohistorical factors which have
conspired to give rise to the metafictional novel, i think Gallagher's insight into the
cultural atmosphere of Garcia Marquez's native Colombia does much to elucidate his
technical achievements as a self-conscious novelist. Indeed. I have argued elsewhere
that American metafiction of the sixties and seventies was largely inspired by the
atmosphere of avant-gardism which permeated its cultural scene. As Barth notes in the
introduction to Last in the Funhouse, “The High Sixties, like the Roaring Twenties. was
a time of more than usual ferment in American social, political, and artistic life. Our
unpopular war in Vietnam, political assassinations. race riots. the hippie
counterculture, pop art, mass poetry readings. street theater, vigorous avant-gardism
in all the arts. together with dire predictions not only of the death of the novel but of
the moribundity of the print medium in the electronic global village-those flavored
the air we breathed then, along with occasional tear gas and other contaminants. One
may sniff traces of that air in the Funhouse (“Fiction for Print, Tape, Live Voice“). I
myself found it more invigorating than disturbing (pp. vii-viii).“

Given the “magic realism“ of Garcia Marquez's metafiction. it seems plausible that

113

the cultural preconditions for a fantastic reality in fiction existed in the American
sixties and seventies as well.

5. There is an intriguing parallel between the rhetoric of this phrase and that of a

similar passage in the first part of Don Quijote: “Admirado quodc el candnlgo do air la
mezcla que don Quijote hacia do verdades y mentiras. . . (pp. 569-570).“ [The canon
was astonished at hearing the hodgepodge of truths and lies that don Quijote uttered. . . .]
Ironically, don Ouijote's “hodgepodge of truths and lies“ points to the fundamental
duplicity at the core of Cervantes' metafictional technique, his much of a

rhetoric of chivalric “history“ in an openly fictive text.

6. What I have identified as an essentially modernist and postmodernist tendency to
prolong discourse against a kind of impingent void can be seen as a more fundamental
characteristic of narrative art generally. As Joaquin Marco remarks in his
introduction to Cien Arias do Soledad, Garcia Marquez's incessant struggle against the
death of his own novelistic discourse can be viewed in the context of a classic narrative
paradigm, the legend of Scheherazade: “Se lucha tamblén [la novela do Garcia Marquez]
contra la muerte, a través do la imaginacion, en una conocida muestra do literatura
tradicional y popular, Las mil y una nachos. Ante la posibilidad do su ejecucion,
Shahrazad hlia un cuenta cada nacho. La narraclon, supono. pues, continuldad y vida (p.
30).“

[{Garcla Marquez's novel} struggles also against death. by means of the imagination,
in a familiar display of traditional and popular literature, The Thousand and One Nights.
Before the possibility of her execution, Scheherazade spins a tale each night.
Narrative art presupposes. then, continuity and life.]

In light of Marco's insight. it isn't surprising that Barth. who appears concerned
with the intertextual continuity and self-referentiality of novelistic discourse in all of
his works, should choose the legend of Scheherazade as the guiding theme and
frame-structure of his own Chimera.

7. For instance, consider these passages from the opening pages of his first novel, The

Floating Opera: “To someone like myself. whose literary activities have been confined

since 1920 mainly to legal briefs and Inquiry-writing, the hardest thing about the task

at hand--viz., the explanation of a day in 1937 when I changed my mind--is getting

into it. . . . For example. I've got this book started now, and though we're probably a

good way from the story yet. at least we're headed toward it, and I for one have learned

to content myself with that. . . . To carry the 'meandering stream' conceit a bit further,

if I may: it has always seemed to me, in the novels that l've read now and then, that

those authors are asking a great deal of their readers who start their stories furiously,

in the middle of things, rather than backing or sidiing slowly into them. Such a plunge

into someone else's life and world. like a plunge into the Choptank River in mid-March,

has, it seems to me, little of pleasure in it. No, come along with me, reader, and don't

fear for your weak heart. . . . Good heavens. how does one write a novell“ (pp. 1-2)
Several characteristics of this passage recall Steme's self-conscious rhetoric in

Tristram Shandy. Like Tristram, Barth's narrator prefers a gradual introduction into

the novel's action (even If it is merely a pretext for meandering digressions on

narrative technique), a rhetorical familiarity with the reader. and an ironic

deprecation of his own powers as a novelist.

8. Barth encapsulates his understanding of the textual complicity between history and
fiction in a supeme ironic reference to “Motteux's Don Quixote“ (p. 16). Cervantes'
novel may indeed have been pirated under a translator or publishers name in the late

114

sixteenth century. but at least one effect of Barth's reference is to underscore his own
imposturo as Ebenezer Cooke's “chroniclor.“ Also. the very mention of Don Quijote. a
work In which literary imposturo and parody is elaborated to an unprecedented degree.
reinforces the irony of Barth's reference.

Chapter Four

1. The basic figure evoked In this structure is that of a Mdbius strip. As the title of the
section containing these two chapters suggests, they illuminate eachcther “do otras
lados“ [from other sides]. just as the two sides of a strip of paper run into a single
infinite loop in the Mdbius strip.

Barth employs the same figure in the actual material structure of his
“Frame-story“ in Lost in the Funhouse, and comments on it in the introduction: “The
reader may skip all these [prefatary] frames and go directly to the first story . . .
called 'Frame-Tale.’ it happens to be, I believe, the shortest short story in the English
language (ten words): on the other hand, it's endless (p. vii).“ (When assembled as a
Mobius strip, the story reads, “Once upon a time there was a story that began Once upon
a time. . . and so on ad infinitum.)

2. As Amords notes in the introduction, one of Cortazar's mast persistent aesthetic
principles is the rendering of description and perception in general in terms of
“figures,“ and it is announced as early as his first novel: “Es una intuicidn que aparece
ya on Las premios: 'Aili tuvo por primera vez una intuican que me sigue persiguiendo,
de la que se habia en Rayuela y que yo quisiera poder desarrollar ahora en un Iibro. Es
Ia nocion do lo que yo llama las figuras. . . . Pienso que todos nosotros componemos
figuras. Par ejemplo, en este momenta podemos estar formanda parte de una estructura
que se continua quizas a dosciontos metros do aqul, donde a lo mejor hay otras tantas
personas que no nos canocen coma nosotros no las canocemos. Siento caninuamente la
posibilidad do Iigazonos, do circuitas que so cierran y que nos interrelacionan al margen
do toda explicacicn racional y de toda relacian humana (p. 67).'“ [it is an intuition
which already appears in Las premios: “There I had for the first time an intuition
which continues to pursue me, one which is discussed in Rayuela and which i would now
like to develop in a book. It's the notion of what I call figures. . . . i think that we all
compose figures. For example. at this moment we may be forming part of a structure
that continues perhaps two hundred meters from here, where perhaps there are as
many people who don't know us as people we don't know. I continually feel the
possibility of bands, of circuits that close up and interrelate us at the margin of all
rational explanation and all human relations.“]

Although Amarés never cites a relation between Cartazar's discursive methods and
deconstruction, I think that there is a striking parafiol in this passage with Derrida's
notion of writing as a network of signification in which signs refer continually to yet
other signs, casting an expansive and regressive net whose margins and interstices open
the possibility of semantic dispersal and alterity.

3. i am paraphrasing an article by Thomas Carmichael entitled, “John Barth's Letters:
History. Representation and Postmodernism,“ in which he applies Barthesian ideas
about the linguistic structure of historical discourse to Barth's “historical“ fiction: “in

his 1967 essay 'The Discourse of Histary,’ Roland Barthes reminds us that the process
of historiographic signification is 'essentially an ideological elaboration. or, to be more
specific, an imaginary eiaboration' in which the historian endeavors 'to fill the void of
pure series. . . . Hence, we arrive at that paradox which governs the entire pertinence

115

of historical discourse (in relation to other types of discourse): fact never has any but

a linguistic existence (as the term of discourse), yet everything happens as if this
linguistic existence were merely a pure and simple 'copy' of another existence, situated
in an extra-textual field, the 'real" (138). For Barthes, of course, the 'real' enters

the field of discourse as a linguistic sleight of hand, or what he famously terms the
'reality effect' (p. 65, Mosaic 21/4).“ As Carmichael recognizes in his citation of
Barthes' poststructuralist conception of historical discourse, Barth's “historical“

fiction is really a form of pseudohistory which reiterates the patterns of historical
contingency within a purely textual field of representation.

4. Waugh expresses this Idea in Metafictlan under the heading of “The linguistic
universe: reality as construct“ (I cited this passage in a slightly different context on
page twenty of the first chapter): “Frame analysis and play theory are areas of
contemporary social investigation which illumine the practice of metafiction and show
the sensitivity of its response to cultural change. They are each, however. aspects of a
broader shift in thought and practice whereby reality has increasingly come to be seen
as a construct. Hegel, in fact, suggested that history be contemplated as a work of art,
for in retrospect it 'reads' like a novel: its end is known. Metafiction suggests not only
that writing history is a fictional act. ranging events conceptually through language to
form a world-model, but that history itself is invested, like fiction, with interrelating
plots which appear to interact independently of human design (pp. 48-49).“

As we saw in the third chapter. the structuring of history according to
“interrelating plots“ is abundantly evident in The Sat-Weed Factor, and is explicitly
thematized in the elaborate conspiracies and counter-conspiracies of Burlingame.
Coodo. and Baltimore.

5. This notion of the fictive nature of being is brilliantly and concretely expressed in a
scene early in the novel, in which Horacio, addressing la Mega, “sketches“ her face by
closing his eyes and tracing with his finger: “Taco tu boca. con un deda taco el barde de
tu boca, vay dibujandola coma si saliera do mi mana, camo si por primera vez tu boca so
entreabriera, y me basta cerrar ics ojos para deshacerlo todo y recamonzar, hago nacer
cada vez la boca que deseo, la boca que mi mano elige y to dibuja en la cara, una boca
olegida entre todas. con soberana libertad olegida par mi para dibujarla con mi mano en
tu cara, y que por un azar que no busca comprender coincide exactamente con tu boca
que sonrie por debajo do la que mi mano te dibuja (p. 160).“ [l touch your mouth, I

touch the edge of your mouth with my finger. I am drawing it as if it were something my
hand was sketching, as if for the first time your mouth opened a little. and all I have to

do is close my eyes to erase it and start all over again, every time i can make the mouth

I want appear, the mouth which my hand chooses and sketches on your face. and which
by some chance that i do not seek to understand coincides exactly with your mouth which
smiles beneath the one my hand is sketching on you.]

6. Amoros cites in his introduction Cartazar's explicit declaration of this aesthetic
valoration of textual indeterminacy and the reader's participation: “Antes, habia
eiogiado la indeterminacion en el arto; ahora pretende, a la voz, abrir la obra y hacer
pafnicigar activamente a un Iector que no so descancierte par las meandros de is

re BXI n.

Ese Iibro abierto es la que ambiciana Cortazar: 'toda eso que III: has pensado me llena
de cantento, es como una especie do recompense para mi porque el hecho de dejar el
Iibro abierto y encantrar en tu caso tantas pasibles opcianes es exactamente lo que yo
busca con mis Iectores' (pp. 42-43).“

[Before. he had lauded indeterminacy in art; now he seeks at once to open the work

116

and to make a reader who isn't discancerted by the meandering reflections actively
participate.

That open book is what Cortazar aspires to: “all of that which you have thought fills
me with contentment, its like a kind of recompense for me, because the act of leaving
the book open and finding in your case so many possible options is exactly what I look
for in my readers.“]

7. William Kerrigan has commented very insightfuliy on the relation between
deconstruction (and other forms of modern theory) and a variety of transcendental
idealism which operates according to the Miltonlc paradigm of a lost paradise. in an
essay entitled, “Milton's place in intellectual history.“ he describes Milton's impact on
contemporary philosophy: “There are three paradises by the time we have arrived at
the concluding Expulsion: Eden. the lost paradise: the eschatological 'Paradise'
(12.464) toward which Christ leads us: and in between the 'paradise within'
(12.587), the interior soul of mortal man cultivated by Christian virtues. At the
Expulsion, man bears within him a symbol born of paradise lost and pointed toward
paradise regained. In Romantic idealism . . . the two paradises on either side of the
interior one reappear in the naive oneness prior to systematic thought and the
saphisticated oneness regained at its completion. The break characteristic of
twentieth-century philosophy occurs when the two framing paradises drop away,
leaving us only a paradise within, the symbol of a home that reason never had and can
never hope to find. There Is just wandering. just discourse or ecriture.

Exile then becomes the sole condition of thought. Alienation or homelessness, the
philosophical afterlife of Milton's summary symbol, Is among the pervasive signs of
modern culture. We find it in Marxism, in Freudian ideas such as 'displacement' and
the 'uncanny' (unheimlich, 'un-homely'), in Derrida's 'deferral', 'difference', and
'difference', and conspicuously in early Heidegger, the ponderous magician of
philosophical symbolism who preached alienation with an almost Gnostic intensity (pp.
265-266).“

8. i am paraphrasing the end of Barth's “Lost in the Funhouse,“ where the bewildered
protagonist, lost in a literal funhouse, demonstrates that he has also lost his way in the
funhouse of Barth's metafictional labyrinth, and vows to become such an author

himself: “He envisions a truly astonishing funhouse, incredibly complex yet utterly
controlled from a great central switchboard like the console of a pipe organ. Nobody had
enough imagination. He could design such a place himself, wiring and all, and he's only
thirteen years old. He would be its operator: panel lights would show what was up in
every cranny of its cunning of its multifarious vastness; a switch-flick would ease this
fellow's way, complicate that's, to balance things out; if anyone seemed lost or
frightened. all the operator had to do was.

He wishes he had never entered the funhouse. But he has. Then he wishes he were
dead. But he's not. Therefore he will construct funhouses for others and be their secret
operator--though he would rather be among the lovers for whom funhouses are
designed (p. 97).“

The image of the author as a “secret operator“ is quintessentially postmodernist in
its suggestion of a form of discourse from which he is “absent,“ yet which everywhere
carries the traces of his activity as a metafictional artificer. (The image of the
switchboard has a parallel in Fenn's television monitors. and not coincidentally, both
Lost in the Funhouse and The Universal Baseball Association were published in 1968,
a pivotal year for “experimental.“ postmodernist writing.)

9. Malcolm Bradbury sees this as a primary characteristic of Thomas Pynchon's work.

117

In a chapter on postmodernism in his book, The Modern American Novel, he comments
on the structure of Pynchon's V. : “Stencil and Profane are effectively the two
compositional principles of the book, the pattem-maker and the man of contingency.

the constructive and the deconstructive. They hunt the lettered sign and seek in some
fashion to construct or elude the world, but their quest is less a discovery of meaning
than a loss of meanings, or rather a disorderly and chaotic excess of them, for the book
proceeds by proliferating data in excess of possible system (p. 176).“

10. In several passages in The Universal BasebalIAssaclatlan, Coover exhibits
affinities with the parodic pseudohistoricism of Garcia Marquez and Barth. At one point
the narrator puzzles over the historical revisionism of a book on the “Damonsday'
tragedy: “Book he's been reading lately. The Daubter. One of the flood of centennial
Bancroft biographies out this year. Author tries to show that Barney Bancroft, not
Rutherford or Casey or Hardy's own progenitor Royce lngram, was actually the central
figure, the heart and point of the Parable of the Duel, as they call it now. Rutherford
and Casey seem to be giants. this guy claims, but are really only subhuman masks,
prodesignod roles, while Bancroft is the only one wholly rounded and thus truly human
participant in that incredible drama. . . . Funny how you can play that game so many
ways. . . . Can't even be sure about the simple facts. Some writers even argue that
Rutherford and Casey never existed-nothing more than another of the ancient myths of
the sun, symbolized as a victim slaughtered by the monster or force of darkness.
History: in the end, you can never prove a thing (pp. 223-224).“

Bibliography

Alter, Robert. W. Berkeley and Las Angeles: University
of California Press, 1975.

Bakhtin, Mikhail Mikhailovich. Wm. Austin,
Texas: University of Texas Press, 1981.

Barth, John. Chimera. New York: Ballantine Books, 1988.

---. W. New York: Bantam Doubleday Dell
Publishing Group, Inc., 1988.

W. New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1984.

W. New York: Bantam Doubleday Dell
Publishing Group, Inc., 1988.

---. W. New York: Doubleday & Company, 1987.

Beckett. Samuel. W.
New York: Grove Press, 1984.

Benjamin, Walter. fljumjnatjgns. New York: Harcourt Brace &
World, 1968.

Brook-Rose, Christine. IhLil- London: Hamilton Press, 1975.

Malcolm Bradbury. W. New York, Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1983.

Carmichael, Thomas. “John Barth's Letters: History, Repesentation
and Postmodernism.“ MQSBIQ- 1988 Fall; 21(4): 65-72.

Cervantes, Miguel de. Wm. Madrid: Ediciones
Cétedra, S. A., 1987.

--. W- Madrid: Ediciones Cétedra, S. A.,
1986.

118

119

W. Trans. WaltorStarkie. London: MacMillan and Co.,
Ltd., 1957.

Christensen, Inger. W. New York: Columbia
University Press, 1981.

Coover, Robert. W
MEM- New York: New American Library Penguin, inc.,
1971.

Cortazar, Julio. Mains. Barcelona: Editorial Soix Barral, S. A.,
1985.

115205901911- Trans. Gregory Rabassa. New York: Random House,
Inc., 1966.

Hamete. Madrid: Ediciones Cétedra, s. A., 1986.

Derrida, Jacques. W. Trans. Peggy Kamuf, Avital
Ronell. New York: Schocken Books Inc., 1985.

---. W. Trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak.
Baltimore, Maryland: The John Hopkins University Press, 1976.

Foucault, Michel. Wm. Trans.
Donald F. Bouchard, Sherry Simon. Ithaca, New York: Cornell
University Press, 1977.

Gallagher, D. P. “Spanish American Literature.“ W
W. Ed. P. E. Russell. London and New York:
Methuen & Co., 1973.

Garcia Marquez, Gabriel. W. Madrid: Editorial
Espasa-Calpo, S. A., 1982.

WW. Trans. Gregory Rabassa. New
York: Alfred A. Knopf, inc, 1983.

120

W. Buenos Aires: Editorial
Sudamericana, S. A., 1981.

WWW. Trans. Gregory Rabassa. New
York: Avon Books, 1971.

Granier, Jean. “Nietzsche's Conception of Chaos.“ Ihsflsyy
Nistzsghs. Ed. David B. Allison. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The
MIT Press, 1985.

Joyce, James. flussss. New York: Random House inc., 1986.

Kaufmann,Waltor. WWW.
Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1974.

Kerrigan, William. “Milton's Place in Intellectual History.“ Ins
W. Ed. Dennis Danielson. New York:
Cambridge University Press, 1989.

LeClair, Tom, and Larry McCaffery. WWW
Wists. Urbana, lllinois:

University of Illinois Press, 1983.

Lemon, Lee T., and Marion J. Reis., trans. Bussianflzmaiist
QLItigism. Essays by Victor Shkiovsky, Boris Tomashevsky, and
Boris Eichenbaum. Lincoln, Nebraska: University of Nebraska
Press, 1965.

Manuel, Don Juan. W. Madrid: Ediciones Cétedra,
S. A., 1986.

Nietzsche, Friedrich. 10m. Trans. Waiter Kaufmann.
New York: Vintage Books, 1968. ‘

Norris. Cristopher. WWW London:
Methuen & Co., 1982.

121

O'Donnell, Patrick. “Obvious Paranoia: The Politics of Don DeLillo's

Running Dag. ' W. 1990 Winter; 34(1):
56-72.
Olivares. Jorge. “Garcia Marquez's Cranica do una Muerte Anunciada

as Metafiction.“ W. 1987 Winter; 28(4):

483-492.

BMW. Oxford, England: Oxford University

Press, 1971.
Pei. Mario. W
W. Ed. Salvatore Ramondino. New York: The New

American Library, inc., 1969.

Ruiz, Juan. “MW- Madrid: Editorial Castalia, S. A.,
1987.

Sterne. Laurence. WWW

London: Penguin Books, 1985.

Waugh, Patricia. WWW
Winn. London: Methuen & Co., 1984.

GENERAL REFERENCES

Amestoy, Lida Aronne. “El Longuaje y su Otro: Motaficcion y

Vanguardia on Cortazar.“ Wm. Ed.

Fernando Burgos. Madrid: Editorial Origenes, S. A., 1986.

Hutcheon, Linda. WWW

Waterloo, Ontario: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 1980.

122

McCaffery,Larry. WM. Pittsburgh,
Pennsylvania: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1982.

Scholes, Robert. Eabuiatmjnimstafigtm. Urbana, Chicago,
London: University of Illinois Press, 1979.

Spires. Robert 0. WW

Mggsmfiganisnflgysl. Lexington, Kentucky: The University Press
of Kentucky, 1984.

Ilillllllllillilliiis