True Lies : Narrative Self-Consciousness in the Contemporary Spanish Novel [1 ed.] 9780838759547, 9780838756614

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TRUE LIES

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TRUE LIES Narrative Self-Consciousness in the Contemporary Spanish Novel

Samuel Amago

Lewisburg Bucknell University Press

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䉷 2006 by Rosemont Publishing & Printing Corp. All rights reserved. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use, or the internal or personal use of specific clients, is granted by the copyright owner, provided that a base fee of $10.00, plus eight cents per page, per copy is paid directly to the Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Danvers, Massachusetts 01923. [0-8387-5661-1/06 $10.00 Ⳮ 8¢ pp, pc.]

Associated University Presses 2010 Eastpark Boulevard Cranbury, NJ 08512

The paper used in this publication meets the requirements of the American National Standard for Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials Z39.48-1984.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Amago, Samuel, 1974– True lies : narrative self-consciousness in the contemporary Spanish novel / Samuel Amago. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-13: 978-0-8387-5661-4 (alk. paper) ISBN-10: 0-8387-5661-1 1. Spanish fiction—20th century—History and criticism. 2. Selfconsciousness in literature. 3. Metafiction. I. Title. PQ6144.A495 2006 863⬘.709353—dc22

2006012911

printed in the united states of america

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For my wife

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Contents Acknowledgments

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Introduction 1. Rosa Montero: Metafiction, Literary Cannibalism, and the Construction of Personal Identity 2. Mapping the Storied Self: Consciousness and Cartography in the Fiction of Juan Jose´ Milla´s 3. Narrative Schizophrenia and the Anxiety of Influence in the Novels of Nuria Amat 4. Indeterminacy for Indeterminacy’s Sake: Textual Narcissism and the Fiction of Javier Marı´as 5. Narrative Truth and Historical Truth in Javier Cercas’s Soldados de Salamina 6. Carlos Can˜eque Turns Metafiction against Itself Conclusion Notes References Index

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Acknowledgments THIS BOOK OWES ITS EXISTENCE TO MANY INDIVIDUALS AND INSTITUtions. Because my work began there, I must first express my gratitude to the Department of Spanish, Italian and Portuguese at the University of Virginia for providing an ideal space for me to develop intellectually and professionally. In particular, I am grateful to Randolph Pope for being such a careful, kind, and thoughtful reader and advisor. I thank my mentors David Gies and Donald Shaw, not only for reading my manuscript and offering much needed comments and advice, but also for their commitment to inspiring and fostering beginning scholars. Fernando Opere´ suggested several titles of novels that have now become a part of this book, and I am thankful for his brilliant direction, on stage and off. Ruth Hill has always been a generous and empathetic advisor, and Joel Rini is responsible for one of my most prized publications: an article that has nothing to do with this book. I am also grateful to Michael Gerli and Andrew Anderson for their guidance and helpful intervention. I thank Eleanor Kaufman of the Department of English for reading my work and for helping me to explore the broader theoretical contexts that ultimately found their way into this book. True Lies would not have been possible without a generous fellowship awarded by the Faculty Senate and the Jefferson Scholar program at the University of Virginia. I also express my gratitude to the Program for Cultural Cooperation between Spain’s Ministry of Education, Culture and Sports and United States Universities for additional financial support. Thanks are also due to the colleagues and friends that I had the honor of knowing during my time in Charlottesville. I cannot name them all, but I must mention Paul Begin, Arantxa Ascunce, Lew Rosenbloom, and Ed Gurski for their valued roles during the inception, development, and completion of this book. I thank Anne Hardcastle for generously spending time on my writing and for sharing her own. My friend and colleague Mat9

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thew Marr was an important source of camaraderie, guidance, and friendly competition during those years on the mountaintop farm. I am grateful to my colleagues in the Department of Romance Languages at the University of Notre Dame—Dayle Seidenspinner-Nu´n˜ez, Ted Cachey, John Welle, Kristine Ibsen, and Tom Anderson—all of whom have offered kind support and counsel that has made the completion of this book possible. Traces of my mother and father can be found behind every word of True Lies. Barbara inspired my love of literature and my lifelong appreciation of the power of storytelling. She read every word of this manuscript. Sindo has inspired me in myriad other ways, but perhaps most importantly he has always reminded me of the importance of maintaining my focus on the unique qualities that comprise Spanish culture. Os quiero mucho. I save the last sentence for the most important person of all: Amy. You rock my world.

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TRUE LIES

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Introduction SELF-CONSCIOUS NARRATIVES CAN BE FOUND EVERYWHERE. FROM LITerary fiction to popular novels and from Hollywood blockbusters to art house cinema, narrative self-consciousness continues to evolve and develop in the contemporary cultural context. Just a cursory glance through book and film reviews published in national and international journals, newspapers, and literary supplements over the last few years reveals that we continue to be fascinated by the dynamic nature of narrative. And even while the theoretical debate continues as to whether postmodernism is a good thing or a bad thing, it has become increasingly clear that regardless of their ideological grounding, contemporary European and American novelists and filmmakers continue to use narrative not only to explore the multifarious processes of narrative itself, but also as a key to understanding ourselves, our cultures, and our histories. There exist a number of important studies of narrative selfconsciousness, or metafiction, in various cultural traditions and national literatures. Two such works are Gregory Lucente’s Beautiful Fables (1986), which deals with Italian self-referential fiction, and, in the Anglo-American tradition, Madelyn Jablon’s Black Metafiction (1997), which adds to the earlier work of critics such as David Lodge, Linda Hutcheon, Patricia Waugh, and many others. Looking back on the fifteen years since the appearance of Lodge’s essay ‘‘Mimesis and Diegesis in Modern Fiction,’’ we can see that the author was correct when he postulated that the self-conscious foregrounding of the narrative act represents one of the defining formal characteristics of postmodern writing. Tracing the continuum of several hundred years of literary development, Lodge argues that postmodernist fiction emphasizes diegesis (telling), as an alternative to modernist and realist foregrounding of mimesis (showing) (1992, 183). Taking as an example the international success of contemporary novels in English by Jonathan Safran Foer, Yann Martel, Mark Haddon, 13

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Jonathan Franzen, and Bret Easton Ellis, among others, along with the work of a host of writers in other national languages— Umberto Eco, Italo Calvino, Alain Robbe-Grillet, and Mario Vargas Llosa, to name only a few—we can see that contemporary authors continue to explore the possibilities of self-consciousness as a narrative strategy. True Lies examines the evolving functions of narrative selfconsciousness in contemporary Spanish fiction. In part, this book was written in response to critics who continue to proclaim the death of the novel while insisting that the postmodern Spanish cultural milieu is merely a nihilistic ‘‘space of horror and death’’ (Moreiras Menor 2000, 139) in which meaningless performance and simulacra fill ‘‘the void produced by the impossibility of discursive signification’’ (140). True Lies shows that in fact the novel as a genre is alive and well in Spain, and that the self-conscious examination of narrative in fiction does not spell out the demise of the form nor represent a narcissistic postmodern relativism, but instead offers a functional, constructive alternative to the pessimistic worldviews articulated by the more negative critics of cultural postmodernism. My understanding of contemporary Spanish fiction has been informed by my sympathetic readings of postmodern critics such as Charles Jencks, Andreas Huyssen, Umberto Eco, John Barth, David Lodge, Linda Hutcheon, Paolo Portoghesi, Jim Collins, Patricia Waugh, and Ihab Hassan. I refer to all of these scholars’ work throughout this book. Jim Collins, for example, has persuasively repudiated some of the most vociferous critics of postmodernism—Fredric Jameson, Terry Eagleton, and, to some degree, Jean-Franc¸ois Lyotard and Jean Baudrillard—who even now aver that postmodernism is a condition of which we must cure ourselves, a culture that ‘‘annihilates artistic ‘difference,’ demolishes narrative, abolishes subjectivity, and just plain denies ‘history’ ’’ (Collins 1992, 94). In my discussion of recent Spanish narrative fiction, I argue that in the hands of the best Spanish novelists postmodern metafiction functions as a celebration of literary difference and subjectivity, an important critical reassessment of the historiographical enterprise, and, above all, a useful reevaluation of the role that narrative plays in the understanding of human consciousness. There has never been a better time to study Spanish fiction. Even as we continue to look back to the genesis of the modern

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novel with Cervantes’s Quixote, in recent years Spain has seen an explosion of novels by critically acclaimed novelists whose popular success may rival that of the Latin American Boom of the 1960s. Works by Rosa Montero, Javier Marı´as, Arturo Pe´rez Reverte, Javier Cercas, Carlos Ruiz Zafo´n, and Antonio Mun˜oz Molina have been translated and distributed widely in Europe and North America, and their novels have been adapted for films produced both in Spain and abroad. While these writers deal with a diversity of themes—love, sex, life, death, marriage, history, alienation, literature, identity—they share a critical preoccupation with a primordial human characteristic: narrative. True Lies is the first comprehensive study of the evolving functions of narrative self-consciousness in contemporary Spain. Previous works, such as Robert Spires’s Beyond the Metafictional Mode (1984), have tended to conclude that after a period of popularity in the early 1980s, metafiction was on the way out. While the foundational studies of narrative self-consciousness—by Robert Alter, Robert Scholes, Linda Hutcheon, Patricia Waugh, and others—have indicated that metafiction serves to blur the distinction between reality and fiction in order to draw attention to the dynamic processes of literary representation, True Lies takes into account a fundamental issue overlooked by earlier treatments of the genre: namely, the importance of consciousness itself to this type of fiction. Through their various reflections on the narrative logic of human consciousness, the authors included in this book—Rosa Montero, Nuria Amat, Javier Cercas, Juan Jose´ Milla´s, Javier Marı´as, and Carlos Can˜eque—represent major examples of the evolving importance of narrative to our understanding of the construction of personal identity.

Theories of Narrative Self-Consciousness The term ‘‘metafiction’’ was coined by William Gass in the late 1960s, but the first book-length study of narrative self-consciousness was Robert Alter’s Partial Magic (1975), which laid the groundwork for many of the theoretical treatments of metafiction that would appear afterward. Alter, like many later scholars, emphasizes the importance of language to this fictional mode. In his book, he famously states that metafiction is a narra-

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tive form that ‘‘expresses its seriousness through playfulness, that is acutely aware of itself as a mere structure of words even as it tries to discover ways of going beyond words to the experiences words seek to indicate’’ (Alter 1975, ix). Four years later, Margaret A. Rose published her book-length study Parody/Meta-Fiction (1979), which examines parody as a kind of metafiction—and metafiction as parody. Rose discusses how both metafiction and parody function in modernist discourse. The author writes that parody can function as a ‘‘metafictional critique of the production and reception of literary texts’’ (Rose 1979, 187), which is a process that raises questions ‘‘not only of a theoretical literary nature’’ (187), but also ‘‘of a sociological nature which relate the text again to its social context’’ (187). In other words, by dramatizing the relationship between the author and the reader, modernist metafictional texts mirror the literary process in a way that simultaneously challenges ‘‘the use of art to ‘mirror’ the outer world’’ (13). In the Spanish cultural context (and in a similar vein) Robert Baah has indicated that through their use of different metafictional strategies, Spanish novels—particularly of the 1980s—‘‘explicitly favor the incorporation of human experience in the literary text’’ (Baah 1994, 78). Baah (and many other theorists who will appear later) agrees with Rose in affirming that metafiction is not incompatible with the representation of personal or social realities. In a collection of essays, Fabulation and Metafiction (1979), Robert Scholes adopts a much broader definition of selfconscious or self-referential fiction. The author suggests that metafiction can be defined essentially as experimental fiction, but unlike Alter and Rose, he considers metafictional texts guardedly, and often comes close to condemning such works outright. He argues that narrative self-reflection is a narcissistic way of avoiding the ‘‘great task’’ of fiction, which he describes with manifesto-like language. Because his view still represents the views of many critics of self-referential writing, Scholes’s call to arms bears citation: ‘‘We need to be able to perceive the cosmos itself as an intricate, symmetrical, cunningly contrived, imaginative entity in which we can be as much at home as a character in a work of fiction. We must see man as himself imagined and being re-imagined, and now able to play a role in the re-imagination of himself. It is now time for man to turn civilization in

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the direction of integration and away from alienation, to bring human life back into harmony with the universe’’ (1979, 217). Scholes sees narrative self-consciousness as essentially incompatible with the human project of creating an integrated, harmonious civilization, and finally condemns literary self-reflection as ‘‘masturbatory reveling in self-scrutiny’’ (218). Much of his criticism is based on the idea that metafiction is experimental, and therefore alienating, fiction. But as True Lies demonstrates, contemporary Spanish authors seek through selfconscious writing the very sort of integration and harmony for which Scholes yearns. Indeed, contrary to what Scholes would have us believe, narrative self-consciousness is not irreconcilable with the human search for meaning, but rather can be used as an important tool in that search. Robert Alter regards metafictional texts in a more positive light, and underlines the importance of this type of literature, which ‘‘systematically flaunts its own condition of artifice and . . . by so doing probes into the problematic relationship between real-seeming artifice and reality’’ (1975 xi). Alter defines the selfconscious novel as a work whose entire fabric—‘‘through the style, the handling of narrative viewpoint, the names and words imposed on the characters, the patterning of the narration, the nature of the characters and what befalls them’’ (xi)— communicates to the reader ‘‘a sense of the fictional world as an authorial construct set up against a background of literary tradition and convention’’ (xi). Alter would no doubt take issue with critics such as Scholes who have criticized metafiction as a mere self-indulgent game. He proposes that self-consciousness is actually a narrative strategy that, when ‘‘integrated into a large critical vision of the dialectic interplay between fiction and reality, . . . may produce some of the most illuminating dimensions of the experience we undergo in reading a novel’’ (xiv). In other words, metafictional texts not only draw attention to their own status as linguistically derived artifacts, but also tend to examine critically the processes of their own construction and of the reader’s interpretation of them. Alter’s work has since informed many subsequent theories of metafiction written by critics such as Inger Christensen, Linda Hutcheon, Ru¨diger Imhof, Steven G. Kellman, Brian Stonehill, and Patricia Waugh. While all of these studies have—in one way or another—played a part in the conception and formulation of

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True Lies, in the pages and chapters that follow I most often draw from Hutcheon and Waugh, as they are the critics who have tended to occupy a privileged place in the study of contemporary world metafiction and whose analyses I have found the most incisive and complete. Narrative self-consciousness has seen its share of critics, particularly during the 1970s when there existed within academia much debate as to the importance, significance, and relevance of novels that pushed the limits of the genre through their use of self-conscious, self-reflexive narrative strategies. Such was the negative critical reaction to metafiction that Waugh dedicates an entire chapter of her canonical Metafiction (1984) to the issue. The chapter is pointedly entitled ‘‘What Is Metafiction and Why Are They Saying Such Awful Things about It?’’ The author concludes that critics who lament the proliferation of metafiction as a symptom of the death of the novel fail to recognize the positive aspects of fictional self-consciousness, such as its usefulness in increasing authorial awareness of the processes of writing and a renewed examination of the theoretical issues involved in constructing and interpreting fictions. It is for precisely these reasons that Inger Christensen asserts in her own study of metafiction that narrative self-consciousness not only ‘‘sheds light on fundamental issues in connection with fictional creation in general’’ (1981, 13), but that writers who use metafiction ‘‘focus on questions of primary importance not only to novelists, but to man in general’’ (13). By investigating the theory of fiction through the practice of fiction, metafiction draws our attention to the relationship between the narrator, his or her role in the construction of the narrative, and the role of the reader in the process of making meaning. Christensen argues that the metafictional novel’s attitude toward the narrator, the narrative, and the reader is in fact indicative of the author’s attitude toward existence. In other words, ‘‘an analysis of these elements will . . . reveal not only the writer’s relation to art, but to reality as a whole. Ultimately, the meaning of metafiction depends on the novelist’s vision of experience’’ (14). Christensen would undoubtedly join Waugh in condemning, then, those critics who censure metafiction as selfindulgent, as decadent, or as characteristic of the exhaustion of the novelistic genre. Indeed, from our current historical viewpoint, it seems safe to agree with the critics who see in metafic-

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tion a positive, constructive textual strategy. The critical acclaim and popular success of metafictional novels published in Spain and elsewhere—by authors such as those discussed in True Lies—would seem to prove that narrative self-consciousness has come to form a privileged part of contemporary fiction. Just as modernist stream of consciousness is now accepted as just one of many literary techniques available to mainstream writers of fiction, so has the self-conscious emphasis on issues of authorship, reading, interpretation, literary creation, and the interrelatedness of reality and fiction become part and parcel of the contemporary novelist’s artistic arsenal. In her own study of metafiction, Linda Hutcheon avoids many of the more abstract theoretical aspects of narrative selfconsciousness and literary postmodernism. In Narcissistic Narrative (1980), Hutcheon limits her discussion to what she calls the ‘‘textual forms of self-consciousness’’ (4), dividing metafictional novels into two groups: those which foreground their fictionality through frame breaks and other discursive ploys, and those which call attention to themselves as linguistic constructs through what she calls generative wordplay. Like Waugh, Hutcheon points to Alter and the importance of his formulation of the ‘‘dialectic between fiction and reality—essentially a metaphysical, ontological, experimental, and epistemological focus’’ (4). But rather than accepting Alter’s split of nineteenth-century realism and the self-conscious fiction that came before and after, Hutcheon (like Lodge) traces a gradual evolution of narrative self-consciousness. And following Margaret Rose, Hutcheon points to Aristotle in her analysis of diegesis as only one part of the mimetic process. Opposing Alter’s dialectical separation, she calls the growing popularity of metafiction a logical part of a continuum that exists between narrative and external reality. Hutcheon writes, ‘‘In much metafiction the reader is left with the impression that, since all fiction is a kind of parody of life, no matter how verisimilar it pretends to be, the most authentic and honest fiction might well be that which most freely acknowledges its fictionality. Distanced from the text’s world in this way, the reader can share, with the author, the pleasure of its imaginative creation’’ (49). Although her book was published four years later, Waugh appears not to have read Hutcheon. While the two critics seem to have arrived at their conclusions independently, they neverthe-

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less agree in many ways. The main difference between Hutcheon and Waugh is that the former places a greater emphasis on the role of the reader in the creation of the fictional world of metafictional texts. The reader, according to Hutcheon, shares responsibility with the author in ‘‘the authorial process of shaping, of making’’ (1980, 154), the meaning of the text. This is a process that represents ‘‘part of the pleasure and challenge of reading as a co-operative, interpretive experience’’ (154). In her estimation, the narcissistic narrative turns in on the reader, ‘‘forcing him to face his responsibility for the text he is reading, the dynamic ‘heterocosm’ he is creating through the fictive referents of literary language’’ (138). Although she classifies metafiction as ‘‘narcissistic narrative,’’ Hutcheon does not suggest that this type of writing is necessarily self-absorbed, nor does she offer a negative judgment of this fiction. Rather, metafiction is simply fiction that contemplates itself through its own textually constituted body. It is narcissistic only insofar as it ‘‘encourages an active personal response to itself and creates a space for that response within itself’’ (141, italics in the original). In The SelfBegetting Novel (1980), Steven Kellman also bases his conceptualization of the ‘‘self-begetting novel’’ on the figure of Narcissus: ‘‘A fantasy of Narcissus become autogamous, the self-begetting novel . . . projects the illusion of art creating itself. . . . This device of a narrative which is in effect a record of its own genesis is a happy fusion of form and content’’ (3). Kellman’s book complements the study of postmodernist fiction as it offers a useful descriptive account of previous modernist permutations of selfreflexive novels and how those novels exploit metafictional conceits in order to explore fundamental human preoccupations such as life, mortality, sex, and reproduction. Patricia Waugh reads metafiction as inextricably linked to theories of literary postmodernism. She consequently places her literary discussion within the larger context of contemporary preoccupations with ontological questions. Metafictional texts, she writes, ‘‘reveal the ontological status of all literary fiction: its quasi-referentiality, its indeterminacy, its existence as words and the world’’ (1984, 101). Many of the artistic manifestations of literary postmodernism—the overtly inventing narrator or author, the explicit appearance of the reader within the text, multiple narrative frames, self-reflexivity, autocritical conceits, parody of popular genres, and so on—all function essentially to

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foreground ‘‘the writing of the text as the most fundamentally problematic aspect of that text’’ (22). Let me conclude this brief survey of the theories of metafiction by mentioning Brian Stonehill’s The Self-Conscious Novel: Artifice in Fiction from Joyce to Pynchon (1988), which reflects perhaps most faithfully my own appreciation of the importance of narrative self-consciousness to our understanding of the contemporary human experience. Using as examples self-conscious novels by five authors—James Joyce’s Ulysses, several of Nabokov’s works, William Gaddis’s The Recognitions, Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow, and John Barth’s Letters—Stonehill avers that modern and contemporary texts continue to ‘‘confirm that the self-conscious novel is an essentially playful genre that retains its claim to ethical responsibility’’ (ix). Following in the line of Hutcheon and Waugh, Stonehill insists that while selfconscious novels have been criticized as elitist and selfindulgent, the self-conscious textual strategies that they employ ‘‘are not narrowly narcissistic’’ (18); rather, these techniques form an important part of ‘‘a broad esthetic strategy’’ (18). Because the self-conscious novel is arguably more honest in depicting ‘‘its own limitations, and its peculiarly sophisticated humility before life itself’’ (18), Stonehill argues that ‘‘far from being decadent, gratuitous, or morally irresponsible, self-depicting fiction may, at its best, remain playful while retaining serious literary claims to ethical responsibility’’ (18). Narrative selfconsciousness, says Stonehill, may be ‘‘one of the most convincing and compelling forms available to our writers for the expression of what is truly important today’’ (18).

Narrative Self-Consciousness in Spain In the cultural context of twentieth-century Spain, the study of metafiction has tended to center on the writings of Unamuno, to whom Alter, Scholes, and Robert Spires all devote chapters. In Niebla [Mist] specifically, the metafictional conceit functions as a modernist metaphor for human existence in which man, symbolized by Augusto Pe´rez—whose surname emphasizes his importance as an everyman—is afforded through art the rare opportunity to confront his author/maker. Robert Alter dedicates an entire chapter of Partial Magic to Unamuno, and approaches

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Niebla as a novel that follows in the line of works by James Joyce, Andrei Biely, and Virginia Woolf. Curiously, the works he mentions were in fact published after Unamuno had completed Niebla in 1907 (although he would not publish the novel until 1914). Alter judges Unamuno’s work rather harshly, writing that the novel is ‘‘far less impressive as a realized fiction than the three we have been considering but one which has abiding interest as a critical statement on the paradoxes of fiction and reality’’ (1975, 154). Alter concludes his study of Unamuno, however, by stating that the Spanish author’s ‘‘casting of doubt on the reality of existence, fictional and nonfictional alike, leads Unamuno to raise certain radical questions about how fiction should be written, questions that might well be regarded as prolegomena for the self-conscious novel in the twentieth century’’ (156). Perhaps the most complete and convincing treatment of metafiction in Spain has been Robert Spires’s Beyond the Metafictional Mode, which offers a satisfying overview of the developments of Spanish narrative self-consciousness, beginning with the Quixote. Acknowledging that his approach is heavily influenced by the linguistic theory of modes, Spires traces what he calls the ‘‘metafictional mode’’ from the Quixote through the 1970s. He identifies the 1970s as a period in which there was a sort of metafictional movement that drew upon some of the textual strategies that had already been evolving. He names this movement the ‘‘Spanish self-referential novel.’’ Writing in the 1980s, Spires points out that the emphasis in the metafictional novel of the 1970s had shifted ‘‘from unmasking the conventions to foregrounding the process of creating fiction; rather than a narrator, reader, or character violating another’s boundaries, there is a violation of the traditional distinctions among the act of narrating, the act of reading, and the narrated product’’ (1984, 16). According to Spires, the world of fiction is made up of a kind of triad, consisting of the realm of the real author, the text-act reader, and the fictional world represented in the text. He defines metafiction as the transgression of any one of these fictional boundaries by an element from another. Spires suggests that in the 1970s the metafictional mode ‘‘became the dominant force in the field of Spanish fiction’’ (72), and for his purposes, he divides the so-called Spanish self-referential novels into three categories:

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1. Those focusing on the world of the fictive author (the act of writing) 2. Those focusing on the world of the fictive reader (the act of reading) 3. Those focusing on the world of the characters and actions (the act of oral discoursing) Spires calls Luis Goytisolo’s Recuento [Count] (1973) the first modern Spanish novel to focus on the act of writing, and thus initiate the self-referential movement in Spain. Goytisolo’s novel ends not with the protagonist, but rather with a series of reflections on the process of narrating his story. This emphasis on the creative process that appears near the conclusion of Recuento is more clear throughout Goytisolos’s next novel, Los verdes de mayo hasta el mar [The Greens of May unto the Sea] (1976), in which ‘‘it becomes impossible to distinguish between one level of fiction and another, or even between reality and fiction . . . the act of narrating is real; the product or what is narrated is always a fiction’’ (Spires 1984, 76). Spires indicates that this novel, along with Recuento and Jose´ Marı´a Merino’s Novela de Andre´s Choz [The Novel of Andres Choz] (1976) ‘‘form the nucleus of a group of Spanish self-referential novels focusing on the world of the fictive author, on the process of writing’’ (Spires 1984, 76). Juan Goytisolo’s Juan sin tierra [Landless Juan] (1975) is another novel that Spires includes within those metafictional works that emphasize the representation of the creative process over the final product. In this work, the text author of the novel constantly interrupts his own narration in order to contemplate what he has created. This is a piece of fiction focusing on the world of the fictive author that goes further than Unamuno, Cervantes, and Galdo´s. In Spires’s words, ‘‘[T]he violations consisting of the world of the text author first competing with, and then finally supplanting the world of the story represent a more radical metafictional expression’’ (1984, 88) than previous cases in Spanish literary history. The author concludes by asserting that ‘‘within the artistic process of the novel, the final chapter of Juan sin tierra is a natural culmination of the conflict for predominance between the narrating instance and what is narrated. In the end the creative process triumphs over the created product; the novel becomes its own referent’’ (88). He indicates that

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the last chapter of the novel is almost pure novelistic theory, and therefore breaks with traditional narrative in order to comment on itself. Spires forms another group made up of novels that dramatize the act of reading as a fundamental part of the creative process. Among these, he includes Torrente Ballester’s Fragmentos de Apocalipsis [Fragments of Apocalypse] (1977), Javier Tomeo’s El castillo de la carta cifrada [The Castle of the Coded Letter] (1979), Luis Goytisolo’s La co´lera de Aquiles [Achilles’ Cholera] (1979), and Juan Marse´’s La muchacha de las bragas de oro [The Girl with Golden Underwear] (1978). In these novels, the readers who appear as characters play the role of critics, commenting on the narrative that we read simultaneously. Their roles as commentators influence the outcome and/or structure of the narrative. La co´lera de Aquiles, for example, ‘‘seems to define sociopolitical issues in terms of artistic creation-in-process; Luis Goytisolo’s novel qualifies as the most radical and profound reader-focused text to emerge in the new wave of Spanish metafiction’’ (Spires 1984, 94–95). There are several implied readers in the novel: Matilde directs the interpolated novel, for example, to Rau´l; she directs her replies to the letters to Camila, and everything else is directed to a secret recipient. La co´lera de Aquiles foregrounds the act of reading, which ultimately results in the undermining of the speaker’s narrative authority: ‘‘[T]he respective worlds of the fictive author and of the story are not merely violated but literally ingested by the world of the reader’’ (Spires 1984, 106). Spires outlines a third type of metafictional novel, represented by those works which create the illusion that the story exists before it was written. He discusses Carmen Martı´n Gaite’s El cuarto de atra´s [The Back Room] (1978) as an example, arguing that it is only the conclusion of the work that clearly creates the novel as it is, since it is only at the end that the protagonist sees the manuscript with the same title as the novel we have in our hands. In this way, the narrator’s previous persona as she appeared while she was talking to the mysterious man is now relegated to a mere ‘‘verbal construct firmly embedded within the pages of the manuscript, as is the stranger with whom she was talking’’ (Spires 1984, 122). Part of the narrative strategy involved in this illusion of product preceding process is, according

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to Spires, the construction of an almost oral discourse. The protagonist of the novel is reader, writer and fictional product.1 Spires’s Beyond the Metafictional Mode concludes with a projection that serves as an excellent springboard for the discussion of contemporary Spanish fiction of the 1990s and 2000s that is developed in True Lies. Spires writes that ‘‘whereas in some ways the story-focused self-referential novels are the most flagrant violators of the laws of fiction, they may also herald a new direction for the Spanish novel, a movement away from the metafictional mode’’ (124). The author concludes his book with an open-ended assertion that the next stage of Spanish fiction will most likely ‘‘carry with it the traces of the self-referential novel’’ (124) in a new, ‘‘unique novelistic expression’’ (124). This is where True Lies picks up the thread.2

A Few Words on Spanish Postmodernism While the focus of True Lies is not postmodernism per se, words such as ‘‘postmodern’’ and ‘‘postmodernist’’ appear throughout this book, most often to describe contemporary Spanish authors’ approaches to literary representation. Consequently, I offer here an admittedly brief survey of the literature on the topic in order to situate better my later discussion of metafiction in the specific context of contemporary Spain. In addition, I have thought it expedient to reveal something about my theoretical orientation and how it has influenced some of my subsequent readings of postmodern Spanish narrative fiction. There does not yet exist in the field of Spanish cultural studies a critical consensus as to the nature of postmodernism. Just as there continues to be in international academe a rift between the critics (Jameson, Eagleton, Baudrillard, sometimes Lyotard) and apologists (Jencks, Huyssen, Eco, Barth, Lodge, Hutcheon, Portoghesi, and Collins) of postmodernism, so too does there continue to exist in Hispanism a divide between scholars who view postmodernism as passe´ (Pe´rez and Pe´rez 2001), ‘‘a hollow concept’’ (Larson 2001, 115), or a ‘‘cul-de-sac’’ without horizons (Navajas 1987, 38), and those who have found in postmodern theory a useful and constructive method of understanding con-

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temporary Spanish cultural production (Hardcastle 2000; Holloway 1999; Bou and Soria Olmedo 1997). It is perhaps not surprising that the negative critics of postmodernism in Spain have tended to base their understanding of postmodern culture on the work of Jameson, Eagleton, Baudrillard, and Lyotard, while the apologists of Spanish postmodernism have preferred to look to Jencks, Huyssen, Eco, Barth, Lodge, Hutcheon, Portoghesi, Collins, sometimes Hassan, and others. The critical divide between negative and positive formulations of Spanish postmodernism has been analyzed ably by Vance R. Holloway in his book, El posmodernismo y otras tendencies de la novela espan˜ola (1967–1995) [Postmodernism and Other Tendencies in the Spanish Novel] (1999), in which the author concedes that because there does not yet exist a critical consensus about postmodernism in general, ‘‘its application to the study of the Spanish novel has produced contradictory conclusions’’ (40). Holloway synthesizes elegantly the debate in Spanish literary studies between those who subscribe to the formulations of Jameson, Lyotard (and sometimes of Hassan)— among whom we may count Gonzalo Navajas, Pablo Gil Casado, Cristina Moreiras Menor, Teresa M. Vilaro´s, and Ana Marı´a Spitzmesser—and those who find more salient the work of scholars such as Barth, Eco, Jencks, Hutcheon, and McHale (Holloway 1999, 58–64).3 The school of scholars in the line of Jameson, Eagleton, and Baudrillard have defined postmodernism as an ahistorical (or antihistorical) cultural manifestation of late capitalism that alternately opposes modernism and indiscriminatingly cannibalizes its past forms through uncritical pastiche, celebrates frivolity, and valorizes empty simulacra. Critics who adhere to this conceptualization have tended to conclude that after Franco’s death in 1975, Spain found itself stripped of the neat ideological framework imposed by the regime and consequently bereft of any strong beliefs in an opposing ideological system— liberal or otherwise. Accordingly, the country has been overrun by globalized media, empty performance, and the proliferation of simulacra; they have filled the vacuum, replacing meaning with information and signifieds with signifiers that refer to nothing, and thus ushering in a culture that wallows in pure relativism and nostalgia for a nonexistent past. In her essay ‘‘Postmodernism and the Problem of Cultural Identity,’’ Jo Labanyi

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makes a brief nod to these formulations that have likened postmodernism in post-Franco Spain to the propagation of an endemic condition: ‘‘If, as has been said, postmodernism is an expression of political impotence resulting from a loss of belief in the master narratives of liberalism and Marxism, and from the media’s monopoly control of the images of reality available to us, then Spain is suffering from a bad attack: not now of a mythical ‘national disease’ of the kind diagnosed by the 1898 writers, but of the latest international fashion. Spain is no longer different’’ (1995, 397). In a more positive tone, Enric Bou and Andre´s Soria Olmedo suggest that in the literary field such crises of legitimation have actually been felt as liberating experiences, ‘‘since political liberty in Spain barely preceded the decay of confidence in history as a teleology and the awareness of the past as an enemy, which were essential to the avant-gardist and neo-avant-gardist attitude’’ (1997, 400). This is to say that in the back-draft created by the death of Franco and the subsequent collapse of the regime’s ideological master narrative, postmodern Spanish writers have been able to reject avant-garde dogmas, replacing John Barth’s ‘‘literature of exhaustion’’ with a ‘‘literature of replenishment’’ that ‘‘proposes the re-conquest of the public while avoiding formal distinctions by transgressing the ‘great divide’ between the elite and the masses . . . that is the mark of modernity’’ (Bou and Soria Olmedo 1997, 400). Critics of Spanish culture who look to theorists such as Barth, Jencks, Huyssen, Eco, Lodge, Hutcheon, and Collins have offered compelling discussions of postmodernism as a potentially positive cultural manifestation that is not single-mindedly opposed to modernity, but rather represents a hybrid form that grows out of modernism and can be understood as part of a coherent cultural continuum. These writers suggest that postmodernism does not have to be viewed as a frustrating cultural malaise, but should rather be seen as a welcome liberation from the hard-and-fast oppositions of truth/fiction, history/fiction, ideology/fiction, and renovation/revisitation that are the hallmarks of modernism in Spain and elsewhere. In short, postmodernism, in Spain and in the world at large, is ‘‘a sensitive art, conscious of its own representative materialism, . . . a simulacrum open to possible identification by the reader’’ (Bou and Soria Olmedo 1997, 401).

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My experiences as a bicultural scholar (having lived my entire life between the cultures of Spain and the United States), coupled with my accordingly diverse literary and theoretical formation, have led me to the conclusion that postmodernism—at least in the Spanish and North American contexts—is a positive (if inescapable) cultural reality. Because of this admitted bias, the reader will find that True Lies tends to favor those notions of the postmodern that describe a nuanced culture that offers a positive critical engagement with historical and canonical inheritances, the literary tradition, and the multivalent cultural processes that have brought us to where we are now, individually, nationally, and internationally. The novels that I discuss in the following chapters encourage the reader to enter into a critical dialogue with received notions of the canonical, the literary, high culture versus low, in order to arrive at new perspectives on historically established notions about what literary culture is and what narrative can do for us. These postmodern texts reflect an appreciation of holism, pluralism, heterogeneity, complexity, hybridity, and interconnectedness. Perhaps it is time to move on from the relativism, paranoia, and nostalgia that has characterized so much of the work by Jean Baudrillard, Jean-Franc¸ois Lyotard, Fredric Jameson, and the most negative critics of postmodernism. While there are many examples of how contemporary Spanish culture has embraced some of the more troubling manifestations of globalized capitalist economies (Amago 2004), postmodernism is not only a nihilistic space of horror, simulacra, and death. In Spain and elsewhere, the postmodern allows us to challenge monolithic elitism; to scrutinize the role of writing as a method of understanding human identity; to seek connections between the past, present and future; to reevaluate our cultural heritage; and to embrace multiculturalism and heterogeneity. I do not propose that all novels written in the 1990s and 2000s in Spain are postmodern. While there have emerged a series of trends in the contemporary Spanish novel that bear analysis, that we should ever again see the establishment of one hegemonic artistic mode seems unlikely. Indeed, any theory of a well-defined, uniform, prevailing cultural mode is antithetical to a Spanish cultural context that is characterized by its generic plurality and diversity both in subject matter and narrative technique. Nevertheless, my readings of recent self-conscious narra-

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tive fiction by Rosa Montero, Nuria Amat, Javier Cercas, Juan Jose´ Milla´s, Javier Marı´as, and Carlos Can˜eque will draw selectively from postmodern theory.

Narrative Self-Consciousness in the Contemporary Spanish Novel Chapter 1, ‘‘Rosa Montero: Metafiction, Literary Cannibalism, and the Construction of Personal Identity,’’ approaches Montero’s hugely successful La hija del canı´bal [The Daughter of the Cannibal] (1997) in terms of its self-conscious exploration of personal and authorial identities. Through the experiences detailed in the novel and through her writing of it, the narrator attempts to come to terms with her suddenly malleable perception of self. The narrator’s symbolic cannibalization of the various discourses that make up the novel and the many selves that constitute parts of her own identity allows her to overcome her previous nihilism and embrace a more positive, pragmatic worldview. In La hija del canı´bal, the cannibal metaphor suggested by the title represents symbolically the postmodern dynamics of constructing personal identity through narrative. Chapter 2, ‘‘Mapping the Storied Self: Consciousness and Cartography in the Fiction of Juan Jose´ Milla´s,’’ deals with recent fiction by Juan Jose´ Milla´s, in which narrative functions as a symbolic cartographic act. While Milla´s’s characters inhabit a concrete geographical, social, and political milieu, they all wander through their personal spaces, lost without points of reference. Nevertheless, writing offers a method of charting themselves, thereby relieving their overwhelming feelings of alienation and estrangement. In Milla´s’s recent fiction, narrative functions as a symbolic cartographic act that comments upon the creation and representation of the self. For the narrators and protagonists Milla´s’s world, writing is the map that leads to an understanding not only of the trappings of artistic representation, but also of themselves and their relation to the world. Chapter 3, ‘‘Narrative Schizophrenia and the Anxiety of Influence in the Novels of Nuria Amat,’’ brings together Harold Bloom’s formulation of the anxiety of literary influence with recent theories of narrative and human consciousness, and ex-

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plores how Amat’s narrators construct their authorial selves. Amat’s novels, Todos somos Kafka [Everyone Is Kafka] (1993) and La intimidad [Intimacy] (1997), are fragmented texts that dramatize their narrators’ struggles to come to terms with the crippling anxiety of the influence caused by their readings of canonical male authors of the Western tradition. As readers and writers, Amat’s characters peer into their own texts and those of the literary canon in search of the causes of their narrative schizophrenia. Todos somos Kafka and La intimidad reflect a process by which the writing self seeks narrative coherence through the reappropriation of traditional discourses. Chapter 4, ‘‘Indeterminacy for Indeterminacy’s Sake: Textual Narcissism and the Fiction of Javier Marı´as,’’ examines the ways in which Marı´as’s Negra espalda del tiempo [Dark Back of Time] (1998) exploits a deliberate confusion of the boundaries between reality and fiction in order to comment upon the complexities of authorial identity through a self-conscious interrogation of language and narrative representation. By introducing extratextual reality into the fabric of a fictional narrative, Marı´as’s narrator explores the limits of the representational power of language. By blurring the distinctions between reality and fiction, Marı´as’s novels aim to emphasize the absurdity of traditional distinctions between narrator, fictional character, and author, as all of these entities are created and mediated through language and narrative. Chapter 5, ‘‘Narrative Truth and Historical Truth in Soldados de Salamina,’’ is a discussion of Javier Cercas’s moving novel about a forgotten episode of the Spanish Civil War. This chapter approaches Soldados de Salamina [Soldiers of Salamis] (2001) in terms of New Historicist theories of historiography authored by Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, Hans Kellner, and Hayden White, and argues that by blurring the traditional boundaries between reality and fiction, history and memory, the novel dramatizes a split between historical truth and narrative truth. The work offers an alternative approach to the reconstruction and representation of reality, history, memory, and consciousness. While historical truth finally escapes the narrator of Soldados de Salamina, the process of writing this history allows him to come to a more profound understanding of the importance of narrative for understanding the human experience. Chapter 6, ‘‘Carlos Can˜eque Turns Metafiction against Itself,’’

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deals with Can˜eque’s award-winning novel Quie´n [Who] (1997), which capitalizes on the traditions of narrative self-consciousness from Cervantes to the present. The novel’s complicated structure and metanarratorial conceits represent metaphorically the protagonist’s fragmented psyche at the same time that they offer a humorous counterbalance to his crippling nihilistic narcissism. Quie´n is a game in which metafiction is stretched to its extremes, parodying all metafictional works, premodern, modern, and postmodern, in order to draw attention to the creative process and the dynamic nature of the reader’s reconstruction of the written text. By turning metafiction against itself— parodying the postmodern self-reflexive, self-begetting, selfconscious novel in general—Can˜eque’s work demonstrates the resiliency of narrative self-consciousness and points to the link between literary creation and human consciousness. In sum, True Lies seeks to answer a fundamental question: If narrative is an elemental human trait, then what does it mean when authors use narrative to examine itself? Each chapter of True Lies shows how contemporary Spanish novelists offer possible answers to this question, but one notion predominates: In seeking to understand narrative, we also seek to understand ourselves, our status as human beings, our identities, and our experience and interpretation of reality. As long as narrative offers ‘‘continuity of meaning in our lived experience’’ (Neimeyer and Tschudi, ‘‘Community and Coherence’’ 2003, 168), so will narrative self-consciousness offer an important tool in understanding that experience.

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1 Rosa Montero: Metafiction, Literary Cannibalism, and the Construction of Personal Identity REFLECTED IN THE TITLE OF ROSA MONTERO’S LA HIJA DEL CANı´BAL [The Daughter of the Cannibal] (1997) are several of the formal and thematic issues that give the novel its meaning. ‘‘The Daughter of the Cannibal’’ is the name that the principal narrator and protagonist, Lucı´a, uses to identify herself, since her father has been both a metaphorical cannibal—‘‘consuming’’ his daughter’s memory and identity through his paternal influence—and a literal cannibal. Throughout her childhood, Lucı´a’s father told the story about his experience during the last days of the Spanish Civil War, when, during a particularly rough passage through the mountains of Navacerrada north of Madrid, he was forced to eat portions of a dead companion’s flesh. The cannibal conceit suggested by the novel’s title also functions structurally as a representation of Lucı´a’s narrative strategy. As a narrator, Lucı´a cannibalizes the stories, memories, and experiences of her companions (and of her other ‘‘selves’’) in order to construct her own personal identity. By writing about the extraordinary experiences that befall her after the kidnapping of her husband Ramo´n, Lucı´a Romero seeks to understand and come to terms with her previously malleable perception of self. She is not just a daughter of a cannibal, but through her symbolic cannibalization of the various discourses that make up the novel and the multiple selves that comprise her own identity she is able to overcome her previous nihilism and embrace a more positive worldview. In La hija del canı´bal, cannibalism is a metaphor that represents symbolically the postmodern dynamics of constructing personal identity. 32

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Like many of the protagonists that appear in the novels treated in the following chapters, Lucı´a Romero is bored with her numbingly banal existence. She is the author of an unsuccessful series of books for children and has been married for ten years to a low-level government bureaucrat. Her dissatisfying but comfortable routine is interrupted by her husband’s kidnapping from the Barajas airport, and the novel’s plot centers on her attempts to collect and deliver a ransom to what appears to be a politically committed terrorist group. While she is at first disconcerted by this disruption of her life’s routine, she later finds that the disappearance of her husband has the unexpected effect of ordering her life and as well as the lives of her two new companions, her neighbors Fe´lix and Adria´n. The novel is not just a detective story, but also a tale about coming to terms with personal identity in a sometimes chaotic and violent world. When Lucı´a finally finds her husband at the conclusion of the novel, she learns that he was implicated from the beginning in a plot designed to embezzle funds from the government. The work concludes with a more or less traditional denouement in the style of detective fiction, but the important thing is the narrator’s liberation from her painfully ordinary existence, via an epiphanic self-discovery. It is in the novel’s final paragraph that she concludes, ‘‘[H]oy creo entender el mundo. Man˜ana dejare´ de entenderlo, pero hoy me parece haber desentran˜ado su secreto’’ (1997, 337). [Today I think I understand the world. Tomorrow I will cease to understand it, but today I think I’ve discovered its secret.]1 Lucı´a’s understanding of the world is based upon an acceptance of the inexorable passage of time and the inevitability of personal loss, betrayal, and the existence of evil in the world. But the novel does not conclude with nihilistic resignation, but rather with a redemptive affirmation that life is still worth living in spite of the unpredictability of the universe and the existence of evil. Through narrative, Lucı´a is able finally to appropriate one of her neighbor Fe´lix’s many philosophical assertions: ‘‘[S]iempre existe la belleza’’ (Montero 1997, 338). [Beauty will always exist.] In this chapter, I examine the metafictional conceits of La hija del canı´bal—its linguistic and narrative self-consciousness, selfreferentiality, montage structure, frame breaks (in the form of the explicit mention of Rosa Montero herself within the text), and use of the cannibal trope—in terms of their importance to

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the construction and understanding of personal identity. In La hija del canı´bal, the self-conscious processes of textual representation reflect the corollary processes of representing the self. These narrative processes can be analyzed in terms of three interrelated schema: the theme of the double and its relevance to the idea of narrative schizophrenia, the creation of narrative indeterminacy, and cannibalism as metaphor.

Narrative Doubles The idea of doubles and multiple selves is a recurring conceit in La hija del canı´bal that is reflected in the novel’s fragmented structure. The story is told from three points of view. Lucı´a’s narrative voice is composed of a first person and a third person, while a third voice in the first person belongs to her octogenarian neighbor, Fe´lix. Just as Lucı´a must assemble the disparate pieces that make up her story (all the while incorporating Fe´lix’s narrative into her own), so must the reader interpret and make sense of the various narratives that make up the novel. The existence of three distinct discourses in this novel about personal identity suggests that identity is synthetic in nature. In La hija del canı´bal, the narrator’s personality is comprised of multiple selves and memories that only achieve coherence through narrative. While she and her new friends endeavor to resolve the mystery of her husband’s disappearance, Lucı´a simultaneously seeks to resolve the mystery of her own identity. One aspect of this search involves the reconciliation of her many doubles. Throughout the novel, the narrator slows the dramatic development of her tale to discuss instances in which she has had to deal with ‘‘other’’ Lucı´as: when an Iranian man stole her identity in order to purchase a car; when, after receiving an erroneous message on her answering-machine, Lucı´a took on the identity of a woman named Ton˜i out of guilt and compassion and visited the real Ton˜i’s dying father in the hospital; when she went to great and surprising lengths to prove to the girlfriend of a man named Constantino that she was not his lover (having seen Lucı´a on television, Constantino had made the story up in order to make his girlfriend jealous); and when the readers of her books for children would confuse her for the author of another popular series of children’s books.2

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In addition to these mistaken identities and doubles, the narrator draws the reader’s attention to instances of psychological doubling. The narrator’s idea of physical love, for example, is based upon the idea that sexuality requires the creation of two selves. In order to avoid embarrassment she suggests that we must create a critical distance from ourselves: ‘‘[M]ientras nos amamos nos estamos viendo en la distancia, como los actores de una mala pelı´cula pornogra´fica (a veces, cuando hay suerte, como los actores de una buena pelı´cula)’’ (Montero 1997, 52). [While we make love we view ourselves from a distance, like actors in a bad pornographic movie (although sometimes, if we are lucky, we view ourselves like actors in a good movie).] Lucı´a sees the expression of sexuality as necessarily schizophrenic, requiring the splitting of the personality into actor and viewer; subject and object. Although she later overcomes this painful self-awareness, Lucı´a points to the importance of a sexual and an intellectual self that coexist within her personality. While her sexual self makes love, her intellectual self watches as if viewing a bad pornographic film. Before she is able to reconcile her many competing personae, even romantic love produces a self-alienating doubling of personal identity for Lucı´a. She posits that love tends to convert its sufferer into a person unknown to himself or herself: ‘‘[L]a primera fase del amor no la vives tu´, sino tu doble, esa enajenada en la que te conviertes [ . . . ] yo me encontraba en ese territorio fronterizo de la locura, a medias devorada por mi yo amoroso’’ (207). [You do not live the first phase of love as yourself. Your double lives it—that alien person you tend to become . . . I found myself in that territory bordering on madness, half devoured by my love-self.] Like the psychological doubling that Lucı´a uses to describe the experience of sexual intercourse, this romantic doubling is likened to a kind of malaise, or, in her words, a ‘‘territory bordering on madness.’’ This statement again makes use of an antithetical relationship between selves that draws upon the cannibal image introduced in the title: there is a romantic self that threatens to devour the real self. Lucı´a’s use of the anthropophagic image implies the danger of a mutual assimilation of each self by the other and introduces the importance of a dialectical synthesis for the creation of personal identity. In terms of narrative structure, the doubling of Lucı´a’s personality is reflected in the contradicting narrative voices that she

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uses to tell her story. The first person and third-person points of view alternately fabricate, correct, and censor falsehoods. Part of this fluid exchange between different narrative points of view can be explained in terms of the metafictional novel’s ‘‘explicit discussion of the arbitrary nature . . . of boundaries’’ (Waugh 1984, 29)—the boundaries that separate reality and fiction, self and other, author and narrator. In this case, Montero posits a series of internally conceived boundaries between possible selves: the self that we present to the world and the self that only we can see. But at the same time, she is aware of the provisional nature of personal identity, for what makes us who we are and not someone else? ‘‘¿Por que´ soy yo y no otra persona?’’ (Montero 1997, 335). [Why am I myself and not someone else?] While she tends to prevaricate when she uses the first person, the third-person point of view allows Lucı´a the critical distance necessary to understand herself. Mutually aware narrative voices within the text symbolize the existence of two sometimes contradictory sides of the same personality. The narrator’s self is split into two conflicting drives, one that fabricates and the other that censors those fabrications. In the following quotation taken from chapter two, the narrator overtly acknowledges the dynamics of her dialogic text, blurring further the distinction between her various identities: [A] veces Lucı´a Romero le parece estar contempla´ndose desde el exterior, como si fuese la protagonista de una pelı´cula o de un libro; y en esos momentos suele hablar de sı´ misma en tercera persona con el mayor descaro. Piensa Lucı´a que esta manı´a le viene de muy antiguo, tal vez de su aficio´n a la lectura; ya que esa tendencia hacia el desdoblamiento hubiera podido ser utilizada con provecho si se hubiera dedicado a escribir novelas, dado que la narrativa, a fin de cuentas, no es sino el arte de hacerse perdonar la esquizofrenia. (21) [Sometimes Lucı´a Romero seems to look at herself from the outside, as if she were the protagonist of a movie or book. During those moments she tends shamelessly to talk about herself in the third person. Lucı´a thinks that this habit was formed long ago, perhaps through her love of reading, since this tendency toward doubling could have been utilized had she decided to write novels. Narrative, after all, is nothing more than the art of reconciling schizophrenia.]

Passages such as these form part of the novel’s self-conscious commentary on its own structure and offer the reader a privi-

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leged view into the dynamic process of narrative creation. In this case, the act of writing reflects the construction of the self through language. Because the autobiographical narrative offers critical distance, it represents one way to come to terms with schizophrenia. By viewing herself as a character in her own book she is able to read and interpret her personal narrative. The third-person point of view allows Lucı´a to distance herself from her story and from herself. As her story becomes stranger, Lucı´a draws upon the language of literature and film as an interpretive tool that she can use to describe and understand her experiences. In the following passage, for example, Lucı´a draws upon the tradition of film noir in order to describe the extraordinary circumstances in which she finds herself. While she and Fe´lix are thinking about where to hide the ransom money, Lucı´a begins to see herself from the outside: ‘‘[M]e veı´a ahı´ fuera, enfrente de mı´, en esa escena tı´pica de pelı´cula negra, discutiendo sobre el botı´n en torno a una mesa de cocina, con las tazas manchadas de cafe´, la botella de con˜ac y la pistola, como una atracadora con su colega’’ (52, italics in the original). [I saw myself from the outside, right there in front of myself, in a typical scene taken from a film noir, sitting around the kitchen table arguing over the loot surrounded by dirty coffee cups, a bottle of cognac and the gun, like a robber with her accomplice.] In order to understand these unbelievable events, the narrator is forced to avail herself of some of the commonplaces of popular genres. Her self-conscious mention of the previously established cultural context of film noir allows the narrator to put ironic quotation marks around the events she describes. Lucı´a is, in effect, living a thriller, and she consequently acknowledges her indebtedness to the language of the archetypical thriller. In a later episode, the narrator describes Adria´n as the prototypical romantic hero (166), and when Lucı´a and Adria´n later become lovers, the narrator resignedly points out, ‘‘Tantas escenas roma´nticas comienzan ası´. En las novelas, en las pelı´culas, pero tambie´n en la propia vida’’ (210). [So many romantic scenes begin like that. In novels, in films, but also in real life.] Thus, the narrator is always conscious of how the novel must appear to the reader and recognizes that fiction and reality are always reflecting and imitating each other. Lucı´a’s self-conscious acknowledgment of a complex network of cultural and historical references and popular literary tropes expresses her indebtedness to them

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even while they allow her to make meaning of her own strange experience. By creating ‘‘doubles’’ for herself—viewing herself as a character in a novel or film—the narrator of La hija del canı´bal is able to distance herself critically from both the authorial enterprise and the events that transpire. Lucı´a is not the only character to have a doppelga¨nger. The theme of doubles extends to her octogenarian friend and conarrator, Fe´lix, who offers a historical account of the years leading up to, during, and after the Spanish Civil War that complements the personal account of Lucı´a’s own history. In addition to providing a historical narrative, Fe´lix also offers an important philosophical discourse that draws upon the themes and forms of Jorge Luis Borges’s fiction. When he describes an episode from his life in which he meets a younger version of himself in the Atocha train station in Madrid, he reflects on the hidden mysterious order of the universe that exists beyond our ability to comprehend it. The anecdote is reminiscent of Borges’s ‘‘El otro,’’ in which the older Borges meets a younger version of himself while sitting on a park bench in Cambridge, Massachusetts. In Fe´lix’s story, a young familiar-looking man sits next to him and the two have a brief conversation. Fe´lix realizes later that he has already lived that experience from the other side: Yo habı´a vivido esa misma escena, pero del otro lado, Lucı´a, del otro lado [ . . . ] Yo tambie´n estaba sentado en un banco y sumido en mi angustia, cuando se acerco´ un viejo y me hablo´ palabras prudentes. Con las mismas palabras, ma´s o menos, que yo le dije an˜os despue´s a ese muchacho. Las mismas palabras, las mismas edades, incluso parecidas palmeras a nuestro alrededor. (323) [I had lived that same scene before, only from the other side, Lucı´a, from the other side. . . . I, too, was seated on a bench, submerged in my anguish, when an old man came up to me and offered some prudent words. With the same words, more or less, that I spoke years later to that young man. The same words, the same ages, we were even among similar palm trees.]

He explains this strange encounter—or pair of encounters—by pointing to a Borgesian order that must exist beyond our human experience of reality: Estoy hablando de una realidad que va ma´s alla´ del tiempo y del espacio, de una continuidad armo´nica que es infinitamente ma´s

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grande que nosotros. Hay un todo que nos engloba, un mapa gigante e indescifrable del que formamos parte. No creo que haya Dios, ni Cielo, ni Infierno; pero tal vez exista una especie de ritmo universal que nos acoja. (323) [I am talking about a reality that goes beyond time and space, a harmonious continuity that is infinitely greater than we are. There is some kind of all that surrounds us, a gigantic indecipherable map of which we form a part. I don’t believe in God, heaven, or hell, but perhaps there exists some kind of universal rhythm that takes care of us.]

Borges’s critical engagement with the literary tradition, along with his subversion of many of the commonplaces of popular fiction, makes him an attractive literary model for contemporary Spanish novelists. The influence of Jorge Luis Borges that we see in the above section not only demonstrates to Montero’s debt to literary history but also to the continued importance of Borges’s work to contemporary Spanish writers of fiction. Fe´lix’s insistence on themes such as time, space, continuity, and infinity, and his use of the map metaphor (‘‘a gigantic indecipherable map of which we form a part’’) point to the Borgesian conceptualization of a universe whose nature continues to elude our attempts to understand it.3 The manifestation of a fictionalized Rosa Montero within La hija del canı´bal represents one final indication of the importance of doubles to the work and once again points to Borges. Aside from its multiple points of view and self-conscious conceits, the appearance of Rosa Montero’s name within her own novel represents the most egregious fragmentation of the discourse that contributes to the novel’s engagement with postmodern indeterminacy. There are two such frame breaks in which the narrator makes an overt reference to the author Rosa Montero. The first appears near the beginning of chapter 5, in which the narrator laments that the protagonist (herself), is not as smart or strong as the novelist Rosa Montero, since the reallife author would undoubtedly perform better in her situation. Reverting to the third person voice that allows her critical distance, she engages in a pointed self-critique: Lucı´a callaba demasiado, consentı´a demasiado, asentı´a demasiado; era asquerosamente femenina en su silencio pu´blico, mientras por

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dentro la frustracio´n rugı´a. Lucı´a envidiaba a aquellas mujeres capaces de imponerse y de pelearse diale´cticamente en el espacio exterior, siempre tan desolado. Como Rosa Montero, la escritora de color originaria de la Guinea espan˜ola: era un tanto marisabidilla y a veces una autoritaria y una chillona, pero abrı´a la boca la tal Rosa Montero (dientes deslumbrantes en su rostro redondo de luna negra) y la gente callaba y la escuchaba. Lucı´a hubiera deseado ser ası´, un poquito ma´s animosa y segura. (Montero 1997, 42) [Lucı´a was too quiet, she consented too much, and she was too agreeable. She was disgustingly feminine with her silent public demeanor, which covered up her raging interior frustration. Lucı´a was jealous of women who could impose themselves dialectically on the desolate outside world. Like Rosa Montero, the woman of Equatorial Guinean color: she was a bit of a know-it-all and sometimes was a little loud and authoritarian, but when that Rosa Montero opened her mouth (with her amazing teeth that appeared in her rounded black-moon face) people quieted down and listened. Lucı´a would have liked to have been like that, a little more animated and sure of herself.]

This technique is not so disconcerting as it is humorous, since Montero seems to be having a bit of fun with her position as author. Yet, the reader is reminded here of the fictionality of the novel even while the fiction is tainted with a bit of reality. Spanish readers would be aware that Montero is herself an author of children’s books just like her protagonist, and that the protagonists of more than one of her novels are storytellers themselves.4 In the above quotation, the figure of Montero is split into two authorial personae, one fictional and one real (or extratextual). The appearance of a fictionalized ‘‘real’’ author within her own text serves to subvert the conventions of literary realism, and, along with the narrator’s repeated prevarications, further problematizes clear-cut distinctions between fiction and reality. Rosa Montero’s fictionalized Equatorial Guinean identity can be related to the postcolonial formulation of the cannibal conceit to which I refer later. Having come to terms with her husband’s betrayal and overcome her own midlife crisis, in the concluding chapter of La hija del canı´bal Lucı´a reflects on her new worldview and explains the ‘‘revelation’’ to which she alludes in the novel’s first line. Deciding to write a novel about her experiences, she indicates

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that her comfortable new perception of the universe lies in her new understanding of herself and others. Having mentally freed herself from her parents’ influence, she finds not only that she feels freer in general, but that perhaps now she is beginning to be herself (Montero 1997, 336). The narrator elaborates on her discoveries while summing up the alter egos or doubles with whom she has dealt through her writing of the preceding pages: La identidad es una cosa confusa y extraordinaria. ¿Por que´ yo soy yo y no otra persona? Yo podrı´a ser Marı´a Martina, por ejemplo, la aguerrida juez con nombre de madre universal; o podrı´a ser Ton˜i, la hija desaparecida de aquel viejo que se estaba muriendo en un hospital. Podrı´a ser la mujer del iranı´ que compro´ un coche con mi nombre, o la verdadera amante de aquel Constantino que atormentaba a su mujer con mi presencia. Claro que tambie´n podrı´a ser Fe´lix, y encontrarme ya al final de mi vida, con todo a las espaldas y muy poco delante. (336) [Identity is a confusing and extraordinary thing. Why am I me and not someone else? I could be Marı´a Martina, for example, the embattled judge with the name of the universal mother; or I could be Ton˜i, the missing daughter of that old man who was dying in the hospital. I could be the wife of that Iranian man that bought a car in my name, or the real lover of that man Constantino who tormented his wife with my presence. Of course, I could also be Fe´lix, finding myself at the end of my life with everything behind me and very little in front.]

But Lucı´a is not Ton˜i, the Iranian man’s wife, Constantino’s lover, Fe´lix, or Rosa Montero. Nevertheless, her use of the conditional tense, along with her repeated admissions of lying throughout the novel, introduce a degree of indeterminacy to her conclusions. For although she appears to have come to terms with each of these alternate selves, they still play an important part in the construction of her narrative. Indeed, each self that she is not represents a useful way to understand what she is. Each of these doubles plays a part in her self-definition, for even if she claims to have nothing in common with these people, she can still define herself in opposition to these possible identities. In writing her narrative of self, Lucı´a draws upon her inheritance as the ‘‘daughter of the cannibal’’ to consume each of these alternate identities, incorporating, censoring, and assimilating them into her own story.

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Indeterminacy, Complexity, and the Making of Meaning The self-conscious reflections on the representational power of language and the sustained emphasis on the theme of the double in La hija del canı´bal point to the narrator’s understanding of the difficulty of representing ‘‘true’’ identity. Because she understands that her autobiographical expression is in fact a story created through language, Lucı´a resigns herself to the knowledge that even the most faithful representation of the self will be a distortion, a re-presentation, a fiction. The metafictional conceits that appear throughout La hija del canı´bal reflect the inherent complexities of articulating identity.5 Any attempt to understand human identity, memory, and consciousness requires an acceptance of the primacy of narrative to their articulation. The corollary indeterminacy of the novel is closely related to its self-conscious approach to narration, which can be understood as part of the postmodern novel’s foregrounding of diegesis (Lodge 1992). As I indicated in the previous section, the appearance of Rosa Montero within her own novel imposes several degrees of indeterminacy upon the narrative—both on the level of fiction and in the relation of that fiction to reality. In the following passage, taken from the final chapter of the novel, the narrator discusses one of her doubles, represented by the fictionalized African Rosa Montero: O incluso podrı´a ser la escritora Rosa Montero, ¿por que´ no? Puesto que he mentido tantas veces a lo largo de estas pa´ginas, ¿quie´n te asegura ahora que yo no sea Rosa Montero y que no me haya inventado la existencia de esta Lucı´a atolondrada y verborreica, de Fe´lix y de todos los dema´s? Pero no. Yo no soy guineana, como la novelista, ni he escrito este libro originariamente en bubi y luego lo he autotraducido al castellano. Y adema´s todo lo que acabo de contar lo he vivido realmente, incluso, o sobre todo, mis mentiras. Me parece, en fin, que hoy empiezo a reconocerme en el espejo de mi propio nombre. Se acabaron los juegos en tercera persona: aunque resulte increı´ble, creo que yo soy yo. (336) [Perhaps I am the writer Rosa Montero. Why not? Seeing as how I have lied so many times over the course of these pages, who is going to assure you that I am not Rosa Montero and that I didn’t invent

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the existence of this foolish, talkative Lucı´a, Fe´lix, and the rest of them? But no. I am not Guinean like the novelist, nor did I write this book originally in Bubi and then translate it myself into Spanish. Besides, I really lived everything I have written, above all, the lies. I think that finally I am beginning to recognize myself in the mirror that is my own name. The games in the third person are over: although it may seem incredible, I believe that I am me.]

Two interpretive dynamics come into play in this paragraph. First, the introduction of Rosa Montero within her own text serves to call into question the illusion of definite systems of representation, for although the narrator purports to have learned something about who she is, the introduction of the real author’s name in the same paragraph exposes the artificiality of that conclusion. Second, the reader will note that the narrator not only undermines the believability of what she has related up to this point, but that she also fictionalizes the ‘‘real’’ author Montero by placing her within a falsified colonial context as a native of Equatorial Guinea, the former Spanish colonial territory. Simultaneously, in saying, ‘‘nor did I write this book originally in Bubi and then translate it myself into Spanish,’’ the narrator alludes to the tradition of self-referential writing exemplified by Don Quixote and Borges’s ‘‘Pierre Menard.’’ In the same sentence, then, the reader is confronted by two traditions: that of the canonical literature of the Spanish tradition (Cervantes and Borges), and that of the ‘‘fictionalized’’ colonial image, here of an Equatorial Guinean Rosa Montero. As if the appearance of a fictionalized Rosa Montero within the novel were not enough, the narrator’s constant lying and subsequent admissions to falsehood establish in the novel an unshakable sense of indeterminacy. The narrator is constantly undermining her own authorial authority by admitting that she has lied. In one place, she says, ‘‘Bien, no he hecho nada ma´s que empezar y ya he mentido’’ (17). [Great. I have only just begun and I have already lied]. At another, she adds, ‘‘[T]ambie´n he mentido en otros dos detalles’’ (20). [I have also lied regarding two other details.]6 While the novel refers constantly to itself, it also deals with fiction in its most general sense. Narrative fiction, after all, necessarily requires invention. That the narrator lies is a part of her role as novelist, but these narratorial admissions function as caveats for the reader, who is forced to main-

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tain a critical distance from the story. As Patricia Waugh maintains, metafictional novels such as La hija del canı´bal are based upon a fundamental opposition: ‘‘the construction of a fictional illusion (as in traditional realism) and the laying bare of that illusion’’ (1984, 6). The metafictional play of La hija del canı´bal serves to emphasize the importance of the novel as signifier, while downplaying the signified, since the metafictional text is alienated from the referential power (fictional or real) of language. La hija del canı´bal is a novel about an author, a work of fiction about a creator of fiction who is always selfconsciously aware of the problems of writing. Montero’s self-conscious attention to the narrative process represents a particularly valuable way for her to continue in the tradition of realism even while she acknowledges its conventionality. As David Lodge puts it, ‘‘[T]he more openly the author appears to reveal him or herself in such texts, the more inescapable it becomes, paradoxically, that the author as a voice is only a function of his own fiction, a rhetorical construct, not a privileged authority by an object of interpretation’’ (1992, 195, italics in the original). In Montero’s later novel El corazo´n del Ta´rtaro [The Tartar’s Heart] (2001), this narrative stance is explicitly articulated by the omniscient third-person narrator. In the final paragraph, the narrator of El corazo´n del Ta´rtaro points to the realist tradition and its unrealistic emphasis on comprehensibility and order: ‘‘La vida era una pura incertidumbre. La vida no era como las novelas decimono´nicas; no tenı´a nudo y desenlace, no existı´a una causa ni un orden para las cosas, y ni siquiera las realidades ma´s simples eran fiables’’ (2001, 268). [Life was pure uncertainty. Life was not like nineteenth-century novels; it did not have plot twists and denouements. There did not exist causes and effects for things. Not even the simplest realities were to be trusted.] Life, quite unlike literature, does not follow a logical order, nor does it offer a comprehensible denouement. The narrative structure of La hija del canı´bal mirrors the indeterminate nature of our conceptions of the universe. The self-conscious foregrounding of the narrator’s power of manipulation that we see in La hija del canı´bal emphasizes the novel’s discursive indeterminacy. Fe´lix, as a representative voice of Borges in the novel, offers an important interpretive tool for our understanding of the text. Beginning the narrative that he will provide in chapters 7, 11, 17, 19, 23, and 29, Fe´lix tells Lucı´a

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that we are all subjective, and that there is no reality beyond that which we complete, translate, and alter through our own eyes: ‘‘Tantas realidades como ojos’’ (Montero 1997, 60). [As many realities as there are eyes.] This postmodern polyvalent vision of reality reflects the contemporary acknowledgment of the complexities involved in arriving at ‘‘true’’ objectivity. Fe´lix, like Lucı´a, is always conscious of the intricacies of narrative and the subjective nature of representation. La hija del canı´bal offers multifaceted perspectives of reality in order to produce meaning, not frustrate it. While some critics will be tempted perhaps to characterize Fe´lix’s worldview as a corrosive descent into postmodern relativism, David Harvey offers a useful formulation of postmodern approaches to truth, history, and indeterminacy that may be brought to bear on Montero’s novel. In his essay ‘‘The Condition of Postmodernity,’’ Harvey paraphrases Foucault’s discussion of the postmodern historian, who in the absence of historical continuity, causality, and memory must become ‘‘an archaeologist of the past, digging up its remnants as Borges does in his fiction, and assembling them, side by side, in the museum of modern knowledge’’ (1992, 311). Fe´lix is Foucault’s postmodern historian who understands that in the absence of master historical narratives, we can only acknowledge that there are as many realities as there are eyes to perceive them. The structure of La hija del canı´bal, made up of multiple discourses and points of view that exist side by side—sometimes contradicting each other, sometimes coinciding—mirrors this philosophy. Postmodern narratives, be they personal or historical, require a greater responsibility of the writer and the reader, as both must make an effort to interpret the many sources of historical and personal material in order to create meaning. Montero continues to reflect on the constructedness of our various visions of the universe in El corazo´n del Ta´rtaro, in which the protagonist Zarza must reconcile the disconcerting chaos of her own reality with her need to construct a reassuring metaphor of order. The Rubik’s cube that her brother constantly carries with him represents symbolically the worldview that Montero developed in the three last books she published up to 2004: Miguel daba vueltas al azar a los cuadraditos con sus dedos pa´lidos y ara´cnidos, y el objeto, en efecto, se transformaba de un instante en

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otro. No recordaba Zarza el nu´mero exacto de posiciones que podı´a tener el maldito cubo, era una cifra imposible y extraordinaria, quintillones de combinaciones de las cuales so´lo una albergaba la solucio´n; esto es, la homogeneidad de los colores, el orden, la armonı´a, la calma primigenia antes del caos. Zarza odiaba esa desalentadora abundancia de posibilidades. Que fuera tan difı´cil atinar y tan fa´cil de perderse. Se sentı´a por completo incapaz de pastorear los cuadrados de colores hasta su posicio´n primera, de la misma manera que habı´a sido incapaz de ordenar su propio destino. (Montero 2001, 156) [Miguel worked the cube randomly with his pallid, arachnid fingers, and the object transformed itself from one instant to the next. Zarza couldn’t remember exactly how many configurations were possible with that damned cube, but it was an impossible, extraordinary number. There were quintillions of possible combinations, but only one offered the solution—that is, the homogeneity of colors, order, harmony, the primeval calm before the chaos. Zarza hated the breathtaking abundance of possibilities. She hated that it was so hard to achieve and so easy to lose. She felt completely incapable of shepherding those little squares back to their initial position in the same way she had been completely incapable of ordering her own destiny.]

The idea of infinite possibilities produces vertigo in the protagonist; the game that entertains Zarza’s young brother becomes a chilling metaphor for the impossibility of deciphering reality. This comparison between a child’s toy and Zarza’s own attempts to order her own universe points to the paradoxical nature of trying to understand the human experience. The game is supposed to be simple, but the human mind’s attempts to figure out both life and the Rubik’s cube can lead to frustration, anxiety, and distress. Similarly, even when the Rubik’s cube has been solved, producing the primeval calm and harmony before the chaos, the ordered homogeneity of colors on each side belies the dizzying multiplicity of ways to arrive at the solution, for the solved Rubik’s cube is, like the novel we hold in our hands, only a representation of order. Fe´lix is able to accept a multiplicity of interpretations while allowing that the only reality that is truly available to us is the one that we complete, translate, and alter through our own distinct perceptions. The structure of La hija del canı´bal, which is composed of multiple points of view, different time frames, and many doubles mirrors this thematic conceit. The novel’s de-

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nouement presents Lucı´a’s acknowledgment of this aspect of contemporary life when she chooses one worldview that, as she clearly recognizes, will most likely change in the future. We may conclude that although the narrator ends her novel by insisting that everything she has written is true, Montero’s appearance in the novel, along with her use of multiple narrative voices and self-conscious reflections on the construction of her narrative, serves to reinforce the novel’s indeterminate structure. This indefinite form reflects the novel’s preoccupation with the indeterminate nature of personal identity, which, along with the recurrent theme of doubles, offers a postmodern view of identity as fundamentally schizoid, although not in the narrow, negative, clinical sense of the word. Nuria Amat’s Todos somos Kafka offers an extreme, opposing version of narrative schizophrenia in which we can see a dramatic example of the shattered signifying chain: ‘‘schizophrenia in the form of a rubble of distinct and unrelated signifiers’’ (Harvey 1992, 310). What differentiates Montero’s fiction from Nuria Amat’s, however, is that Montero’s narrators recognize the existence of their textually manifest schizophrenia and are able to construct for themselves a narratively derived simulacrum of an ordered, cohesive, albeit momentary, sense of self. In the concluding paragraph of El corazo´n del Ta´rtaro, the narrator introduces several possible outcomes, refusing to impose any one interpretation on the reader. In the following passage, the narrator reflects on some of the possible endings for the protagonist: La hepatitis C podrı´a acabar reventando el hı´gado de Zarza y provocarle una cirrosis como la de Harris. O tal vez no. El anhelo insaciable de la Blanca, eternamente inscrito a fuego en su memoria, podrı´a volver a arrojar a Zarza en brazos de la Reina. O tal vez no. La vida era una pura incertidumbre. (Montero 2001, 268) [Hepatitis C could have destroyed Zarza’s liver and caused a cirrhosis like Harris’s. Or perhaps not. The insatiable yearning for Blanca (heroin), eternally burned into her memory, could have forced Zarza back into the arms of Reina. Or perhaps not. Life was pure uncertainty.]

The use of the conditional tense further emphasizes the uncertainty of the novel’s conclusion. Both La hija del canı´bal and El

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corazo´n del Ta´rtaro suggest that life is, at best, an uncertain game. As Borges put it in ‘‘La loterı´a de Babilonia’’ [The Lottery of Babylon], the universe is an ‘‘infinito juego de azares’’ (1956, 75) [an infinite game of chance]. Although La hija del canı´bal concludes with the first-person narrative style winning out over the third-person one, the novel’s indeterminate structure points to a less-than-decisive victory of one self over the other. After all, the narrator concludes by saying that although today she believes she understands the world, tomorrow she may no longer understand it: ‘‘[Hoy creo entender el mundo. Man˜ana dejare´ de entenderlo’’ (Montero 1997, 337). [Today I think I understand the world. Tomorrow I will cease to understand it.] If the world is indeed chaotic and indeterminate, how can we navigate it? In the following sections, I argue that Montero’s discursive juxtaposition of various narrative elements and conflicting discourses reflects the contemporary readers’ efforts to make sense of the contemporary world. By self-consciously acknowledging the indeterminate nature of our experience, Montero’s narratives allow the reader to understand what is involved in the narrative structuring process, and invite the reader to participate in the game of making meaning. By offering competing narratives and worldviews, and by refusing to offer one interpretation of how her novels must be read, Montero dramatizes the postmodern conception that ‘‘no hierarchy of discourses or ‘cultural orchestration’ ’’ (Collins 1992, 112) can make the process of interpretation automatic. Her aim is not to create an arbitrary textual pastiche; rather, Montero’s eclecticism and her creation of competing narratives that comment on each other and on themselves function as a way ‘‘to produce meaning (as opposed to frustrating it)’’ (Collins 1992, 113). Postmodern texts reflect the postmodern world, since in our contemporary cultural context we must create meaning out of the multiple, ambiguous, contradictory, and occasionally chaotic cultural environment in which we live.

Literary Cannibalism as Postmodern Metaphor In a convincing study of the novel, Warren Johnson writes that anthropophagic imagery characterizes the male-dominated social structures of the novel (2002, 457), and that narrative offers

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the protagonist her only means of articulating a personal identity while symbolically removing herself from ‘‘participation in the cannibalistic system’’ (465). Although he fails to take into account the importance of the symbolic cannibalism practiced by the narrator herself, Johnson’s is a compelling Marxist reading of the novel. It concludes that Lucı´a’s essentially inchoate self is a by-product of post–totalitarian exchange systems. In the following pages, I emphasize an alternative reading that takes into account Montero’s careful use of cannibalism as a postmodern metaphor that represents the dynamic processes of personal identity. I will argue that the cannibal trope introduced in the novel’s title functions as a narrative method of resolving indeterminacy and reconciling the many thematic and structural doubles that appear throughout La hija del canı´bal. In Totem and Taboo, Freud discusses the symbolic resonance of cannibalism in a chapter entitled ‘‘The Infantile Recurrence of Totemism,’’ in which he describes the psychological ambivalence of the exiled sons who had banded together to slay and eat their father. In so doing, they ‘‘accomplished their identification with him by devouring him and each acquired a part of his strength’’ (1998, 122), while simultaneously ridding themselves of ‘‘the father who stood so powerfully in the way of their sexual demands and their desire for power’’ (122). According to Freud, the cannibalization of the father is indicative of a fundamentally ambivalent and contradictory complex that we find ‘‘in all our children and in neurotics’’ (122), who at the same time hate and admire the paternal figure. The cannibal trope, then, is the incarnation of this ambivalent attitude that seeks simultaneously to assimilate and destroy patriarchal power and influence. In the Western tradition, cannibalism has generally been considered a universal taboo, as we see in Freud’s discussion of the theme, in which the brothers are described as ‘‘cannibalistic savages’’ (122). The cannibal thus has been linked historically with the incomprehensible, misunderstood other: the savage, ‘‘the ultimate marker of difference in a coded opposition of light and dark, rational and irrational, civilized and savage’’ (Stam 1997, 238). While some writers of the Western tradition such as Montaigne, Herman Melville, Alfred Jarry, and the dadaist Francis Picabia have used the cannibal trope against Europe (Stam 1997, 238), it is in the context of postcolonial discourse that the idea

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has been most profitably reclaimed and recontextualized. Postcolonial writers have used the cannibal trope as a way to engage critically the dominant discourses of colonial cultural hegemony while examining the syncretic nature of identity formation. In his evocatively titled essay ‘‘Self-consuming Fictions: The Dialectics of Cannibalism in Modern Caribbean Narratives,’’ Eugenio Matibag indicates that the cannibal trope persists in modern Caribbean writing as a way ‘‘of critiquing and constructing a post-colonial cultural identity’’ (1991, 1). According to Matibag, a consideration of the metaphorical implications of cannibalism ‘‘provides a more fruitful focus on the manner in which recent Caribbean texts have undertaken a search for identity in the traces left by Antillean ‘forerunners,’ while at the same time ironizing the implicit search for origins’’ (3). Indeed, it is precisely because of cannibalism’s symbolic association with the ‘‘other’’ that makes the practice such a useful ideological and literary tool. Matibag asserts that the cannibal, although not a master trope, does function as ‘‘a sign of radical difference whose reinscription, in Caribbean discourse, opens up new approaches to the question of identity’’ (3). The idea of the cannibal, which within a European imperialist discourse was used as a way to objectify the ‘‘other’’ as an uncivilized savage, has been appropriated by postcolonial writers as ‘‘a metaphor of incorporation and/or differentiation, of subjective self-divisions and mergings with respect to an other’’ (14). The cannibal trope is a method of dealing with ‘‘the dilemma of a post-plantation society in which the cultural contributions of Africans, Indians, Europeans, and Asians had never been completely synthesized; in which individuals, living in such a heterogeneous, disunified world dominated by persistent colonial structures, feel cut off from any history and community they could call their own’’ (2). In order to create a new, hybrid identity, postcolonial writers utilize the image of the cannibal as a discursive tool that ‘‘de-defines and re-defines the divisory line between self and other, with the consequence of transforming what was considered an antinomy into a dialectical opposition to be canceled and subsumed into a higher level of transindividual unity’’ (14). Most important to my discussion of La hija del canı´bal, literary cannibalism is a dialectical narrative process through which discourse consumes other discourses: ‘‘[A] dialectics of cannibalism works through one of the paths by which

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fiction consumes fictions, including the reigning fictions of selfhood’’ (15). Thus, the cannibal trope represents a multidirectional dynamic of identity formation in which the self is fused or combined with the other, a process that ultimately transforms symbolically both entities: the cannibal and the cannibalized. The cannibalized discourse continues to exist in an altered form within the new hybrid narrative, while the consuming narrative is also changed through its assimilation of the other. Matibag’s formulation reflects the diversity of a Caribbean postcolonial culture in which writers must make meaning out of eclectic combinations of cultural references and heritages, both imperial and autochthonous. The idea of cultural cannibalism reflects the preoccupation of postcolonial writers who continue to seek ‘‘the integration of the divided colonial self’’ (2), which represents a vindication of their right to self-definition. Matibag indicates that this vindication of cultural identity is particularly valuable because it reconciles ‘‘the broader question of cultural syncretism and synthesis endemic to Caribbean culture’’ (2). But the Caribbean is not the only culture comprised of multiple, sometimes competing heritages that defines itself through cultural syncretism and synthesis. This is how all culture works. It is by reflecting heterogeneous contemporary cultures that postmodernism, for example, derives its defining eclectic style, its philosophy of pluralism and participation, and its strategy of designing art within the codes of its users. Culture in general (and postmodernism in particular) has an expanded audience of different tastes and cultures. Postmodern art can be seen and interpreted from many differing points of view at once, so it is inevitably ironic and multiply coded, providing several discontinuous interpretations based on multiple perspectives. The postmodern predilection for eclecticism can be explained by the fact that it is ‘‘a style and an ideology which ‘builds in’ the fragmentation and conflicted nature of contemporary culture’’ (Collins 1992, 110). In short, the agenda of postmodern art, like that of the Caribbean context Matibag describes, is ‘‘to challenge monolithic elitism’’ (Jencks 1992, 13) and the hegemonic discourses of the past. What postmodernism adds to this equation is a bridging of the gap that divides ‘‘high and low cultures, elite and mass, specialist and non-professional, or most

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generally put—one discourse and interpretive community from another’’ (Jencks 1992, 13). Charles Jencks is a critic of postmodern architecture whose formulations describe clearly the same sort of dynamics that we see in Matibag’s articulation: ‘‘[P]arts, sub-assemblies, subcultures often keep their unassimilated identity within the new whole. Hence the conflicted nature of the pluralism, the radical eclecticism of the post-modern style’’ (Jencks 1992, 15). Jencks writes that, in literature in particular, ‘‘virtually all post-modern writers mix genres, hence the hybrid subject matter and heterogeneous audience, once again bringing us back to the core idea of contested, or heteroglottic, pluralism’’ (15). Pluralism is perhaps the most agreed-upon ‘‘ism’’ of postmodernity. The postmodern celebration of pluralism represents the end of a single monolithic worldview and the death of the traditional colonial cultural hegemonies. Postmodernism is based upon a concerted resistance to single explanations, a respect for difference, and a celebration of the regional, local, and particular (11). The postmodern is, in short, characterized by hybridity, mixture, ambiguity, and double coding. Rosa Montero’s use of the cannibal trope in her novel opens up new interpretive possibilities that allow the reader to contemplate the broader question of cultural syncretism and synthesis that is endemic not only to Caribbean culture, but also to postmodern culture in general. As Jim Collins has so convincingly argued, the great variety of conflicting and complementary discourses that coexist in contemporary culture requires eclecticism and fragmentation: The situation, then, is not a ‘‘democratic’’ plurality, where aesthetic and ideological alternatives are carefully arranged in a kind of laissez-faire smorgasbord. Instead, a semiotic glut necessitates the arrangement, even hierarchizing[,] of conflicting discourses by individual subjects at a localized level. The bombardment of signs has produced, by no preconceived design whatsoever, a subject who is engaged in the process of being interpellated while simultaneously arranging those messages—as if the lack of cultural orchestration has produced a subject who must act as curator of his or her muse´e imaginaire. (Collins 1992, 116)

Montero’s appropriation and recontextualization of the postcolonial cannibal trope demonstrates its versatility as a conceit.

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In La hija del canı´bal, we can see how cannibalism in fact represents a perfect postmodern metaphor: it is a way to address the complexities of a postmodern culture that is ‘‘rendered fragmentary and ephemeral by the sheer plurality and elusiveness of cultural forms wrapped in the mysteries of rapid flux and change’’ (Harvey 1992, 315). In the concluding chapter of La hija del canı´bal—the same chapter in which the Equatorial Guinean Rosa Montero appears—Lucı´a significantly likens her new life without her husband to the independence of a colony from its empire. Having discovered finally that she is happy living her life alone, she is able to liberate herself from the stifling, inauthentic existence that she shared previously with her husband. She confesses that after so many years of living with Ramo´n, she has begun finally to recuperate her own house with the same kind of enthusiasm that a colonial nation frees itself from the empire: ‘‘Despue´s de tantos an˜os de convivir con Ramo´n recupero mi casa con la misma avidez con la que un paı´s colonial se independiza del imperio’’ (Montero 1997, 326). [After so many years of living with Ramo´n, I have taken back my house with the same kind of zeal with which a colonized country declares its independence of the empire.] Lucı´a’s relationship with Ramo´n is not the only ‘‘empire’’ from which she has won independence, as she also frees herself from the overwhelming psychic influence of her parents, who had cannibalized her memory and identity for so many years: ‘‘Ahora que he librado mentalmente a mis padres, yo tambie´n me siento ma´s libre’’ (336). [Now that I have liberated my parents mentally, I feel freer too.] Part of this liberation has to do with the fact that she no longer thinks of her father as ‘‘the cannibal,’’ although the reader must remember that she has, nevertheless, chosen to title the novel ‘‘The Daughter of the Cannibal,’’ implying that she has not only identified herself in relation to her father, but also sees herself as somehow continuing in his line. The novel’s structures and themes point perhaps to the hereditary transmission of the cannibal gene.7 By appropriating Matibag’s rubric for understanding the ‘‘selfconsuming fictions’’ of postcolonial Caribbean discourse, we may derive a useful theoretical framework that describes how the cannibal metaphor functions as a representation of postmodern articulations of identity in Montero’s novel. In La hija del

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canı´bal, the cannibal trope can be seen to function in the following ways: 1. As a method of critiquing and constructing identity, both cultural and personal 2. As a sign of radical difference whose narrative reinscription opens up different approaches to the question of identity 3. As ‘‘a metaphor of incorporation and/or differentiation, of subjective self-divisions and mergings with respect to an other’’ (Matibag 1991, 14) 4. As a way of dealing with a society in which multiple cultural contributions have not been totally synthesized, ‘‘in which individuals, living in such a heterogeneous, disunified world dominated by persistent [cultural] structures, feel cut off from any history and community they could call their own’’ (2) 5. As a method of de-defining and re-defining ‘‘the divisory line between self and other, with the consequence of transforming what was considered an antinomy into a dialectical opposition to be canceled and subsumed into a higher level of transindividual unity’’ (14) 6. Most importantly, as ‘‘a dialectics of cannibalism [that] works through one of the paths by which fiction consumes fictions, including the reigning fictions of selfhood’’ (15) Even though she has surmounted her father’s psychic cannibalization of her personal history and memory, Lucı´a’s narrative shows that she has inherited some of his anthropophagic tendencies. While she states that she had been cannibalized (and vampirized) by the psychic and real influence of her parents (predominantly her father), her inclusion of multiple discourses within her own narrative signals her own symbolic cannibalization of the narratives of others. Her text, which reflects her attempts to formulate and articulate a new personal identity, is in fact predicated upon her own consumption of other discourses and identities. Her fiction—the novel we hold in our hands—is realized through the consumption of other fictions. She appropriates Fe´lix’s narrative and worldview, takes on a part of her father’s identity in defining herself as the ‘‘daughter of the cannibal,’’ and annihilates the many other identities that were her doubles. Consequently, Lucı´a exposes the provisional bound-

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aries that separate her identity from her ‘‘others.’’ The thematic importance of doubles in La hija del canı´bal points to the dedefinition and re-definition of the line that divides the self from the other, for in seeking out her many doubles, Lucı´a is able to incorporate and assimilate them into her discourse and thus convert them into parts of her narrative of self. The dual action that characterizes cannibalism, in which self and other act upon each other through assimilation and incorporation, represents one way that Lucı´a is able to accept ambiguity and indeterminacy in the construction of her own personal identity. By assimilating the identities and foundational myths of her forebears, Lucı´a is able to create what Matibag calls ‘‘a dialectical opposition to be canceled and subsumed into a higher level of transindividual unity’’ (1991, 14). In other words, the cannibal continues to be herself, but having absorbed or acquired some of the qualities and characteristics of the ‘‘other’’ that has been consumed, those qualities exert an influence within the resulting self. Sometimes, these disparate elements cannot be completely reconciled, and so the (supposedly) antithetical facets of personal identity are allowed to coexist, as we have seen in the novel’s indeterminate structure in which Lucı´a’s first-person and third-person points of view are allowed to exist in simultaneity. The privileged inclusion of Fe´lix’s discourse within the novel that bears her name represents a textual absorption of his life story and, by extension, an important part of his identity. Although she never admits that she is a cannibal, symbolic or otherwise, Lucı´a does admit that she is sometimes unable to distinguish her own memories and narratives from those of others: [S]ucede en ocasiones no alcanzo a distinguir con nitidez un recuerdo mı´o del pasado de algo que son˜e´ o imagine´, o incluso de un recuerdo ajeno que alguien me narro´ vı´vidamente. Como el extenso, fascinante relato que empezo´ a contar Fe´lix esa tarde. Se´ que no soy e´l, pero de algu´n modo siento parte de sus memorias como si fueran mı´as. (Montero 1997,52) [Sometimes I am unable to distinguish clearly between a memory of mine from the past and something that I dreamed or imagined—or, in some cases, even a memory that someone else vividly narrated to me. Like the extensive, fascinating story that Fe´lix began to tell that

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afternoon. I know that I am not he, but in some way I can feel parts of his memories as if they were my own.]

Having shared his story with Lucı´a, Fe´lix’s memories not only become a part of her own but comprise a significant portion of the novel she has written about herself. At some point in their lives, both Fe´lix and Lucı´a feel that their past has in some way cannibalized their present. Yet, both characters are able to come to terms with their past through their narration of it. Lucı´a in particular is able to consume the fictions of her past in order to construct a new identity. Just as she appropriates parts of Fe´lix’s discourse and worldview, so she assimilates parts of her parents’ identities: ‘‘Nos apropiamos de ellos, les convertimos en las esquinas inmutables de nuestro universo, en los mitos originarios de nuestra interpretacio´n de la realidad’’ (334). [We appropriate them, we turn them into the immutable corners of our universe, into the foundational myths of our interpretation of reality.] Through her cannibalization of other discourses and identities, the narrator creates a montage structure of self. The resulting narrative is a collage composed of stories, some true, some false. This narrative reflects a postmodern, but not necessarily exclusively postcolonial, ‘‘heterogeneous, disunified world dominated by persistent [cultural] structures’’ (Matibag 1991, 2). Through the writing of her novel, however, Lucı´a must acknowledge that the elements that she has assimilated into her text also work actively within it and exert their own power. By including these other voices within her own discourse, the narrator relinquishes some of her authority to impose meaning. The recurring structures and themes of La hija del canı´bal show that the idea of literary cannibalism can be fruitfully utilized in conjunction with the postmodern montage aesthetic in order to examine the dialectical complexities of contemporary articulations of personal identity.

Between Relativism and Pragmatism: The Redemptive Power of Narration Rosa Montero’s recent fiction emphasizes the importance of narrative to the construction and understanding of personal

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identity. In La hija del canı´bal, Lucı´a states that the fundamental and primordial art form must have been narration, because ‘‘para poder ser, los humanos nos tenemos previamente que contar. La identidad no es ma´s que el relato que nos hacemos de nosotros mismos’’ (Montero 1997, 17) [in order to be, we humans must first narrate ourselves. Identity is nothing more than the story that we make of ourselves]. Montero returns to similar territory in La loca de la casa [Madwoman of the House] (2003), a memoir of sorts in which she uses nearly the same words to describe the human need for narrative: ‘‘Siempre he pensado que la narrativa es el arte primordial de los humanos. Para ser, tenemos que narrarnos, y en ese cuento de nosotros mismos hay muchı´simo cuento: nos mentimos, nos imaginamos, nos engan˜amos’’ (10). [I have always thought that narrative is the primordial art of human beings. In order to be, we must narrate ourselves, and in this story that we create of ourselves there is a lot of storytelling: we lie to ourselves, we imagine ourselves, we fool ourselves.] Montero’s conception of personal identity depends upon narrative for its articulation. Identity is the story we tell about ourselves—it is discursively derived and therefore thoroughly and necessarily subjective. While providing a metaphor for the indeterminate, ever-changing nature of personal identity, the novel’s discursive self-reflexivity and metafictional conceits are combined with the cannibal metaphor to illustrate the active processes of identity formation. In the following passage taken from the opening paragraph of chapter 13 of La hija del canı´bal, the reader sees the linguistic and narrative self-reflexivity that embodies Montero’s conception of personal identity. Here, the narrator views herself critically with the distance provided by the third-person point of view: Creo que ya va siendo hora de que hable un poco de mı´. Es decir, ya va siendo hora de que hable de Lucı´a Romero. Porque me resulta ma´s co´modo referirme a ella: el uso de la tercera persona convierte el caos de los recuerdos en un simulacro narrativo y disfraza de orden la existencia. Como si estuvie´ramos aquı´ para algo, cuando de todos es sabido que este desvivirse que es la vida en realidad no conduce a nada. (Montero 1997, 110, italics in the original) [I think that it is probably time to say a little bit about myself. That is, it is now time to talk about Lucı´a Romero. Because it is much

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more comfortable for me to talk about her: the use of the third person turns the chaos of memory into a narrative simulacrum that disguises our existence and makes it look like order. As if we were really here for a reason, for everyone knows that this unliving state that we call life doesn’t really go anywhere.]

The nihilism apparent in the above statement—‘‘this unliving state that we call life doesn’t really go anywhere’’—is a result of Lucı´a’s midlife crisis combined with the trauma she has experienced with the disappearance of her husband. Her early pessimism also has to do with a car accident in which she not only lost some of her teeth, but also her unborn daughter and her ability to bear children.8 Nevertheless, as the novel concludes Lucı´a’s existential angst is replaced by a more positive holistic worldview that accepts disorder and indeterminacy as inexpungeable parts of the contemporary world. In her study of some recent Spanish novels, Peregrina Pereiro describes the optimistic turn at the end of La hija del canı´bal as a positive alternative to the disenchantment and passivity of postmodernism and a return to simplicity and community (Pereiro 2002, 132). While the novel’s structures and themes surely cannot be dismissed as a mere return to simplicity, the novel does conclude with a positive reference to the lesson we might learn from the instinctive solidarity of baby penguins. Indeed, the circumstances surrounding the disappearance of Lucı´a’s husband result directly in the creation a new community made up of Fe´lix, Adria´n, and Lucı´a, thereby giving new coherence and meaning to their lives. But this is not so much an ethical alternative to postmodernism, as Pereiro would have it, but rather a valorization of a Rortian pragmatism that is articulated ‘‘within the confines of some local determinism, some interpretative community’’ (Harvey 1992, 309). This emphasis on localized communal responsibility is not in any way antithetical to postmodern social and political structures, for the idea of community has an important place in the postmodern sociality. Unfortunately, Pereiro does not consider the more constructive formulations of the postmodern authored by scholars such as Jencks, Huyssen, Eco, Barth, Lodge, Hutcheon, Portoghesi, and Collins, who have made the case for an understanding of postmodernism that allows for a celebration of diversity, the valorization of subjectivity and localized communities, a return to

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heterogeneity, and a turning away from the alienation espoused by modernism. Although La hija del canı´bal portrays some of the evils of postmodern society and the institutionalized corruption of global economies, Montero does not promote an ideological call to solidarity, community, or political commitment. The novel’s emphasis on indeterminacy forces the reader to acknowledge, too, that even though Fe´lix’s ideas about solidarity and fraternity are allowed a privileged place in the novel’s discourse, his voice is only one of three that appear in the novel. Lucı´a has learned many things from her octogenarian neighbor—indeed, the novel concludes with a reference to Fe´lix’s comforting metaphor of the innate solidarity of the penguins (Montero 1997, 338)—but this solidarity is only fully comprehensible within the context of the novel. Although the community formed by Lucı´a, Fe´lix, and Adria´n is quite positive in nature, it cannot function as a model for Spanish society at large. Perhaps this little group offers an example, but this model is only practical within the fixed context of the narrator’s interpretive community. Fe´lix offers Adria´n a pragmatic reflection on the world that allows for a meaningful existence in a universe characterized by ambiguity and uncertainty: A tu edad probablemente te parezca que el Bien y el Mal son categorı´as claramente diferenciadas, pero la verdad es que vivimos en un mundo ambiguo y sin perfiles. Y, sin embargo, todos los dı´as tomamos decisiones que tendra´n una repercusio´n pra´ctica y moral en nuestras vidas, de manera que ya puedes prepararte para mantener un co´digo de conducta personal o acabara´s como el indeseable de Ramo´n. (328) [At your age you probably think that Good and Evil are clearly differentiated categories, but the truth is we live in an ambiguous world without clear distinctions. Nevertheless, every day we make decisions that will have moral, practical repercussions in our lives. So you can go ahead and prepare yourself to maintain a code of personal conduct or you will end up like that loser Ramo´n.]

Fe´lix’s view can be compared to Richard Rorty’s idea of the pragmatism of localized interpretive communities, but to suggest that his philosophy represents an idealistic ethical alternative to

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postmodernism in general is to oversimplify the complexity of Montero’s worldview. Nor can the novel be characterized as a relativistic, defeatist, nihilistic text, either. When Lucı´a finally chooses the third person as her preferred perspective, she points to its power to convert the chaos of memory into a narratively derived simulacrum of order. While she knows that this simulacrum is arbitrary and perhaps ultimately unreliable, she understands that it offers enough solace to make life worth living. As the novel progresses, Lucı´a’s skepticism about her ability to make sense of the universe becomes infused with Fe´lix’s pragmatic approach to understanding human experience. She arrives at this understanding through the symbolic cannibalization of her own past, her many possible identities, and Fe´lix’s discourse. Li-Chao, the sinister Chinese mafioso who appears in chapter 22 of the novel, offers a contrasting nihilistic postmodern worldview against which Lucı´a and Fe´lix must fight. Li-Chao articulates precisely the kind of nihilism that so many critics have identified as the defining characteristic of postmodernism: ‘‘[E]l caos avanza y el desorden nos devora. Y no se trata de ese desorden co´smico del que el orden nace, sino de la confusio´n, de la imprecisio´n, de la falta de lugar y contenido. La tradicio´n se pierde, la memoria se rompe. La Nada nos acecha’’ (232). [Chaos advances and disorder devours us. And I am not talking about the cosmic disorder from which order is born, but rather confusion, imprecision, the lack of place or content. Tradition is lost, memory is broken. The Void threatens us.] After she undergoes her anagnorisis, the narrator is finally able to develop an alternative to Li-Chao’s negativity and pessimism that incorporates the more constructive elements of postmodern thought. Having peered into the depths of her own nihilistic abyss, Lucı´a takes comfort in Adria´n’s brainteasers and riddles, which she values as reassuring metaphors of order: Que´ consoladoras eran las adivinanzas de Adria´n. [ . . . ] Tontos misterios en apariencia incoherentes que luego tenı´an un porque´, una explicacio´n, una causa suficiente. Las adivinanzas de Adria´n te ayudaban a creer que la existencia tenı´a en el fondo algu´n sentido. Que la vida no era cao´tica y absurda, sino simplemente enigma´tica, una especie de enorme acertijo que uno podrı´a llegar a desentran˜ar a fuerza de reflexionar sobre el asunto. (279)

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[How consoling Adria´n’s riddles were. . . . Stupid little mysteries that at first appeared incoherent but that later revealed a why, an explanation, a sufficient cause. Adria´n’s riddles helped you believe that at heart existence had some meaning. That life was not chaotic and absurd, but instead simply enigmatic, a kind of enormous riddle that one could figure out through careful reflection.]

In Montero’s later El corazo´n del Ta´rtaro, instead of logic riddles, it is a Rubik’s cube that functions as a metaphor for modern man’s attempts to order and understand his chaotic, apparently absurd surroundings. As La hija del canı´bal concludes, Lucı´a is able finally to surmount her previously crippling pessimism, and through her experiences as protagonist and narrator of her own detective novel, she might finally agree with the narrator of El corazo´n del Ta´rtaro that, in spite of it all, ‘‘la vida merece la pena vivirse’’ (2001, 268) [life is worth living]. For Lucı´a, identity, like history, is elusive and changing. She says at the outset, ‘‘[L]a identidad de cada cual es algo fugitivo y casual y cambiante’’ (12), [For everyone identity is something that escapes us, it’s casual and changing.] But in a universe characterized by discontinuity, fragmentation, indeterminacy, and void of the great historical metanarratives, it is up to us to piece together our own coherent narratives. As Lucı´a confides, ‘‘Ignoro de que´ sustancia extraordinaria esta´ confeccionada la identidad, pero es un tejido discontinuo que zurcimos a fuerza de voluntad y memoria’’ (51). [I don’t know what extraordinary material our identity is made of, but it is a discontinuous fabric that we must darn constantly with the help of our will and memory.] Fe´lix echoes this statement much later, when he says that identity is a strange thing indeed, ‘‘casi tan extran˜a como el deseo y como la memoria y como el amor’’ (257) [almost as strange as desire, memory, or love]. Within this world of possible harmony and meaning, the key to understanding humanity, according to Fe´lix, is understanding that words and language are what give us our primacy: ‘‘[L]a palabra lo es todo para nosotros’’ (320). [Words are everything to us.] Language, after all, is the house we live in, and it is the novel’s self-conscious acknowledgment of the constructedness of language that makes this so clear; it is through language that we are able to put order into our universe. If our conceptions of reality are largely subjective, as both Fe´lix and Lucı´a suggest, then our

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methods of representing that reality must necessarily recognize that subjectivity. Language, which the structuralists exposed as a subjective system of arbitrarily assigned signifiers, inevitably reflects the indeterminacy of the universe that it attempts to describe. As Patricia Waugh has indicated, because our knowledge of the world is now seen to be mediated through language, ‘‘literary fiction (worlds constructed entirely of language) becomes a useful model for learning about the construction of ‘reality’ itself’’ (1984, 3). The indeterminate, fragmented structure of La hija del canı´bal reflects this conception, and as Fe´lix states in the novel’s penultimate chapter, perhaps language is all we have: ‘‘Somos so´lo palabras, palabras que retumban en el e´ter’’ (Montero 1997, 317). [We are only words, words that sound in the ether.] Fe´lix’s worldview contrasts with the nihilistic worldview of the mafioso Li-Chao. Fe´lix’s philosophy of life reflects a pragmatic method of dealing with the disorder and indeterminacy of the modern world, and may be interpreted as a clue to the reader for making meaning out of the chaos: Cuando llegas a vivir tanto como yo, en fin, empiezas a intuir que dentro del desorden del mundo hay cierto orden. Tal vez sea un producto de mi necesidad, una defensa ante la desolacio´n y el sinsentido, pero lo cierto es que cada dı´a que pasa me parece ma´s evidente que la armonı´a existe [ . . . ] a veces la conciencia se consuela con esa percepcio´n global del equilibrio, con la intuicio´n de que todo esta´ relacionado de algu´n modo. (320) [When you live as long as I have, you begin to intuit that somewhere in the disorder of the world there is a kind of order. Perhaps this is just a product of my need, a defense against desolation and senselessness, but the truth is that every day that passes I believe more that harmony exists . . . sometimes our conscience takes consolation from this global perception of equilibrium, and from the idea that perhaps everything is related to everything else.]

It is we who must put together and order our own global perception of the universe, a process that is self-consciously set forth symbolically in La hija del canı´bal. Metafiction is a celebration of language, for it is through words, stories, and narration in general that we are able to put order into the chaos of experience that surrounds us. This is in fact one of the true things about

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fiction that Mario Vargas Llosa explores in his book, La verdad de las mentiras [The Truth of Lies] (2002). The author concedes that life is disorder, but ‘‘la vida de la ficcio´n es un simulacro en el que aquel vertiginoso desorden se torna orden: organizacio´n, causa y efecto, fin y principio’’ (19) [the life of fiction is a simulacrum in which that vertiginous disorder turns into order: organization, cause and effect, end and beginning.] Having completed her narrative, Lucı´a states in the novel’s final paragraph, ‘‘[H]oy creo entender el mundo. Man˜ana dejare´ de entenderlo, pero hoy me parece haber desentran˜ado su secreto’’ (337). [Today I understand the world. Tomorrow I will no longer understand it, but today I think I’ve unraveled its secret.] Rosa Montero’s La hija del canı´bal and El corazo´n del Ta´rtaro reflect the complexity of contemporary culture. Through its metafictional play, linguistic self-consciousness, and autocritical conceits, La hija del canı´bal emphasizes the constructedness of personal identity and the arbitrary nature of representations of the universe and the historiographic process. As such, La hija del canı´bal contains within itself two worldviews, both of which coexist in the postmodern world: (1) a nihilistic, relativistic view verbalized by the mafioso Li-Chao, and which characterizes Lucı´a at the outset; (2) a more positive, pragmatic view, articulated first by Fe´lix and later by Lucı´a, that accepts complexity, ambiguity, indeterminacy, and change as inevitable parts of the human experience.9 It is precisely this philosophical duality that represents the novel’s overarching metaphor. The continued iterations of doubles—Fe´lix’s double at the Atocha train station, Lucı´a’s many doubles, and so on—reflect the novel’s philosophical duality. Thus, just as the detective novel paradigm details an effort to learn the ‘‘truth’’ of the case while good battles evil, so La hija del canı´bal articulates a struggle between postmodern worldviews, one negative and one positive. The cannibal trope, which allows for a dialectical, mutual assimilation of identities, fictions, and philosophies, further emphasizes the dynamic nature of interpretation and representation. The philosophical discord that exists between the views articulated by Li-Chao and by Fe´lix continues to persist in current discussions of postmodernism. But the meaning of La hija del canı´bal lies at the interstices of this struggle, and if we are to take away a message, surely it has to do with the redemptive power of nar-

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ration. Storytelling, after all, is perhaps humanity’s most powerful metaphor: in the face of the chaotic disorder that sometimes threatens to overwhelm us, narrative allows us to reorder and interpret the many histories that comprise our experience of reality. Stories make sense even when reality does not.

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2 Mapping the Storied Self: Consciousness and Cartography in the Novels of Juan Jose´ Milla´s JUAN JOSE´ MILLA´S IS AMONG THE MOST POPULAR AND CRITICALLY ACclaimed authors writing in Spain today. Among other literary awards, he has won the prestigious Nadal Prize for La soledad era esto [This Was Solitude] (1990) and the Primavera Prize for Dos mujeres en Praga [Two Women in Prague] (2002). He is the author of more than thirteen novels, and seven collections of short stories and essays, and has been a regular contributor in the Spanish press. Among the principal themes of his fiction are the individual’s alienation by contemporary society and his or her search for a more authentic existence; the exploration of the processes of constructing and representing personal identity; and the examination of the writer’s attempt to represent reality through writing. This chapter addresses the self-conscious dimensions of Milla´s’s fiction and how the author uses narrative self-consciousness as a strategy by which his protagonists and narrators are able either to articulate themselves or be articulated, and thereby come to terms with their various experiences of societal, familial, and existential estrangement. In the novels of Juan Jose´ Milla´s, narrative functions as a symbolic cartographic act by which his characters are able to find their points of reference and orient themselves within their geographical, spiritual, and personal territories. Milla´s uses metafiction as a metaphor that represents the human struggle not only to make sense of the world, but also to form personal identity. Like Lucı´a, the protagonist of Rosa Montero’s La hija del canı´bal, Milla´s’s characters see identity as a slippery, indeterminate thing. The protagonist of Milla´s’s classic novel El desorden de tu nombre [The Disorder of Your Name] 65

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(1986), articulates the quintessence of Milla´s’s conception of personal identity: ‘‘[P]arece absurdo que los hombres nos empen˜emos en la bu´squeda de un destino propio o de una identidad definida. Si de verdad tuvie´semos identidad, no necesitarı´amos tantos papeles (certificados, carne´s, pasaportes, etce´tera) para mostrarla’’ (126). [It seems absurd that we should insist on searching for a particular destiny or a definite identity. If we really had an identity, we wouldn’t need so many papers (certificates, cards, passports, etcetera) in order to prove it.] In his later story ‘‘El pequen˜o cada´ver de R.J.,’’ [The Little Corpse of R. J.] which appears in the collection, Primavera de luto y otros cuentos [Spring of Mourning and Other Tales] (1992), the disgruntled narrator characterizes identity with similarly skeptical language: No comprendo la loca carrera de los hombres en busca de un destino personal que no existe o de una individualidad que, en el mejor de los casos, es un mero artificio incapaz de tapar la falta de sustancia que, como un agujero, nos traspasa. La propia identidad, y sus pobres distintivos, no pasa de ser, en mi opinio´n, una ingeniosa construccio´n verbal, u´til para crear sociedades, establecer jerarquı´as y levantar ası´ edificios, trazar autopistas o plantar sema´foros. (12–13) [I don’t understand the crazy efforts of people searching for a personal destiny that doesn’t exist or for an individuality that, in even the best of cases, is nothing but an artifice incapable of covering the lack of substance that, like a hole, runs right through us. In my opinion, identity, along with all of its outward signs, is nothing more than an ingenious verbal construction useful for creating societies, establishing hierarchies and thus erecting buildings, sketching out highways and planting streetlights.]

For the characters that people Milla´s’s world, identity is an ingenious verbal construction that hides existential emptiness. Yet, while his characters are often mystified by their everchanging relationship to their surroundings, these same characters use narrative as the device through which they attempt to arrive at a sort of personal peace through their varying experiences of diegesis, either as authors, narrators, and organizers of the discourse or simply as narrative objects.

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Milla´ s’s Early Fiction Just a perfunctory look at a few of Milla´s’s novels published in the 1970s and 1980s demonstrates the thematic and structural importance of narrative self-consciousness to his oeuvre. In these early works, the narrative process has redemptive powers for protagonists and narrators alike. El desorden de tu nombre, for example, concludes with the protagonist’s realization that he is the protagonist of the novel we are reading. He is finally able to take comfort, not so much from his romantic success with Laura or his sessions of psychoanalysis, as from the thought that when he gets back to his apartment, this novel will be waiting for him on his table: Julio sonrio´ para sus adentros. Abrio´ el portal, entro´ en el ascensor, apreto´ el boto´n correspondiente, y entonces tuvo la absoluta seguridad de que cuando llegara al apartamento encontrarı´a sobre su mesa de trabajo una novela manuscrita, completamente terminada, que llevaba por tı´tulo El desorden de tu nombre. (1986, 172) [Julio smiled to himself. He opened the front door, entered the elevator, pressed the appropriate button, and then felt the absolute certainty that when he entered the apartment he would find on his desk the manuscript of a novel, completely finished, that carried the title The Disorder of your Name.]

Whether or not Julio Orgaz is the author of his own novel remains unclear, but the notion that he might be the protagonist of a novel about himself gives him a sense of security. Being written about, it seems, gives him enough of a comforting sense of stability that he is able to give up his counseling (although, in an interesting twist, his psychologist, who happens to be Julio’s lover, has in fact been murdered by his wife). While Julio is unable to write his own novel, he sees writing as the key to personal understanding and success: ‘‘[T]riunfar, tal vez, era escribir, era escribir. Era escribir un libro que articulara lo que se´ y lo que ignoro’’ (Milla´s 1986, 57). [To triumph, perhaps, was to write, to write. It was to write a book that would articulate what I know and what I don’t know.] If the information that we have about ourselves, including our identity, takes the form of narrative, then the processes of col-

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lecting and representing personal identity will also coincide with the processes of writing. As Julio states from the outset, ‘‘La informacio´n que tenemos de nosotros mismos es tan parcial como la de un personaje de novela’’ (57). [The information that we have about ourselves is just as partial as that of a character in a novel.] Our privileged point of view about our own lives, he suggests, does not allow us any more information about ourselves than we might have about a character in a work of fiction. Thus, his efforts to write his own novel titled El desorden de tu nombre correspond to his desire to take control of his life and write some sense into it. Although he is at first unnerved by the uncomfortable coincidence between his own reality and the fictional world of his novel, it is only when he finally realizes that he is living a novel that he finds a resolution to his personal crisis: ‘‘Pero que´ amor, que´ amor el de Laura y el mı´o. Y que´ novela’’ (172). [What a love, what a love Laura and I have. And what a novel.] To look at one’s life as if it were a novel is a reassuring way to deal with personal estrangement while putting order into the human experience. In most novels, after all, everything has a purpose; events happen for a reason; and there is an author who has created the world according to a plan. As Milla´s himself has stated in an interview: ‘‘[I]t is true that literature is a representation of reality, or a metaphor of reality, but literature and reality are autonomous territories, they have their own laws. In reality everything is contingent, while in literature everything is necessary’’ (Caban˜as 1998, 106). Thus, whereas literature may pretend to represent reality, it differs in a fundamental way: in fiction, things happen for a reason, while in real life things do not necessarily follow any sort of order. If Julio can think of his life as a narrative, then maybe he can find some meaning in it, for he sees that there is a comforting degree of order in the literary text that is not replicated in nature. An earlier, Borgesian metafictional novel is Milla´s’s Papel mojado [Wet Paper] (1983). Fabia´n Gutie´rrez has indicated that it is with this work that we begin to see ‘‘the appearance of writer protagonists’’ (1992, 37) in Milla´s’s fiction. As in El desorden de tu nombre, the resolution of the novel’s plot is achieved through the actual completion of the narration, at which point the ‘‘narrator’’ discovers that he is in fact the protagonist of the novel

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written by his dead friend, a novel that he had stolen from him upon his death. Milla´s’s next novel, Letra muerta [Dead Letter] (1984), documents the efforts of a narrator named Turis as he represents the process by which he comes to terms with his current position as a ‘‘resentido social’’ [misanthrope] who has been duped into joining the Catholic Church as a lay religious brother. Throughout part 1 of the novel, he reflects upon his experiences, writing what he resignedly considers the useless scribblings that give the novel its title (81). In part 2, however, he comes to understand his situation through the reading and writing of his diary, and finally realizes that the recuperation and reading of his ‘‘dead letter’’ has allowed him to find a progressive meaning or direction (‘‘sentido progresivo’’) for his existence (95). Robert Baah has written that the novel suggests that ‘‘literary discourse can achieve sufficiency only when it engages with reality’’ (1993, 17). In this way, reading and writing complement lived experience in the making of meaning: ‘‘[L]a lectura ordenada de estos cuadernos, que en ese sentido han funcionado a modo de sumario, fue alumbrando con cierta lentitud una serie de conclusiones a las que un hipote´tico lector, algo ma´s inteligente y menos implicado que yo en estos sucesos, habrı´a llegado con la sola lectura de la primera parte’’ (Milla´s 1984, 129). [The ordered reading of these notebooks, which in that respect have functioned as a kind of summary, highlighted a series of conclusions that a hypothetical reader, more intelligent and less implicated in these events than myself, probably would have figured out just by reading the first part.] Part 2 represents the novel’s turning point, in which the resolution of the tension is linked to the act of writing. The narrator’s uses of expressions such as ‘‘sentido progresivo’’ [progressive sense] and ‘‘lectura ordenada’’ [ordered reading] point to the power of narrative to give meaning and order to a personal reality that was previously only a series of ‘‘fluctuating emotional states.’’ This understanding of self is provisional, however, and Turis is only able to say that he has arrived at ‘‘casi la categorı´a de la certidumbre’’ (129) [almost the category of certainty]. More satisfying, perhaps, is the fact that he is able to find an antidote for his existential malaise through the writing and rereading of his story. From the beginning, Milla´s’s fiction has always linked writing and living. Letra muerta offers one of several examples of a narrator who comes to believe

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that what he has written can be more important than what he has lived, for narrative can give order to the chaos of life.

Mapping the Space of Self: La soledad era esto In Milla´s’s fiction published during the 1990s and 2000s we can see a developing emphasis on narrative as a symbolic act. In particular, in his novels La soledad era esto (1990), Volver a casa [Returning Home] (1990), Tonto, muerto, bastardo e invisible [Dumb, Dead, Bastard and Invisible] (1995), and Dos mujeres en Praga (2002) narrative self-consciousness not only draws attention to the complex nature of representing reality, but also functions dramatically as an antidote for the protagonists’ existential malaise and feelings of estrangement.1 In the following sections, I analyze these four novels in terms of their strategic use of cartographic imagery, which is linked to a self-conscious emphasis on the dynamics of narrative creation. Let me introduce my discussion of La soledad era esto with a brief mention of Graham Huggan’s Territorial Disputes (1994). In it the author discusses the symbolic importance of maps in literature. Huggan indicates that maps are useful representations of the real world, precisely because they are ‘‘conceptual models containing the essence of some generalization about reality’’ (4). Futher, citing Christopher Board, Huggan points out that it is because they are conceptual models that ‘‘maps are useful analytical tools which help investigators to see the real world in a new light, or even to allow them an entirely new view of reality’’ (4). Huggan addresses how maps ‘‘are frequently used as metaphors in literary texts, usually of structure (arrangement, containment) or of control (organization, coercion)’’ (24), although in twentieth-century fiction, as he emphasizes, the map ‘‘has often tended to function as a metaphor of the appearance of control rather than of its actual exercise’’ (25). In La soledad era esto, narrative is a symbolic cartographic act through which Elena Rinco´n is able to chart her space of self and thereby achieve a comforting resolution to the crisis occasioned by the death of her mother. Like many of Milla´s’s protagonists, Elena is estranged: she remains ignorant of her daughter’s pregnancy and she is alienated from her increasingly distant husband, whom she suspects of having an affair. Having anony-

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mously hired a private investigator to follow her philandering husband, she finds that her suspicions were true, but is uninterested finally in the investigator’s findings. Instead, she employs the detective to follow her, again anonymously. Curiously, it is the private investigator’s reports on her own activities that intrigue Elena, and finally, through her readings of his briefs— what amounts to a ‘‘novel’’ written about herself by a hired narrator—her mother’s diaries, and her own diary writing, she is able to realize a positive sort of personal transformation or epiphany that parallels the novel’s epigraph, which is taken from Kafka’s Metamorphosis. Much of Elena’s anxiety comes from within; her sense of estrangement is in many respects self-induced and springs from a crisis of personal identity and familial estrangement. As she confesses in the second part of the novel, she sees identity as a precarious, indefinite thing: A veces pienso que la identidad es algo precario, que se puede caer de uno como el pelo que se desprende cuando nos lavamos la cabeza y desaparece por el sumidero de la ban˜era en direcciones que ignoramos. [ . . . ] Por eso me da miedo salir, por si no me reconocen al volver y me quedo sin identidad. (Milla´s 1990a, 154–55) [Sometimes I think that identity is something precarious that could fall off like the hair that comes out when you shampoo and that disappears down the drain of the bathtub to unknown places. . . . that is why I’m afraid to go out, just in case they don’t recognize me when I return and I end up without an identity.]

Elena Rinco´n, much like Lucı´a Romero in Montero’s La hija del canı´bal, sees identity as something fragile that can dissolve unexpectedly. The solitude to which the novel’s title alludes is the solitude that comes with Elena’s sense of alienation and anomie, and her subsequent search for a personal, inner understanding as she undergoes her transformation. The novel’s first part is narrated from a third-person, omniscient point of view. Elena has two roles in this part, as she is both protagonist and reader. Throughout the novel, she reads two texts: her mother’s diary and the reports about herself written by Enrique Acosta, the private investigator she has hired to follow her. Elena is the thematic link between all of the manuscripts that make up the novel: her mother’s diaries, her own diaries, the investigator’s

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reports, and the novel itself; all these texts are similar in that they are about her in some way. Elena is not interested merely in being observed, although she does sometimes take comfort in knowing that her private detective is watching her, particularly after he intervenes to thwart a mugger. Because he is a narrator of her story, she attempts to maintain a distant relationship with him, although she misses him when he is absent (150). Acosta’s reports interest Elena, and soon she undertakes to improve them, since she finds them lacking in subjective depth: ‘‘[H]ay en ellos una gran pulcritud sinta´ctica, pero son excesivamente contenidos, como si el investigador, que, no lo olvidemos, es el que narra, estuviera apresado en el interior de un corse´ lleno de fo´rmulas y frases hechas de las que no pudiera desprenderse’’ (82). [They have a great syntactic neatness, but they are too contained, as if the investigator, whom, we should not forget, is the one who is narrating, were imprisoned inside a corset full of formulas and set phrases from which he could not free himself.] Throughout the novel, the investigator’s reports are transcribed into the body of the novel’s discourse. These reports are coupled with Elena’s literary criticism of them, a common characteristic of contemporary metafiction, which seeks to break down ‘‘the distinctions between ‘creation’ and ‘criticism’ and merges them into the concepts of ‘interpretation’ and ‘deconstruction’ ’’ (Waugh 1984, 6). Elena’s directions to the investigator are narrative, not substantive, and have little to do with his actual investigation, for she is more interested in the story than in the actual inquiry. As the novel progresses, she comes to occupy three positions vis-a`-vis the narrative: she is the object of the narrative, a critic of it, and a writing subject. As she reads the textual representation of herself, she attempts to understand herself better through a critical interpretation of it, and is able finally to take on the role of author. Significantly, the reader discovers near the middle of the novel that the private investigator, Acosta, is not just a gumshoe, but also an aspiring writer. In compliance with Elena’s wishes and obeying his own writerly inclinations, he abandons the objectivity of his previous investigations and allows himself to become more subjective in his reports. The reader can detect a gradual change in Elena as she begins to depend upon her ‘‘author,’’ who, in the beginning, appears better able to articulate her than she

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can herself. Taking into account Elena’s statement near the conclusion of the novel, we should view narrative as a symbolic cartographic act: ‘‘[L]o cierto es que el detective ha comenzado a funcionar como un punto de referencia del que difı´cilmente podrı´a prescindir en este momento’’ (Milla´s, 1990a, 177–78). [The truth is that the detective has begun to function like a point of reference that I really couldn’t do without at this moment.] The protagonist, Elena, previously lacked concrete points of reference, and it is her detective/narrator who serves as a symbolic compass: his reports are a chart by which Elena is able to map herself. Elena’s personal transformation is linked to reading and writing. Her process of self-knowledge begins with her mother’s diaries and the private investigator’s reports on her own activities. Toward the end of the first part the narrator links this process to the Kafka work that gives the novel its epigraph: [P]enso´ que durante los u´ltimos an˜os tambie´n ella habı´a sido un raro insecto que, al contrario del de Kafka, comenzaba a recuperar su antigua imagen antes de morir, antes de que los otros le mataran. El pensamiento consiguio´ excitarla, pues intuyo´ que si conseguı´a regresar de esa metamorfosis las cosas serı´an diferentes. (99) [She thought that during the last couple of years she, too, had been a strange insect that, contrary to Kafka’s, began to recuperate its old image before dying, before the others killed it. This thought excited her because she intuited that if she were able to reverse that metamorphosis things would be different.]

It is not coincidental that Elena turns to the world of literature for a symbol for her own transformation, for she is, first and foremost, a reader. What is significant about her choice of ‘‘The Metamorphosis’’ is that in Kafka’s text, the narrator’s physical transformation leads not only to a total alienation from his family and surroundings, but ultimately to his own death, locked in his bedroom. Elena’s is an ironic reversal of this negative trajectory, and as the novel progresses, she sheds the psychological and physical symptoms of her alienation in order finally to reintegrate herself into the world. The novel ends not in darkness, but with the promising light of future possibilities pouring through her window. The second part of La soledad era esto is narrated from the

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first-person point of view and marks a major turning point as Elena effectively takes control of her own story. Flush with the power to take active control of her own life narrative, she writes, ‘‘Me encuentro en el principio de algo que no se´ definir, pero que se resume en la impresio´n de haber tomado las riendas de mi vida’’ (107). [I find myself at the beginning of something I don’t know how to define, but that can be summarized as an impression of having taken the reins of my life.] Although her new efforts as narrator help her achieve self-realization, she continues to rely heavily on Enrique Acosta’s briefs to fill in the blank spaces: Como al detective le he encargado ser muy subjetivo, dice cosas de mı´ que yo ignoraba y eso, adema´s de divertirme mucho, me reconstruye un poco, me articula, me devuelve una imagen unitaria y so´lida de mı´ misma, pues ahora veo que gran parte de mi desazo´n anterior provenı´a del hecho de percibirme como un ser fragmentado cuyos intereses estuvieran dispersos o colocados en lugares que no me concernı´an. (109) [As I’ve told the detective to be subjective, he now says things about me that I didn’t know. This not only entertains me but also reconstructs me a bit, it articulates me, it gives me back a unified solid image of myself, and I see now that my previous anxiety came from the fact that I perceived myself as a fragmented being whose interests were dispersed or placed in locations that didn’t concern me.]

Thus, being the object of the detective’s narrative has the effect of reconstructing her self-image, of restoring the illusion of a unified solid identity. Writing is the principal thematic and structural conceit of La soledad era esto. Elena’s efforts as a writer not only constitute the second part of the text as she writes it into existence, but she is also aware that her body is a text that can be written and consequently understood. She comes to believe that, without her narrative, there would be no Elena Rinco´n: ‘‘Pese a la firmeza de mis propo´sitos, llevo varios dı´as sin acudir a este diario y eso me proporciona la rara sensacio´n de no existir’’ (115). [Despite the firmness of my resolve, it has been several days since I spent time on this diary, which gives me the strange sensation of not existing.] This explicit link between story and self links Milla´s’s work with that of the other authors included in True Lies. Elena

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Rinco´n self-consciously acknowledges the narrative logic of personal identity, and her tale shows that ‘‘to be without stories means . . . to be without memories, which means something like being without a self’’ (Young and Saver 2001, 74). Much like the narrator of Letra muerta, Elena depends on narrative to constitute her self. It is significant, then, that she uses cartographic terminology throughout the novel when she describes the act of writing: ‘‘[U]n diario de este tipo es una suerte de mapa esquema´tico en el que se relatan los aspectos ma´s sobresalientes de la propia vida. Sin embargo, en mi imaginacio´n, el diario es la vida misma’’ (Milla´s 1990a, 115). [A diary of this type is a kind of schematic map in which the most noteworthy aspects of life are related. Nevertheless, in my imagination, the diary is life itself.] Elena Rinco´n not only equates writing and living, but she imagines a somewhat paradoxical absolute equivalence of the two. The impossibility of arriving at the perfect correspondence of map (diary) and territory (life or body) brings to mind Borges’s tale ‘‘Del rigor en la ciencia’’ [The Rigor of Science], which allegorizes the absurdity of such an enterprise. Referring indirectly perhaps to Borges’s story, Elena writes, ‘‘Alguna vez leı´ algo acerca de quienes confunden el territorio con la representacio´n del territorio (el mapa); tal vez eso es lo que me sucede, tal vez por eso tengo la impresio´n de no haber existido los dı´as pasados’’ (115). [At some point I read something about people who confuse the territory with the representation of the territory (the map); perhaps that is what is happening to me; maybe that’s why I have the impression of not existing in past days.] In his essay ‘‘A Misreading of Maps,’’ Bruno Bosteels illustrates the importance of Borges to our contemporary understanding of the map as a symbol. Referring to Borges’s ‘‘Del rigor en la ciencia’’ and ‘‘Magias parciales del Quijote’’ [Partial Magic of the Quixote], the author points out that ‘‘Whenever a map is the territory, cartography is useless or, in any case, without semiotic value as a sign’’ (1996, 121). The value of the map, in other words, is its ability to translate massive geography into readable signs that stand for real places. Cartography is useful precisely because it does not represent exactly the territory it purports to represent. What is notable about Borges’s tale is that ‘‘the dream of total mimesis . . . becomes a self-destructive nightmare’’ (Bosteels, 1996, 121). Elena never actually attempts a perfect repre-

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sentation of herself through writing, but narrative is important because, like a map, it represents ‘‘the embodiment of a middle ground through which human beings bestow meaning upon their material environment’’ (Bosteels 1996, 115–16). Quoting the semanticist Alfred Korzybski, Bosteels indicates that ‘‘The map is not the territory it represents, but, if correct, it has a similar structure to the territory, which accounts for its usefulness’’ (115, italics in original). Elena’s story is not her life, but her diary/map is useful in that it allows her to navigate not only the exterior space of her surroundings, but also her own space of self. In many of his tales, Borges emphasizes the absurdity of human attempts to represent and understand reality. In ‘‘Del rigor de la ciencia,’’ the map represents paradigmatically this very human endeavor. In a valuable collection of essays, The Nature of Maps (1976), Arthur H. Robinson and Barbara Bartz Petchenik engage with the popularity and usefulness of maps in general. The authors indicate that historically maps have represented a comforting method of understanding the world that surrounds us: As we experience space, and construct representations of it, we know that it will be continuous. Everything is somewhere, and no matter what other characteristics objects share, they always share relative location, that is, spatiality; hence the desirability of equating knowledge with space [as in ‘‘mapping things out scientifically’’], an intellectual space. This assures an organization and a basis for predictability, which are shared by absolutely everyone. This proposition appears to be so fundamental that apparently it is simply adopted a priori. (4)

Maps give us predictive power in the physical world. In La soledad era esto, Elena looks to narrative as a map that will give her a continuous knowledge of her self and the space that she inhabits. In her mother’s diary, the body is described as a geographical space, characterized either with the complications of continents or the solitude of islands (Milla´s 1990a, 118). Cartographic imagery constitutes the symbolic syllogism that is the novel: The body is a territory (and the territory is a body), and writing functions as a map. But, although the narrator implies that narration is the key to the cartography of the body, she simultaneously draws attention to the limitations of this invention: ‘‘Esta ciudad es un cuerpo visible, pero la visibilidad no es

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necesariamente un atributo de lo real. Quiza´ no exista ni existamos nosotros’’ (130). [This city is a visible body, but visibility is not necessarily an attribute of the real. Perhaps it doesn’t exist and we don’t exist.] Elena, like Borges, understands that the map is not a perfect metaphor, and she recognizes that our understanding of the universe is provisional at best. In an essay on the limitations of cartography entitled, ‘‘Cities without Maps,’’ Iain Chambers writes that ‘‘the very idea of the map, with its implicit dependence upon the survey of a stable terrain, fixed referents and measurement, seems to contradict the palpable flux and fluidity of metropolitan life and cosmopolitan movement’’ (2000, 188). The map, in other words, serves to navigate the dynamic spaces of a city, but it cannot reflect the contradictions and complexity of a living, breathing metropolis—that is, its reality. A map cannot explain or contain the entire territory to which it corresponds. The map ‘‘permits us to grasp an outline, a shape, some sort of location, but not the contexts, cultures, histories, languages, experiences, desires and hopes that course through the urban body. The latter pierce the logic of topography and spill over the edges of the map’’ (188). The map is not a perfect metaphor for reality, but the limitations of cartography draw attention to the very issues that arise in the examination of literary texts: reality in its many forms is much too broad to be encompassed by a text. Reality will always spill over the edges of the map—or, in our case, the text—and tend to escape perfect representation. Elena quite obviously cannot map her subjectivity in its totality, but the symbol of the map still serves as a guide or outline by which she might trace the shape of her personal world. Regardless of the limitations of representation, the appearance of control is still useful as a counterbalance to existential angst. As Robinson and Bartz Petchenik point out, although the map is not the territory, it is a territory, and consequently ‘‘it may be meaningful to employ a variety of transformations to retain particular relationships from one territory to the other. Reality and language must, therefore, both be converted into some kinds of spaces before one can be mapped on the other’’ (1976, 5–6, italics in original). Reality, in other words, must be distorted in order to be mapped. But the map is a territory with its own internal logic that serves to understand better that reality. Language, then, must also take into account the distortion inherent in the

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cartographic process. This is the dynamic with which Milla´s’s narrators struggle. In La soledad era esto, the implicit and explicit link between geographical terminology and the human body represents the text’s point of symbolic cohesion: if, as her mother had written, the body is a geographical space, then perhaps what Elena has been lacking is a map by which to navigate that space; she lacks a map with points of reference. Like Julio in El desorden de tu nombre, Elena repeats that her life lacks concrete definition: ‘‘¿Que´ tengo yo que certifique lo que he sido, lo que ahora soy, si soy algo?’’ (Milla´s 1990a, 127). [What do I have that verifies what I have been, what I am now, if I am anything?] The only thing she really has, she confesses, is the hashish that she is trying to quit; the clock and easy chair she inherited from her mother; and, most importantly, the diary in which she begins to chart the processes of her emotional and personal self-discovery. Near the conclusion of the work, Elena reaches a sort of epiphany and begins to answer the question that arises from the novel’s title: ‘‘What is solitude, really?’’ [L]a soledad era esto: encontrarte de su´bito en el mundo como si acabaras de llegar de otro planeta del que no sabes por que´ has sido expulsada. [ . . . ] La soledad es una amputacio´n no visible, pero tan eficaz como si te arrancaran la vista y el oı´do y ası´, aislada de todas las sensaciones exteriores, de todos los puntos de referencia, y so´lo con el tacto y la memoria, tuvieras que reconstruir el mundo, el mundo que has de habitar y que te habita. ¿Que´ habı´a en esto de literario, que´ habı´a de divertido? (133–34) [Solitude was this: finding yourself in the world as if you had just arrived from another planet from which you had been expelled for unknown reasons. . . . Solitude is an invisible amputation, but one that is as effective as if they were to take away your sight and hearing and thus, isolated from all exterior sensations, from all points of reference, and equipped only with your sense of touch and your memory, you would have to reconstruct your world, the world you would inhabit and that would inhabit you. What was so literary about that? What was fun about that?]

Solitude is suddenly finding oneself alone in the world, estranged and without points of reference. Symbolically blind and

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deaf, Elena must feel her way about by relying on her memory. Writing is the key to this process. Her own diary helps Elena to map her identity, and the efforts of her private investigator help complete that identity. To be the object of an externally generated narrative allows her to feel more ‘‘real.’’ His briefs, she finds, justify and certify her very existence, and give her the power to reconstruct her life: De estos informes, por banales que resulten, no puedo prescindir porque certifican mi existencia, pero tambie´n porque la seguridad de que alguien me mira me da fuerzas para moverme de un lado a otro en esta durı´sima tarea de construir mi propia vida. Nunca terminamos de hacernos; estos dı´as tengo la impresio´n de estar frente a mı´ como un escultor frente a una roca de la que ha de eliminar todo cuanto no sea substancial. (163) [These reports, banal as they may be, are impossible for me to do without because they certify my existence, but also because the security that someone is watching me gives me the power to work on this very difficult task of constructing my own life. We never finish making ourselves; these days I feel like I’m standing in front of myself like a sculptor in front of a rock from which she must eliminate everything but that which is essential.]

Jacques Lacan has written that the process of self-knowing is a constant and ever-changing struggle that can have no final conclusion. The novels of Milla´s dramatize the many different stages of this process and demonstrate that human identity is never perfectly complete. Just as Borges’s map cannot encompass every aspect of the territory that it tries to represent, so is a definitive representation of the self impossible. If we take into account Lacan’s idea that we cannot ever really know who we are, since the subject (our ‘‘self’’ or ‘‘I’’) is always undergoing the process of coming into being, then Milla´s’s characters demonstrate that it is the struggle to know ourselves that characterizes us as humans. But in La soledad era esto—and elsewhere in Milla´s’s work—writing and being written function not only as devices of self-exploration, but also as comforting methods of coping with the bleaker relativism of postmodern worldviews such as Lacan’s, which view humans as transitory ‘‘beings’’ floating unmoored in a world of nothingness. To know oneself

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truly may be impossible, but Milla´s nonetheless points to the redemptive power of narrative.2 Javier Marı´as writes that Elena is a woman that ‘‘wants to be narrated, that is, she wants to be objectified and subjectified at the same time and become in a way a fictional character, as if only through that process or transformation could she know herself or, if you prefer, recognize herself’’ (1995, 45, italics in the original). It is this struggle to come to terms with a subjectivity in constant flux, to recognize and understand oneself by peering into the mirror of the text (a desire that is wrapped up in narration), to be written as both subject and object of a text (and perhaps even fictionalized) that represents the novel’s main symbolic and dramatic driving force. Elena finally concludes that perhaps she will never be able to map precisely her space of self. But in the novel’s final pages, she takes the impossibility of an absolute correspondence of map and territory, text and self, as a possibility for freedom and relief: ‘‘Ahora que no tengo coordenadas, que he perdido todos los puntos de referencia, la tarde del domingo me parece un lugar para el descanso’’ (Milla´s 1990a, 172). [Now that I don’t have coordinates and have lost all my points of reference, Sunday afternoon seems like a nice place to rest.]

Urban Spaces and Personal Places: Volver a casa Published in the same year, Volver a casa (1990) is similar to La soledad era esto in that its protagonist suddenly finds himself without any points of reference and therefore experiences an existential crisis. Juan Estrade is estranged from his spouse, life, and society at large. When his identical twin brother Jose´, a famous novelist, disappears, Juan comes to Madrid from Barcelona to investigate. His return to his hometown after so many years leads him to question his life, his identity, and his place in the world. Like Elena in La soledad era esto, Juan’s personal evolution can be traced through the novel’s geographical language. Indeed, Juan sees identity as precarious and unstable, but the narrator expands on Elena’s formulation, linking explicitly geographical space with personal space: Comparo´ la evolucio´n de la ciudad en la que habı´a vivido en otro tiempo con su propio territorio corporal y afectivo, y dedujo que las

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ciudades y los cuerpos poseı´an una identidad precaria, inestable, pues cuando alcanzaban el punto en el que parecı´an ser una cosa, un movimiento subterra´neo los convertı´a en otra, aunque era una mutacio´n tan sutil, tan insensible, que podı´a pasar inadvertida a una mirada perezosa. (Milla´s 1990b, 21–22) [He compared the evolution of the city in which he had lived in another time with his own corporal and affective territory, and decided that cities and bodies possessed a precarious, unstable identity, because just when they reached the point of seeming like one thing, a subterranean movement would change them into something else, although it was such a subtle mutation, so imperceptible, that it could escape a lazy glance.]

Juan’s crisis of identity is compounded by the fact that, as young men, he and his brother swapped their identities along with everything that came with them: their professional pursuits, their mother’s favor, and, in a particularly difficult twist, Juan’s girlfriend, Laura.3 As a result, Juan views the life that he made for himself later in Barcelona as a fake, but, after so many years, he is unable to acclimate himself fully to being back in Madrid. He is thus characterized as a piece of a puzzle that does not fit with the whole: ‘‘Y ahora estaba en la ciudad que debı´a haber sido suya y venı´a de ver a la mujer en quien su vida habrı´a encontrado un complemento, pero tambie´n en este espacio funcionaba como una pieza que no acababa de encajar con precisio´n’’ (Milla´s 1990b, 39). [And now he was in the city that should have been his and he was returning from seeing the woman in whom his life would have found its complement, but also in this space he functioned like a piece that wouldn’t fit with precision.] Juan, like many Milla´s characters, lacks points of reference to navigate his physical space. As he steers his way through the spaces of his memory and personal geography, he fixes on his exgirlfriend Laura, who has since married his brother, Jose´. Laura becomes a possible point of reference: ‘‘[L]a figura de Laura constituı´a un elemento de referencia estable, como el horizonte para un marinero’’ (117). [The image of Laura constituted an element of stable reference, like the horizon for a sailor.] Romantic love is not the answer to Juan’s problems, however. His problem is that he lacks ‘‘un espacio propio’’ (46) [a space of his own], for even after he and his brother have traded identities again, he still cannot find happiness. In this respect, the novel is fundamen-

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tally different from La soledad era esto, since, unlike Elena, he is unable to find his ‘‘espacio propio’’ through narrative. While the novel that he purports to write is the novel that he is already living—a work entitled Volver a casa—he never sits down to write, preferring instead to revel in the fame and recognition that his twin brother has won for him by writing critically acclaimed novels in his name. The work ends ambiguously, although it appears as though Juan has (perhaps symbolically) committed suicide, taking the place of the wax figure of himself (or of his identical twin brother) in the suggestively named Museum of Desperation. The question of unstable identities is reflected in the novel’s structure. In particular, there is a metafictional frame break in the final chapter in which Milla´s himself appears in a televised roundtable discussion of Juan’s publicity stunt. (After a final swap of identities, Juan had posed as Jose´ and had appeared at an interview wearing a mask, declaring that he planned to become a superhero-like ‘‘masked writer.’’) During the televised discussion, the fictional Milla´s inexplicably starts crying, and when another writer accuses him of attempting to steal some publicity, too, Milla´s punches him in the mouth. After a cut to a commercial, someone comes up with a theory that Juan Estrade and Milla´s are perhaps conspiring together (241). This play between the ‘‘real’’ author and his fictionally represented persona within the novel appears in recent novels by Javier Marı´as, Rosa Montero, and Javier Cercas, all of whom make a sustained use of this ambiguous interplay between an extradiegetic ‘‘reality’’ and the purely ‘‘fictional’’ world of the diegesis. This narrative trick functions superficially as a playful wink at the reader while introducing a deeper hermeneutic confusion that problematizes clear-cut distinctions between fact and fiction, reality and make-believe. It is perhaps not a coincidence that the two brothers of Volver a casa, Juan and Jose´, each represent one-half of Milla´s’s own given name: Juan Jose´. In El desorden de tu nombre, Julio derives a sense of existential satisfaction from the fact that he is the protagonist of a novel, while in Letra muerta Turis seeks through writing a way of understanding himself and his new, unfamiliar situation. We can see in Elena a combination of these two things, as she finds that both writing and being written offer a concrete, comforting counterbalance to her personal feelings of instability and dissat-

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isfying experience of reality. In Volver a casa, however, the protagonist seems to be the object of a more cruel sort of authorial joke, as he is alternately the protagonist of his brother’s sadistic game/novel and the unwilling object of Milla´s’s own novel. In the end, ‘‘returning home’’ is not a nostalgic return to the comforts of childhood, but rather a vertiginous existential meditation on the indeterminate nature of personal identity.

Tonto, muerto, bastardo e invisible In Milla´s’s intriguingly odd novel, Tonto, muerto, bastardo e invisible (1995), the protagonist is bored with his situation in life. Having lost his job as the director of human resources at a paper manufacturing company, Jesu´s decides to construct for himself a new identity. He puts on a fake mustache, takes a new apartment, begins to frequent the local sex shop, and finally divorces his wife in order to run away—in a final flight into fiction—to Denmark with his favorite stripper, an Asian prostitute whom he calls Gretel to his Hansel. Jesu´s’s nihilistic worldview is most probably the result of his numbingly banal life among the ‘‘social democrats,’’ a term with pejorative connotations that he uses to describe the bourgeois drones who live and work in the contemporary Spanish workplace.4 As he begins to construct (indeed, write) his own alternative reality, the narrator becomes more adept at seeing through the artifice and banality that surrounds him. Having quit his job and taken on a new identity, Jesu´s is suddenly able to see through his surroundings and recognize the artificiality that characterizes the world of which he once formed a part. Jesu´s grows more dissatisfied with his surroundings, and in a search for his peculiar idea of authenticity he begins to inhabit the periphery of society, wandering the streets, frequenting sex shops, and visiting psychics. His new critical vision allows him to invert more traditional perceptions of the world, and he yearns to amputate himself from reality, since reality is nothing but another part of a body (Milla´s 1995, 93). The language that Jesu´s uses to describe the process of reintegrating his identity is based upon the same kind of vocabulary that characterizes many of Milla´s novels: reality is fragmented and chaotic, and the novel represents his attempts to make sense

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of the chaos. His rambling, disorganized discourse reflects a crisis of his subjectivity: ‘‘[M]e parecı´a que la vida era un conjunto de fragmentos como los que forman los cristales de un vaso roto sobre el suelo, y esos pedazos han comenzado a aproximarse como cuando pasas la pelı´cula de un desastre al reve´s, se encuentran los fragmentos, digo, y forman un sujeto que soy yo, un hombre articulado, una geografı´a definida de la que se puede levantar un mapa’’ (165). [It seemed to me that life was a pile of fragments like the shards from a broken glass on the floor, and that those pieces had begun to come together like when you watch a disaster movie backward: I’m saying that there are fragments, and that they form a subject that is I, an articulated man, a defined geography from which you can construct a map.] This is only one part of a sentence that spans an entire page. He continues to describe the reintegration of his fragmented self and the usefulness of the map metaphor: ‘‘[S]abemos do´nde esta´n colocados sus bordes y do´nde termina el o´rgano y comienza la pro´tesis, porque ahora se´ que mi identidad o mi personalidad, que´ palabra, era una pro´tesis con la que intente´ sustituir la funcio´n de la inteligencia’’ (165). [We know where the borders are and where the organ ends and where the prosthesis begins, because now I know that my identity or my personality—what a word—was a prosthesis with which I had tried to substitute the function of my intelligence.] Thus, the idea of the map allows Jesu´s to identify the borders and limits that outline his self in a process that is linked to the intelligence that he previously squandered as an administrator of human resources at a paper factory. The physical paper is now linked to the subjective process of writing a personal narrative. Jesu´s continues on this theme in the same extended sentence, referring to ‘‘un papel en el que los otros escribı´an su vida porque tenı´an una novela de ella y sabı´an desde donde la debı´an contar y en que´ persona, no yo’’ (165) [the paper on which the others wrote their life because they had a novel about it and they knew from where they had to tell it and in what person, not I]. Psychoanalytic theory is an ever-present subtext in Milla´s’s fiction. In Tonto, muerto, bastardo e invisible, Jesu´s’s psychological struggle exemplifies Lacan’s formulation of the conflict between the ego’s unachievable goal of a unified identity and the unconscious acknowledgment of the subject’s own ‘‘fragmented body’’ (Lacan 1977, 4) to which I referred briefly in my discus-

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sion of La soledad era esto. Jesu´s is aware that any homogenous vision of himself (of his ‘‘I’’) will necessarily be a product of his imagination and his intelligence. Consequently, he describes identity in artificial terms as a prosthesis. Jesu´s’s case is illustrative of the way in which Milla´s’s protagonists are possessed of an extraordinary insight not only into their own psyches but also into the world that surrounds them. While these characters explore the processes and dynamics of their written texts, they simultaneously use those processes to examine the workings of their own consciousnesses. Milla´s’s novels tap into larger issues of the importance of narrative to our understanding of human consciousness. Jesu´s exemplifies how narrative infiltrates every aspect of our lived cognitive experience, and demonstrates how ‘‘conscious experience is not merely linked to the number and variety of personal stories we construct with each other within a cultural frame but is also consumed by them’’ (Fireman, McVay, and Flanagan 2003, 3). While narrative gives meaning to Jesu´s’s conscious experience, that experience is simultaneously, like our own, consumed by narrative. Like the narrator of Nuria Amat’s Todos somos Kafka, Jesu´s struggles to stave off the disintegration of his personality by engaging directly with the narratives that constitute his self. He recognizes a conflict between the fragmentation of his personality and a desire for unity, and finally decides that writing can help him to arrive at a cohesive, whole self: ‘‘Creo que comprendı´ de su´bito que la escritura es un cuerpo lleno de o´rganos de todas las medidas, quiza´ por eso antiguamente los libros se encuadernaban en piel’’ (178). [I think I understood suddenly that writing is a body full of organs of all sizes; maybe that is why they used to bind books in leather.] Jesu´s decides to construct a new textual body, written on paper that, properly bound, would provide a space for the emergence ‘‘de una anatomı´a fisiolo´gica o patolo´gica, en fin, no se´, con la que identificarme’’ (178) [of a physiological or pathological anatomy with which, I don’t know, I might identify myself]. Jesu´s begins writing himself on the Sunday that his crisis began (181), and as he continues to construct his narrative, he begins to realize that his words give order to his existence: ‘‘A medida que las palabras se ordenaban, formando un cuerpo que no habı´a podido ni son˜ar que existiera, mi existencia iba adquiriendo un orden insospechado y funcional’’ (181–82). [As the

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words ordered themselves, forming a body that I could never have dreamed to exist, my existence began to acquire an unsuspected functional order.] Each narrative fragment that he transcribes functions as a part of an organic, living, whole: ‘‘[L]a escritura era un cuerpo complejo’’ (82). [Writing was a complex body.] For Jesu´s, narrative is the only route to authenticity. But, like the protagonist of Amat’s Todos somos Kafka, he eventually loses touch with reality, and his sense of self finally loses its coherence. The fictions he has created begin to wash away his previous identity, and an invented persona supplants his real persona: ‘‘[Y]o deje´ de ser Jesu´s y me transforme´ en Olegario, un he´roe de novela’’ (193). [I stopped being Jesu´s and I became Olegario, a novelistic hero.] Only by first narrating and then reading himself is Jesu´s able to understand both his actions and his personality, and although from our perspective he is still a borderline case, he is nevertheless able to make conclusions based upon his written self, conclusions that only reinforce his earlier suspicions that his previous life as a cog in the capitalistic ‘‘social democrat’’ machine was an inauthentic and soul-deadening one. His new identity may be artificially generated, but it is authentic in that it provides him with a very real alternative to a more profoundly false, negative existence in the bureaucratic, capitalistic world of contemporary Madrid. Paradoxically, it is through his flights of fantasy and role-playing that Jesu´s attempts to infuse his life with ‘‘un poco de realidad’’ (197). [a little reality]. What Jesu´s needed, he realizes finally, was a story: ‘‘La gente como yo necesitaba amuletos, po´cimas, cuentos en general, para abrirse camino en la vida, y para comprenderla’’ (202). [People like me needed amulets, concoctions, stories in general, to find our paths in life and to be able to understand it.]

Lost in Madrid without a Map: Dos mujeres en Praga In an article published in El Paı´s, Juan Jose´ Milla´s writes that the story of the Tower of Babel continues to have an important symbolic value in the contemporary world. He posits that the destruction of the tower was a watershed event in the story of humanity: ‘‘[I]t was an instant in which our reality was broken into a thousand pieces, like a porcelain vase, and thus began the

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history of the fragment . . . before the construction of that damned tower, nature had the coherence of a literary tale’’ (Milla´s 2002b). Milla´s offers that it was when the Tower of Babel fell that human beings lost their ability to comprehend reality or themselves. The fundamentally unknowable nature of the universe and our fragmented experience of reality is a common theme in much of Milla´s’s fiction. In this section, I will analyze his novel Dos mujeres en Praga in terms of its dramatization of the narrative process, and how the novel itself—through a self-conscious insistence upon its own coming into being—represents metaphorically the relationship between fiction and reality. Before the Tower of Babel, nature may have had the coherence of a literary work, and Dos mujeres en Praga attempts to answer the question of how we might restore some semblance of order to our perception of reality. Like many of Milla´s’s protagonists, the characters of Dos mujeres en Praga all suffer from various degrees of estrangement and ´ lvaro Abril, find themselves searching for points of reference. A for example, has effectively prostituted himself professionally; having written a critically acclaimed novel, he has resigned himself to selling his services as a writer for hire. His intriguing customer Luz is apparently a prostitute herself, and is either a pathological liar or a born novelist. Her quirky new friend Marı´a Jose´, (despite her stubborn insistence on learning to write a ‘‘lefthanded’’ novel) seems to be—along with the unnamed narrator—one of the most emotionally stable characters of the work. ´ lvaro and Luz suffer from a more generalized anxiety that they A ´ lvaro states on the third do not really belong anywhere. As A page, ‘‘Yo no estoy seguro de que las cosas sucedan unas detra´s de otras. Con frecuencia suceden antes las que en el orden cronolo´gico aparecen despue´s’’ (Milla´s 2002a, 9). [I’m not sure that things happen one after the other. Often things that were supposed to happen first chronologically happen later.] The novel traces the process by which each of these characters finds personal meaning in the narrative act, and it is the act of narration that holds the novel and its characters together. In Dos mujeres en Praga, the metafictional process of constructing the narrative not only brings all the novel’s characters together in the first place, but also allows each one to come to terms with his or her own experiences of reality. Like Elena in

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La soledad era esto, Luz Acaso wants to be narrated. Luz visits ´ lvaro Abril’s office at Talleres Literarios, a biography-for-a-fee A ´ lvaro disfirm. Through his efforts to put Luz’s story to paper, A covers important clues about his own possible origins and personal identity. Similarly, through his narration of these personal ´ lvaro’s) the narrator is able finally to narratives (Luz’s and A order his own life. In the final paragraph of the novel, he acknowledges explicitly the importance of the narrative act in creating order: Era evidente que para llevar a cabo ese reparto no hacı´a falta un albacea, pero sı´ un narrador, un narrador que al contar los u´ltimos dı´as de Luz Acaso tuviera, sin comprender por que´, la impresio´n de ordenar su propia vida. (230) [It was evident that in order to accomplish the execution of the will, they didn’t need an executor but rather a narrator, a narrator who, upon relating the final days of Luz Acaso, would have, without knowing why, the impression of ordering his own life.]

In stark contrast to these lost characters is the concrete geographical orientation of the world they inhabit. The reader becomes quickly aware that Milla´s has gone to great lengths to establish a very specific geographical setting for Dos mujeres en Praga, as the narrator carefully and continuously mentions specific geographic areas and locales, beginning in the first chapter. ´ lvaro’s ofFour pages into the novel, for example, he situates A fice with noteworthy geographic specificity: La sede de Talleres Literarios estaba situada al fondo de un callejo´n de chalets antiguos que arrancaba en Alfonso XIII, cerca de Lo´pez de Hoyos, e iba a morir violentamente contra el parapeto meta´lico de un ramal de la M-30. A la entrada del callejo´n, llamado Francisco Expo´sito, habı´a una sen˜al de tra´fico con el sı´mbolo de calle cortada. (11) [The head office of Literary Workshops was situated at the end of a small street of older houses that began on Alfonso XIII, near Lo´pez de Hoyos, and died violently against the metallic parapet of a branch of the M-30. At the entrance of the alley, called Francisco Expo´sito, there was a traffic sign that indicated that the street was closed.]

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As in most of Milla´s’s works, the novel takes place in northeast Madrid in the neighborhood known as ‘‘Prosperidad.’’ The narrator later points out that Literary Workshops is located approximately four blocks east of the Parque de Berlı´n, where the protagonist of Milla´s’s El desorden de tu nombre most often met his lover. The reader is told that Luz lives just south of the Parque de Berlı´n, which is near the Chamartı´n train station behind ´ lvaro lives on the Auditorio Nacional on Prı´ncipe de Vergara. A Corazo´n de Marı´a, which runs perpendicular to Lo´pez de Hoyos, very near Luz’s house. The narrator himself mentions that he lives on Calle Alcala´, near the Plaza de Manuel Becerra, not far ´ lvaro live. His supposed twin lives south from where Luz and A even further south, near the intersection of Doctor Esquerdo and Pez Volador, just east of the Retiro park and Atocha. But, although the text is very exact in its description of physical settings, the novel’s characters wander through their environment lost without points of reference. For some characters, this disjunction between real and imaginary space is voluntary: Marı´a Jose´ provides the title of the novel, assigning the name ‘‘Praga’’ to Luz’s home in Madrid. While her choice of Prague is in keeping with the geographic imagery of the novel, it represents for her an invented ‘‘espacio fı´sico singular’’ (22) [a singular physical space] where she might write her left-handed novel. Similarly, she is obsessed with the idea of lumbago precisely because of its geographic sonority. ‘‘[S]uena como el nombre de una geografı´a mı´tica’’ (18) [It sounds like the name of a mythical geography], she says during her first visit to Luz’s flat. Dos mujeres demonstrates a more skeptical approach to the representation of reality than we see in many other novels by Milla´s. The novel’s structure and themes serve to create a hermeneutic confusion, which is introduced thematically by Luz’s frequent falsifications of her life’s story. Structurally, the unreliable nature of representation comes to the fore most emphatically through the narrator’s sly manipulations of point of view. ´ lvaro goes to a party where, quite In chapter 3, for example, A unexpectedly for the reader, he meets the previously invisible narrator of the novel. Up to this point, the novel is narrated in ´ lvthe third person, but suddenly, while the narrator describes A aro’s entrance and his awkward wanderings as he searches for someone with whom to interact, the narrator slips for the first ´ lvaro’s boss time into the first-person singular to say that A

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‘‘hablaba conmigo’’ (28) [was talking with me]. The effects of this ingenious device are disconcerting, since it undermines the normal conventions of the third-person discourse, forcing the reader to reexamine his or her suspension of disbelief. The sudden appearance of a first-person narrator this far into the novel serves as a warning to the reader, who so far has taken for granted the narrative point of view and everything for which it traditionally stands: objectivity, truth, and neutrality. It is here that the reader is forced to realize that things are definitely not what they seem in the novel, and significantly, we learn soon thereafter that Luz’s story has probably been invented in its entirety. The narrator’s surprise appearance in this chapter also has important ramifications for the plot, since it raises thematic questions about how the narrator can possibly describe so clearly and with so much detail events that he has not witnessed. For example, when their conversation at the cocktail party has concluded, the reader is hard-pressed to discern how the narrator is able to ´ lvaro’s feelings at the time that he experidescribe so closely A ences them. At the party, for example, the narrator describes in detail his movements and thoughts for the remainder of his short visit (31). A similarly surprising shift of narrative voice appears in chapter 5, while Luz Acaso sits in her car, waiting for her appoint´ lvaro. As she listens to the radio—an activity ment with A described with what can only be characterized as an omniscient sort of third-person point of view—the narrator suddenly inserts himself into the discourse, using the first-person form of the preterit: Al dı´a siguiente, Luz Acaso llego´ a Talleres Literarios a las doce menos diez y se quedo´ dentro del coche, escuchando la radio, para hacer tiempo hasta las doce. El programa de la radio trataba sobre la adopcio´n y me habı´an invitado para que contara algu´n caso. Hable´ de madres que entregaron a sus hijos en adopcio´n al nacer y que despue´s de muchos an˜os decidieron buscarlos para verles el rostro. Tambie´n conte´ [otras] historias. (47) [The next day, Luz Acaso arrived to Literary Workshops at ten minutes to twelve and stayed in her car, listening to the radio to kill time until noon. The radio program was about adoption and they had invited me to talk about a case. I spoke about mothers who had

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given up their infant children for adoption and that had later decided to seek them out in order to see their faces. I also told other stories.]

In a further twist, Luz later uses this information (which she has heard on the radio from the narrator of the novel) in order to turn ´ lvaro to write into her it into an invented story of her life for A ´ lvaro begin to suspect biography. This invention in turn makes A that she may be his birth mother. Much of the novel’s narrative tension is derived from a carefully structured discourse that teases the reader with a movement back and forth between the narrator’s statements about things he could not possibly have seen and the resolution of the confusion in the following chapter. The plot of Dos mujeres deals almost exclusively with the various characters’ attempts to reach some final result: the nar´ lvaro writes his biography of Luz, Marı´a rator writes his novel, A Jose´ tries to get perspective on her novel on the so-called lumbago or ‘‘l’um bago.’’ The novel, then, is composed of the various processes of these various narrative works in different stages of coming into being, as all these characters strive to make sense of the disparate experiences that make up their lives. The work’s interest lies in that all these characters are interconnected not only socially or thematically, but also structurally, so that when their stories are woven together they become a novel themselves. The narrator, therefore, functions as a compiler who orders all the information he has received from his various sources. Marı´a Jose´ offers the most dubious material, and her story represents perhaps the greatest interpretive challenge. The narrator confesses that it was not easy for him to distinguish between truth and fiction: [N]o me fue fa´cil distinguir lo verdadero de lo falso. Tampoco supe si en su cabeza estas categorı´as permanecı´an separadas. Procure´, a la hora de seleccionar unos hechos y desestimar otros, aplicar el sentido comu´n—mi sentido comu´n—, lo que quiza´ significa que este relato es la suma de dos invenciones (de tres, si contamos el material ´ lvaro). Lo interesante es que todos los materiales, pese aportado por A a su procedencia, siempre fueron compatibles. (105) [It was not easy for me to distinguish the real from the false. Nor was I sure whether she viewed those categories as separate. I tried, at the

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time of selecting certain happenings and leaving others out, to apply common sense—my common sense—which perhaps means that this tale is the sum of two inventions (of three, if we count the mate´ lvaro). What is interesting is that all these materirial provided by A als, in spite of where they came from, were always compatible.]

In many ways, the narrator’s position vis-a`-vis his subject mirrors the reader’s position facing the novel itself. It is nearly impossible to distinguish convincingly between fact and fiction, because both enjoy an equal status within the various texts that constitute the novel. Milla´s’s protagonists are searchers who strive to put together the fragmented pieces of their world, and it is only through narration that they are sometimes able to do so. While life is imperfect, literature has an internal logic, and for Milla´s’s protagonists, the written text represents a reassuring metaphor for the universe. In the absence of order in the world, at the very least they may find comfort in the comprehensible nature of the creation of literary works. As the narrator wonders, ‘‘Quiza´ la red sobre la que se sostiene la realidad es pura reto´rica. La realidad no necesita sostenerse sobre ninguna red: ella es la red. Pero nosotros sı´ que necesitamos la invencio´n. Necesitamos creer que las cosas suceden unas detra´s de otras y que las primeras son causa de las segundas’’ (116). [Perhaps the web upon which reality rests is purely rhetorical. Reality doesn’t need to rest on any web: it is the web. But we do need invention. We need to believe that things happen one after another and that the first ones cause those that come later.] Significantly, this statement comes near the center of the novel’s 230 pages. The centrality of its placement reflects its importance in understanding the novel, since this is what Dos mujeres is about: reality, the narrator pronounces, is what we make it. In order to make sense of the world that surrounds us, we need to believe that things happen in an ordered fashion. But the narrator, like his postmodern readers, recognizes that the order we put to our experience of reality is an arbitrary creation of illusion; it is a comforting metaphor that hides the sometimes disconcerting absence of an authoritative master narrative. It is only in the creation of these narrative illusions that the narrator seems to take solace and even find pleasure. The universe may be, as Borges famously wrote, an ‘‘infinito juego de azares’’

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(Borges 1956, 75), [an infinite game of chance], but in the world of Dos mujeres, we can still enjoy the creation of our life’s illusions and take consolation in the writing. The narrator points out that ‘‘la vida esta´ llena de novelas’’ (Milla´s 2002a, 144). [life is full of novels]. If indeed life is like a novel, then perhaps we can understand reality by using the same tools we use to interpret fiction. The novel itself, with its constant self-reflexivity, seems to embody this idea. The novel cries out that it is fiction, but it also tells us that fiction is just like reality, and reality is just like fiction. And fiction is important ´ lvaro says in his huto our experience of everyday reality. As A morous letter to his mother, written at the request of his editor, ‘‘Los libros justifican mi existencia del mismo modo que a mı´ me habrı´a gustado ser la justificacio´n de la tuya. Todo es escritura, como vera´s’’ (193). [Books justify my existence in the same way that I would have liked to have been the justification of yours. Everything is narrative, as you will see.] ´ lvaro’s letter to his mother, the narrator is surAfter reading A prised by the mixture of reality and fiction that it offers, but he comes to an important realization after its reading. As we can see also in the recent novels of authors such as Javier Marı´as, Javier Cercas, and Rosa Montero, the narrator of Dos mujeres realizes that all writing involves a mixing of reality and fiction: Comprendı´ que toda escritura es una mezcla diabo´lica de las dos cosas, con independencia de la etiqueta que figure en el encabezamiento. La materia de mis reportajes era tan ficticia como la de la ´ lvaro, o la de la carta a la madre era tan real carta a la madre de A como la de mis reportajes. Se podı´a decir de las dos formas porque todo era mentira y verdad al mismo tiempo. Todo es mentira y verdad de forma simulta´nea, Dios mı´o. (209–10) [I understood that all writing is a diabolical mix of the two things, regardless of the label that appeared in the heading. The material of ´ lvmy reports was just as fictitious as the letter to his mother that A aro wrote, or his letter to his mother was just as true as one of my reports. You could say it both ways because everything was lies and truth at the same time. Everything is lies and truth simultaneously. My God.]

As we see in many contemporary works of Spanish metafiction, the narrator explicitly draws attention to his task, which is com-

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prised mainly of weaving these varied stories into one coherent whole. These various ends that he attempts to tie together often seem too coincidental, as he remembers, there is a ‘‘red de coincidencias sobre la que se sostiene la realidad y que a veces, por causas que desconocemos, se queda al descubierto, como los a´rboles cuando se retira la niebla’’ (115) [web of coincidences upon which reality relies and that sometimes, for causes that we will never know, is suddenly discovered, like trees when the mist recedes]. Nevertheless, he is always forthright about the indeterminacy of his sources and the admittedly subjective and individual method that he uses to tie them together. After all, he uses his own common sense to put together the narrative pieces of the novel, and therefore his story is perhaps doubly unreliable. The question that he poses to himself might just as well be directed to the reader: ‘‘¿Co´mo saber la verdad?’’ (104). [How to know the truth?] The truth, he seems to suggest, is only as good as the words that we use to represent it. But just because everything contains simultaneously a mixture of fiction and truth does not mean that we must despair at the lack of certainty and absolutes in the world. In the novels of Juan Jose´ Milla´s, what makes life bearable are the stories we tell about ourselves, the stories in which we play a part, the stories that make us who we are. In a universe perhaps devoid of existential certainty, we can still seek comfort in storytelling. Literature, after all, imposes the ‘‘imaginative order of its conventions on the disorder of life’’ (Pike 1981, 137). For the narrators and protagonists that people Milla´s’s fictional world, metafiction is the map that leads them to understand not only the trappings of artistic representation, but also themselves and their relation to ´ lvaro tells Luz during their first the world they inhabit. As A meeting, ‘‘[L]a vida, de ser algo, es eso: un relato, un cuento que siempre merece la pena ser contado’’ (Milla´s 2002a, 9). [Life, if it is anything, is that: a story, a tale that is always worth telling.] The disjuncture between physical and emotional space provides the novel’s principal dramatic tension. As the novel progresses, it becomes clear that only the narrative act will offer the characters a meaningful point of reference from which to make ´ lvsense of their surroundings and their place in the world. Life, A aro asserts, is like a novel, but it is up to us to organize the events and assign them significance. The only thing one has to do is ‘‘tomarlo y ordenarlo’’ (35) [take it and give it order].

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3 Narrative Schizophrenia and the Anxiety of Influence in the Novels of Nuria Amat OF ALL THE NOVELISTS INCLUDED IN TRUE LIES, THE CATALAN AUthor Nuria Amat is perhaps the most preoccupied with the dynamic relationship between the processes of reading and writing. Her prose is not marked by the easy narrative flow, sometimes lighthearted tone, and accessibility that characterizes the fiction of Rosa Montero, Javier Cercas, Carlos Can˜eque, and Juan Jose´ Milla´s. The fiction of Nuria Amat lies somewhere between the contemporary experimental novel and the ‘‘novela de crisis subjetiva’’ [novel of the crisis of subjectivity] that Vance Holloway outlines in his book El Posmodernismo y otras tendencies de la novela espan˜ola (1999). Amat’s novels tend to be formally complex, sometimes hermetic reflections on literary creation and the complexities of representing subjectivity. This chapter illustrates how this narrative style is linked to the narrators’ anxiety of influence, and how these narrators’ experiences as readers can be related to their own narrative schizophrenia. Taking Todos somos Kafka [Everyone Is Kafka] (1993) and La intimidad [Intimacy] (1997) as primary examples, I will discuss how Amat’s narrators and protagonists often demonstrate a protracted inability to surmount the issues of literary influence through their various experiences of diegesis, and thus their texts reflect the conflicting forces that comprise their developing subjectivities. These works reveal how the conflictive relationship between reading and writing is linked in turn to the construction of human identity. Amat’s obsession with the written word in its various forms is apparent in her numerous essays. Indeed, she has written on little else. As she states in the introduction to her own collection of essays and stories, El ladro´n de libros [The Book Thief], 95

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‘‘Las distintas facetas literarias, librescas, bibliogra´ficas y biblio´manas que aquı´ se incluyen coinciden con las propias de mi mundo ı´ntimo [ . . . ] y profesional: literatura, escritura, bibliotecas, informa´tica, documentacio´n, libros y ficcio´n’’ (1988, 13). [The various literary, bookish, bibliographic, and bibliophilic facets of the present work coincide with my own personal . . . and professional worlds: literature, writing, libraries, information, documentation, books, and fiction.] Even those novels that do not examine explicitly the narrative practice make at least superficial references to reading and writing. Reina de Ame´rica [Queen of America] (2002), for example, is not overtly metafictional, but it does deal with a young Catalan woman named Rat who experiences the dangers of civil war in Colombia with her Colombian lover, who happens to be a journalist and novelist. Susanna Regazzoni writes that in the panorama of contemporary women novelists, Nuria Amat represents ‘‘an original phenomenon who embodies the infinite possibilities of the freedom and pleasure of writing’’ (1995, 261). Nuria Amat has dedicated her life to books. Having received her doctorate in information science she has worked as a librarian and taught courses in library science at the University of Barcelona. Curiously, in spite of Amat’s well-documented reverence for books and the written word, in her best work reading and writing are almost always associated with insanity and death. The critic who has written most extensively on Amat is Nuria Capdevila-Argu¨elles, who has examined her novels and essays as a comprehensive whole in which she traces an evolving female narrative voice. Capdevila-Argu¨elles suggests that by considering her novels together, we can see in Amat’s work a transgression of generic boundaries that forms, as a narrative corpus, a ‘‘bildungsroman of an authorial voice’’ (1999, 56). Much of Capdevila-Argu¨elles’s published material focuses on the development of this thesis, and has been synthesized and expanded ably in her book-length study, Challenging Gender and Genre in the Literary Text: The Works of Nuria Amat (2002). By way of a starting point, I trace briefly here the trajectory of Amat’s development as a writer by drawing upon the work of Capdevila-Argu¨elles, who divides her novels into three categories. Amat’s first novels—Cuerpo desnudo blanco [White Naked Body], which remains unpublished; Pan de boda [Wedding Cake] (1979); and Narciso y Armonı´a [Narcissus and Harmony]

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(1982)—are characterized by their emphasis upon the configuration of a female ‘‘I.’’ Capdevila-Argu¨elles writes that these novels are ‘‘narrated as a culturally antiseptic process of individualization; a femininity engendered and understood as a patriarchal, culturally isolatable, objectifying construction’’ (1999, 57). These first novels are concerned primarily with the social and political issues surrounding the experience of Spanish women during the late seventies and eighties, and might be characterized, as Lori Ween has suggested, as pure testimonial literature (2001, 189). Capdevila-Argu¨elles establishes a second group of books, consisting of El ladro´n de libros y otras bibliomanias [The Book Thief and Other Bibliomanias] (1988), a collection of personal essays in which Amat examines her own love of books, writing, reading, book collecting, and other themes relating to literature; Amor breve [Brief Love] (1990); Monstruos [Monsters] (1990); Todos somos Kafka [Everyone Is Kafka] (1993); and Viajar es muy difı´cil: Manual de ruta para lectores perife´ricos [Traveling Is Very Difficult: A Guidebook for Peripheral Readers] (1995). Capdevila-Argu¨elles calls this second group of books ‘‘unclassifiable’’ because of their generic and stylistic ambiguity, which places them halfway between fiction and essay (1999, 58). The difficult classification of much of Amat’s fiction can be explained in part by looking at how contemporary metafiction explores ‘‘the arbitrary nature . . . of boundaries’’ (Waugh 1984, 29), the boundaries that separate reality and fiction, self and other, author and narrator, and critic and novelist. In his book, Metafiction (1995), Mark Currie addresses the collapse of traditional distinctions between criticism and literature in the metafictional novel, and posits that metafiction represents the ‘‘convergence where fiction and criticism have assimilated each other’s insights, producing a self-conscious energy on both sides’’ (1995, 2). The ramifications of this collision of criticism and fiction are twofold, and affect both genres: literature has assimilated critical perspectives into its fictional discourse, along with a corresponding linguistic and ontological self-consciousness; and in contemporary literary criticism we can now see ‘‘an affirmation of literariness in its own language, an increased awareness of the extent to which critical insights are formulated within fiction, and a tendency towards immanence of critical approach which questions the ability of critical language to refer

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objectively and authoritatively to the literary text’’ (2). Currie concludes that ‘‘the reciprocity of this relationship indicates that metafiction is only half, the fictional half, of a process of challenging the boundary between fiction and criticism, and therefore that its explanation requires that it be articulated across the boundary, connecting it to the self-consciousness of criticism’’ (2). This interstitial positioning between the ‘‘real’’ world of literary criticism and the ‘‘fictional’’ world of literature characterizes in one way or another all of the contemporary Spanish novelists discussed in True Lies, but the disintegration of these boundaries between the two worlds is most acutely evident in Carlos Can˜eque, Javier Cercas, Javier Marı´as, and Nuria Amat. Regazzoni writes that it is precisely its equivocal nature that makes Nuria Amat’s fiction unique: ‘‘Nuria Amat’s narratives are based upon the equivocal. In effect, her writing feeds off the ambiguity between the real and the fictional, lived and imagined memory’’ (1995, 266). Capdevila-Argu¨elles proffers a third group of novels that represent a ‘‘mature’’ stage of artistic development. These works include La intimidad [The Private Life] (1997), a metafictional novel that deals specifically with a female writer’s coming of age as a reader while she simultaneously attempts to cope with the issues of artistic influence and the symbiotic relationship between reading and writing; Letra herida [Wounded Letter] (1998), a collection of essays, memoirs, and observations on the writing craft; and El paı´s del alma [The Country of the Soul] (1999), a sort of free-flowing memoir and love story set in post–civil war Barcelona. We might also include Amat’s more recent Reina de Ame´rica (2002) in this group of later novels. In the following pages, I will discuss Todos somos Kafka and La intimidad in terms of the author’s strategic use of metafiction. Both of these novels are fragmented texts that dramatize their narrators’ struggle with the crippling anxiety of the influence that springs from their readings of the great canonical male authors of the Western tradition. As readers and writers, Amat’s characters peer into their own texts and those of the literary canon in search of the causes of their narrative schizophrenia. These two novels in particular reflect a process by which the writing self seeks narrative coherence through the reappropriation of and critical engagement with traditional discourses.

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Todos somos Kafka In their essay ‘‘The Neurology of Narrative,’’ Kay Young, a professor of English, and Jeffrey L. Saver, a neurologist, emphasize that ‘‘what predominates or fundamentally constitutes our consciousness is the understanding of self and world in story’’ (Young and Saver 2001, 73). Quoting Roger Schank’s Tell Me a Story (1990), the authors point out that ‘‘what enables the making of memories is the telling of stories’’ (74), and that to be without stories is ‘‘to be without memories, which means something like being without a self’’ (74). But what happens when we have too many stories? In Nuria Amat’s Todos somos Kafka, the reader can see how a self attempts to make sense of the many stories and texts that infiltrate her consciousness through a lifetime of reading, and how those exterior stories become an important part of her own. It is this ongoing ebb and flow of texts and their interaction with an interpreting subjectivity that give the novel its form. Amat’s narratives reflect a kind of textual psychosis of which metafiction serves as a marker. In the words of the narrator of Todos somos Kafka, ‘‘Escribir es volverse loco’’ (1993, 55). [To write is to go insane.] Nuria Amat’s narrators are always concluding their readings of one text and beginning the process of writing another, but it is the anxiety that springs from reading the canonical works of Western literature that precludes them from arriving at any definitive articulation of their narrative voices. Metafiction becomes a dramatic recognition of discursive schizophrenia brought on by the trauma induced by reading. Harold Bloom’s formulation of the anxiety of influence offers an important interpretive key to understanding Nuria Amat’s recent fiction, for it is through a psychoanalytical approach to the terms of anxiety, trauma, and sublimation that we can make sense her work. The bulk of Amat’s corpus arises from what Harold Bloom has famously said of poetry: ‘‘Poems rise not so much in response to a present time . . . but in response to other poems’’ (1979, 99). Amat’s novels rise in response to other novels. It is not a coincidence, therefore, that Todos somos Kafka begins with the sentence ‘‘Cerre´ el libro’’ [I closed the book] (1993, 13), for the narrator only begins to write when she stops reading; the act of writing one book begins with the closing of another. As the narrator says while she watches her literary

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‘‘father’’ Kafka write, ‘‘Ver co´mo un escritor escribe aumenta tu capacidad de escritor’’ (1993, 27). [To see how a writer writes is to increase your capacity as a writer.] But although she admires Kafka, it becomes almost immediately apparent that there is an antagonistic relationship between the narrator and her literary forebears. Todos somos Kafka is perhaps Nuria Amat’s most intriguing work of fiction. The novel evinces the same thematic preoccupation with reading, writing, literary influence, and intertextuality that we see in much of her other work, but it is in Todos somos Kafka that the author transcends the testimonial style that characterizes her earlier fiction and engages with universal themes. Todos somos Kafka is a novel that not only engages critically with the literary tradition, but that also emphasizes the architecture of its own creation through the narrator’s selfconscious reflections on the diegetic process. At the same time, the narrator’s experience of diegesis is related to the construction of the self. Todos somos Kafka deals with a first-person narrator’s attempts to come to terms with the literary influence of the classics as she begins to write her own novel, which she has titled tentatively El hombre que amaba la literatura [The Man Who Loved Literature] (Amat 1993, 20). In the absence of any sort of traditional plot, the novel emphasizes instead the mutually related processes of reading and writing. Although it is difficult to discern a clear plotline, the protagonist and narrator, who refers to herself only as ‘‘la lectora’’ [the reader], seems to enter and leave a library—either real or imagined—while engaging in conversations with some of the great male authors of the modernist canon. ‘‘La lectora’’ also imagines the relationships these authors must have had with the women who loved them, and, because her sense of self throughout the novel is fluid, she sometimes counts herself among these women. The narrator alternately identifies herself as daughter and lover of both Franz Kafka and James Joyce. Just a few of the authors who appear in the novel are Joyce, Flaubert, Italo Calvino, and, of course, Kafka. Todos somos Kafka is characterized by a fragmented structure and a stream of consciousness that seamlessly flows between themes and ideas that are related only insofar as they deal with reading and writing. The novel’s discourse is alternately com-

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prehensible and hermetic as it follows the mysterious musings of a reader’s subjectivity. Narrative time and real time are collapsed, and the plot does not correspond to any one time frame, be it personal or historical. The multiplicity of temporal frames and intersubjective relationships represent symptoms of the narrator’s textually represented schizophrenia, which springs from her inability to sublimate her sense of Bloomian anxiety. The narrator seems to be aware of her instability, as the word ‘‘loco’’ [crazy] and other variants appear countless times in the novel. One section of the work is called ‘‘Estaba loca por Ulysses ’’ [I was crazy about Ulysses], and in it the narrator explicitly mentions her inclination to mental illness: ‘‘Mi predisposicio´n a la locura debio´ de permitir que Joyce me transformase en Nora Joyce’’ (111). [It must have been my predisposition to madness that allowed Joyce to transform me into Nora Joyce.] Some readers will recall that Joyce’s own daughter Lucia was schizophrenic. Several critics have pointed to Lucia’s possible influence on her father’s writing, particularly in the conception of Finnegans Wake, which is a novel that is characterized by its schizophrenic discourse (Kuberski 1985; McBride 1996; Shloss 1997–98; Wexler 1994). The narrator of Todos somos Kafka self-consciously draws attention to her mental state and ponders the causes of her insanity. She says of herself, using a more impersonal third-person point of view, that she has read far too much: La lectora ha leı´do demasiado. Esta´ a punto de convertir al padre escritor en un ser perverso que encierra a la nin˜a en el desva´n junto a la loca de tal modo que la nin˜a ya no sabe si es ella la hija o la madre loca y, finalmente, como es de prever, termina volvie´ndose loca de verdad por culpa del padre escritor que ha llevado su imaginacio´n demasiado lejos. Sin embargo, la personalidad de Franz Kafka no concuerda en absoluto con el prototipo de hombre cruel y trastornado que parece disfrutar con el delirio de su hija. Ma´s probable parece que mientras el padre esta´ en su habitacio´n leyendo y escribiendo, la hija suba y baje del desva´n y divague sobre historias de locas y desaparecidos. Ma´s probable parece que sea la hija, la lectora, la u´nica trastornada y loca. (Amat 1993,33) [The reader has read too much. She is at the point of turning her writer father into a perverse being that locks the girl up in the attic

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with the madwoman and, finally, as is to be expected, ends up crazy herself because of the writer father who has taken his imagination too far. Nevertheless, the personality of Franz Kafka does not correspond in the slightest with the prototype of the cruel, deranged man who seems to enjoy the delirium of his daughter. It seems more probable that while the father is in his bedroom reading and writing, his daughter might go up and down the stairs to the attic, digressing about stories of madwomen and missing persons. It is more probable that the only deranged madwoman is the daughter, the reader.]

In this short passage alone, the word ‘‘loca’’ [madwoman, crazy] is repeated five times, along with the mention of the words ‘‘delirio’’ [delirium] and ‘‘perverso’’ [perverse]. Simultaneously, we can see in this passage a self-conscious engagement with the critical tradition—in particular, Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar’s classic work, The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination (1979). But unlike Gilbert and Gubar, by giving her reader a voice, Amat is concerned with the importance of reading to the formation of a female subjectivity. Indeed, Todos somos Kafka inverts the hierarchical arrangement of author and reader at the same time that it subverts the filial metaphor of writing that is the basis for Gilbert and Gubar’s thesis. In Todos somos Kafka, the madwoman in the attic is not just the subject of the novel, but also an author. Nevertheless, because it is sometimes related to her insanity, the narrator often ascribes a negative value to reading. Quite tellingly, on several occasions the narrator likens herself to Lucia, James Joyce’s schizophrenic daughter, to whom she gives the credit for the writing of Finnegans Wake (Amat 1993, 126).

Narrative Schizophrenia and the Anxiety of Influence While Deleuze and Guattari offer a more sympathetic— decidedly literary—reading of schizophrenia in their AntiOedipus (1983), in this chapter I draw predominantly upon Lee R. Edwards’s essay ‘‘Schizophrenic Narrative’’ (1989), which offers an accessible introduction to the ramifications of contemporary conceptions of schizophrenia in the field of literary criticism.

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Edwards writes that schizophrenia ‘‘as a mode of existence is both experienced and defined linguistically’’ (25). Thus, subjective derangements and temporal lapses of the kind that we see in Todos somos Kafka are accompanied by a definitive narrative structure that reflects those altered mental states. Schizophrenia manifests itself in part through ‘‘a certain concatenation of verbal gambits and narrative derangements’’ (Edwards 1989, 25). Edwards points to the most notable of these verbal and/or narrative manifestations of schizophrenia. They include, he says, frequent neologisms and/or logical discontinuities resulting in an ordering that depends on the sounds of words (or other private systems of association) rather than their more conventional (or public) meanings; an insistence on the human self—including, but not necessarily restricted to the speaker—as inconstant, unstable, porous, infinitely permeable so that sequences of time (yesterday-todaytomorrow), spatial distinctions (here-there, outside-inside), a sense of mental or physical integrity (me-not me, human-not-human, subject-object, thinking-being thought, alive-dead) dull or entirely disappear. Syntax, however, and however surprisingly, frequently survives and thus some sense of shapeliness and of a desired formal order—a shared order—or communication. (25)

Todos somos Kafka, as an embodiment of the consciousness of its narrator, reflects textually the characteristics of the schizophrenic narrative described by Edwards in the passage above. In the following analysis of the novel, I explore how Amat makes use of these narrative derangements, logical discontinuities, and an insistence of the human self as ‘‘inconstant, unstable, porous, infinitely permeable’’ as major structuring principles. Todos somos Kafka is organized in a seemingly arbitrary way. It is divided into three parts composed of randomly arranged chapters of varying length. This nebulous structure functions in two ways: as a metaphor for the writing process, in which a narrator endeavors to engage and appropriate the heterogeneous texts of the literary canon while simultaneously attempting to create something completely new; and, more importantly, as one textually manifest symptom of the narrator’s narrative schizophrenia. Indeed, keeping in mind Edwards’s formulation, throughout the novel ‘‘la lectora’’ is unable to define clearly important distinctions between outside and inside (for example, whether she is inside the library or outside of it; whether she is

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inside her own mind or outside of it); time frames and temporal sequences are frequently confused; and she is unable to articulate a cohesive conception of self, alternately defining herself as daughter and lover to both Kafka and Joyce, two figures who, in turn, alternate between living and dead in the novel. The narrator draws explicit attention to her porous sense of self with statements such as ‘‘Yo cometı´ el error de confundir a mi hija conmigo misma o con la hija de mi madre, o con mi madre incluso, y determine´ su fin por querer equipararlo al principio’’ (Amat 1993, 128). [I committed the error of confusing my daughter with myself or with the daughter of my mother, or even with my mother, and I decided to reconcile them from the beginning.] The novel’s most prominent characteristic is precisely this representation of a (literary) personality that is alternately in a process of integration and disintegration. The narrator attempts to filter and interpret her many readings of canonical texts as the novel progresses, relating these readings to her own experience as a subject. This process can be related to our attempt to sort through and interpret the varied textual elements that represent the novel we hold in our hands. What gives the novel thematic unity is that every section deals with authors, reading, or writing. These three sections of the novel can be seen to comprise important parts of the author’s subjectivity as a reader and a writer of fiction. Capdevila-Argu¨elles has stated in a study of the novel that the possible interpretations of the work are infinite, and that even the narrator’s identity is ambiguous. Capdevila-Argu¨elles indicates that ‘‘la lectora’’ could be anyone: ‘‘Joyce’s daughter, Kafka’s wife, all the women implicated in the literary scene and labeled as mad, all of them co-exist in her mind because she is reading them or has read them and because she is also reading for the female presence around dead male writers’’ (2000, 12). Capdevila-Argu¨elles argues finally that the novel represents ‘‘a mirror of patriarchal or phallocentric politics of representation’’ (10). But this mirror does not offer a faithful representation of the politics of representation; instead, the novel represents a fragmented mirror of patriarchal and phallocentric literature in which the narrator appropriates critically the many intertexts that have come to comprise her subjectivity. In the novel’s fragmented structure we can see the narrator’s attempt to dismantle traditional modes of representation. The novel engages with the male-authored

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canon by placing it alongside her fictional representations of the historically subaltern feminine discourses that existed simultaneously through literary history: Lucia Joyce; Flaubert’s lover, Louise Colet; Kafka’s last lover, Dora Diamant; Mileva Einstein; and the narrator herself.1 In Todos somos Kafka, the discourse is its story. Insofar as the novel represents her subjectivity, the text is the site of the struggle for the narrator’s self-realization. Further, while ‘‘la lectora’’ attempts to escape the bonds of patriarchal power structures and approach self-realization, it is more than just a struggle against patriarchal power; the novel comments also on the aporia of human consciousness. The novel, as a symbolic act of remembering and telling, produces meaning for the subject through its writing. Through the skillful melding of some of the tropes of the autobiographical genre with a metafictional narrative strategy that emphasizes porousness, indeterminacy, and flux, the novel dramatizes the many processes by which bodies, selves, memories, heredity, and narrative all come together to make meaning out of lived and imagined experience. Although there is no cohesive whole, the meaning of the text lies in its fragmentation and the ambiguity that embodies it. The novel’s thematic preoccupation with the issues of literary representation, poetic influence, and the antagonistic relationship between a would-be writer and an author of an already written text is reflected in the novel’s structure.

Reading as Trauma in Todos somos Kafka In Todos somos Kafka, the narrator’s anxiety of literary influence is described as a narratively derived trauma that can be seen as a sort of ‘‘cause’’ of the text’s disturbed structure. The trauma experienced by the narrator can be likened to that of a son or daughter who suffers the mistreatment of an abusive parent or a personal loss. As the narrator writes, she is haunted by the revenants of dead male authors that she has read. The novel is about influence. It is most likely, given the novel’s title and thematic insistence on filial relationships, that the narrator draws upon Kafka’s relationship with his father as a generative example of the corrosive effects of patriarchal influence. In his book As Lonely as Franz Kafka, Marthe Robert ex-

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plores some of the contacts between fiction and reality in Kafka’s work, and suggests that ‘‘The Metamorphosis was a response to Kafka’s violent altercation with his father’’ (1982, 172–73). In his ‘‘Letter to His Father,’’ Kafka writes about his father’s despotic treatment and overwhelming negative influence on him. The author supposes that perhaps he would have been happy to have known his father in almost any other context except as his son: ‘‘I should have been happy to have you as friend, as a chief, an uncle, a grandfather, even indeed (though this rather more hesitantly) as a father-in-law. Only as what you are, a father, you have been too strong for me’’ (1954, 140). Kafka’s letter describes the universal struggle with the influence of the father, which in Amat’s novel becomes a Bloomian anxiety of the influence of male literary predecessors. In Amat’s formulation, it is the Kafka who suffered so much because of his own father who becomes the narrator’s own literary father. He in turn has similarly impeded her own development as a subject. It is this literary relationship between paternal forebear and symbolic offspring that necessitates the narrator’s struggle for self-realization. The novel represents a relationship of resistance between the dual issues of influence and insanity. The metafictional conceits that comprise Todos somos Kafka broadly encompass many aspects of the literary enterprise, from reading and writing to publishing and the literary marketplace. From the outset, the narrator of Todos somos Kafka is concerned first and foremost with understanding literary influence. She says that writers such as Kafka, who have become great writers by killing their own fathers with each phrase of their work, have created their own literary offspring, who in turn must struggle against their fathers. In Todos somos Kafka, literary influence is trauma. Having inherited the failure of the father, the narrator, ‘‘la lectora,’’ confesses that she cannot conceive of anything in her life that is not, from the beginning, a monumental failure. Referring to herself in the third person, she writes that when she is finally able to put pen to paper, what comes out is merely ‘‘una larga queja por no poder escribir literatura’’ (Amat 1993, 64) [a long complaint about not being able to write literature]. Criticizing the very novel that she is in the process of writing, ‘‘la lectora’’ points to her persona as narrator and expatiates on the impossibility of writing literature:

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Ella, la lectora, no escribe una novela e inventa un personaje llamado abogado, ingeniero o farmace´utico, alter ego del escritor, que sufre y es un fracasado porque no ha podido escribir una novela. La lectora se convierte en personaje de la tal novela y cuenta su imposibilidad de escribir una novela cuando hay tantos mortales hoy en dı´a, sino todos, que se consideran capaces de escribir cualquier tipo de novela. La lectora, cuando esta´ de buen humor, inventa que tal vez la literatura surja de una larga queja de no ser ya capaz de hacer literatura. Y toda gran novela, se consuela la lectora, no es ma´s que una gran queja sobre la incapacidad total y honesta del escritor para hacer literatura. (64, italics in original) [She, the reader, does not write a novel or invent a character called ‘‘lawyer,’’ ‘‘engineer,’’ ‘‘pharmacologist,’’ or an alter ego of the writer who suffers and is a failure because he is unable to write a novel. The reader instead turns into a character in that novel and talks about how it is impossible to write such a novel when there are so many mortals in the world—maybe even all of them—who consider themselves capable of writing any kind of novel. The reader, when she is in a good mood, invents a scenario in which perhaps literature springs from a long complaint about not being able to write literature. And all great novels, she tells herself, are nothing but huge complaints about the perfect incapacity of the writer to make literature.]

The narrator suggests, then, that perhaps literary failure can be turned into literature. We note in this quotation the preponderance of negative terms, such as ‘‘inu´til’’ [useless], ‘‘nada’’ [nothing], ‘‘fracasado’’ [failed], ‘‘sufre’’ [suffers], ‘‘queja’’ [compliant], ‘‘imposibilidad’’ [impossibility], and ‘‘incapacidad’’ [incapacity], which point to the universal frustration of the writer who must struggle to overcome the anxiety of literary influence. The narrator turns these negative sentiments into literary creation, but as a subject she is ultimately unable to move beyond the trauma induced by her reading of the great literary works of the twentieth century. At times, the narrator’s self-conscious self-examination reaches the neurotic levels of the protagonist and narrator of La intimidad, who is similarly handicapped by her constant awareness of the canonical works of literature, so that, finally, her own relationship with them can only be described as antagonistic. La intimidad ends with the protagonist enclosed in an insane asylum, while Todos somos Kafka ends with suicide.

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Todos somos Kafka doubles back upon itself in the third and last part as the narrator attempts to examine her own methodology and the choices she has made in beginning her work. This self-examination springs perhaps from her desire to understand her inability to write, the difficulty she encounters in dealing with her textually manifest psychosis: Empiezo pregunta´ndome por que´ coloco cada palabra en este lugar en concreto y no en otro; sobre el efecto que pretendo causar con las palabras; que´ idea quiero expresar en la primera frase de cada uno de los meditados capı´tulos del tal libro; a quie´n quiero sorprender con tal historia; de quie´n procuro vengarme con la intromisio´n de ese desgraciado personaje . . . (149) [I begin by asking myself why exactly I put this word in this place and not in another; what effect I am looking for in choosing these words; what idea I want to express with the first phrase of each possible chapter of this book; whom I want to surprise with this story; against whom I want to seek revenge for the intrusion of that unhappy character . . . ]

Perhaps the answer to her questions are simpler than she suspects, for her self-conscious emphasis on the processes of reading and writing have always led her back to the same point, which is her own subjectivity and inner experience of artistic creation. Thus, in creating this self-conscious ‘‘complaint’’ against literature, she simultaneously creates her own subjectivity in all its complexity, contradiction, and indeterminacy. Todos somos Kafka is its narrator; the text is her self. Through the process of creating her narrative, the narrator produces her subjectivity. Having met Edgar Allan Poe in what appears to be a hallucination, and having pondered his most famous poem, she writes, ‘‘[E]l poema no es tal poema, que la escritura no es so´lo la escritura sino el me´todo de la escritura’’ (157). [The poem is not the poem. Writing is not just writing, but rather it is the method of writing.] In other words, the novel is not the be-all end-all, but rather it is the process that is important. For the narrator, this process is the process of dealing with her own demons and her anxiety of influence. She appears to find solace through writing—‘‘Esta libreta de notas se ha convertido en mi coraza. Me sostiene. Me sirve de atalaya’’ (159). [This little book of notes

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has turned into my shield. It protects me. It functions as my watchtower.] Like the poets that live so large in Bloom’s imagination, the protagonists of Amat’s most obsessively metafictional works fight under the weight of their ‘‘Great Originals.’’ Their readings and misreadings of their literary predecessors become the inspiration for their own creativity. The narrator of Todos somos Kafka works at undermining the great works of the Western canon, and in so doing, she personifies the ‘‘poetic state of Satan’’ that Bloom describes in his allegorical reading of Milton’s Paradise Lost. Bloom posits that Milton’s work dramatizes the dilemma of the modern poet who rebels, like Satan, against ‘‘his dead but still embarrassingly potent and present ancestor’’ (1979, 20). This state of Satan is, in Bloom’s estimation, ‘‘a constant consciousness of dualism, of being trapped in the finite, not just in space (in the body) but in clock-time as well’’ (32), and functions as a metaphor for the situation of the strong modern poet who must struggle against the influence of his forebears. In the same way, Amat’s narrator is trapped in her own text/discourse, which is begotten by her own readings of her strong predecessors—Kafka, Joyce, Borges. Bloom’s ‘‘Great Inhibitor’’ is Milton, whose influence, he contends, ‘‘strangles even strong imaginations in their cradles’’ (32), and while Bloom’s poets struggle against Milton, the narrator of Todos somos Kafka struggles with her own Great Inhibitors: Kafka and the great modernist writers. In light of Bloom’s postulations, Amat’s narrator can be viewed as a subjectivity that has been flooded, or exhausted, by her benefactors or predecessors, who serve not as inspirations, but instead, to use Bloom’s negative terminology, as a sort of poetical calamity or trauma. Even as the issues of literary influence become more negatively charged, Todos somos Kafka continues to problematize the very tribulations of literary influence via the dramatization of an antagonistic relationship between female reader and male writer. Through the diffuse and sometimes confusing literary digressions that compose the novel, the reader is left with a representation of the ambiguous, contradictory, and sometimes paradoxical struggle to create a literary text while the narrator attempts to deal with the overwhelming anxiety of literary influence. The narrator’s inability to come to terms with these issues is

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reflected in the schizophrenic structure of the text: she does not even allow herself to have a proper name, and she is only able to refer to herself as ‘‘la lectora,’’ an identity that is predicated upon her dependent relationship to a preexisting written text. When she does venture a more concrete identity, she is only able to identify herself in terms of her (subordinate) relationship with her literary ‘‘fathers’’ and lovers. The reader is never able to discern whether she truly is Kafka’s lover, his daughter, or, taking Bloom a step further, merely reader as a figurative ‘‘daughterreader’’ of her (literary) father’s text. Capdevila-Argu¨elles persuasively concludes her study of Todos somos Kafka by suggesting that, at the novel’s end, ‘‘what is left is writing, but writing is feigning and signification is always a mirage because it is always momentary’’ (2000, 12). The novel’s conclusion is paradoxical, however, for although writing is all that remains at the novel’s conclusion, the narrator—like the narrator of La intimidad, which I will discuss below—has been ultimately unsuccessful in her attempts to arrive at a final literary product. She has written the process of trying to come to terms with her ‘‘Great Inhibitors,’’ but she never truly appears to escape their influence or even effect any sort of Bloomian misprision of them. Instead, the text that we read tells the story of an ‘‘ephebe’’ who cannot escape the influence of her Great Inhibitor. Thus, the novel is not the articulation of a success, but rather of a failure. Amat does not rewrite Kafka or his work, she does not ‘‘misread’’ him in a different light, nor is she able to offer a new or original rereading of Joyce. Although Bloom has mentioned, again citing Nietzsche, that ‘‘every talent must unfold itself in fighting’’ (1979, 52), in spite of their constant struggles, very few of the protagonists of Amat’s novels ever acknowledge that they have reached poetic plentitude. The irony implicit in these works is that although their narrators do not achieve literary plentitude, their narratives finally transcend the language that gives them form. Freud, says Bloom, defines anxiety as ‘‘anxiety before something’’ (57, italics in original), which Bloom then interprets as the expectation of something. This expectation is similar to desire: ‘‘The anxiety of influence is an anxiety in expectation of being flooded’’ (57, italics in original). Further, ‘‘every good reader properly desires to drown, but if the poet drowns, he will become only a reader’’ (57, italics in original). Todos somos

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Kafka is about a narrator who strives to move away from her role as reader in order to become a writer. I mentioned earlier that Kafka’s letter to his father must have influenced the novel’s title, since Todos somos Kafka is all about fathers and their offspring. Kafka begins his letter by talking about why he fears his father: ‘‘Dearest Father: You asked me recently why I maintain that I am afraid of you. As usual, I was unable to think of any answer to your question, partly for the very reason that I am afraid of you, and partly because an explanation of the grounds for this fear would mean going into far more details than I could even approximately keep in mind while talking’’ (1954, 138). While we must surely maintain a bit of critical distance, Kafka says that as a result of his father’s supposedly malignant influence, he withdrew into himself and suffered greatly from his emotional abuse. The author writes that at times he could not even speak: ‘‘The impossibility of getting on calmly together had one more result, actually a very natural one: I lost the capacity to talk . . . I couldn’t either think or speak in your presence’’ (150–51). In light of these and other sentiments expressed in both Kafka’s letter and Todos somos Kafka, it seems likely that it is this frustrating inability to overcome the influence of the father that fuels or incites the narrator’s turn toward schizophrenia. ‘‘La lectora,’’ for example, refers to Kafka in terms of a father-daughter relationship: ‘‘Me siento la heredera de mi literario padre. Su sucesora’’ (Amat, 1993, 28) [I feel like the heiress of my literary father. His successor]. In her efforts to sublimate the anxiety of her literary ‘‘father’s’’ influence, the narrator is forced to turn inward—into the text that is her subjectivity—where she explores through metafiction the fragmented, disintegrating, and altogether chaotic mass that is her subconscious. As I mention in chapter 1, Rosa Montero’s novels offer a comprehensible, cohesive interpretation of reality, but with the caveat that this interpretation is exactly that: a subjective representation of a wholly unknowable reality. Lucı´a, the protagonist of La hija del canı´bal, for example, admits to being a liar, even while she attempts to put forth an acceptable interpretation of her own perceptions of the world that surrounds her. The protagonist of Todos somos Kafka, in contrast, never offers even a simulacrum of order, as she leaves for the reader the task

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of making sense of the many narrative threads she has attempted to create. The narrators of the two works only coincide in that they both believe, explicitly or implicitly, that ‘‘ningu´n escritor, sadista o no, dice la verdad’’ (Amat 1993, 139) [No writer, sadist or not, tells the truth].

Readers and Writers While we may be tempted to read Todos somos Kafka as a positive realization of a narrative self, the narrator becomes more embittered as the novel progresses, and her aggressiveness toward her literary forebears increases. Joyce receives the harshest criticism in the novel. ‘‘La lectora’’ condemns him for writing in such a way as to turn his readers into his foes; he treats them with the same indolence and antipathy with which he might treat his enemies: ‘‘Joyce es el gran especialista del sadismo literario. El movimiento sadista (joyceano o postjoyceano) acuerda aprobar que a la pregunta: ‘¿Para quie´n escribes?’, la respuesta aceptada, con diferentes matices para cada caso, sea: ‘Para fastidiar al lector’ ’’ (137–38). [Joyce is the great specialist of literary sadism. The sadist movement (Joycean or postjoycean) seeks to prove that the answer to the question ‘‘For whom do you write?’’ is, with slight variations in each case: ‘‘To frustrate the reader.’’] Paradoxically, this is precisely the approach that the narrator takes in the construction of her own narrative. Her experimental narrative style challenges the reader, even while she criticizes Joyce’s Finnegans Wake for its schizophrenic narrative form—‘‘No es de extran˜ar, entonces, que el llamado lenguaje esquizofre´nico de F.W. sea el producto de la mente joyceana de Lucı´a’’ (126). [It is not strange, then, that the so called schizophrenic language of F.W. should be the product of Lucia’s Joycean mind.] The narrator concurs with literary scholars who have in fact contended that Joyce’s daughter Lucia influenced (if not inspired) Joyce’s modernist masterpiece (Kuberski 1985; McBride 1996; Shloss 1997–98; Wexler 1994). The narrator argues that Joyce merely transcribed her mental illness in writing Finnegans Wake, so that Lucia is in fact the true generator of the work. The relationship between Lucia and her father seems to represent a model for Amat’s narrator and her descriptions of her own relationships with both Joyce and Kafka in Todos somos

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Kafka. She, like Lucia, is the insane daughter of the great authors, only she wishes to usurp their authorial authority via her rewriting of their works. Feeling incapable of creating her own masterpiece, she seeks more surreptitious methods of writing her own masterwork. The novel itself represents that struggle. Based upon her concept of ‘‘sadistic’’ writing, the narrator develops her own literary theory, reasoning that most readers want either to be entertained or to learn something new. In her estimation, the sadistic writer, knowing this, says to himself, ‘‘Vamos entonces a ofrecerle lo que busca pero a costa de torturarlo, cuantas veces sea necesario, con la entrega de lo contrario a lo que desea’’ (Amat, 138). [Let’s offer the reader what he wants, but let’s torture him in the process, as often as necessary, by giving him the opposite of what he desires.] What is a sadistic writer? The narrator declares that the sadistic writer is he who writes only for himself: [E]l escritor sadista es aquel escritor que se niega a escribir para otro que no sea e´l mismo y se aviene a despreciar a cualquier tipo de lector comu´n pues lo considera un escritor frustrado que disfruta, sin embargo, del privilegio de ejercer el derecho a la lectura, cosa que el escritor despreciativo no puede hacer en ese momento, ya que se encuentra ocupado escribiendo el libro que el lector esta´ leyendo. Cuando, en realidad, lo que le gustarı´a es, en vez de escribir, leer cuanto e´l ha escrito dentro de un objeto llamado libro, leer su propio libro como, con toda seguridad, esta´ haciendo ahora el lector con el suyo o el de otro autor elegido. (138) [The sadistic writer is he who refuses to write for anyone but himself and who dares to despise the common reader because he views him as a frustrated writer who enjoys, nevertheless, the privilege of exercising his right to reading, which is precisely the thing that the disdainful writer cannot do in that moment because he is engaged in writing the novel that the reader is reading. In reality, what the writer would rather be doing, instead of writing, is to be reading what he has written in an object called a book—to be reading his own book just like, surely, the reader is doing at that moment either with his book or with a book by another author.]

The narrator concludes by pronouncing that the writer with writerly ambitions must despise the reader out of envy, pure and simple (138). This is a unique take on theories of reader response

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criticism, since the narrator posits here that the antagonistic relationship between the writer and his readership is one based upon jealousy: the reader reads, while the writer toils in the writing of the book he wishes he could read but must write. Perhaps this is the narrator’s take on her own task: a self-professed avid reader, she is engaged in writing the novel that will bridge the gap between her experience as reader and writer of literature. Yet the daunting style that she employs throughout reveals the same sort of sadistic narrative tendencies that she criticizes in Joyce. Perhaps she, too, would prefer narcissistically to read her own novel rather than toil at its writing.2 Nevertheless, her acerbic criticism of ‘‘sadistic’’ writers within a text that employs the same sort of difficult language and narrative structure points to a textual self-loathing—a further symptom, perhaps, of her narrative schizophrenia. According to ‘‘la lectora,’’ James Joyce was one of the best examples of the sadistic writer, who must have enjoyed himself immensely while writing his novels: ‘‘Sus textos pretenden hacer reı´r al lector, lo que es muy distinto de divertirlo o de hace´rselo pasar bien en su compan˜ı´a’’ (Amat 1993, 141). [His texts seek to make the reader laugh, which is very different from entertaining him or allowing him to enjoy his company.] This represents the great danger that the sadistic writer faces, since because his novels tend to be more fun and interesting for himself than for any reader, he runs the risk of ending up without any readers. Throughout Todos somos Kafka, the narrator comments on the reading and reception of the great modernist writers. As I have already indicated above, she singles Joyce out in particular and gives him credit for killing the reader: ‘‘Un escritor sadista que goza de la particularidad de ser ma´s comentado que leı´do debe saber mantener su fama. Joyce, en este sentido, sigue siendo insuperable. Dio muerte al lector. Fue su verdugo’’ (142). [A sadistic writer who enjoys the unique pleasure of being more commented upon than read should know how to maintain his fame. In this respect, Joyce continues to be insuperable. He killed the reader. He was his executioner.] Readers, for their part, have repaid Joyce in kind: ‘‘la lectora’’ writes that no one reads Joyce anymore. She concludes these statements by appealing directly to the sadistic author: ‘‘[E]scritor suicida, en lugar de obedecer tu primer impulso y darte muerte, hara´s mejor en contar tu vida’’

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(142). [Suicidal writer: instead of obeying your first impulse and killing yourself, you could do better by telling the story of your life.] Statements such as these serve to remind the reader, however, of the discursive inconsistencies of Todos somos Kafka. The novel, after all, is narrated in precisely the sort of style the narrator seems to loathe, and she treats her own readers with a similar sort of disdain. In the novel’s concluding sentence, when she is overcome by her anxiety of influence, ‘‘la lectora’’ throws herself (symbolically, perhaps) out of a window or into a book: ‘‘Abro el libro o la ventana y tambie´n me tiro’’ (224). [I open the book or the window and I heave myself out, too.] As a reader herself, the narrator of the novel is interested in exploring the general experience of the modern reader. She writes that contemporary readers are complicated, arbitrary, and incapable of concentrating on a mosaic of words, and that contemporary writers are condescending (137). Both readers and writers in the contemporary cultural sphere are guilty of condescension and laziness. The narrator constantly criticizes the classic figures of the Western canon and berates the canonical male writers for what she considers their dishonest approach to sentimentality: ‘‘Cuanto ma´s arriba quiere llegar un escritor, mayor cuidado pone en ocultar su intimidad, especialmente la relacionada con el sexo. Por el momento, no se conoce otro me´todo literario de alcanzar la divinidad’’ (131). [The higher the writer aspires, the more care he puts into hiding his intimate life, especially his sex life. For now, there is no other literary way to approach divinity.] Yet we are reminded that the narrator is guilty of the same sort of dishonesty, as she reveals very little of her own inner life, and she prefers to identify herself only as ‘‘the reader.’’ Her intimate life is jealously guarded, and she never allows herself to be identified; her identity slides back and forth between reader, daughter, and lover of Joyce and Kafka. The only aspect of her personality that she allows the reader to see is hidden in the discourse of the novel. It is up to the reader to decipher it. Perhaps because she finds herself unable to sublimate the influence of her literary predecessors, the narrator turns her creative efforts into the criticism of the great writers. This criticism in turn becomes her novel. As I mentioned above, the novel represents as much the testimonial of a writer as it does the confessions of an avid reader. But both tasks come together, as she

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confesses near the novel’s conclusion: ‘‘Los lectores satisfechos nunca escriben. Por el contrario, son los perennes insatisfechos de la literatura los primeros en convertirse en escritores’’ (193). [Satisfied readers never write. On the contrary, it is always the perennially dissatisfied readers of literature that turn into writers first.] Bloom has argued compellingly that poets read differently than do average readers and critics. The satisfied reader is never compelled to write. In Todos somos Kafka, the narrator is both consumer and creator, a dissatisfied reader who seeks to create the text that will reconcile her two personae.

La intimidad: Bridging the Gap between Reader and Writer Like Todos somos Kafka, La intimidad explores one protagonist’s subjectivity through a first-person narrative. In this later novel, however, the narrator concentrates on her childhood and early adulthood, tracing mainly her early family life and relationship with her father, an avid reader, who constantly urges his daughter ‘‘to write like Dickens.’’ Having spent the majority of her life reading, the young narrator takes a similarly cautious approach to narration, and, like ‘‘la lectora’’ of the previous novel, she frequently associates books, reading, and writing with death, decay, and other negative images. As the narrator asks in chapter 2, ‘‘¿Que´ es una tumba sino un libro inmenso, quieto y preparado para ser abierto y profanado? Un libro es otra tumba que guarda celosamente el secreto de la vida’’ (1997, 45). [What is a tomb but an immense book, still and waiting to be opened and profaned? A book is another tomb that jealously guards the secret of life.] The protagonist of La intimidad links her entire life cycle with reading: ‘‘De pronto descubrı´ el orden de la vida y que toda mi vida coincidı´a con el recta´ngulo blanco y lapidario de mi infancia de libro’’ (45). [Suddenly I discovered the order of life and that my entire life coincided with the white stone rectangle of my book childhood.] The profound importance of narrative is belied by its constant association with life and death. Her childhood is spent devouring novels: ‘‘Las novelas equivalı´an a la leche materna o dieta alimenticia de toda lectora ane´mica’’ (47). [Novels were like maternal milk, a nourishing diet for all ane-

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mic readers.] Thus, the process of reading is associated with the most fundamental processes of human life and existence; it is as necessary and nurturing as a mother’s milk, but also primordially linked to the final stages of death. While La intimidad can be read as an homage to books and writing in general, it articulates the same kind of antagonistic relationship between literary predecessors and Bloomian ‘‘ephebes’’ that we see in Todos somos Kafka. The novels differ, however, in that La intimidad takes a more conventional approach to narration, and is consequently more reader friendly. The novel is set in the 1960s and 1970s in the Barcelona of Nuria Amat’s childhood, in the neighborhoods of Sarria´ and Pedralbes. The protagonist and her father lovingly collect and catalogue books in their home. Whether or not the narrator can be said to represent Nuria Amat herself—in the novel’s concluding section the narrator watches a girl named Nuria who contemplates the insane asylum where the narrator now lives, having gone insane through her many readings and writings—is left purposefully ambiguous (Amat 1998a, 680). La intimidad is characterized throughout by its constant reflections and reveries on literature: on novels, poems, and authors.3 Throughout La intimidad, the eccentric narrator struggles constantly against the sometimes negative paternalistic influence of her father, who can be interpreted in two ways: as a symbolic representation of Spain’s previous authoritarian regime, or as the personification of an overwhelming (male) literary predecessor or Bloomian ‘‘Great Inhibitor.’’ The influence of this father figure cripples the narrator in her efforts to write what she calls her ‘‘textos ilegibles’’ [illegible texts], and in spite of her constant efforts, she never actually publishes anything, even though her second husband enthusiastically attempts to inspire her to collect them together into a book she might title La oscuridad [Darkness] or, as he suggests in English, The Darkness. That she is unable to bring herself to publish her ‘‘illegible texts’’ is due, in part, to her overwhelming fear of paternal disapproval. In this respect, both the narrator of La intimidad and Todos somos Kafka embody the sentiments expressed by Kafka in his letter to his father: ‘‘My writing was all about you; all I did there, after all, was to bemoan what I could not bemoan upon your breast’’ (1954, 177). In La intimidad, the narrator’s husband, a grandson of the

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Catalan poet Carles Ribes, is the only person to read her many writings. But the narrator rarely appears outside the confines of either her house on Pedralbes, the library, or the cemetery. Like her mother before her, the narrator’s self-imposed isolation and enclosure makes her feel like the ‘‘sen˜ora demente e incendiaria que habitaba en las alturas del castillo del sen˜or Rochester’’ (Amat 1997, 54) [that demented, incendiary lady who lived in the upper reaches of Mr. Rochester’s castle]. Nevertheless, in spite of the fact that the illegible texts that she writes in an effort to ‘‘kill literature’’ are never published, the narrator’s creative efforts are not in vain, as the present novel exists as a testament to her personal struggle. Unlike the ‘‘illegible texts’’ that we never see, the novel is written more or less intelligibly. This seems to represent the narrator’s principal inconsistency, since she places a great deal of importance on these illegible texts, but what we have in our hands turns out to be the true testament to her literary vocation. As she says herself, ‘‘Una novela es un susurro de inmortalidad. Retrato ı´ntimo. Una confidencia a media voz. Pecado revelarla’’ (167). [A novel is a whisper of immortality. An intimate portrait. A whispered confidence. A sin to reveal it.] Nevertheless, in spite of statements of this nature, she has in fact revealed much in this novel entitled Intimacy, and the narrator makes a concerted effort to reveal a very intimate portrait of her own subjectivity. Thus, La intimidad and Todos somos Kafka can be read not only as feminist works, but also as narrative reflections on the efforts and experiences of common readers and writers who struggle for their own voice amid the cacophony of literary predecessors. Capdevila-Argu¨elles has stated that in La intimidad in particular, ‘‘the social is replaced by the symbolic and literary’’ (1999, 63). In both of these novels, we can see how a narrator seeks through literature an acceptable symbolic alternative to a dissatisfying social order. The struggle for a unique narrative voice mirrors the social struggle. In La intimidad, while the narrator’s father has fostered her love of literature, he has simultaneously established a set of literary expectations (such as the Dickens model) against which she must constantly fight. The novel sets forth a symbolic representation of our relationship as readers and writers with what has come before, and illustrates how a new poet will struggle with the idea that absolute originality is impossible, since our literary (and genetic) forebears will neces-

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sarily always be present in our own personal narratives. This ongoing battle against the social and literary status quo is what generates these texts. The narrative represents the site of the struggle for self-knowledge and self-realization. The narrator of La intimidad is obsessed with the idea of literary originality. Echoing sentiments from Todos somos Kafka, she writes that no reader can ever be a truly original thinker: ‘‘Ningu´n lector puede llegar a ser nunca un pensador original. La biblioteca del recuerdo de los libros leı´dos y no leı´dos se lo impide’’ (Amat 1997, 106). [No writer can ever become an original thinker. The library of memories of books read and unread makes it impossible.] Later, on a trip to the library where her older cousin works cataloguing books, the narrator posits that the true writer must recognize the absence of true originality: [L]o primero que aprende un verdadero escritor es a asumir la ausencia de frases originales. Y que toda escritura verdadera tiene un aire de plagio disfrazado. Y que las musas de los escritores son ahora ma´s que nunca las bibliotecas, pese a que algunas de ellas sean regentadas por mı´seros y necios bibliotecarios. (117) [The first thing that a true writer learns is to assume the absence of original phrases. And that all writing has an air of disguised plagiarism. And that writers muses are, now more than ever, libraries, in spite of the fact that some libraries are run by miserable dim librarians.]

It is only by acknowledging that absolute originality is impossible that the writer is able to move forward with the creation of her text. The image of the library thus represents a metaphor for our literary antecedents and the body of literary history and influence that make this absence of originality all the more apparent. The narrator speaks to her cousin, Isabelita, who is, like Amat herself, a librarian. In spite of her youth, she offers a sophisticated theorization of Bloomian influence: Hoy la literatura es un enorme tapiz que se teje por medio de repeticiones, un libro enorme, centrado en un par de viejos motivos, escrito por mu´ltiples autores. Diderot le robo´ ideas y palabras a Cervantes, Sterne a Rabelais, John Barth a las Mil y una noches, Nabokov a Tolstoi y ası´, sucesivamente. Cada produccio´n es una reproduccio´n, cada rostro una ma´scara. (117)

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[Today literature is an enormous tapestry that is woven through repetition, an enormous book centered on a couple of old motifs, written by multiple authors. Diderot stole ideas and words from Cervantes, Sterne from Rabelais, John Barth from the 1001 Nights, Nabokov from Tolstoy, and so on, successively. Each production is a reproduction, each face a mask.]

This self-conscious acknowledgment of our indebtedness to the literary tradition appears in much contemporary Spanish metafiction. The passage above embodies the postmodern conception of the imbeddedness of all literature and how the production of art is linked to intertextual reproduction. Amat states in an interview that she believes that ‘‘literature is an interminable conversation with dead authors. My novels are a consequence of this idea. As I mentioned before, it is time to resuscitate the dead authors’’ (Amat 1998a, 682). Thus, the postmodern author— indeed, any author—can only begin writing by acknowledging her indebtedness to other narratives in creating her own literary work. This is the same dynamic that we can see in Todos somos Kafka, in which the narrator observes that literary influence is one of the most powerful forces that a writer may feel. She writes that after Kafka, there is no place left for other writers: Es como si despue´s de Kafka hubiera que enterrar para siempre todos los libros existentes y posibles y ya no hubiera lugar para ma´s libros ni para ma´s hijos. Su literatura nos convierte en desheredados de la literatura. Me deshereda, para empezar, de toda posibilidad de ser feliz escribiendo libros o de ser desgraciada escribiendo libros o hasta de no ser nada escribiendo libros. (Amat 1993, 40) [It’s as if, after Kafka, we were to have to bury forever all existing books and possible books because there was no place for more books or more offspring. His literature turns us into the disinherited of literature. To begin, he has disinherited me, and has taken away any possibility of being happy writing books or of being disgraced writing books or even of being nothing writing books.]

Thus the narrators of Amat’s novels bespeak the anxiety of a writer as she contemplates the creation of a new text in the face of the great works of literature. Bloom writes that ‘‘A philosophy of composition . . . is a genealogy of imagination necessarily, a study of the only guilt that matters to a poet, the guilt of indebtedness’’ (1979, 117). Amat’s narrators, like the poets that Bloom

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adores, acknowledge throughout their narratives their indebtedness to the literary genealogy of imagination—‘‘Todos e´ramos nietos de nuestros abuelos poderosos. Sombras alargadas de la literatura’’ (Amat 1997, 189). [We were all grandchildren of our powerful grandfathers, those long shadows of literature.] These characters recognize that they cannot escape the guilt of indebtedness, and they consequently use their narratives as methods of addressing their status as the disinherited children of literature. As ‘‘la lectora’’ laments in Todos somos Kafka: ‘‘Somos los desheredados. Los herederos de un valioso patrimonio llamado literatura que es como un bau´l del tesoro cerrado a cal y canto. Imposible de violar. Un bau´l cargado de citas librescas’’ (187). [We are the disinherited. The disinherited from a vast and valuable patrimony called literature, which is like a treasure chest locked tight. Impossible to open. A chest filled with book quotations.]

Intertextual Victimization and the Anxiety of Influence While the protagonists of Amat’s novels tend to be women engaged in a struggle against their male literary antecedents, Amat extends the theme of literary indebtedness to all writers regardless of gender. The theme of literary creation appears throughout her fiction. In Letra herida, a collection of essays focusing on reading and writing, the author discusses Kafka together with Charlotte Bronte¨, both of whom she imagines must have suffered from the crippling indifference of their fathers before their art. Alluding to Goya’s well known capricho, Amat writes that all writers are, ‘‘hijos inseguros de la gran literatura que siempre reproduce sus monstruos’’ (1998b, 39) [insecure sons and daughters of the great literature that always reproduces their monsters]. Yet, in spite of its inherent complexities, literature can have a somewhat redemptive power to entertain us on our inexorable journey toward death. Amat writes, ‘‘La literatura, pienso yo, me distraera´ en el camino hacia la tumba’’ (41). [Literature, I think, will distract me on the road to the tomb.] Amat’s narrators begin their narratives by conceding that true writing is impossible without the influence of literary antecedents. In an essay entitled ‘‘La doble vida del escritor,’’ [The Dou-

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ble Life of the Writer], Amat writes that the library is ‘‘la casa viva de la familia literaria’’ (90) [the living house of the literary family]. In another essay in which she recognizes Virginia Woolf, entitled ‘‘Escribir sin cuarto propio’’ [Writing without a Room of One’s Own’’], she asserts, ‘‘El escritor se alimenta ba´sicamente de sus lecturas. Un escritor es la sı´ntesis de todo lo leı´do y de lo que nunca podra´ leer’’ (233). [The writer basically feeds off of her readings. A writer is the synthesis of all that she has read and of all that she will never be able to read.] There is a fundamental step that every author must take. The writer sustains herself through reading, and is consequently a synthesis of everything she has read, but how those readings become new, original poetry is the fundamental question. It is how one reads that is important (or, as Bloom puts it, how one misreads), and what one does with that misreading that creates literary art. The anxiety of influence is something that poets suffer from. And it is this anxiety which inspires, even obliges, them to misread their forebears. It is, according to Bloom, a way to deal with the melancholy caused by reading the ‘‘Great Ones.’’ This anxiety makes misprision inevitable, but it is this process that allows the new writer to create his or her own art. Only through sublimation of the past forms can an ‘‘ephebe’’ deal with the poetic demons of the past and create something new. This is the tension from which Amat’s fiction springs. Her characters read, they misread, they attempt to sublimate the anxiety of influence. Bloom writes that ‘‘poetic history . . . is held to be indistinguishable from poetic influence, since strong poets make that history by misreading one another, so as to clear imaginative space for themselves’’ (1979, 5). Poetic influence, contrary to what Amat’s narrators sometimes articulate, need not preclude originality; indeed, it can breed greater originality. Bloom makes a sometimes shaky, but finally convincing, argument in Freudian terms: ‘‘The anxiety of influence is so terrible because it is both a kind of separation anxiety and the beginning of a compulsion neurosis, or fear of a death that is a personified superego. Poems, we can speculate analogically, may be viewed (humorously) as motor discharges in response to the excitation increase of influence anxiety’’ (58). He suggests that, contrary to the tradition of poetry and of romanticism in particular, ‘‘poems are not given by pleasure, but by the unpleasure of a dangerous situ-

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ation, the situation of anxiety of which the grief of influence forms so large a part’’ (58, italics in original). The strong poet, in his estimation, ‘‘is both hero of poetic history and victim of it. This victimization has increased as history proceeds because the anxiety of influence is strongest where poetry is most lyrical, most subjective, and stemming from the personality’’ (62). This idea of intertextual victimization is appropriate, I think, to this discussion of Amat’s fiction, in which we read narrators who struggle against their great precursors with the great courage that Bloom describes. Indeed, like Bloom’s favorite poems, Amat’s novels are the struggle: ‘‘A poem is not an overcoming of anxiety, but is that anxiety’’ (Bloom 1979, 94). Todos somos Kafka and La intimidad are characterized by their struggle to sublimate the instinctual hostility that is the anxiety of influence. These novels’ narrators strive to move beyond the parent text, to misread and incorporate it into a new discourse, to kill the father, to commit an act of narrative aggression against it and make it another. Whether or not they are successful in this process is left to the reader to decide, for these novels, as representations of consciousness, give us a knowledge of physical, emotional, and psychological conditions beyond whatever meanings their language conveys. In terms of discourse, Todos somos Kafka, perhaps more than La intimidad, is a schizophrenic text, reflecting ‘‘a type of psychosis characterized by loss of contact with the environment and by disintegration of the personality’’ (Webster’s New International Dictionary, 2nd ed., s.v. ‘‘Schizophrenia’’). While this is an accurate formal description of the novel Todos somos Kafka, the protagonist of La intimidad in fact quite literally goes insane. Todos somos Kafka is a schizophrenic narrative whose discourse is fragmented and nonreferential, and the narrator’s wavering between temporal planes, and time frames and inability to accurately arrive at a concrete description of her relationship with the authors who people her text seem to imply this mental imbalance. Her personality, such as it is, has eroded to the point that she must cling to what she has read in order to make sense of her identity and surroundings. Reading has caused such trauma that the library itself comes to symbolize mental illness: ‘‘Me imagino en una biblioteca de la cual soy la u´nica lectora y en la que los libros aparecen y desaparecen. Es otra

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forma de contemplar el sanatorio’’ (1993, 173). [I imagine myself in a library in which I am the only reader and in which the books appear and disappear. It is another way of contemplating the sanatorium.] Lee Edwards writes that because it implies a conflicted self, schizophrenia becomes in deconstructionist theory a favored literary metaphor: ‘‘[I]f schizophrenia locates the self at the moment of its own bewildering disintegration, it permits what many contemporary critics, self-styled postmodernists or deconstructionists, most desire: the study of the world without a self, a world established solely as a text that plays itself out infinitely, immeasurably in its encounter with an infinity of other texts’’ (1989, 29). Edwards suggests that schizophrenia is a more perfect ‘‘postmodern’’ disease because its phenomenology reflects some of the characteristics of postmodern theoretical developments, such the problemization of the self. In Nuria Amat’s fiction, the self is not completely annihilated, but it is in a state of conflict and possible disintegration. The meaning of Todos somos Kafka and La intimidad lies in the encounter between the writing self and the infinite number of other texts that preexist and coexist alongside it. Self-consciousness is the awareness of how narratives work on the self. Todos somos Kafka and La intimidad are texts that explore the darkest recesses of a literary imagination, and their narrators use their writing to peer into their own subjectivities, proclaiming their own desire ‘‘to see a human face mirrored in its shattered subjectivity’’ (Edwards 1989, 29). The function of metafiction in these novels is both to facilitate the narrators’ examinations of their subjectivities and to represent their struggle to sublimate their anxiety of literary influence.

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4 Indeterminacy for Indeterminacy’s Sake: Textual Narcissism and the Fiction of Javier Marı´as AN ARTICLE IN EL PAI´S INDICATES THAT IN THE LAST FEW YEARS SPANish authors such as Javier Marı´as and Javier Cercas have taken an altogether new approach to writing novels, eschewing ‘‘pure fiction’’ in favor of a ‘‘hybrid’’ form that confuses genres and integrates reality into the territory of the imagination (Rojo 2001). At a conference given at the Universidad Internacional Mene´ndez Pelayo, Francisco Rico responded that this mingling of reality and fiction in the contemporary Spanish novel is actually nothing new, and that when it comes to this genre everything is invention and imitation. In Rico’s estimation, the proliferation of works such as Marı´as’s Negra espalda del tiempo [Dark Back of Time] (1998) and Cercas’s Soldados de Salamina [Soldiers of Salamis] (2001) represents not a new form but a logical return to literary tradition. Rico says that ‘‘from the social novel we passed over to unbridled fantasy. Now there has been a return to the novel closer to journalism. This is nothing new, and changes do not appear from one year to the next but rather over periods of fifteen years. Everything is ebb and flow, action and reaction’’ (Me´ndez 2002b). Whether or not the tides of literary change can be charted in the fifteen-year intervals as Rico suggests is debatable, but there is little doubt that the last fifteen years have seen a flourishing of Spanish novels that engage critically the problematic distinction between fiction and reality. While I will begin this chapter by discussing how Marı´as’s Negra espalda del tiempo and Cercas’s Soldados de Salamina are similar—particularly in terms of this problemization of traditional boundaries between reality and fiction—I hasten to point out that this chapter and the next will in fact demonstrate 125

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how these authors approach reality and fiction in very different ways.1 Javier Marı´as and Javier Cercas are like each other in that some of their recent novels spring from an ostensibly real event, and both novelists exploit a deliberate confusion of real-life author and fictional narrator. To varying degrees, both Cercas and Marı´as mix reality and fiction, representation and interpretation. The authors are alike in several other respects: both have written extensively for the Spanish press, and both have taught at universities in Spain and abroad. Cercas still teaches at the University of Girona, Marı´as taught at the Complutense in Madrid, and both authors have taught in the United States: Cercas spent two years at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign before he began teaching at the Universitat de Girona in 1989, and Marı´as, aside from his famous tenure at Oxford in 1984 and 1985, taught at Wellesley College in spring of 1984. The protagonists of many of their novels are writers, intellectuals and university professors. Their narrative strategies, however, differ in a fundamental way. Marı´as self-consciously constructs his narrative in order to emphasize the impossibility of representing reality, and his narrator is decidedly noncommittal in revealing anything about himself, while Cercas uses his self-conscious narrative strategy to draw attention to the complexities of the historiographical enterprise. Through writing, Cercas’s narrator in fact reveals a great deal about himself. Perhaps most importantly, Soldados de Salamina, quite unlike Negra espalda del tiempo, concludes with a reassuring assertion of the redemptive power of narration. Perhaps because of the absence of a traditional plot and the novel’s deliberate confusion of reality and fiction, Francisco Orejas remarks in his encyclopedic La metaficcio´n en la novela espan˜ola contempora´nea that Marı´as’s book is not a novel but rather a ‘‘metanovel’’ (2003, 425–26).2 The critical consensus, however, is that Negra espalda del tiempo is in fact a novel (Mason 2005; Herzberger 2001; Miller 2004). Indeed, this book is a novel about a novel, a fictional account about a real work of fiction. In the absence of a plot, what is noteworthy about the work is its deliberate problemization of the relationship between reality and fiction and its extended explorations on the nature of authorship and the construction and interpretation of authorial identity. Marı´as’s paradoxical aim is to address the reality of the circumstances surrounding his own writing and the

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subsequent readings of his previously published novel, Todas las almas [All Souls] (1989), through a fictional form. Javier Cercas’s novel, in contrast, is about a real historical event. But, as I will discuss in chapter 5, Soldados de Salamina is not a traditional historical novel, for the narrator does not attempt to hide his personal investment in the construction of his tale, and although the impetus for his writing is a concrete historical happening, the actual incident takes a secondary role to the process of representing it. The major distinction between Javier Marı´as and Javier Cercas, then, is found in their differing attitudes toward their readers, which is evident in the extremity of their use of narrative self-consciousness: Marı´as’s narrator calls continued attention to his vague relationship with the ‘‘real’’ Javier Marı´as, author of the novel, in order to create and accentuate the work’s overall hermeneutic uncertainty, while Cercas’s narrator does not call undue attention to the coincidence of fiction and reality (notwithstanding the fact that the narrator is named Javier Cercas), preferring instead to leave the question of the author/narrator’s identity entirely up to the reader. In a word, the two authors are alike in that they highlight the very real problems of constructing their story or ‘‘history,’’ but Marı´as’s narrator flaunts his narratorial omnipotence and never relinquishes the narcissistic pleasure that he takes in the contemplation of his own text and his own appearance therein. Cercas’s narrative problematizes the uncertain boundaries between fiction and reality, but in the end the reader is left with a compelling account about the importance of storytelling in understanding history and the self. In this way, ultimately Marı´as’s author/narrator is far too concerned with his own role as begetter of the narrative to pay much attention to the telling of a compelling tale. Cercas writes about writing, and the fact that he echoes some of the preoccupations of readers and writers in general is reflected in the great economic and critical success of his novel. Marı´as writes about his own writing, and his author/narrator is most concerned with the reception and the reading of his own texts. The fictional Javier Marı´as that appears in Negra espalda del tiempo reads and rewrites his own narrative to the point that any referentiality to things exterior to his own texts vanishes into thin air. This selfbegetting intertextuality is the novel’s principal discursive driv-

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ing force, but it also represents the work’s main weakness, since the narrator in fact reveals very little of himself to the reader.3

Narrative and Human Consciousness Contemporary Spanish novelists have increasingly reevaluated hard-and-fast distinctions between fiction and truth, make-believe and reality, and have thus reflected postmodern conceptualizations of the provisional nature of representation. These views reflect a world that is no longer composed of ‘‘eternal verities but a series of constructions, artifices, impermanent structures’’ (Waugh 1984, 7). But while the abolition of the difference between reality and make-believe in narrative fiction has led some critics to conclude that contemporary novelists are just playing games with brainteasers and paradoxical riddles, these novels in fact reflect greater issues that concern the complex relationship between language and understanding. The human attempt to use language to encapsulate and understand social, human, or exterior reality lies at the heart of much theoretical work by philosophers, cognitive scientists, literary critics, and logicians such as Jerome Bruner, Hilary Putnam, John Searle, Daniel Dennett, and a host of others. David Lodge’s book Consciousness and the Novel (2002) contains an accessible discussion of issues of human consciousness and their relation to language and narrative that draws upon much of this work. The author pays special attention to the cognitive scientist Daniel Dennett, whose Consciousness Explained (1991) develops the idea of an interrelated relationship between literary creation and human consciousness. Dennett argues that the individual self is in fact constructed very much like a novel, and that ‘‘our fundamental tactic of self-protection, self-control and selfdefinition is not spinning webs [like spiders] or building dams [like a beaver] but telling stories’’ (qtd. in Lodge 2002, 112). These stories we tell are the stories about who we are. A great deal of the difficulty that human beings encounter in attempting to comprehend reality lies in the fact that we are a part of the very system that we seek to understand. Indeed, it is impossible for us to remove ourselves from that system. Go¨del’s incompleteness theorem, which revealed that ‘‘provability is a weaker notion than truth’’ (Hofstadter 1989, 19), offers an irre-

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futable illustration of the limitations and drawbacks of pure logic and reason. Language, like Go¨del’s mathematical equation, can express things that are inherently contradictory and thereby lie outside the realm of reason. Rene´ Magritte’s famous painting The Treason of Images, in which a realistic representation of a pipe appears above a caption (within the painting) that reads, ‘‘Ceci n’est pas une pipe’’ [This is not a pipe] is a graphic example of how representation can be used to expose its own inadequacies. Magritte’s painting is a visual representation of the same sort of dynamic that we see in contemporary metafiction in novels that declare themselves to be true even while they prove themselves to be false. Language and writing represent just one way to negotiate the gap between what is real and how it is represented. In Consciousness and the Novel, Lodge posits that our self-conscious fascination with literary creation lies in the fact that it is impossible to ‘‘catch oneself in the act of creation’’ (2002, 109), because each writing and rewriting of a text in fact creates a new, distinct text: ‘‘[E]very revision is not a reformulation of the same meaning but a slightly (or very) different meaning’’ (109). In the same way, each reading yields a slightly different interpretation. At the same time that philosophers, psychologists, and cognitive scientists continue to explore language as one of the keys to understanding the human mind, they have been forced to acknowledge that it is precisely because of the narrative underpinnings of human consciousness that our understanding of ourselves continues to be provisional at best. The American writer Patricia Hampl’s essay ‘‘The Lax Habits of the Free Imagination’’ synthesizes the paradox of capturing effectively the process of narrative creation through narration itself. Hampl writes that ‘‘every story has a story. This secret story, which has little chance of getting told, is the history of its creation. Maybe the ‘story of the story’ can never be told, for a finished work consumes its own history, renders it obsolete, a husk’’ (qtd. in Lodge 2002, 109). This is the same dynamic that interests Patrick Crowley in his discussion of volume 3 of Paul Ricoeur’s Time and Narrative (1988), in which Ricoeur develops his notion of narrative identity, which is largely ‘‘a response to the question of how an identity can bespeak both change and permanence’’ (Crowley 2003, 1). According to Ricoeur, the usefulness of narrative—in this case, autobiographical writing—is that it can serve

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to mediate ‘‘the aporia of change and permanence through a process of ‘emplotment’ that organizes the contingencies of existence into a coherent whole’’ (Crowley 2003, 2). One of the fundamental paradoxes of narrative representations of the self is that those representations are static, while the self is constantly changing and coming into being. David Lodge writes, ‘‘[I]t is said that consciousness is the last great challenge to scientific inquiry, but if you browse through the more accessible literature in this field it is interesting to note how often it touches on questions and phenomena that concern literary critics’’ (2002, 110). The complexities of understanding literary creation—a process that is self-consciously put forth in all the novels discussed in True Lies—has been increasingly linked to the larger problem of understanding human subjectivity. The problems implicit in literary interpretation are the same sorts of problems that thinkers in a wide range of fields— ‘‘philosophers, linguists, cognitive scientists, sociobiologists, neurologists, zoologists, and many others’’—continue to encounter in trying to understand human consciousness (Lodge 2002, 110). Through their varying self-conscious narrative strategies, Negra espalda del tiempo and Soldados de Salamina point to the enduring limitations of narrative. Paradoxically, in so doing both novels reinforce the primacy of narrative in representing the self—authorial or otherwise.

Negra espalda del tiempo Stephen Miller writes that ‘‘one frequently noted characteristic of Javier Marı´as’s work is his tendency to introduce an element or theme in an earlier work that is minor in that work, but to which he subsequently returns with increasing insistence’’ (2004, 98). If Negra espalda del tiempo is about anything, it is about Todas las almas, which most Spanish readers will recall is a novel about a Spanish professor who spends two years as a visiting lecturer at Oxford. Since its publication in 1989, Todas las almas elicited much speculation as to how closely the novel corresponded to Marı´as’s own experiences at Oxford as a visiting scholar (Blanca 1994). Negra espalda ostensibly springs from the author/narrator’s desire to set the record straight about his ear-

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lier novel, yet many fictional or real characters from Todas las almas appear again in the second work, among them, perhaps most extensively, the figure of John Gawsworth, a little-known author who is the object of much of the narrator’s speculation.4 David Herzberger argues compellingly that the intertextual referentiality that is created between Todas las almas and Negra espalda del tiempo functions in a paradoxical fashion that in fact does not seek to disentangle ‘‘the real from the make-believe or [allow] the narrator to speak as the author’’ (2001, 88), but instead ‘‘serves only to deepen the hermeneutic confusion of both works’’ (88). This resulting interpretive uncertainty is, according to Herzberger, precisely the point of the novel, for rather than defining or facilitating the understanding of either work, Marı´as’s metafictional game is crafted so as to convolute interpretation ‘‘or perhaps more concretely, to define interpretation as convolution’’ (88). In this section, I will take as a starting point Herzberger’s persuasive theoretical framework for the novel that is based upon the logic of hermeneutics, and I will examine how the very language that comprises Negra espalda del tiempo reflects the work’s thematic insistence on ‘‘ambiguity and contradiction as narrative determinants’’ (89). The first two sentences of Negra espalda effectively represent the narrator’s implicit aim to abolish completely the distinction between reality and fiction in his narrative while doing away with any faithful representation of reality. The novel’s opening sentences are long, with many subordinate clauses that function to frustrate any attempt at concrete interpretation. These two sentences reflect the uncertain, always subjective approach that the narrator takes regarding the task at hand. The narrator is loathe to compromise himself discursively, and he constructs a narrative that is slippery, diffuse, and decidedly noncommittal: Creo no haber confundido todavı´a nunca la ficcio´n con la realidad, aunque sı´ las he mezclado en ma´s de una ocasio´n como todo el mundo, no so´lo los novelistas, no so´lo los escritores sino cuantos han relatado algo desde que empezo´ nuestro conocido tiempo, y en ese tiempo conocido nadie ha hecho otra cosa que contar y contar, o preparar y meditar su cuento, o maquinarlo. (Marı´as 2001b, 9) [I believe I’ve still never mistaken fiction for reality, though I have mixed them together more than once, as everyone does, not only novelists or writers but everyone who has recounted anything since

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the time we know began, and no one in that known time has done anything but tell and tell, or prepare and ponder a tale, or plot one.] (Marı´as 2001a, 7)

Although Herzberger asserts that these opening words represent a ‘‘confident assertion that fiction and reality occupy two separate ontological fields’’ (2001, 92–93), in this chapter I read the novel’s opening line in quite the opposite way as an example of how, in spite of what he says in the novel’s first line, the narrator is interested most in establishing a sense of indeterminacy. Indeed, if the narrator were truly interested in making a confident assertion that fiction and reality occupy two separate ontological fields, certainly he might have been less equivocal in his choice of words. He could have begun, for example, by saying, ‘‘I have never confused fiction with reality.’’ The accumulation of adverbs that surround the main verb ‘‘confundir’’ [to confuse]—no [no], todavı´a [still], and nunca [never]—serve to do exactly that: to confound and perhaps confuse the reader. Thus, while Herzberger suggests that the narrator’s subsequent ‘‘reading’’ of Todas las almas ‘‘compels him to retreat from such certainty’’ (2001, 93), I suggest that the novel in fact begins and ends with uncertainty. At no point does the narrator attempt to represent anything other than a problem. If the first sentence of the novel has not already established the narrator’s evasive approach to narration, the second sentence makes his modus operandi clear. The sentence is more than twice as long as the first, and continues well onto the novel’s second page. I include it here in its entirety, because it illustrates the style that Marı´as uses throughout: Ası´, cualquiera cuenta una ane´cdota de lo que le ha sucedido y por el mero hecho de contarlo ya lo esta´ deformando y tergiversando, la lengua no puede reproducir los hechos ni por lo tanto deberı´a intentarlo, y de ahı´ que en algunos juicios, supongo—los de las pelı´culas, que son los que mejor conozco—, se pida a los implicados una reconstruccio´n material o fı´sica de lo ocurrido, se les pide que repitan los gestos, los movimientos, los pasos envenenados que dieron o co´mo apun˜alaron para convertirse en reos, y que simulen empun˜ar otra vez el arma y asestar el golpe a quien dejo´ de estar y ya no esta´ por su causa, o al aire, porque no basta con que lo digan y cuenten con la mayor precisio´n y desapasionamiento, hay que verlo y se les solicita una imitacio´n, una representacio´n o puesta en escena, aunque ahora

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sin el pun˜al en la mano o sin cuerpo en el que clavarlo—saco de harina, saco de carne—, ahora en frı´o y sin sumar otro crimen ni an˜adir nueva vı´ctima, ahora so´lo como fingimiento y recuerdo, porque lo que nunca pueden reproducir es el tiempo pasado o perdido ni resucitar al muerto que ya paso´ y se perdio´ en ese tiempo. (Marı´as 2001b, 10) [Anyone can relate an anecdote about something that happened, and the simple fact of saying it already distorts and twists it, language can’t reproduce events and shouldn’t attempt to, and that, I imagine, is why during some trials—the trials in movies, anyway, the ones I know best—the implicated parties are asked to perform a material or physical reconstruction of what happened, repeating the gestures, the movements, the envenomed steps they took, the way they thrust the knife to become the accused; they’re asked to simulate seizing the weapon once again and delivering the blow to someone who, because of it, ceased to be and is no more, or rather to empty air, because it isn’t enough for them to say it, to tell the story impassively and as precisely as possible, it must be seen, and an imitation, a representation or staging of it is required, though now without the knife in hand and without the body—sack of flour, sack of flesh—to drive it into, this time in cool detachment and without racking up another crime or adding another victim to the list, but only as pretense and memory, because what they can never reproduce is the time gone by or lost, nor can they revive the dead who are lost within that time and gone.] (Marı´as 2001a, 7–8)

This is a fine translation, but the reader notices that Allen is forced to include a semicolon to break up this this Jamesian ‘‘loose, baggy monster.’’ The passage functions metonymically as a representation of the novel that will spring from these two opening sentences. In this one sentence, the narrator calls deliberate attention to the inexactness of language and the subjectiveness and unreliability of all narrators, who, in the very moment of speaking have already distorted the facts. The language that he uses further illustrates his point. Here, Marı´as brings to mind Hampl’s description of the story about the writing of a story, which can never capture the true essence of that moment of creation. Language cannot reproduce the facts (nor should it attempt to do so, suggests the narrator), and Marı´as uses this notion as the generative concept from which the entire novel will flow. The material reconstruction of events in trials that the narrator purports to have seen so often in movies is re-

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peated throughout Negra espalda del tiempo in the form of maps, photographs, quotations, facsimile reproductions of newspaper articles, and illustrations. In all, there are thirty-three graphic elements incorporated into the novel that represent, according to Stephen Miller, a way by which the narrator is able to draw the reader into the same kind of conversation that he himself has with those images as the novel progresses (Miller 2004, 99). Miller is concerned with how words and images collaborate in the work of Marı´as and Manuel Rivas, and how the inclusion of graphical elements ‘‘open[s] to writers and readers important possibilities and realities not available to texts that are only lexical’’ (108). In this way, these novelists acknowledge the importance of ‘‘the visual and the graphic’’ (108) to our time. The circuitous, oblique language of Negra espalda del tiempo mirrors its thematic preoccupation with the unreliable nature of language and representation. The narrator self-consciously blurs fact and fiction throughout the first chapter through his choice of narrative style: A diferencia de lo que sucede en las verdaderas novelas de ficcio´n, los elementos de este relato que empiezo ahora son del todo azarosos y caprichosos, meramente episo´dicos y acumulativos—impertinentes todos segu´n la parvularia fo´rmula crı´tica, o ninguno necesitarı´a al otro—, porque en el fondo no los guı´a ningu´n autor aunque sea yo quien los cuente, no responden a ningu´n plan ni se rigen por ninguna bru´jula, la mayorı´a vienen de fuera y les falta intencionalidad; ası´, no tienen por que´ formar un sentido ni constituyen un argumento o trama ni obedecen a una oculta armonı´a ni debe extraerse de ellos no ya una leccio´n—tampoco de las verdaderas novelas se deberı´a querer tal cosa, y sobre todo no deberı´an quererlo ellas—, sino ni siquiera una historia con su principio y su espera y su silencio final. No creo que esto sea una historia, aunque puede que me equivoque, al no conocer su fin. (Marı´as 2002b, 12) [Unlike those of truly fictional novels, the elements of the story I am now embarking upon are entirely capricious, determined by chance, merely episodic and cumulative—all of them irrelevant by the elementary rule of criticism, none of them requiring any of the others— because in the end no author is guiding them, though I am relating them; they correspond to no blueprint, they are steered by no compass, most of them are external in origin and devoid of intention and therefore have no reason to make any kind of sense or to constitute an argument or plot or answer to some hidden harmony, and no les-

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son should be extracted from them (nor should any such thing be sought from real novels; above all, the novels themselves should not want it)—not even a story with its beginning and suspense and final silence. I don’t believe this is a story, though, not knowing how it ends, I may be mistaken.] (Marı´as 2001a, 9–10)

The novel’s meandering discursive form reflects exactly what the narrator is saying: that this novel is not going anywhere in any traditional sense, nor does it have a direction; there is no plot; this is a mere accumulation of episodes. Further, by suggesting that he does not know where his tale will lead him, this narrator creates the illusion of a novel that begets itself as it is narrated, which further draws the reader into the creation of the fiction and the contemplation of where that fiction may lead. With the words quoted above, the narrator also seems to attempt to preclude the inevitable critical analysis of his text by saying that his novel is devoid of intentionality. In making this statement at the beginning of his novel, he purports to head off the future criticism of his work, as it were, before it may be formulated. To this end Herzberger writes in his essay ‘‘Javier Marı´as’s Tu rostro man˜ana: The Search for a Usable Future’’ that Negra espalda del tiempo is ‘‘written expressly to correct the perceived misreading of the author’s earlier novel . . . and serves in part as an attempt by Marı´as to gain ownership over the use of the text by other readers’’ (2005, 207). In his previous essay, Herzberger asserts that ‘‘all of the myriad theoretical aspects of Negra, all of the digressions, images, and intercalated texts, are gathered into a discursive formation which gradually displaces the representational elements of the work and presses them into a labyrinth of tenuous and movable connections unpropped against life’’ (2001, 91). This is an accurate description of the novel’s main thrust, as Marı´as’s work is not about anything so much as it is about itself and the language that constitutes it. While these labyrinthine discourses are ‘‘unpropped against life,’’ they create their own textually constituted reality, a reality that is based on language. Perhaps more than any other contemporary Spanish voice, the author/narrator of Negra espalda takes the most extreme stance on the nonreferentiality of language and narrative. Through his particular use of language, the author/narrator of Negra espalda del tiempo complicates the reader’s attempts to

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make sense of the text. The indeterminacy of his narrative is further reflected in the novel’s theme, which deals with the problematic distinction between reality and fiction, beginning with the confusion of the real-life author and his fictional narrator. Returning to the beginning of the first chapter, the narrator points out that his novel Todas las almas also lent itself to the absolute identification of its narrator with its author: [E]sa novela titulada Todas las almas se presto´ tambie´n a la casi absoluta identificacio´n entre su narrador sin nombre y su autor con nombre, Javier Marı´as, el mismo de este relato, en el que narrador y autor sı´ coincidimos y por tanto ya no se´ si somos uno o si somos dos, al menos mientras escribo. (Marı´as 2001b, 16) [T]his novel, entitled Todas las almas or, in English, All souls, lent itself to the almost absolute identification of its nameless narrator with its named author, Javier Marı´as, also author of the present narrative in which narrator and author do coincide and I no longer know if there is one of us or two, at least while I’m writing.] (Marı´as 2001a, 13)

The alert reader will detect here a buried intertextual reference to Borges, whose brief essay/tale ‘‘Borges y yo’’ [Borges and I] deals enigmatically with the paradoxical delineation between his various personae: the real-life Borges who writes, the Borges who appears in the text, and Borges the man who lives and breathes. By including this implicit intertextual reference to Borges, Marı´as draws further attention to the ambiguous relationship between ‘‘real’’ authorial personae and the narrative representations of those personae, and inscribes his novel within the tradition of contemporary self-conscious writing that began with Borges. Although the author/narrator affirms time and again that what he wrote in Todas las almas was only based upon some events, places, and people from his time at Oxford, he cannot resist the temptation to draw the reader further into the uncertain territory of fictionalized reality. He insists that the previous novel was fiction, but the reader must recall that this very insistence appears within another work of fiction. Throughout the novel, the narrator’s discourse teeters on the edge of an ironic divide between possible interpretations and inevitable confusion:

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[E]n realidad lo que yo asegure o declare no tiene por que´ ser creı´do, aunque haya una confiada e injustificable tendencia a creer lo que los autores afirman respecto a sus libros. (Y al advertirlo me doy cuenta de que estoy poniendo involuntariamente en tela de juicio la veracidad de cuanto aquı´ estoy diciendo y seguire´ contando, pero debo correr ese riesgo y apelar a esa credulidad pese a todo: se me atiende o no se me atiende, se me escucha o no se me escucha y no hay por que´ hacerlo; no hay vuelta de hoja, eso es todo.) (Marı´as 2001b, 28) [Though in fact there’s no reason to believe anything I state or declare, even if there does exist a credulous and unjustifiable tendency to believe the statements authors make in regard to their books. (I realize, even as I point this out, that I’m involuntarily putting into question the veracity of whatever I say here, and will go on saying, but I’ll have to run that risk and appeal to that credulity in spite of everything: attention will be paid or will not be, I’ll be heard out or I won’t, and there is no reason to do so: there are no two ways about it, that’s all.)] (Marı´as 2001a, 24)

The narrator’s declared intention, paradoxical as it may be, is to establish the veracity of the present novel while writing about how unreal his last novel was. The function of this metafictional play is to confound the reader and establish in his narrative a profound hermeneutic uncertainty that, as Herzberger has indicated, serves to define interpretation as convolution (2001, 88). At the same time, according to Marı´as’s worldview representation also means convolution. What the narrator attempts to describe is less important than the language he uses to describe it. When he speaks of the fictional character Toby Rylands, for example, the narrator indicates that in Todas las almas Rylands was based upon a real person, but for the purposes of Negra espalda del tiempo, he says that he will continue using his supposedly fictional name to refer to a man who is not the real man (nor was he ever that man) but who may become that man (Marı´as 2001b, 38). The narrator delights in this play between reality, fiction and fictionalized reality, and as he continues his narrative, even the reality that he describes begins to mirror fiction. And although the narrator would wash his hands of responsibility, he is, as always, unreliable. In the following citation, the narrator makes a halfhearted attempt to explain the interpretive confusion that came out of his previous novel:

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Quiero pensar que la culpa es poco mı´a, yo no soy responsable de que algunas personas reales empezaran a comportarse en la vida como si fueran personajes de Todas las almas tras su publicacio´n, ni de que algunos eminentes lectores con supuesto conocimiento de causa dieran por bueno en la realidad lo que se habı´a contado tan so´lo en una novela llena de bromas y exageracio´n. (Marı´as 2001b, 77) [I want to believe that I’m not much at fault in this; I am not responsible for the fact that certain real people began to behave in real life as if they were characters in All Souls, after it came out, or that a few eminent readers, who can be assumed to have been in full knowledge of the facts, took as valid in reality what was only recounted in a novel full of levity and exaggeration.] (63)

Yet it must be acknowledged that the narrator facilitates the very confusion he says he dislikes, and that he quite relishes the fact that his own fiction has infringed so markedly on the realm of reality. He complains that more than one person has imagined him or herself portrayed in the previous novel (Marı´as 2001b, 100), but the attentive reader notes that in spite of the narrator’s pointed criticism of those ‘‘real-life’’ characters who have found themselves in his novel, it is in writing his subsequent novel, Negra espalda del tiempo, that he has definitively inserted himself into his own narrative. Perhaps this shadowy narrator suffers from the same sort of megalomania that he condemns in his real/fictional readers. Perhaps his own posturing betrays a narcissistic desire to become also a literary protagonist, and to behold himself within his own text. The author/narrator refers time and again to the desire of so many readers in Oxford and elsewhere to find themselves in what they believed was his roman a` clef. He describes an extreme case in which a woman claims that a short story of his is in fact about her (101), and commenting briefly on that story, he points out that this was the first time he had made an author and a narrator coincide within ‘‘an apparently fictional piece’’ (102), and he confesses that in that isolated instance, ‘‘the narrator was me’’ (102). Negra espalda del tiempo imbricates reality and fiction, and the work is most compelling when the author/narrator examines the symbiosis of these two realms. Most interesting, perhaps, are the narrator’s reflections on the encroachment of fiction on reality. For example, Marı´as describes the Alabas-

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ters—appearing in Negra espalda del tiempo as the Stones—who wish to act in the movie based upon the novel Todas las almas. These ‘‘real’’ people want to act as the fictional characters based upon themselves in a film based upon the novel. The ontological uncertainty of the text comes to the fore as the narrator ponders, Y si tal encarnacio´n se producı´a, entonces los Alabaster ficticios se convertirı´an a su vez en modelo para los Stone reales, que los estudiarı´an e imitarı´an, aunque so´lo para los Stone haciendo de los Alabaster ante una ca´mara. (Marı´s 2001b, 134–35) [And if such an incarnation were to occur, then the fictional Alabasters would become, in turn, a model for the real Stones, who would study and imitate them, though only while they played the Alabasters before a camera.] (109)

And later, when the Stones defend themselves based upon how they appeared in the novel (what they saw as reality), the narrator marvels at how these real people are able to argue so uncritically with a fictitious narrator and dispute his observations about a pair of equally fictitious booksellers (Marı´as 2001b, 141). Thus, two characters of a work of fiction (Negra espalda)—who the narrator wants us to believe are real—in turn debate the authenticity of his previous fictional representation of them as real persons. This interaction between reality and fiction is not only related to the subsequent readers of Todas las almas. The author/narrator confesses that his reality, too, has been affected by his fiction. He writes, ‘‘[H]an transcurrido ocho an˜os desde que publique´ esa novela y todo continu´a invadiendo mis dı´as o desliza´ndose en ellos al igual que en mis noches . . .’’ (Marı´as 2001b, 259). [Eight years have passed since I published the novel and all of it continues to invade my days, stealing into them, and my nights, too] (208). Through this play between fiction, reality and fictionalized reality, the author/narrator constructs a delicate house of cards in which reality is stacked upon fiction and fiction is stacked upon fictionalized reality.5

Borges and Marı´as Negra espalda del tiempo concludes without a resolution of the questions posed in the opening pages. Marı´as uses metafic-

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tion to draw the reader into an ontological game of cat and mouse, in which fiction and reality are irrevocably intertwined. It is not surprising, then, that the novel ends with yet another buried intertextual reference to Jorge Luis Borges. In the novel’s penultimate paragraph, the author/narrator finally and arbitrarily decides to conclude his narrative, and states: Ahora que voy a parar y a no contar ma´s durante algu´n tiempo, me acuerdo de lo que dije hace mucho, al hablar del narrador y el autor que tienen aquı´ el mismo nombre: ya no se´ si somos uno o si somos dos, al menos mientras escribo. Ahora se´ que de esos dos posibles tendra´ uno que ser ficticio. (Marı´as 2001b, 418) [I’m going to stop now and say no more for a while; I remember what I said long ago, in speaking of the narrator and the author who have the same name here: I said I no longer know if there is one of us or two, at least while I am writing. Now I know that of those two possible figures, one would have to be fictitious.] (336)

If the reader takes into account Borges’s own formulation of the theme in ‘‘Borges y yo’’—clearly present in the above quotation—the absurdity of the narrator’s final statement becomes clear, for it is precisely in the moment of writing (and this is to say nothing of the fact that he writes himself into a work of fiction) that both the author and the narrator indeed become fictional. Borges cleverly points to this unavoidable pitfall when he notes that he is perpetually destined to lose his real identity to the textually manifest version of himself (the other Borges of the title). Borges says that he lives so that the other Borges may write his literature. Paradoxically, the Borges who laments his own mortality in ‘‘Borges y yo’’ becomes the other Borges— losing his ‘‘real’’ persona—at the moment he puts pen to paper: ‘‘[Y]o estoy destinado a perderme, definitivamente, y so´lo algu´n instante de mı´ podra´ sobrevivir en el otro. Poco a poco voy cedie´ndole todo, aunque me consta su perversa costumbre de falsear y magnificar’’ (1961,194). [I am destined to perish, definitively, and only some instant of me may live on in him. Little by little, I yield him ground, the whole terrain, though I am quite aware of his perverse habit of magnifying and falsifying] (1967, 200). Thus, the real author writes that he is condemned, in that instant of writing, to become again merely a textual representa-

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tion of Borges. That is, the inner, authentic self that is Borges becomes a literary, false self: Yo he de quedar en Borges, no en mı´ (si es que alguien soy), pero me reconozco menos en sus libros que en muchos otros o que en el laborioso rasgueo de una guitarra. Hace an˜os yo trate´ de librarme de e´l y pase´ de las mitologı´as del arrabal a los juegos con el tiempo y con lo infinito, pero esos juegos son de Borges ahora y tendre´ que idear otras cosas. Ası´ mi vida es una fuga y todo lo pierdo y todo es del olvido, o del otro. (Borges 1961, 194) [I shall subsist in Borges, not in myself (assuming I am someone), and yet I recognize myself less in his books than in many another, or than in the intricate flourishes played on a guitar. Years ago I tried to free myself from him, and I went from the mythologies of the city suburbs to games with time and infinity, but now those games belong to Borges, and I will have to think up something else. Thus is my life a flight, and I lose everything, and everything belongs to oblivion, or to him.] (1967, 200–201)

Borges’s reflections also have ontological implications in which his being in the world is translated into being in the text. Experience is turned into language. As a consequence of this paradoxical constant process of living through writing (and thus being written), the Borges that appears in ‘‘Borges y yo’’ must relinquish any attempt to distinguish between his various personae. In the final line of the essay, he famously gives up trying to differentiate between Borges and the other Borges, writing, ‘‘No se´ cua´l de los dos escribe esta pa´gina’’ (1961, 194). [I don’t know which one of the two of us is writing this page (1967, 201).] But if Borges does not know whether it is he or his double that is writing this page, Marı´as concludes by saying that he is sure that one of the two people must be fictional. By collapsing so convincingly the distinction between reality and fiction throughout his novel, however, this final statement is not very useful. Which persona is fictional? The author or the narrator? Is there really a difference between the two? As in Carlos Can˜eque’s novel Quie´n, these questions are left for the reader to decide. Negra espalda del tiempo can be interpreted as an extended reflection on the paradoxical implications of Borges’s ‘‘Borges y yo.’’ Throughout the novel, Marı´as contemplates authorial authority and the impossibility of discerning which of the two per-

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sonae of Javier Marı´as (narrator or author) is fictitious. Therein lies one of the novel’s meanings: it is either impossible to distinguish between reality and fiction, or there is in fact no difference between the two. In the act of attempting to commit reality to language, reality itself becomes unreal, fictional. The next chapter, on Javier Cercas, returns to this terrain, taking as a point of departure the author’s introduction to his Relatos reales [True Stories], in which he ponders the fact that the very title of his collection is an oxymoron, for the concept of a ‘‘true story’’ is impossible to conceive: ‘‘En rigor, un relato real es apenas concebible, porque todo relato, lo quiera o no, comporta un grado variable de invencio´n; o dicho de otro modo: es imposible transcribir verbalmente la realidad sin traicionarla’’ (Cercas 2000, 16). [In truth, a true story is barely conceivable, because all stories, whether they try to or not, imply some kind of invention; or in other words: it is impossible to verbally transcribe reality without betraying it.] This is precisely the sort of sentiment that Borges expressed more than forty years ago: that it is impossible to represent reality with words without somehow betraying not only that reality but also yourself. This is what he emphasizes when he writes about the ‘‘other’’ Borges and his ‘‘perversa costumbre de falsear y magnificar’’ (Borges 1961, 194) [perverse habit of magnifying and falsifying] (1967, 200). Borges anticipates much subsequent theoretical work on metafiction. Robert Alter takes the title of his Partial Magic from Borges’s ‘‘Magias parciales del Quijote,’’ and other critics and theorists of narrative postmodernism and metafiction invariably cite the great Argentine author in their texts. Patricia Waugh has Borges in mind when she writes that metafictional novels ‘‘reject the traditional figure of the author as a transcendental imagination fabricating, through an ultimately monologic discourse, structures of order which will replace the forgotten material text of the world’’ (1984, 16). Waugh writes that postmodern metafiction attempts to show that ‘‘the ‘author’ is a concept produced through previous and existing literary and social texts’’ (16) and that ‘‘what is generally taken to be ‘reality’ is also constructed and mediated in a similar fashion’’ (16). The importance of this element of contemporary metafiction lies in how it dramatizes the limitations of many of our narrative attempts to interpret and understand reality. In this way, metafictional novels acknowledge the provisionality of narra-

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tive representations of the real. The upshot of this formulation is that if ‘‘reality’’ is indeed ‘‘fictional’’—or mediated and embodied through language and narrative—then perhaps reality might best be ‘‘understood through an appropriate ‘reading’ process’’ (16). What is perhaps most notable about Marı´as’s novel is that it seeks to create its own referentiality through the intertextual, essentially narcissistic, contemplation of a previous novel written by the same author/narrator. The narrator of Negra espalda del tiempo attempts to place himself somewhere between fiction and reality while drawing attention to the symbiotic relationship between writing and reading; representation and interpretation. The ‘‘reality’’ of the novel is based upon the fictionality of another novel and the real critical perceptions of that novel. Thus, Negra espalda del tiempo is discursively inscribed into a (paradoxical) circular process of representation and interpretation that can never be resolved by the reader. Nor does the narrator attempt to resolve the textual problems he poses. Instead, he is content to let the reader sort it out however he or she can.

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5 Narrative Truth and Historical Truth in Javier Cercas’s Soldados de Salamina JAVIER CERCAS’S SOLDADOS DE SALAMINA [SOLDIERS OF SALAMIS] (2001) shares with Javier Marı´as’s Negra espalda del tiempo a confusion of real-life author and fictional narrator. But while Marı´as’s novel takes as its starting point the critical reception and speculation that came out of the publication of the novel Todas las almas, Cercas finds his inspiration in an extratextual real historical event: the story of Rafael Sa´nchez Mazas, Falangist ideologue, author, and poet, who escapes a Republican firing squad during the last days of the Spanish Civil War and survives in the mountains with the help of a few Republican deserters. In this chapter, I draw upon New Historicist work of Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, Hans Kellner, and Hayden White, in which the importance of narrative, subjectivity, and multiple perspectives are linked to the representation and interpretation of history. In Soldados de Salamina, Cercas’s self-conscious narrative strategy blurs traditional boundaries between reality and fiction, history and memory, in order to dramatize a divergence of historical truth and narrative truth.1 In the process, the novel offers an alternative approach to the reconstruction and representation of reality, history, and memory. Thus, while historical truth finally escapes the narrator of Soldados de Salamina, the process of writing this history allows him to come to terms with the complexities of historiography and approach a new understanding of the larger importance of narrative to the human experience. Perhaps due to the fact that the narrator of the novel is named Javier Cercas, and because the subject of Soldados de Salamina is historical in nature, some readers have been tempted to read the work as nonfiction. A book review published in El Mundo, 144

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for example, shows the confusion caused by the novel’s deliberate blending of reality and fiction. Juan Bonilla writes, ‘‘With this story, Javier Cercas has written a vibrant, beautiful, fastmoving book. Not a novel, of course, but rather a true story, an excellent piece of reporting’’ (Bonilla 2001). Cercas himself, however, has insisted that readers interpret Soldados de Salamina as a novel, and he warns his readers to be wary of all narrators, since they are prone to lying, often fool their readers, and sometimes fool themselves. In an interview given in Santander at the Universidad Internacional Mene´ndez Pelayo, Cercas reiterated that Soldados de Salamina should be read as an adventure novel—‘‘about the greatest adventure of the century, which is the civil war’’ (qtd. in Me´ndez, 2002a)—and although Cercasthe-narrator who appears in the novel constantly affirms otherwise, Cercas-the-author insists that the work should not be read as a true story. Nor is his novel to be read as an example of New Journalism. Cercas insists that Soldados de Salamina ‘‘is a novel, a weird novel, but a novel nonetheless. . . . I was searching for literary truth, not journalistic truth. Literature is a moral, universal truth that manipulates reality’’ (qtd. in Me´ndez. 2002a). In the following sections, I will show how Soldados de Salamina complicates the category of truth in a way that renders the traditional dichotomy of fiction/reality obsolete. Through its self-conscious examination of the relationship between reality, literature, and truth, Cercas’s novel transcends its historical subject matter in order to become a persuasive meditation on narrative and memory.

On the Reality of Fiction: Autobiography and Historiography A glance over Cercas’s earlier work reveals a longtime preoccupation with the interrelatedness of reality and fiction. In the introduction to his collection of tales, Relatos reales [True Stories] (2000), for example, Cercas asserts that the mere act of writing, regardless of whether it is fiction or nonfiction, consists, among other things, of inventing a persona: Si no ando equivocando, escribir consiste, entre otras cosas, en fabricarse una identidad, un rostro que al mismo tiempo es y no es el nue-

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stro, igual que una ma´scara. De hecho, ma´scara es lo que persona significa en latı´n y, como se dice en una de estas cro´nicas [ . . . ] la ma´scara es lo que nos oculta, pero sobre todo lo que nos revela. En mi caso, esa identidad—ese yo que soy yo y no soy yo al mismo tiempo—no es, a que´ engan˜arnos, demasiado original. (7–8) [If I am not mistaken, among other things writing consists of fabricating an identity, a face that simultaneously is and is not our own, just like a mask. In fact, mask is what persona means in Latin. As is said in one of these tales . . . the mask is what hides us but, above all, it also reveals us. In my case, that identity—that me that is me and not me at the same time—is not (why kid ourselves?) very original.]

While the persona that Cercas creates as he writes this introduction pretends to relinquish any claim to originality, he engages with the universal conundrum implicit in all narrative creation: regardless of whether we are writing fiction or nonfiction, the moment we put pen to paper we necessarily create a persona. Many of Cercas’s narrators bear a marked similarity to Cercas himself. In La velocidad de la luz [The Speed of Light] (2005), for example, the narrator remarks that he is writing a novel in which the narrator will be ‘‘un tipo exactamente igual que yo que se hallaba exactamente en las mismas circunstancias que yo’’ (62) [a guy exactly like me that finds himself in exactly the same circumstances that I do]. This statement encapsulates Cercas’s ideas about narrators. Taking into account all his fictional work, the reader can trace the development of a fictionalized autobiography of a writer very much like Cercas who finds himself in very similar circumstances. Even when they are not explicitly named ‘‘Javier Cercas,’’ his narrators are typically writers who have spent time in the United States—often Urbana, Illinois— and that currently live in Girona. Fiction offers Cercas a method of turning personal and historical reality into art at the same time that it permits him to explore the ambiguous territory that lies at the intersection of nonfiction and the novel. Apropos of Paul Ricoeur’s well-known theorizations of narrative identity, Patrick Crowley writes that ‘‘the attempt to fix any life in words, however provisionally, is inevitably beset by the metonymic, supplemental, structure of language and once inscribed or recounted each life story is subject to further interpretations’’ (2003, 8). Thus, there is a sustained tension between

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the narrating self and the remembered self. The strength of the metafictional novel, however, lies in its ability to preempt and acknowledge the weaknesses of autobiographical and historical discourses through the process of writing fiction. These weaknesses spring largely from the temporal distance that exists between the narrating ‘‘I’’ and experiencing ‘‘I.’’ Autobiography—and historiography, I would argue—is consequently vulnerable to ‘‘the temptations of fictionalizing memories, the tensions between competing versions of the self, the uncertainty that erodes the identity of the ‘I’ that attempts to recover the past’’ (9). Precisely because of their emphasis on subjectivity, we may read novels such as Soldados de Salamina, La hija del canı´bal, and Negra espalda del tiempo as dramatizations of the inherent complexities of autobiographical writing. The most faithful representations of narrative identity through autobiography can offer only ‘‘dim reflections of the ontological self, provisional expressions of the narcissistic subject that knows itself only through a mimetic mirror darkly’’ (Crowley 2003, 10). The postmodern metafictional novel’s foregrounding of diegesis grows out of a recognition of the limitations of the mimesis favored by realism, and allows contemporary writers to acknowledge, perhaps more authentically, the provisional, ever-changing contemporary notion of ‘‘reality,’’ be it personal, historical, cultural, or social. In Soldados de Salamina historiographical discourse is further complicated by the fact that the narrator—however objective he pretends to be—is not only separated from the historical events by a temporal gap, but must also interpret the subjective accounts authored by other historical actors and narrators. The narrator—‘‘that me that is me and not me at the same time’’—that Cercas acknowledges in Relatos reales calls to mind the tradition of self-conscious fiction (Jorge Luis Borges in particular) and points to the unreliable nature of any writing about the self. The narrator of Cercas’s earlier novel El vientre de la ballena [The Belly of the Whale] (1997), takes an extreme approach to the narrative representation of identity and reality, and insists that reality is nothing more than the story we tell about it: [N]i siquiera el presente tiene entidad propia, objetiva, no so´lo porque es inasible, apenas una la´mina infinitamente efı´mera que, como

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ocurre con la felicidad, basta nombrar para que desaparezca [ . . . ] tambie´n porque el presente so´lo existe en la medida en que alguien lo percibe; es decir: en la medida en que alguien lo inventa. Por eso vivir consiste en inventarse a cada paso la vida, en conta´rsela a uno mismo. Por eso la realidad no es otra cosa que el relato que alguien esta´ contando, y si el narrador desaparece, la realidad tambie´n desaparecera´ con e´l. De ese narrador pende el mundo. La realidad existe porque alguien la cuenta. Inventamos constantemente el presente; ma´s au´n el pasado. Recordar es inventar. (203–4) [Not even the present has an objective entity of its own, not only because it is inscrutable, an infinitely ephemeral facade that, just like happiness, only has to be named in order for it to disappear . . . but also because the present only exists insofar as someone perceives it; that is: insofar as someone invents it. That is why living consists of inventing life step by step, telling oneself about it. That is why reality is nothing more than the story that someone tells, and if the narrator disappears, reality disappears with him. The world depends on that narrator. Reality exists because someone tells the story. We constantly invent the present; and even more so the past. To remember is to invent.]

In this passage, the narrator links narrative to ontological and epistemological questions by suggesting that being itself is linked to our consciousness as narrators—entities who narrate ourselves—and that our knowledge of the present and the past are contingent upon our existence and awareness as narrators. If there is a common theme in contemporary Spanish metafiction, it is the idea that human consciousness is tied to narrative imagination. But I should repeat that imagination and invention do not imply the absence of truth. Even though remembering entails invention, Cercas’s narrators always draw the reader’s attention to the redemptive powers of writing, and how narrative allows us to access subjective truth. The narrator of El vientre de la ballena, for example, says, ‘‘[L]a verdad es que, quiza´ porque so´lo somos capaces de saber lo que pensamos cuando las palabras lo fijan, no lo he comprendido con claridad sino a medida que escribı´a estas pa´ginas, a medida que completo esta cro´nica que, como el mundo, so´lo es real porque yo la cuento’’ (Cercas 1997, 204). [The truth is that—perhaps because we are only able to know what we think when words tie it down—I only really began to understand things clearly insofar as I began to write these pages, insofar as I complete this chroni-

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cle that, like the world, is only real because I am telling its story.] Cercas’s narrators and protagonists find meaning not only in their experience of the world, but also in the processes involved in interpreting and representing it through writing. As Jerome Bruner, Roger Schank, and other cognitive scientists and psychologists have insisted, ‘‘[S]torytelling and understanding are functionally the same thing . . . intelligence is bound up in our ability to tell the right story at the right time’’ (Young and Saver 2001, 21). From a historical point of view, what makes Soldados de Salamina such a compelling work is its selfconscious acknowledgment of a two-way pull of historical narrative: on the one hand, writing is an unreliable method of representing reality—historical or otherwise—because it depends upon subjective perceptions of that reality. On the other hand, while historical representation is problematic, the examination of narrative itself offers a method of engaging that very problem and offers new perspectives on the human need for storytelling. In the following pages, I discuss Soldados de Salamina in terms of the novel’s critical engagement with the paradoxical relationship between narrative truth and historical truth. Inspired in part by Mark Freeman’s essay ‘‘Rethinking the Fictive, Reclaiming the Real,’’ I argue like him that narrative selfconsciousness draws attention to a process by which truth can be ‘‘made available by narrative and by the poetic processes that go into the telling of the past’’ (Freemen 2003, 126). Soldados de Salamina shows how historical truth—even though it is relegated to an irrevocably lost past—can be made accessible through the dynamic processes of writing history in the present.

Historical Truth versus Narrative Truth The novel that is Soldados de Salamina deals with two main issues: the mysterious events surrounding some of Sa´nchez Mazas’s experiences before, during, and after the Spanish Civil War, and the process of writing Soldados de Salamina. The book is divided into three parts, each comprised of a little over sixty pages. Each section represents an articulation of the discourse. Part 1 deals with the circumstances surrounding the author/narrator’s life and consequent decision to write the novel we hold in our hands; it deals with the problems he faces in collecting

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his data, and some of his possible solutions. Part 2 is concerned with the narration of the dramatic historical episode that ostensibly inspired the author/narrator to write in the first place. This part is a straightforward narration in the third person, with occasional incursions of the narrator into the discourse, usually to indicate where he was forced to invent events or where his sources were unreliable. Although this central section most closely approximates a traditional historical account of events, the narrative is still marked by a novelistic flair and embellishment, and the narrator makes no attempt to hide his ideological bias in reconstructing this key episode in the Spanish Civil War. Further, at no time does the author/narrator lose sight of the complexities of writing this history, for throughout his narrative he slows the dramatic development in order to draw attention to his role as a subjective organizer and interpreter of the events: ‘‘[N]o ofrezco hechos probados, sino conjeturas razonables’’ (Cercas 2001, 89). [I’m not offering proven facts, but reasonable conjectures] (2004, 80). The narrator concludes his tale of Sa´nchez Mazas in the novel’s third part, tying up the loose ends that remain from parts 1 and 2. But even though the narrative concludes, the work’s final words point to the ongoing nature of human history, and end with a forward-looking repetition: ‘‘[H]acia adelante, hacia adelante, hacia adelante, siempre adelante’’ (2001, 209). [Onwards, onward, onwards, ever onwards] (2004, 208). We need only read a few sentences to see that Soldados de Salamina is anything but a traditional account of the Spanish Civil War: Fue en el verano de 1994, hace ahora ma´s de seis an˜os, cuando oı´ hablar por primera vez del fusilamiento de Rafael Sa´nchez Mazas. Tres cosas acababan de ocurrirme por entonces: la primera es que mi padre habı´a muerto; la segunda es que mi mujer me habı´a abandonado; la tercera es que yo habı´a abandonado mi carrera de escritor. Miento. (2001, 17) [It was the summer of 1994, more than six years ago now, when I first heard about Rafael Sa´nchez Mazas facing the firing squad. Three things had just happened: first my father had died; then my wife had left me; finally, I had given up my literary career. I’m lying.] (2004, 3)

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The first sentence of the novel prepares the reader for what would seem like a nonfiction account of the failed execution of Sa´nchez Mazas during the final days of the Spanish Civil War, but the introduction of the narrator’s highly personal information, use of the first-person narrative voice, and most importantly, his admission to lying, all serve to undercut the supposed ‘‘historical’’ thrust of the book and introduce immediately the self-conscious subjectivity that will characterize the novel as a whole. Many of Cercas’s narrators—such as the one who writes the introduction to Relatos reales—insist that the idea of writing a ‘‘true story’’ is impossible, since every narrative, whether we like it or not, requires an element of invention. Thus, Cercas’s narrators struggle with the inevitable fact that it is impracticable to transcribe reality with words without somehow betraying that reality (2000, 16). Paradoxically, even though the faithful representation of reality is impossible, the process of writing still allows the author to make sense of that reality. The narrator of La velocidad de la luz says that the role of authors ‘‘consiste en convertir la realidad en sentido, aunque ese sentido sea ilusorio; es decir, puede convertirla en belleza, y esa belleza o ese sentido son su escudo’’ (Cercas 2005, 69) [consists of converting reality into meaning, even if that meaning is illusory; that is, he can turn it into beauty, and that beauty or that meaning are his shield]. Soldados de Salamina is rife with the narrator’s assertions that he is not writing a novel but a true story. When he first meets Miquel Aguirre, for example, Aguirre asks him if he plans to convert his present investigations on Sa´nchez Mazas into a novel. The narrator replies without hesitation that he has abandoned his career as a novelist, and that his current project will not be a novel, but rather a ‘‘true tale.’’ Aguirre, however, responds that he enjoyed his previously published article on Sa´nchez Mazas, in particular because of its literary quality: ‘‘Me gusto´ porque era como un relato concentrado, so´lo que con personajes y situaciones reales . . . Como un relato real’’ (Cercas 2001, 37). [I liked it because it was like a compressed tale, except with real characters and situations. . . . Like a true tale] (2004, 24). In fact, Cercas-the-narrator resists writing this book at first. It is only after much deliberation—and some time spent in Can-

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cu´n with his girlfriend Conchi—that he decides finally to write the book that everyone wants him to write: [D]ecidı´ que, despue´s de casi diez an˜os sin escribir un libro, habı´a llegado el momento de intentarlo de nuevo, y decidı´ tambie´n que el libro que iba a escribir no serı´a una novela, sino so´lo un relato real, un relato cosido de la realidad, amasado con hechos y personajes reales, un relato que estarı´a centrado en el fusilamiento de Sa´nchez Mazas y en las circunstancias que lo precedieron y lo siguieron. (2001, 52) [I decided that, after almost ten years without writing a book, the moment to try again had arrived, and I also decided that the book I’d write would not be a novel, but simply a true tale, a tale cut from the cloth of reality, concocted out of true events and characters, a tale centered on Sa´nchez Mazas and the firing squad and the circumstances leading up to and following it.] (2004, 40)

While he tells Conchi that he will begin writing novels again after a ten-year hiatus, he stubbornly continues to insist on the nonfictionality of his enterprise: ‘‘Sera´ como una novela [ . . . ] So´lo que, en vez de ser todo mentira, todo es verdad’’ (2001, 68). [It’ll be like a novel. . . . Except, instead of being all lies, it’s all true] (57). And when his editor asks him if he is going to write another novel, he again responds in the negative, reiterating that it will be a true story (2001, 74). The narrator’s frequent statements as to the truth of his story may stem from his desire to assuage the reader’s doubts as to the veracity of his account, but mostly they serve to reveal his own narratorial insecurity. The anxiety that we see in the narrator of Soldados de Salamina, with his constant statements as to the ‘‘truth’’ of his story, can be related to contemporary approaches to historiography. Foucault’s discussion of the ‘‘effective history,’’ for example, represents a useful formulation of the same kind of issues at work in Soldados de Salamina. Foucault’s essay ‘‘Nietzsche, Genealogy, History’’ explores the hidden motivations and desires experienced by any reader of history. Foucault writes that ‘‘we want historians to confirm our belief that the present rests upon profound intentions and immutable necessities’’ (1997, 125). In other words, we want to believe that historical happenings have some sort of meaning and that they correspond to a meaningful teleology. Foucault emphasizes,

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however, that ‘‘the true historical sense confirms our existence among countless lost events, without a landmark or a point of reference’’ (125). The sometimes frustrating reality of historiography is that the true historical sense is impossible to re-create through language. Foucault establishes an opposition between traditional histories and ‘‘effective’’ histories, basing his formulation on Nietzsche’s idea of ‘‘wirkliche Historie,’’ which does not approach history as a natural process or teleological movement, but instead ‘‘deals with events in terms of their most unique characteristics, their most acute manifestations’’ (Foucault 1997, 124). Consequently, according to the ‘‘effective’’ history, a historical happening ‘‘is not a decision, a treaty, a reign, or a battle, but the reversal of a relationship of forces, the usurpation of power, the appropriation of a vocabulary turned against those who had once used it, a feeble domination that poisons itself as it grows lax, the entry of a masked ‘other’ ’’ (124–25). For Foucault, then, the effective history has less to do with events and more to do with relationships of power and the subtle ideologies implicit in linguistic structures. He points to the importance of language to our perception of historical events and how historical discourse must reflect the existence of competing narratives. Foucault concludes that the ultimate trait of the effective history ‘‘is its affirmation of knowledge as perspective’’ (126). Specifically, that perspective is tied to an acknowledgment of the primacy of the present moment in making sense of history, for the present imbues the past with meaning. But while traditional historians ‘‘take unusual pains to erase the elements in their work which reveal their grounding in a particular time and place, their preferences in a controversy—the unavoidable obstacles of their passion’’ (126), Foucault prefers Nietzsche’s version of historical sense, because it is ‘‘explicit in its perspective and acknowledges its system of injustice’’ (126). Foucault distrusts those historical accounts that attempt to hide their interpretive and ideological frameworks in order to offer a (false) sense of mimetic transparency. As the narrator of Soldados de Salamina continues his project, he becomes more aware of the fact that he will perhaps never get the story straight. He consequently allows himself more liberty in the construction of his tale. The Sa´nchez Mazas episode that had provided him with a starting point becomes only one of innumerable ‘‘historical’’ events and perspectives

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that lead him to his final conclusion. It becomes clearer that this solitary episode in the life of Sa´nchez Mazas is only important insofar as it provides the narrator with a compelling episode around which he may create his narrative. Eschewing the narrative style of a conventional historiography, the novel places one historical happening within the larger context of an ongoing multifaceted discourse, and explores the relevance of that event to our understanding of the present. Like Foucault’s ‘‘effective’’ history, Soldados de Salamina does not concentrate on Sa´nchez Mazas’s escape and struggle for survival as a key episode in contemporary Spanish history, but rather takes that episode as a starting point from which to engage in a reflection on history and historiography in general, while simultaneously acknowledging the legitimacy of the subjective multiple points of view that coexist in postmodern conceptions of historical discourse. Much of the narrator’s information comes from forgotten historical actors who either knew Sa´nchez Mazas or the young Republican deserters who aided him. From these disparate accounts of a single episode, the narrator attempts to fashion a cohesive whole. Although the accounts he collects from eyewitnesses sometimes differ, he emphasizes that their narratives are not contradictory, and that often their stories complement each other. Thus, he writes, ‘‘[N]o resultaba difı´cil recomponer, a partir de sus testimonios y rellenando a base de lo´gica y de un poco de imaginacio´n las lagunas que dejaban, el rompecabezas de la aventura de Sa´nchez Mazas’’ (Cercas 2001, 71). [From their testimonies, and filling in the gaps they left by means of logic and a little imagination, it wasn’t difficult to reconstruct the puzzle of Sa´nchez Mazas’s adventure] (2004, 61).2 The problems implicit in representing reality are a common theme in Cercas’s fiction. In the earlier novel El vientre de la ballena, the narrator draws attention to the unreliability of his own reconstruction of personal events. Because his reflections relate so well to my interpretation of Soldados de Salamina, I cite them here: [S]e´ que este relato va a infectarse de olvidos, omisiones y errores; cuento con ellos. No pretendo ser absolutamente veraz o exacto: se´ que recordar es inventar, que el pasado es un material maleable y que volver sobre e´l equivale casi siempre a modificarlo. Por eso, ma´s que a ser veraz o exacto, aspiro so´lo a ser fiel al pasado, quiza´ para no

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traicionar del todo al presente. Por eso, y porque a menudo la imaginacio´n recuerda mejor que la memoria, se´ tambie´n que aque´lla rellenara´ los vacı´os que se abran en e´sta. No importa: al fin y al cabo tal vez sea cierto que so´lo una historia inventada, pero verdadera, puede conseguir que olvidemos para siempre lo que realmente ha pasado. (1997, 12) [I know that this story will be infected by forgetting, omissions, and errors; I’m counting on them. I have no illusions about being perfectly truthful or exact: I know that remembering means inventing, that the past is a malleable material, and that returning to the past is almost always equivalent to modifying it. That’s why, rather than being truthful or exact, I aspire only to being faithful to the past, perhaps in order not to betray completely the present. For that reason, and because often our imagination remembers better than our memory does, I know that the former will fill the voids that open up in the latter. It doesn’t matter: when all is said and done, perhaps it’s true that only an invented, but true, story can make us forever forget what really happened.]

The narrator’s meditations on the interrelatedness of imagination and memory brings to mind Ramo´n del Valle-Incla´n’s statement that ‘‘las cosas no son como las vemos sino como las recordamos’’ (qtd. in Vargas Llosa 2002, 23) [things are not as we see them but rather as we remember them]. Mario Vargas Llosa includes this quotation in La verdad de las mentiras [The Truth of Lies] (2002), a collection of essays in which the author explores the intrinsic value of literature and how narrative not only comments upon reality but also complements the human experience. Literature, Vargas Llosa asserts, is an unreal thing that can acquire a ‘‘precarious reality’’ through the knowing collusion of a skilled writer and a good reader (23). Therein lies the truth of fiction, and therein lies the moral value of literature: ‘‘[L]a irrealidad y las mentiras de la literatura son tambie´n un precioso vehı´culo para el conocimiento de verdades profundas de la realidad humana’’ (399). [The unreality and lies of literature also represent a valuable vehicle for knowing profound truths about human reality.] Toma´s, the narrator of Cercas’s El vientre de la ballena, is constantly meditating on the truth of fiction and the fictionality of truth (1997, 235). But it is through his writing of the true lies that make up his story that he is able to make sense of his expe-

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rience. In so doing, Toma´s acknowledges the inseparability of narrative, representation, and reality. Cercas continues his mediation on this theme in Soldados de Salamina, in which, through the self-conscious emphasis on the process of writing, the narrator is able to approach critically the difficulties that arise in the writing of history, and thereby come to terms with the unavoidable provisionality of his narrative.

Soldados de Salamina as Self-Conscious Historiography In an essay entitled ‘‘Literary Criticism and the Politics of the New Historicism,’’ Elizabeth Fox-Genovese elegantly sums up New Historicist views of historiography that deal with the problem of knowing—and therefore representing—history. The author writes that the contemporary historian must recognize his or her imperfect grasp of the past, because ‘‘we remain hostage not merely to the imperfection but to the impossibility of precisely recapturing the past and, in this sense, remain bound on one flank by the hermeneutic conundrum’’ (Fox-Genovese 1997, 68). This does not mean, however, that we must give up on the struggle to represent historical reality: ‘‘[T]hose constraints neither justify our abandoning the struggle nor our blindly adhering to the denial of history’’ (88). Instead, the truthful historiography must come to terms with the idea that interpretation is a necessary part of the writing of history. This is a process that is selfconsciously put forward by the narrator of Soldados de Salamina, who recognizes that history must be viewed subjectively, for it is only through the filters of chronology, perspectivism, and ideology that he is able to make sense of the events he strives to represent. Having interviewed several octogenarian Republican veterans of the Spanish Civil War, Cercas avers the only thing linking the three men’s stories is the fact that they are all survivors. The mere fact that they are all still alive has invested them with an arbitrary historical authority: [L]os tres eran tan diversos que lo u´nico que a mis ojos los unı´a era su condicio´n de supervivientes, ese suplemento engan˜oso de prestigio que a menudo otorgan los protagonistas del presente, que es siempre consuetudinario, anodino y sin gloria, a los protagonistas

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del pasado, que, porque so´lo lo conocemos a trave´s del filtro de la memoria, es siempre excepcional, tumultuoso y heroico. (Cercas 2001, 72) [The three of them were so different that to my eyes the only thing that linked them was their condition as survivors, that deceptive added prestige the protagonists of the bland, routine inglorious present, often concede to the protagonists of the past, which because we only know it through the filter of memory, is always extraordinary, tumultuous, heroic.] (2004, 61)

Yet, is this not always the case with historical accounts? Historians must always find some arbitrary thread with which to weave together the disparate micronarratives that make up historical discourse. Difficulties arise for the narrator when he realizes that he must rely on the accounts of these eyewitnesses to complete his provisional vision of the ‘‘real story.’’ The present, then, becomes the bland perspective from which we contemplate a heroic past through the distorted, fragmented lens of memory. As a self-avowed believer in the power of literature, Mario Vargas Llosa appreciates the dynamics that make Soldados de Salamina such a compelling work. In a review of the novel, Vargas Llosa writes that what is important about Cercas’s novel is not its documentation of historical events: ‘‘Soldados de Salamina is more important than Rafael Sa´nchez Mazas and the firing squad from which he escaped miraculously (a crater of history), because in its pages the literary trumps the historical, and invention and words manipulate the memory of lived experience in order to construct another story, basically rooted in the literary, that is, the fictional’’ (Vergas Llosa 2001).3 Whether or not the novel can be considered an example of committed literature—as Vargas Llosa suggests in his review—is open to debate, but it is clear that the novel emphasizes the literariness of its historical subject matter while dramatizing the narrative process: the compilation, sorting, review, and interpretation of the many historical sources available. In Soldados de Salamina, the process of representation takes precedence over that which is represented, and in so doing the novel reflects the inseparability of rhetoric, representation, and reality. The third part of Soldados de Salamina begins with the narrator’s confession that he cannot conclude the novel, even though

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he has accomplished his main goal of writing about Sa´nchez Mazas’s postwar and literary fortunes. The narrator discovers that although he has constructed a reasonable interpretation of Sa´nchez Maza’s character, and, by extension, the nature of falangismo—‘‘o, ma´s exactamente, de los motivos que indujeron al pun˜ado de hombres cultos y refinados que fundaron Falange a lanzar al paı´s a una furiosa orgı´a de sangre’’ (Cercas 2001, 143) [or more precisely, of the motives that induced the handful of cultivated and refined men who founded the Falange to pitch the country into a furious bloodbath] (2004, 137)—he realizes that this is not enough. Cercas-the-narrator confesses that after having read and reread his manuscript, his momentary exhilaration at completing his tale has evaporated. His novel is lacking something: ‘‘A la segunda relectura la euforia se troco´ en decepcio´n: el libro no era malo, sino insuficiente, como un mecanismo completo pero incapaz de desempen˜ar la funcio´n para la que ha sido ideado porque le falta una pieza’’ (2001, 144). [At the second rereading my euphoria gave way to disappointment: the book wasn’t bad, but insufficient, like a mechanism that was whole, yet incapable of performing the function for which it had been devised because it was missing a part] (2004, 138). Taking a break from writing Soldados de Salamina, Cercas seeks solace in the less-demanding journalistic work to which he has become accustomed. The editor of his newspaper assigns him interviews and, happily, he meets Roberto Bolan˜o, a Chilean novelist residing in Spain. Bolan˜o is not just a character in the novel, nor is his appearance in the novel a sly novelty, for the author’s statements hold an important clue to the novel’s interpretation. The Chilean novelist tells Cercas, quite significantly, ‘‘Para escribir novelas no hace falta imaginacio´n [ . . . ] So´lo memoria. Las novelas se escriben combinando recuerdos’’ (Cercas 2001, 151). [To write novels you don’t need an imagination. . . . Just a memory. Novels are written by combining recollections] (2004, 146). Indeed, the novel’s critical combination of autobiographical, philosophical, historical, and novelistic writing leads Alı´cia Satorras Pons to classify Soldados de Salamina as a kind of ‘‘all’’ that allows for a more open interpretation on the part of the reader (2003). By combining his own memories and those of history’s survivors, Cercas-the-narrator is able to write a nontraditional historical version of events that takes

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into account the processes of its own writing, which in turn functions to open up the interpretive process to the reader.

History and Fiction History, like literature, depends upon language and narrative; it is a genre, a particular type of text that is open to multiple interpretations. Through its generic hybridity and inclusion of multiple perspectives, Cercas’s novel self-consciously acknowledges the complexities inherent in the writing of history. As Fox-Genovese points out, ‘‘[W]hat we know of the past depends upon the records—implicit interpretations of who and what matters—and upon the ways in which subsequent human beings have written about and interpreted those records’’ (1997, 84). Just as Felix and Lucı´a conclude in Rosa Montero’s La hija del canı´bal, the perfect mimetic representation of history is impossible: from the fragments of memory we must construct a narrative whole that makes sense. Patricia Waugh argues that ‘‘writing history is a fictional act, ranging events conceptually through language to form a worldmodel, but that history itself is invested, like fiction, with interrelating plots which appear to interact independently of human design’’ (1984, 48–49). Through his experience of diegesis, the fictional Javier Cercas comes to realize that history becomes history only when we tell the story, and at the same time, it is through the process of telling the story that we come to understand it. As Cercas draws attention to the interrelating plots, past and present, that appear throughout the novel, he selfconsciously points to himself as having his own (narrative) design in making sense of the events. Linda Hutcheon has indicated that works of historiographic metafiction tend to favor two modes of narration: either multiple points of view, or an overtly controlling narrator. These two narrative techniques point to the dynamic relationship between subjectivity and history. Whether the metafictional text is told from multiple points of view or from the point of view of an overtly controlling narrator, Hutcheon emphasizes that the narrating subject is never completely ‘‘confident of his/her ability to know the past with any certainty’’ (1995, 85). This does not

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mean, however, that history is transcended, but rather, this offers an example of how subjectivity is inscribed into history (85). Hutcheon’s theory of historiographic metafiction is influenced by New Historicist accounts of historiography. Indeed, issues of subjectivity, intertextuality, reference, and ideology are all at the root of the problemized relationship between fiction and history in postmodernism, although Hutcheon acknowledges that many theorists, among them Jameson and White, have pointed to narrative as ‘‘the one concern that envelopes all of these’’ (89). Narrative, Hutcheon writes, ‘‘has come to be seen as a central form of human comprehension, of imposition of meaning and formal coherence on the chaos of events’’ (89). The author paraphrases Hayden White’s assertion that ‘‘narrative is what translates knowing into telling, and it is precisely this translation that obsesses postmodern fiction’’ (Hutcheon 1995, 89). I would like to invert this assertion and suggest that telling can also lead to knowing. Although White has argued convincingly that there is ‘‘an inexpungeable relativity in every representation of historical phenomena’’ that is related to ‘‘the language used to describe and thereby constitute past events’’ (1997, 392), novels such as Soldados de Salamina show how the narrative process can lead to understanding. Historical narratives, like autobiographical narratives, function as instruments of the mind that construct our conception of reality: ‘‘[T]he experience of life takes on meaning when we interact with it as an ongoing story, as our story’’ (Young and Saver 2001, 75). While critics such as Satorras Pons and Carlos Yushimoto del Valle have analyzed Soldados de Salamina in terms of the novel’s meditations on the symbolic importance of Miralles as an archetypal modern hero, scholars have not yet analyzed fully the structural importance of Miralles to the construction of the narrative itself. Indeed, although he is not a historian or novelist, Miralles possesses a sophisticated approach to history that sometimes escapes his young interlocutor. His approach to the unreliability of memory, for example, functions as a warning to the alert reader, as he cautions the narrator that most of what he is able to remember are lies: ‘‘[L]a mitad son mentiras involuntarias y la otra mitad mentiras voluntarias’’ (Cercas 2001, 177). [half of them are unintentional lies and the rest intentional ones] (2004, 173). Throughout the third part, Miralles articulates important

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(contradictory) information for our interpretation of the novel. The aging Republican veteran scolds Cercas for putting words in his mouth—indeed, trying to force the narrative into something that it is not: ‘‘No me haga decir cosas que no he dicho, joven. Yo so´lo le cuento las cosas como son, o como yo las vivı´. La interpretacio´n corre de su cuenta, que para eso es usted el periodista’’ (2001, 192). [Don’t put words in my mouth, young man. I’m just telling you how things were, or at least how I experienced them. The interpretation is your job, that’s why you’re a journalist, isn’t it?] (2004, 190) And later, Miralles points out that what Cercas proposes to write can never be a true story, but rather ‘‘Una historia muy novelesca’’ (2001, 198). [Sounds like fiction, that story] (2004, 196). Much of the dramatic tension of the novel is derived both from its subject matter and from its writing, two elements that are structurally intertwined. Cercas’s search for Miralles and subsequent conversations with him represent a particularly effective dramatization of the project that Vargas Llosa deems one of the most important aspects of the work: the narrator’s strategy ‘‘is more unusual and fascinating than that which he pretends to narrate’’ (Vargas Llosa 2001). In the final pages of Soldados de Salamina the narrator comes to terms with the indeterminate nature of language and the subjective character of historiography with a moving reflection on time, memory, and the forgotten dead. Having learned from Miralles and Bolan˜o that the ‘‘real story’’ will always be just out of reach, the narrator realizes finally that words can only really communicate themselves: ‘‘[L]as palabras so´lo esta´n hechas para decirse a sı´ mismas, para decir lo decible, es decir, todo excepto lo que nos gobierna o hace vivir o concierne o somos’’ (Cercas 2001, 208). [Words are only made for saying themselves, for saying the sayable, when the sayable is everything except what rules us or makes us live or matters or what we are] (2004, 207). Cercas concludes that stories are only good insofar as they are stories; words are only made to say themselves, but there is no way of accounting for the mysterious forces behind human activity and history. Having concluded his interview of Miralles in France, the narrator returns to Spain on the train. As he watches the countryside go past, the narrator decides that his novel has reached the end he had been searching for:

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Y allı´, sentado en la mullida butaca de color calabaza del vago´n restaurante, acunado por el traqueteo del tren y el torbellino de palabras que giraba sin pausa en mi cabeza, con el bullicio de los comensales cenando a mi alrededor y con mi whisky casi vacı´o delante, y en el ventanal, a mi lado, la imagen ajena de un hombre entristecido que no podı´a ser yo pero era yo, allı´ vi de golpe mi libro, el libro que desde hacı´a an˜os venı´a persiguiendo, lo vi entero, acabado, desde el principio hasta el final, desde la primera hasta la u´ltima lı´nea. (2001, 208) [And there, sitting in the soft pumpkin-colored seat in the restaurant car, rocked by the clattering of the train and the whirlwind of words spinning round unceasingly in my head, with the bustle of passengers dining around me and my almost empty glass of whisky in front of me, and in the window, beside me, the distant image of a sad man who couldn’t be me but was me, there I suddenly saw my book, the book I’d been after for years, I saw it there in its entirety, finished, from the first line to the last.] (2004, 207)

Staring at the ‘‘distant image of a sad man who couldn’t be me but was me,’’ the narrator finally sees his completed book. It is not a coincidence that he sees the end of his novel in his own reflection in the darkened train window. What the narrator cannot see until the final paragraph is that his own image has in fact been reflected in the manuscript from its very beginnings. He realizes that he has completed his novel only when he sees himself reflected in the mirror of the text. Thus, the novel’s last page reveals the important connection between the narrating subject and the completion of the historical account—indeed, Cercas is the story that he tells. In the concluding pages, Cercas takes heart in knowing that the people he has written about will live on in his novel: Vi mi libro entero y verdadero, mi relato real completo, y supe que ya so´lo tenı´a que escribirlo, pasarlo a limpio, porque estaba en mi cabeza desde el principio (‘Fue en el verano de 1994, hace ahora ma´s de seis an˜os, cuando oı´ hablar por primera vez del fusilamiento de Rafael Sa´nchez Mazas’) hasta el final, un final en el que un viejo periodista fracasado y feliz fuma y bebe whisky en un vago´n restaurante de un tren nocturno que viaje por la campin˜a francesa. (2001, 209) [I saw my book, whole and real, my completed true tale, and knew that now I only had to write it, put it down on paper because it was in my head from the start (‘It was the summer of 1994, more than

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six years ago now, when I first heard about Rafael Sa´nchez Mazas facing the firing squad’) to finish, an ending where an old journalist, unsuccessful and happy, smokes and drinks whisky in the restaurant car of a night train that travels across the French countryside.] (2004, 208)

Thus, the novel ends with an image of a narrator contemplating endings, and in this way the story self-consciously ends when the discourse ends. The inscription of the first line of the novel within the final sentence introduces a circular structure to the novel that not only symbolizes the ongoing nature of history, but also reflects the novel’s theme as articulated by the narrator, who believes that as long as he has written these men into his book, they will live on forever: [A]unque en ningu´n lugar de ninguna ciudad de ninguna mierda de paı´s fuera a haber nunca una calle que llevara el nombre de Miralles, mientras yo contase su historia Miralles seguirı´a de algu´n modo viviendo y seguirı´an viviendo tambie´n, siempre que yo hablase de ellos, los hermanos Garcı´a Segue´s—Joan y Lela—y Miquel Cardos y Gabi Baldrich y Pipo Canal y el Gordo Odena y Santi Brugada y Jordi Gudayol, seguirı´an viviendo aunque llevaran muchos an˜os muertos, muertos, muertos, muertos. (2001, 208) [Although nowhere in any city of any fucking country would there ever be a street named after Miralles, if I told his story, Miralles would still be alive in some way and if I talked about them, his friends would still be alive too, the Garcı´a Seque´s brothers—Joan and Lela—and Miquel Cardos and Gabi Baldrich and Pipo Canal and el Gordo Odena and Santi Brugada and Jordi Gudayol would still be alive even though for many years they’d been dead, dead, dead, dead.] (2004, 207)

The novel concludes with an open-ended resolution: the narrator does not know if Miralles was the anonymous soldier who allowed Sa´nchez Mazas to escape the firing squad during those final days of the war. Although the final meaning of the novel is left open to the reader, Cercas seems to suggest that we can learn as much from history as we can from fiction, because the intersection of the two offers valuable narrative perspectives: remembering, imagining, and writing are interrelated processes that help us to make meaning out of experience.

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Self-Conscious Narrative and the Problem of Historical Representation There is an unalterable connection between fictional and historical discourse in the contemporary novel in Spain and elsewhere. American writers such as Kurt Vonnegut, Joseph Heller, Art Spiegelman, and Jonathan Safran Foer have sought to address the problems of representing historical trauma by exploiting the self-referential possibilities of narrative. Faced with the unrepresentability of the horrors of World War II, the bewildered narrators of novels such as Slaughterhouse Five (1969), Catch-22 (1961), Maus: A Survivor’s Tale (1992), and Everything Is Illuminated (2002) distance themselves from historical reality in order to make some sense of the senselessness of war and violence. In a similar fashion, the metafictional conceits of Soldados de Salamina allow the narrator to engage with the larger ongoing theoretical discussion of narrative, postmodernism, and historiography, while seeking out the forgotten voices of the Spanish Civil War.4 Hans Kellner has emphasized that as the forces of historical change and evolution develop and occur, they do not take the form of narrative (1997, 127–38). Nor do the records we have of historical activity form a cohesive, comprehensible story. Dramatized in Soldados de Salamina, we can see how the author (or historian) must interview, read, compile, and make sense of the multiple and sometimes conflicting historical sources at his disposal. What he ultimately finds, however, is that history is exactly that: an ongoing multidirectional, multidimensional process that tends to escape our attempts to represent it with language. As Cercas concludes in the novel’s penultimate page, words are only made to articulate themselves, or to say what is sayable. Words can express everything but what really makes us tick (Cercas 2001, 208). Cercas situates his historical account within a self-conscious narrative frame that calls attention to the problems implicit in historiographic representation. Kellner points out that narrative ‘‘is the product of complex cultural forms and deep-seated linguistic conventions deriving from choices that have traditionally been called rhetorical’’ (1997, 127). Consequently, he asserts that ‘‘there is no ‘straight’ way to invent a history, regardless of the honesty and profession-

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alism of the historian’’ (127). The fictional Cercas’s naive insistence that he is going to tell a true story is doomed to failure, because, as Kellner writes, ‘‘all history, even the most long-term, quantified, synchronic description, is understood by competent readers as part of a story, an explicit or implicit narrative’’ (127). Kellner concludes that ‘‘the longing for the innocent, unprocessed source that will afford a fresher, truer vision (that is, the romantic vision) is doomed to frustration’’ (127). This is the frustrating reality with which the narrator of Soldados de Salamina must struggle. If there is indeed no ‘‘straight’’ way to invent a history, and if facts, as Barthes has suggested, ‘‘can only have a linguistic existence, as a term in a discourse’’ (1997, 121), then perhaps the truest way to write a history is to write the history of that history. For in calling attention to the subjective, linguistically derived processes of writing his history, Cercas comes closer to a true account than if he were to mask his narrative in the form of the more traditional historiographies. I conclude this chapter with Kellner’s essay ‘‘Language and Historical Representation,’’ in which the author writes: ‘‘Because the sources of history include in a primary sense the fundamental human practice of rhetoric, we cannot forget that our ways of making sense of history must emphasize the making’’ (1997, 128, italics in original). Javier Cercas’s Soldados de Salamina is a moving and effective novel because it helps us to understand that ‘‘the straightness of any story is a rhetorical invention and that the invention of stories is the most important part of human self-understanding and self-creation’’ (Kellner 1997, 128). It is by self-consciously drawing attention to the process of writing his novel that Cercas is able to come to terms with the sometimes maddening impossibility of achieving historical truth in any absolute way. Soldados de Salamina exposes the illusion of completeness in traditional historical discourse at the same time that it immortalizes the innumerable anonymous individuals who have driven history forward. While the straightness of any story is necessarily a rhetorical invention, the process of narrative invention gives meaning to our experience as human beings.

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6 Carlos Can˜eque Turns Metafiction against Itself CARLOS CAN˜EQUE’S QUIE´N [WHO], WHICH WON THE PREMIO NADAL in 1997, is the postmodern self-conscious novel par excellence. The book is made up of a first-person stream of consciousness, third-person omniscient points of view, transcripts of conversations, letters, scholarly prologues to critical editions of the novel, reviews of the book taken from newspapers and scholarly articles, and footnotes that comment upon the text. There are at least three possible ‘‘narrators’’—Antonio Lo´pez, Gustavo Horacio Gilabert, and Luis Lo´pez—and many other narrative voices appear throughout. Composed of such varied textual elements, the novel’s title alludes to the indeterminacy that characterizes the entire narrative: Who is the real author? Antonio Lo´pez, the first-person narrator of chapter 1 (and ostensibly the novel’s principal protagonist), is a defeated, unsuccessful, nihilistic college professor trapped in what he characterizes as a loveless marriage (1997, 24–25, 41–42). Nevertheless, this numbingly banal married life is useful to Antonio in at least one way, as it allows him the peace and quiet he needs in order to begin his novel: ‘‘[E]sta relacio´n le seguı´a aportando el calor y el orden mı´nimos que e´l intuı´a necesarios para poder escribir su novela’’ (25). [This relation provided him with the minimal amounts of warmth and order that he thought necessary in order to write his novel.] Many of the novel’s unnumbered sections deal directly with Antonio’s narcissistic desire to write the novel that will save him from his ‘‘doloroso anonimato’’ (14) [painful anonymity]. To publish a great novel represents the protagonist’s chance for personal redemption. He constantly reiterates that the only way out of his spiritual and emotional malaise would be to write a 166

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critically acclaimed book, but, as the novel progresses, it becomes increasingly apparent that he lacks the willpower to complete his project. The novel becomes, then, the documentation of both his preparations and, to a lesser degree, his actual writing of the novel, in spite of the fact that he believes that he arrived too late in the distribution of talent (12–13). The story of Quie´n is simple enough: Antonio Lo´pez, the defeated, unsuccessful college professor has decided to write a novel, which will be an extended Borges story that, when published, will save him from his painful anonymity. Quie´n documents the process by which he writes this novel, which he has tentatively entitled Proyecto de mono´logo para la soledad de G. H. Gilabert [Monologue Project for the Solitude of G. H. Gilabert.] It is about an older book publisher named Gilabert, who is, in turn, writing a novel called Lo´pez y yo [Lo´pez and I] about a defeated, unsuccessful college professor who is writing a novel about an older publisher who is writing a novel about a college professor, and so on. The novel’s discourse is inscribed within the context of world literature. In a case of Bloomian literary anxiety much like that of the narrator of Amat’s Todos somos Kafka, Antonio Lo´pez strives to sublimate the influence of his literary forebears. From the second page Lo´pez expresses his frustration with the literary enterprise: ‘‘Me gustarı´a escribir, por ejemplo, pronto estare´ muerto. Pero esas palabras ajenas no serı´an apreciadas por los lectores, los crı´ticos las considerarı´an triviales, mis amigos tal vez las celebrarı´an con la condescendencia que provoca la imagen especular del Fracaso’’ (13). [I would like to write, for example, soon I will be dead. But those alien words would not be appreciated by my readers, the critics would consider them trivial, and my friends would probably celebrate them with the condescension that springs from the spectacular image of Failure.] This is, of course, an explicit allusion to the work from which Can˜eque has taken the novel’s first epigraph, a self-reflexive quotation from Samuel Beckett’s Malone Dies, in which the dying Malone says, ‘‘I shall soon be quite dead at last in spite of all’’ (1959, 243).1 The novels are similar also in that they share the metafictional theme of writing, while the reader of both novels must piece together his or her own meaning from the many disparate narrative threads that constitute the novels.

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Jorge Luis Borges and I Just a cursory look through the hundreds of critical articles and books devoted to the work of Jorge Luis Borges reveals a surprising dearth of material dealing with his influence in Spain. There have been a few studies of his ultraista days and importance to the Spanish avant-garde, but there exists very little on Borges’s evolving presence in contemporary Spanish narrative. This is surprising, considering his importance in novels by the most popular and critically acclaimed authors writing in Spain today. Javier Marı´as, Rosa Montero, Nuria Amat, Juan Jose´ Milla´s, Antonio Mun˜oz Molina, and Carlos Ruiz Zafo´n have all drawn upon Borges as a literary model. Indeed, Camilo Jose´ Cela could not have been more wrong when he wrote in Indice in 1953 that ‘‘Jorge Luis Borges is a phantom, he is the great bluff of Argentine literature. At times an unsophisticated young lady may perhaps find his stories acceptable. Jorge Luis Borges is a hybrid product without any great interest’’ (qtd. in Stabb 1991, 111, italics in original). Fine exceptions to this critical oversight are Edward T. Gurski’s essay, ‘‘Antonio Mun˜oz Molina and Jorge Luis Borges: Buried Intertextualities in Beatus Ille’’ and Marco Kunz’s ‘‘Quie´n: Can˜eque, Borges y las paradojas de la metaficcio´n.’’ Aside from his importance in Can˜eque’s work, Kunz mentions Borges’s influence in the work of Juan Bonilla and Pedro Zarraluki, and concludes his essay by positing that Can˜eque’s novel is a parody of metafiction that ends with a paradox: ‘‘Quie´n is at the same time its admiring apotheosis, and by taking the themes of the genre to their extremes, he dismantles them and celebrates them at the same time’’ (2004, 76). Carlos Can˜eque is an exemplary case of contemporary Spanish authors’ continued engagement with Borges’s fiction. In Quie´n, Borges not only appears as a character, but his work also provides a formal paradigm: the novel’s structural patterning and thematic insistence on writing, translation, repetition, and reflection all point to Can˜eque’s indebtedness to Borges. This intertextual engagement is an important part of Carlos Can˜eque’s metafictional parody of the postmodern poetics of self-consciousness. Borges first appears as a character in Quie´n during a conference in Sitges, where Antonio Lo´pez has a conversation with Borges on the hotel balcony. Borges is amused by his fan and the

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two converse for a while, until Lo´pez, having just swallowed a bag of marijuana, begins to hallucinate. He wakes up later on the balcony after having dreamt that Borges was floating about in the air (and later, Antonio runs into Borges again at a bookstore, and they talk about ‘‘La biblioteca de Babel’’ [The Library of Babel] and ‘‘La muerte y la bru´jula’’ [Death and the Compass], which Borges says are imperfect stories, confessing that he would have liked to have changed some elements of each). Borges does not only appear in the drug-induced dreams of the protagonist. Throughout the novel there appear episodes from Borges’s life: after undergoing an emergency dental procedure in Sitges, for example, Borges signs a book at the request of his dentist. In a humorous twist, it turns out that the book he has signed is not his own, but rather a collection of comics by the Spanish cartoonist Forges. The Borgesian irony of this episode is not lost on Lo´pez, who wrote his doctoral dissertation on Borges. He says, ‘‘Borges, que ha llevado al ma´ximo de la elaboracio´n este´tica el arte de las falsas atribuciones, habı´a firmado un libro a un hombre que tambie´n lo tomaba por otro’’ (Can˜eque 1997, 107). [Borges, who has taken to the extreme the aesthetic elaboration of the art of false attributions, had signed a book for a man who had also taken him for someone else.] This same anecdote appears verbatim in the introduction to Can˜eque’s other book entitled Conversaciones sobre Borges (1995), a collection of interviews with Borges scholars. The novel’s language is infused with Borgesian tones and themes. Antonio chooses to write his novel in a diary format through which he might, by chance, create some sort of meaningful whole out of his experiences. The ‘‘chance’’ he mentions is, of course, an overt reference to a famous quotation taken from Borges’s ‘‘La loterı´a de Babilonia’’ [The Lottery of Babylon], in which the narrator says that Babylon, which represents the universe, is nothing but ‘‘un infinito juego de azares’’ [an infinite game of chance]. Can˜eque’s narrator interjects that there is no such thing as chance: ‘‘[N]o hay azar, salvo que lo que llamamos azar es nuestra ignorancia de una compleja y secreta maquinaria de causalidades’’ (Can˜eque 1997, 28). [There is no chance, save that what we call chance is our ignorance of a complex and secret machinery of causalities.] With another Borgesian twist, another, extradiegetic, narrator includes a footnote that acknowledges Quie´n’s indebtedness to

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Borges, while engaging in a bit of academic parody. The footnote reads: En el original en catala´n, la frase entre pare´ntesis es una traduccio´n literal de otra de Borges, lo que nos ha animado a traducirla directamente con las palabras del autor argentino, que, en este caso, convierten la frase en castellano en el original del original. En lo sucesivo, obraremos de igual forma cuando vuelvan a repetirse casos similares. (28) [In the original Catalan, the phrase that appears in parentheses is a literal translation of another Borges quotation, which has inspired us to translate it directly with the words of the Argentine author, which, in this case, turns the phrase in Castilian into the original of the original. In future cases, the editors will follow the same rule as necessary.]

This footnote not only shares in Borges’s characteristic sense of humor, but also significantly includes several of Borges’s favorite themes—namely, translation, repetition and reflection—all of which are employed throughout Quie´n. The comedy of this quotation is reminiscent of ‘‘Pierre Menard,’’ particularly in its pedantic academic tone and caricature of the critical enterprise in the form of comically erudite editorial commentary. At the novel’s conclusion, just as the mysterious figure of ‘‘Las ruinas circulares’’ [The Circular Ruins] is revealed to be the dream of another, so does Antonio wind up being a character in a book written by someone else. Further, his efforts as a writer and as a character are ridiculed within the very novel he is attempting to write. After his death, Teresa, Antonio’s former lover, and a graduate student writing a dissertation on the theme of masks in Pessoa and Borges, critiques his project, telling his brother that he was obsessed with a novel that he had barely begun: ‘‘[Q]uerı´a hacer una especie de parodia de los cuentos de Borges, construir un personaje que reprodujera los de sus relatos, que participara de sus procedimientos literarios’’ (Can˜eque 1997, 205). [He wanted to write a kind of parody of Borges’s stories, to construct a character that would replicate those of his tales, that would share his methods.] Teresa describes the painstaking process by which Antonio had attempted to re-create Borges’s fiction in a longer narrative form: ‘‘[H]acı´a esquemas en los que el cı´rculo era el principal sı´mbolo referencial: los dibujaba conce´n-

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tricos y los llenaba con los nombres que les daba a los distintos planos de realidad; yo me perdı´a en esos laberintos y e´l se esforzaba en explica´rmelo todo con una energı´a apabullante que me obligaba a escucharle con toda mi atencio´n’’ (205). [He made diagrams in which the circle was the principal referential symbol: he drew them concentrically and filled them with names that he gave to the various planes of reality; I would get lost in those labyrinths and he took great pains to explain everything to me with an overwhelming energy that compelled me to listen to him with all my attention.] Antonio’s obsession with Borges pervades every level of the novel’s structure. The Borgesian elements of Quie´n include: 1. A constant engagement with the literary tradition, real and invented; inter- and intratextuality 2. A narrator or narrators who conspire against the unseeing protagonist (as in ‘‘La muerte y la bru´jula’’ and ‘‘El jardı´n de senderos que se bifurcan’’ [The Garden of the Forking Paths]) 3. A circular structure (‘‘Las ruinas circulares’’) 4. A purposeful blurring of reality and fiction (in which a dream appears to consume reality, as in ‘‘El sur’’ [The South] and ‘‘El milagro secreto’’ [The Secret Miracle]) 5. Humor based on human vanity and futility, or academic pedantry (‘‘La muerte y la bru´jula’’ and ‘‘Pierre Menard’’)2 I have noted at least fifty-two explicit mentions of Borges and his fiction in the novel: a taxi driver reminds Antonio of ‘‘Funes el memorioso’’ (Can˜eque 1997, 126) [Funes the Memorious]; he sees the cat that appears at the end of ‘‘El sur.’’ He makes brief mention of ‘‘La busca de Averroes’’ [The Search of Averroes] quoting the protagonist’s final meditation: ‘‘[S]entı´ en la u´ltima pa´gina que mi narracio´n era un sı´mbolo del hombre que yo fui mientras la escribı´a’’ (Can˜eque 1997, 171). [On the last page I felt that my narration was a symbol of the man I was while I wrote it.] As the novel reaches its conclusion and Antonio finally loses his tenuous grip on reality, he has a series of dreams—again, due perhaps to the massive amounts of marijuana he has been enjoying—in which he participates in conversations with Cide Hamete Benengeli, Avellaneda, Cervantes, Don Quixote, Pierre

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Menard, Unamuno, and Augusto Pe´rez, and with his own character/author Gilabert, who plays Don Quixote to his Sancho. Virtually the entire tradition of Spanish self-referential writing appears in this section, alongside the authors and characters of great works from the Western tradition. Gilabert becomes Virgil and Antonio is Dante, and at the gates of hell they see various sinners playing with a globe; nearby are Fernando Savater and E. M. Cioran, while Charles Foster Kane repeats ‘‘Rosebud’’ over and over, accompanied by several characters from Dante’s Inferno—Pier della Vigna, Ugolino, and Ruggieri degli Ubaldini. Quie´n is a novel about writing a novel. It is also a text about literary influence and admiration that addresses concretely the complexity involved in dealing with an anxiety of literary influence. The result is an engaging parody of the experimental novel’s preoccupation with complicated textual forms. For Quie´n, in spite of its multiple textual elements and superficially complicated form, is in fact quite easy to read and engages the reader in a satisfying literary dialogue. The novel’s complicated structure and metanarratorial conceits function perhaps as the representation of a writer’s fragmented psyche as he attempts to incorporate the literary tradition. The novel is also a dramatization of the formation of an authorial identity in which a narrator reflects self-consciously on what he wishes to become as a writer. The novel’s intertextual play also offers a ludic counterbalance to the more nihilistic conceptions of postmodernism. Quie´n is a game in which metafiction is stretched to its extremes, parodying all metafictional texts, premodern, modern, and postmodern, in order to draw attention simultaneously to the creative process and the dynamic nature of the reader’s reconstruction of the written text. Can˜eque, like his literary forebear Borges, takes an iconoclastic approach to the literary tradition. Citing Crossan, Martin Stabb writes that the essence of Borges’s iconoclasm ‘‘lies in his ‘comic subversion of one giant and central aspect of our literary heritage, the tradition of the Book. And especially of its most fascinating example, the Realistic Novel’ ’’ (1991, 109). In ‘‘Magias parciales del Quijote,’’ Borges points to part 2 of Don Quixote, in which the illustrious Manchegan reads his own adventures in part 1. Stabb discusses how ‘‘these inversions suggest that if the characters in a story can be readers or spectators, then we, their readers and spectators can be fictitious’’ (Stabb

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1991, 46). Quie´n, like the Quixote and Borges’s best tales, inverts the positions of readers, writers, and critics, drawing the reader into the text and pushing its protagonists outward into our own world outside of the diegesis. Whoever the narrator of Quie´n may finally be, it is the process of reading and writing that gives the novel its meaning. Indeed, the novel’s circular structure points to the ongoing nature of literary endeavors; there is never any ‘‘final’’ project, only an ongoing dialogue between texts. And even though the question implicit in the novel’s title is never clearly answered, it really does not matter. Quie´n is a celebration of the creative process. It delights in the asking of the question, not in the answer. In a contemporary cultural context sometimes characterized by uncertainty, Quie´n makes clear that we can still take pleasure in narrative.

On beyond Borges Borges does not provide the only intertext in Quie´n. It can be argued that the novel is in fact about intertextuality. Can˜eque adopts two levels of intertextual play, one overt, and the other buried. We might take as an example the beginning sentences of chapter four, in which Antonio Lo´pez enjoys a bath while smoking a joint made with hashish. Here the narrative contains an inlaid intertextual reference to Cien an˜os de soledad [A Hundred Years of Solitude]: ‘‘Muchos an˜os despue´s, cuando e´l apenas serı´a un leve perfil en la memoria de Silvia, ella recordarı´a la noche en que le pregunto´: ‘¿Es el humor una rama del sexo o el sexo una rama del humor?’ ’’ (Can˜eque 1997, 22). [Many years later, when he would only be an outline in the memory of Silvia, she would remember the night in which he asked her, ‘‘Is humor a branch of sex or is sex a branch of humor?’’] The result of this intertext is to link—at least superficially—Quie´n with the literary tradition. Another episode is reminiscent of Unamuno’s Niebla; in it Lo´pez dreams of entering the reality of a novel in order to meet the protagonist (Can˜eque 1997, 180). And in chapter 11, Lo´pez plays with possible titles for his novel, and fantasizes about the possible resonance that these might have in his readers: La Lopeceida [The Lopezeid], for example, might recall Virgil; Don

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Lopezote de la Mancha [Don Lopezote of La Mancha], Cervantes; El gran Lo´pez [The Great Lo´pez], F. Scott Fitzgerald; and Lo´pez y yo [Lo´pez and I], Borges’s famous essay ‘‘Borges y yo.’’ The authors who appear throughout the novel are not always fictional. Harold Bloom appears in a footnote in chapter 8, in which Luis, Antonio’s brother, drives through the rain from Valencia after just having gotten the news of his brother’s sudden death at the celebration of the Gracia´n award for literature. In this chapter, Luis remembers their past, their childhood, and feels some guilt for his role as dominant older brother. The narrator includes a footnote here that cites Harold Bloom’s (fictional) study, The Gilabert’s Paternities in ‘‘Lo´pez and I’’ [sic]. In this study the fictional Bloom points (of course) to Gilabert’s anxiety of his father’s influence (66). Literary comparisons appear throughout the novel. Lo´pez is compared to John Kennedy Toole, author of the Pulitzer Prize winning A Confederacy of Dunces (Can˜eque 1997, 18), and in a footnote the implied author points to the Spanish writer Luis Puente (19). Typically, the intertextual references to other works come in the form of explicit mentions of the classic authors of world literature: Borges, Cervantes, Unamuno, Beckett, Dante, Toole, Harold Bloom, Jardiel Poncela, Onetti.

On the Coincidence of Fiction and Criticism I discussed briefly in chapter 3 how Nuria Amat’s fiction reflects the collapse of traditional distinctions between criticism and literature in contemporary metafiction. Carlos Can˜eque’s Quie´n is similarly engaged in problematizing these distinctions. The novel is written within the boundaries of two literary traditions: one real, and one fictional. The ‘‘fictional’’ literary tradition is made up of the footnotes, prologues, and book reviews that are included in the novel’s discourse. Patricia Waugh has indicated that the metafictional novel can be an exploration of the theory of fiction through the practice of writing fiction, and is constructed based upon a fundamental opposition: ‘‘the construction of a fictional illusion (as in traditional realism) and the laying bare of that illusion’’ (1984, 6). Waugh agrees with Linda Hutcheon in suggesting that it is this opposition between the representation and the creation of that representation which

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produces in the metafictional novel a formal tension ‘‘which breaks down the distinctions between ‘creation’ and ‘criticism’ and merges them into the concepts of ‘interpretation’ and ‘deconstruction’ ’’ (Waugh 1984, 6). The collapse and intermingling of the worlds of criticism and creation is an important narrative strategy in contemporary Spanish fiction that appears perhaps most overtly and amusingly in Quie´n. In Can˜eque’s novel, criticism appears constantly within the fictional space, both in the form of critical footnotes and as chapters that mimic critical introductions or prologues to ‘‘scholarly’’ editions of the very novel we hold in our hands. Chapter 6, for example, is an introduction to a scholarly edition of Gilabert’s novel Lo´pez y yo, supposedly published in 1997, the same year as the publication of the novel Quie´n itself (the prologue, translation, and notes to an edition from 2026 are by a fictional critic named Francisco Rodrı´guez Cachuena). The narrative style of this chapter parodies the language and tone of scholarly editions of novels. The narrator of this chapter analyzes the novel Lo´pez i jo (1997), by Gustau Horaci Gilabert, a work that was supposedly translated from the Catalan into Spanish. The novel is apparently one part of a trilogy written originally in Catalan, whose other titles are Toda la realidad de mi suen˜o [All the Reality of My Dream] and El espejo de mi cara [The Mirror of My Face]. The fictional critic who writes this prologue calls the novel a pioneering example of ‘‘la generacio´n interactiva’’ [the interactive generation] born of metafiction, which has spread over all Europe and North America. The narrator/critic named Cachuena discusses briefly Gilabert’s style, which he characterizes as a ‘‘delirious’’ narrative voice that jumps without apparent justification between essayistic academic prose and a dramatic, egocentric stream of consciousness (Can˜eque 1997, 48). Cachuena points out that the reader must participate, not only in the construction of the story but also in the construction of his or her own identity: ‘‘[S]e ubica ası´ el protagonista en el centro de un universo paro´dicoexistencial que impulsa al lector a practicar una suerte de interaccio´n ritualizada con su propia identidad’’ (48). [Thus the protagonist finds himself in the center of a parodic existential universe that forces the reader into a kind of ritualized interaction with his or her own identity.] This technique reflects our own experience in reading Quie´n.

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The novel by Gilabert that is described in Quie´n seeks to transcend the boundaries even of metafiction, and goes much further that Can˜eque can with his own work. Gilabert’s project approximates what Borges might have imagined had he lived in the digital age. In a bid to transcend the conventional materiality of the book, Gilabert publishes his novel simultaneously in CD-ROM format, which, according to a fictional critic’s comments, began a veritable revolution. By breaking with traditional typography, Gilabert is able to write the first truly interactive novel: Ya en la primera versio´n interactiva disen˜ada por el propio Gilabert, se abrı´an mas de dos mil ventanas (unas se convertı´an en racimos de nuevas ventanas, otras en espejos en los que el propio lector podı´a ver su cara) que hacı´an de la novela un texto que en ocasiones se leı´a y, en otras, se escribı´a. (48) [In the first interactive version designed by Gilabert himself, there were more than two thousand windows that would open (some became clusters of new windows, others became mirrors in which the reader could see his or her own face) that would make the novel into a text that sometimes you read and other times you wrote.]

Thus, Can˜eque plays with reader reception theories in which the act of reading is ascribed a primal role in the construction of the story, while simultaneously making a nod to Borges, who undoubtedly would have found the implications of Gilabert’s project fascinating. At the same time, Can˜eque addresses new electronic media in the 1990s that many believed would make the printed book obsolete.3 There is an academic prologue intercalated into Quie´n that represents a self-reflexive commentary on itself (Can˜eque 1997, 50–51), and throughout the novel there appear a series of footnotes that point out technical, structural, and thematic narrative devices at play in the work. For example, in a humorous episode in which a woman argues with her husband on the telephone and appeals to Lo´pez to give her coins and to speak to her reticent lover, there appears a footnote referring to a fictional article by Jaime Alazraki (Can˜eque 1997, 153), who points out the Borgesian character of the protagonist’s words. And in chapter 17, another footnote suggests a similarity between Antonio’s lovemaking with his lover, Sandra, in which he changes personality and calls her ‘‘cerda’’ [pig], making reference to the novel A

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rebours by the French decadent novelist J. K. Huysmans (specifically, the ventriloquist mistress taken by the protagonist Jean). The criticism of the novel that appears within itself is not always positive. In chapter 18 there appears a negative critical reaction to the novel (that we are reading) in the form of a newspaper book review entitled ‘‘La imposibilidad de una ficcio´n’’ [The Impossibility of a Fiction], published in El Heraldo de Asturias, a real newspaper published regionally in Spain. In this review, the apparently fictional critic Jose´ Luis Gonza´lez Garcı´a writes about the problematic nature of the novel by Lo´pez that has won the Gracia´n Prize, suggesting that it is not really a novel. The reviewer notes that Teresa Ga´lvez, Lo´pez’s lover and student, submitted the work to the literary contest without his knowing. In particular, the fictional reviewer is harshly critical of the novel’s confusion of reality and fiction, and is hesitant to categorize the work as a novel at all (173). The author of this chapter continues his acerbic criticism of the novel, stating that the text lacks any narrative structure and is, in purely literary terms, a mediocre imitation of Borges (174). The critic comments directly upon what we have already read by describing the reader’s experience upon reading Lo´pez’s work, with its frustrating lack of organization and self-referentiality. As I suggested in my introduction, self-conscious narrative has seen its share of critics, who lament the postmodern novel’s fascination with self-consciousness as a mere descent into nihilistic relativism. By including negative critiques of the novel within itself, Can˜eque parodies with humor the more negative critics of cultural postmodernism. The convergence of criticism and fiction goes hand in hand with the inherent self-reflexivity of the novel, as many chapters are devoted to documenting the process by which Gilabert writes his novel. Another critic included in the novel suggests that Gilabert’s work can be read as a self-referential discussion of the very novel we hold in our hands. She essentially describes the plot and structure of Quie´n: [L]a novela esta´ plagada de textos que, desde un punto de vista lo´gico, nadie podrı´a incluir en ella: notas a pie de pa´gina de un supuesto prologuista que comenta la obra de Gilabert basa´ndose en las pole´micas que suscito´ en el mundo acade´mico, crı´ticas en perio´dicos

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que esta´n incluidas en la propia novela (de no haber sido escritas por esta humilde servidora, estas mismas lı´neas podrı´an pertenecer al texto de Gilabert). (213) [The novel is plagued by texts that, from a logical point of view, no one would be able to include with in it: footnotes by a supposed scholar who comments on Gilabert’s work based on the polemics that it caused in the academic world, newspaper reviews that are included inside the novel itself (if these very lines hadn’t been written by yours truly, they might pertain to Gilabert’s text).]

The novel’s metafictional commentary on itself creates a mise en abyme, in which the distinction between fiction and criticism disappears in an infinite series of inter- and intratextual references. And mirroring Borges’s own comments on the power of the Quixote to draw the reader into the world of fiction, the author of this book review, a fictional critic named Patricia Lacasa, concludes: ‘‘Gilabert parece, con su presencia dentro de esta brillante novela, querer advertirnos de una sorprendente simetrı´a: si los personajes de una ficcio´n pueden ser escritores de esa misma ficcio´n, nosotros, los lectores, podemos ser tambie´n ficticios . . .’’ (214). [With his presence in this brilliant novel, Gilabert draws our attention to a surprising symmetry: if the characters in a fictional work can be writers of that very fiction, we, the readers, could also be fictional . . . ] This is precisely the dynamic that is created in Quie´n, in which critics, scholars, journalists, and novelists share the pages with the fictional entities that are the objects of their study. Patricia Waugh writes that the metafictional text is that which ‘‘self-consciously and systematically draws attention to its status as an artifact in order to pose questions about the relationship between fiction and reality’’ (1984, 2). Waugh underlines that through this self-reflexive criticism of their own processes of coming into being, such novels ‘‘not only examine the fundamental structures of narrative fiction, they also explore the possible fictionality of the world outside the literary fictional text’’ (2). Metafiction, writes Mark Currie, represents the ‘‘convergence where fiction and criticism have assimilated each other’s insights, producing a self-conscious energy on both sides’’ (1995, 2). In this way, novels like Can˜eque’s draw the reader into the construction of the dialogue between writing and interpretation that emphasizes the dynamic processes that em-

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body both activities. In the following section, I will address specifically the relationship between the narrative process and the final literary product in Quie´n, and how the self-conscious emphasis on the process over the product emphasizes the importance of narrative to our understanding of reality.

Process over Product Quie´n is a text that emphasizes its own coming into being by drawing constant attention to the writing process. From the novel’s first chapter, its protagonist, Antonio Lo´pez, reflects on the writing of the novel that the reader holds. He dreams of writing a novel that will justify scholarly prologues by important future academics and professors: ‘‘un texto que se situ´a en las fronteras de la literatura, que marca la divisoria, un texto que se cierne para sen˜alarnos los lı´mites’’ (Can˜eque 1997, 14). [a text that situates itself on literature’s frontier, that marks the dividing line, a text that divides itself in order to show us the limits]. Later, the narrator indicates that the writer is someone who finds his own world through language (39). This is the essence of Quie´n: more than a literary product, the novel is a celebration of the literary process and the importance of language. Antonio struggles with the process of writing his novel and decides finally that his present ‘‘project’’ of keeping a diary will help him in the definitive formulation of the novel. At first he has an oversimplified idea about what it means to write this work, and thinks that all he will have to do is fuse a few things together and cut out a few others, and then he will have his novel (40). Antonio decides to write everything down that occurs to him, and later he will put order to the chaotic mass of writing, giving it a final narrative form (41). Long before he has begun his novel, however, Antonio is already thinking about the praise he will receive for his work and how this praise would relieve his existential depression as a mediocre university professor of literature (Lo´pez often has nightmares in which university authorities remove him forcibly from his classroom while his students jeer and spit at him). Lo´pez outlines several possible plotlines for future novels, one of which corresponds exactly to his own story within Quie´n, in which a man dies of a heart attack upon learning that he has won a liter-

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ary prize. The novel would be about the winning novel and the story of all that happened before and after its publication (111). But Lo´pez spends more time thinking and writing about beginning his novel than he does actually writing, which is, in effect, a thematic representation of the novel’s principal structural conceit: Quie´n emphasizes the writing process over any final product. It is significant, then, that Lo´pez only begins to write his novel more than two-thirds of the way through, and he only decides to begin the novel in order to impress a graduate student named Teresa, who later becomes his lover and submits his ‘‘manuscript’’ to the literary prize competition. When he finally decides to write the novel he has been talking about, what he comes up with are two sentences that mirror exactly those that begin chapter 19. ‘‘Ya he comenzado mi novela’’ (200) [now I have begun my novel], he says, satisfied. But Antonio’s novel begins near the end of Quie´n. In this way, Can˜eque engages selfconsciously with the finite nature of narrative. As Hans Kellner writes, ‘‘[N]o narrative can seem continuous in its beginning and ending; there the fact that a narrative, a history, is a discontinuous thing in a world of discontinuous things becomes all too apparent’’ (1997, 129). This metafictional confusion of beginnings and endings demonstrates the arbitrary nature of the very concepts of a beginning, middle, and end, along with the ideological ramifications of such distinctions in narrative.

Reading and Coming-into-Being The act of reading is given particular prominence in Quie´n. Attention is drawn both to readers within the diegesis and to extradiegetical readers—both in the form of fictionalized critics whose words appear in footnotes and critical prologues and reviews of the novel—and the text act reader. Gilabert explains to his editor that when Teresa reads Antonio’s diary/manuscript, she becomes in fact another author. Reading becomes an invaluable element in the creative process. The mere fact that Teresa has read the diary and later submitted it without changing it transforms her into a coauthor, y no de una forma tan inocente, porque ella esta´ sumergida en las ma´scaras de Borges, en los hetero´nimos de Pessoa, en ‘‘Pierre Me-

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nard, autor del Quijote’’, y sabe que es el lector el que crea la obra, que no es la misma Biblia la que lee san Agustı´n y la que lee Marx. (193) [and not in such an innocent way, because she is submerged in the masks of Borges, the heteronyms of Pessoa, in ‘‘Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote,’’ and she knows that it is the reader who creates the work, and that the Bible that Saint Augustine reads is not the same one that Marx reads.]

The process of reading is linked with the process of writing. As Lo´pez writes, he draws attention not only to his writing but also to the reader’s participation in the creation of the fictional world. He views his potential readers as a sort of lover that he must woo (15). The narrators of the novel are always aware of their readers, predicting possible weaknesses of their novels and contemplating their future critical reception. Even before the various plots or story lines of the novel have taken form, readers and critics comment on the novel we are reading and affect our later reception of the text. In chapter 3, the reader finds a dialogue, described in the third person, in which five members of what appears to be a committee charged with the selection of a literary prize discuss Lo´pez’s novel. There is some contention as to its quality, and the discussion serves as a sort of criticism of the institution of literary prizes in general (17). There are a variety of literary prizes that continue to be given every year in Spain, and throughout Quie´n Can˜eque pokes fun at this literary fashion. One cannot forget, however, that although there is an implicit criticism of these prizes in the text, Quie´n received the prestigious Nadal Prize upon its publication. One speaker criticizes the novel—indeed, the very novel we are reading—saying that it is a work which lacks novelistic profundity, a ridiculous literary game: ‘‘[L]a novela carece por completo de densidad novelesca, es un jueguecito ridı´culo y sin ninguna gracia’’ (17). [The novel is completely lacking in novelistic density, it is a ridiculous little game without quality.] This entire chapter functions as an autocriticism of the novel itself, in which critics discuss the relative merits and shortcomings of Lo´pez’s novel: Lo malo de este Lo´pez es que no es un escritor; lo suyo parece realmente un diario y no porque allı´ haya un entramado narrativo que

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cree esa sensacio´n, sino ba´sicamente porque el autor debe de ser un idiota como el protagonista de esa infamia. (17) [The bad thing is that this Lo´pez is not a writer; what he has written actually looks like a diary, and not because there is a narrative structure that creates that impression, but basically because the author must be an idiot like the protagonist of that disgraceful text.]

Some members of the committee consider his work ‘‘pedante, ridı´culo’’ (18) [pedantic, ridiculous], while others disagree, finding the sincerity of Lo´pez’s project endearing and, above all, authentic: ‘‘[E]s muy gracioso que un tipo se desnude ası´, que es una novela verdadera, que hay que apoyar a los narradores con esta autenticidad, que Conrad debı´a de ser un ingenuo de este talante’’ (18). [It is funny that someone would bare himself like that. It’s a real novel, and we must support narrators with this kind of authenticity. Conrad must have been an inge´nue of this temper.] Thus, conflicting opinions of the novel are presented without the elevation of any one above the others. This multivalent critical point of view allows for a more ample interpretation of the novel itself, as the reader is permitted to read the novel either as a critical parody of the contemporary novel of metafiction, or as a humorous investigation of the craft of writing. The novel’s ‘‘true’’ meaning remains ambiguous, but the reader may interpret these different critical perspectives as a dramatization of the ongoing critical debate as to the characteristics, reception, and value of postmodern cultural production that continues between its apologists and critics. Also imbedded in this dialogue is a criticism of the literary market, in which editors search for fashionable young authors to promote in the interest of making them best-selling brandnames. Lorenzo Carren˜o, one of many characters that appear in the novel, criticizes his editor for wanting to sell books as if they were bars of soap: ‘‘[P]iensa que el secreto esta´ en encontrar jo´venes escritores con las que la gente se identifique’’ (19). [He thinks that the secret is to find young writers that people will identify with.] Consequently, Carren˜o criticizes Lo´pez’s novel, now echoing the common critical contention that metafiction represents either the death of the novel or a lamentable postmodern predicament: ‘‘Yo me niego a darle mi voto a una novela tan floja, a una novela que no es ni siquiera una novela, que tiene

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toda la pinta de un diario ingenuo y barato’’ (20). [I refuse to give my vote to such a weak novel, a novel that isn’t even a novel, that has every appearance of being an ingenuous, cheap diary.] Carren˜o’s negative commentary is contrasted with that of another member of the group, Marı´a Eugenia Castro, who sees sincerity, ingenuity, freshness, and innocence in Lo´pez’s work (21). A later conversation between Gilabert and his editor offers another direct commentary upon the novel. Gilabert wants his novel to reflect upon itself, ‘‘dobla´ndose y desdobla´ndose en mu´ltiples miradas y perspectivas’’ (73) [holding and unfolding itself through multiple perspectives and views]. He wants some characters to perceive the novel from varying angles and realities, and says, [U]n periodista podrı´a criticar la misma novela que el lector tiene enfrente, un personaje estarı´a intentando crear a otro personaje que tal vez serı´a ma´s verosı´mil que e´l, un prologuista podrı´a cobrar vida propia a trave´s de las notas a pie de pa´gina que le convierten progresivamente en un personaje ma´s de la novela. (73) [A journalist might criticize the novel that the reader has in front of him, another character might be trying to create another character who might be more believable than himself, a prologue writer could attain a life of her own through the footnotes which progressively transform her into yet another character in the novel.]

In this way, Gilabert insists that everything in his novel would be inside and outside of the text: the literary prize, the critical edition of the novel, publishing details, book reviews, letters written and sent between various characters, and the numerous conversations that refer to the novel that ‘‘nadie y todos escriben’’ (73) [no one and everyone writes]. Thus, the novel would become a completely open process in which its very characters philosophize about the artifice of the novel itself, finally making evident the presence of the author. Through the continual emphasis on the narrative process, Gilabert hopes to make the author visible (73). Gilabert’s perfect novel would have multiple plots and protagonists that would intertwine and interact. In this way, he would call into question the reader’s preconceived notions about reality and existence, leaving him with ‘‘un efecto de lucidez que le haga dudar de su propia condicio´n de realidad, que le cree una

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incertidumbre que le implique en la novela, transforma´ndole en un personaje capaz de salir y entrar, de escribir y ser escrito’’ (76) [a lucid effect that makes him doubt his own condition of reality, that creates an uncertainty that implicates him in the novel, transforming him in a character capable of entering and leaving, of writing and being written]. Gilabert’s editor points out that what he really wants to do is write an entirely metaliterary novel, a novel in which literature appears within literature ad infinitum (76). This is, of course, exactly what the novel Quie´n attempts to do in a parodical fashion. Gilabert explicitly articulates his literary goals throughout the novel. He confesses that he would like to write a novel about a character who writes about another writer who writes, in turn, about another writer. Each of these writers would have his or her own writerly motivations (76–77). These multiple realities would converge and become interrelated, creating a Borgesian infinite series of interconnected writers, readers, and characters. The novel that Gilabert proposes in his interview with his editor will be a choose-your-own adventure in which the reader can choose from the various plotlines: ‘‘Toda la novela podrı´a articularse por bloques en los que siempre se presentan tres senderos que se bifurcan’’ (79–80). [The entire novel could be articulated through blocks in each of which there would appear three bifurcating paths.] Gilabert’s would be a textual labyrinth in which reality and fiction would be mixed in such a way so as to disorient the reader and cause him or her to question language, narrative, representation, and reality. The novel’s metafictional play reaches its most absurd point in chapter 27, in which a professor of veterinary medicine, Angel Gonza´lez Villanueva, is finally contacted by the professor of philology, Andre´s Miguel Esteve, and they talk about the manuscript that the former had sent the latter, which was purportedly the same novel authored by Antonio Lo´pez that had won the Galaxia Prize. The novel takes a bizarre turn when Gonza´lez says that he was reading the novel and discovered that the letters that his colleague sent him were included in the novel itself: ‘‘[E]stuve hojeando un poco la novela (por cierto, no tengo ni la menor idea de quie´n puede ser su autor) y me llamo´ la atencio´n el hecho de que las cartas que me escribiste y adjuntaste con el paquete se reproducen literalmente dentro’’ (246). [I was leafing through the novel a little (the truth is, I have no idea who the author

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might be) and I was surprised to find that the letters you wrote me and included in the package with the book are literally reproduced inside of it.] Thus, with a fantastic turn, the novel seeks to create the illusion of being produced as it is read. And even as Gonza´lez and Esteve discuss the impossibility of the appearance of their correspondence inside the novel they are reading, their own conversation becomes a part of the novel: ‘‘[E]s imposible, es lo mismo que si me dijeras que esta conversacio´n que estamos teniendo tu´ y yo ahora por tele´fono, despue´s de colgar, vas y te la encuentras en la novela’’ (247). [It’s impossible, it is as if you were to tell me that this conversation that we are having right now over the telephone, after hanging up, were to appear in the novel.] Chapter 27 represents a series of fevered dreams that bring together all of the novel’s metafictional elements. Antonio dreams that he is Sancho to Gilabert’s Quijote, who fears that this will be their last adventure together. Antonio replies that the two will undoubtedly meet again in another novel by their author, perhaps in the second part of this very novel in which they find themselves now (252).4 Even this dream sequence is complemented by footnotes and scholarly incursions into the narrative. Antonio, for example, quotes the Quixote directly, and at the end of his quotation, there appears a footnote that refers to a ‘‘scandalous’’ article by a fictional E. J. Hartigan Jr. entitled ‘‘Interior Duplication and the Problem of Form: Cervantes vs Gilabert.’’ Hartigan suggests that the only discursive function of this ‘‘plagiarism’’ is to avoid having to imitate Cervantes (253). This fictional critic points out that all attempts at parody hide a secret kind of making fun. While Antonio’s dream continues, Gilabert/Quixote and Antonio/Sancho come across Benengeli, who scolds the ‘‘Curioso impertinente’’ (the main character of ‘‘Tales of Impertinent Curiosity’’) for appearing in a novel in which he has no business (254). To this he obstinately responds, ‘‘A mı´ me coloco´ aquı´ el autor’’ (254). [The author put me here.] Cide Hamete speaks up, saying ‘‘I am the author.’’ Gilabert and Antonio later come across two pale, sickly looking men arguing, who turn out to be Pierre Menard and Avellaneda, two authors of false Quixotes, while nearby an older gentleman with small eyes and a long white beard ‘‘conversa con un joven que juega a introducirse en la boca un Luger de doble can˜o´n’’ (255) [converses with a young

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man who pretends to put a double-barreled Luger in his mouth]. This is, of course, Augusto Pe´rez, who continues his conversation with Unamuno that began in Niebla (255). The character and his author continue to argue, and Unamuno points out the anachronism of Augusto’s pistol appearing in the middle of the Quixote. While the conversations continue among these metafictional figures of the past and present, Gilabert ventures a question from horseback, verbalizing the question inherent in the novel’s title: ‘‘Por favor, ¿saben ustedes quie´n es el autor de esta novela?’’ (256). [Please, does anyone know who the author of this novel is?] In a humorous twist, Unamuno approaches him and then falls to his knees, saying to Gilabert, ‘‘¡Maestro don Quijote, es usted el u´nico autor, el u´nico, el u´nico!’’ (256). [Master Don Quixote, you are the only author, the only one, the only one!]

The Truth about Metafiction Carlos Can˜eque’s strategic use of intertextuality in this novel is one way to acknowledge the power of narrative in structuring the literary self. Antonio Lo´pez is an extreme example of how literature affects the way that we experience and interpret reality. His reading of Borges gives him a model by which to live, but Quie´n demonstrates some of the pitfalls in following one author too closely, particularly when the author is Borges. Quie´n demonstrates how all readers, writers, authors, and even characters view reality through a lens polished by art. But in Antonio’s case, his intertextual lens is fragmented beyond his ability to decipher it or make meaning. The final flight into literary fantasy, in which Antonio meets Pierre Menard, Avellaneda, and Cervantes, can be interpreted as a chaotic view into an unmediated literary imagination in which texts and intertexts interact on many simultaneous levels without the benefit of critical distance. Quie´n shows what happens when we lose our perspective on the literary tradition and it begins to dominate our own narratives. In a valuable study on the importance of humor in postmodernism, Lance Olsen writes that ‘‘postmodern humor delights in its own sense of process. Indeed, process is everything because the goal is at best uncertain, at worst nonexistent’’ (1990, 19).

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Whoever its narrator may be, the process of writing Quie´n represents the primary thematic narrative element, so no single part stands out so much as the completion of the process at the conclusion of the text with its surprise ending. Nevertheless, even the ending is not really definitive, since the novel ends with the ‘‘true’’ author Luis beginning his own novel—the novel we have just finished reading. The work ends with the same paragraph with which it begins, and therefore its form suggests symbolically that the narrative process is infinite; there is never any ‘‘final’’ project, only a celebration of the creative process. Similarly, Can˜eque problematizes the notion of authorship. The implicit question in the novel’s title is never answered, nor is any final narrative product produced by any of the many narrators, writers, and compilers. Quie´n is a novel that delights in the asking of the question and is ultimately uninterested in the answer. Patricia Waugh suggests that metafictional play (and play in general, according to some sociologists) is a fictional response ‘‘to the sense of oppression by the endless systems and structures of present-day society—with its technologies, bureaucracies, ideologies, institutions and traditions’’ (1984, 38). Indeed, this would seem to be the case of Antonio Lo´pez, who is, in effect, suffering from an existential malaise brought on by his unfulfilling life as a professor, his failed marriage, and the onset of his midlife crisis. Thus, the novel’s complicated structure and metanarratorial conceits function in two ways: as a structural representation of his fragmented psyche and as a sort of ludic counterbalance to his crippling, nihilistic narcissism.

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Conclusion IN ‘‘DON QUIXOTE AT 400,’’ A BRIEF ARTICLE PUBLISHED ON FEBRUARY 23, 2005 in the Wall Street Journal, Harold Bloom writes that the first few years of the twenty-first century have shown how the novel as a genre ‘‘seems to be experiencing a long day’s dying.’’ He goes on to say that ‘‘our contemporary masters— Pynchon, Roth, Saramago and others—seem forced to retreat back to picaresque and the romance form, pre-Cervantine.’’ Bloom sounds the death knell for great works of literature in the electronic era, and asserts that ‘‘in our Age of Information and of ongoing Terror, the Cervantine novel may be as obsolete as the Shakespearean drama. I speak of the genres, and not of their supreme masters, who never will become outmoded’’ (Bloom 2005). Similarly, Gonzalo Navajas posits that the last two decades of Spanish cultural production have also seen ‘‘a reduction of the universal objectives of literature and of the humanities in general’’ (2005, 342), and that ‘‘doing literature today is a cultural activity just like any other’’ (342). While I do not pretend to dispute Bloom’s contention that Thomas Pynchon, Philip Roth, and Jose´ Saramago are among the more distinguished contemporary literary ‘‘masters,’’ I take issue with these kinds of nostalgic obituaries for the novel. Indeed, over the last twenty years in Spain and elsewhere there have appeared a significant number of literary novels that not only continue the narrative tradition of self-consciousness that began with Don Quixote, but that also engage with the universal themes evoked by Cervantes in his classic work. In Spain, novels such as Montero’s La hija del canı´bal (1997), Cercas’s Soldados de Salamina (2001), Mun˜oz Molina’s Sefarad (2001), Milla´s’s Dos mujeres en Praga (2002), and Ruiz Zafo´n’s La sombra del viento [Shadow of the Wind] (2002) have enjoyed a popular and critical success that has shown convincingly that the novel as a genre is alive and well in the contemporary Spanish cultural context. The international success of these works in translation and of recent metafictional 188

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novels in English by writers such as Jonathan Safran Foer, Yann Martel, Mark Haddon, and Jonathan Franzen (not to mention earlier fiction by Kurt Vonnegut, Margaret Drabble, and Joseph Heller) points to the inadequacy of the dire diagnoses offered by a cadre of literary critics over the last thirty years. As I mentioned in my introduction, True Lies is in part a response to those critics who continue to proclaim the death of the novel while insisting that the postmodern Spanish cultural milieu is an apocalyptic, posthuman, postliterate space. While True Lies is by no means an exhaustive study of narrative selfconsciousness in Spain, I have sought to illustrate how a narrative technique that thirty years ago seemed to augur the end of the novel has become part and parcel of the renewal of Spanish narrative.1 Choosing from a wide field of Spanish novelists, I offer here a focused analysis of recent metafiction by six significant Spanish novelists: Nuria Amat, Rosa Montero, Carlos Can˜eque, Javier Marı´as, Javier Cercas, and Juan Jose´ Milla´s. These authors are noteworthy because their novels represent emblematic examples of the versatility of self-consciousness as a narrative strategy. While their work is part of a greater novelistic tradition that can be traced from Cervantes through Unamuno to the present day, we see in their novels that the self-conscious dialogue between real-life author and fictional narrator has taken on new narrative functions and philosophical implications. In recent novels by Javier Marı´as and Javier Cercas, the interplay between extradiegetic ‘‘reality’’ and the fictional world of the novel functions in very different ways. When Marı´as appears in his own novel Negra espalda del tiempo, for example, he does not ask the same kinds of existential questions that Unamuno explores in Niebla. Rather, Marı´as’s work calls into question our ability to comprehend reality itself and interrogates the human desire to represent it through language. As David Herzberger points out, all of Marı´as’s fiction ‘‘celebrates the entire process of storytelling as the principal way in which we connect ourselves to the world and give it meaning’’ (2005, 205). But while Negra espalda del tiempo ends with an irresolvable question posed by a mysterious narrator, Javier Cercas’s Soldados de Salamina transcends the ambiguous distinction between historical reality and fictional discourse in order to show how the processes of recuperating historical memory can have

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an impact in helping us to learn about ourselves. Cercas’s novel is concerned less with hermeneutic confusion and more with how narrative allows us to revisit critically the construction of historical discourse and, in so doing, recuperate lost or repressed national memories. Similarly, the self-referential conceits that Rosa Montero employs in La hija del canı´bal point to the importance of narrative in making sense of human experience. From the multiple points of view that she uses to tell her story, Lucı´a, the principal narrator and protagonist of the novel, self-consciously sets out to form a coherent narrative whole. The appearance of Rosa Montero’s name within her own work of fiction draws attention to the fluid medium of narrative and acknowledges the interrelated roles of reality and fiction in the construction of the self. In the novels of Juan Jose´ Milla´s, the dynamics of reading and writing texts allow his narrators and protagonists to understand the ways in which narrative mediates their experience of reality. The author’s metafictional preoccupation with writing and reading is an ever-present way by which his characters chart their subjectivities and attempt to arrive at a greater understanding of self. Although they often acknowledge the ultimate unreliability of cartographic metaphors, for Milla´s’s characters writing is a symbolic cartographic act by which they are able to find their points of reference and orient themselves in their geographical, spiritual, and personal territories. If Milla´s, Montero, Marı´as, and Cercas put narrative selfconsciousness to new uses, Carlos Can˜eque delights in poking fun at the postmodern novel’s potential narcissism by posing the question, ‘‘Who is the real author of a novel?’’ Unlike Unamuno’s works, Can˜eque’s self-referential novels are not concerned with finding an ultimate answer; rather, his narrators play with the writing process and are seemingly unconcerned with the final product. Quie´n can be read as a game in which metafiction is stretched to its extremes, parodying all metafictional texts, premodern, modern and postmodern, in order to draw attention to the creative process and the dynamic nature of not only writing, but also the reader’s reconstruction of the written text. In Todos somos Kafka and La intimidad, Nuria Amat problematizes the processes of literary creation by representing the universal struggle to sublimate the anxiety of literary influence. In both novels, the narrator seeks to overcome the trauma in-

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duced by her readings of the canonical male writers of the Western tradition. Reflected in their discourses are fragmented, porous subjectivities that attempt to understand the complexities involved in the formation and articulation of authorial and personal identities. Metafiction is here to stay. Indeed, it is only because of the sheer number of recent novels that employ self-conscious textual strategies that I have been forced to exclude many excellent novelists: Antonio Mun˜oz Molina, Gonzalo Torrente Ballester, Alberto Escudero, Juan Goytisolo, and Luis Goytisolo, to name a only a few. Nor are the postmodern poetics of self-consciousness by any means limited to the novel. A compelling future study might address cinematic manifestations of self-conscious storytelling in Spain. The films of Pedro Almodo´var, for example, are almost exclusively concerned with the processes involved in film and theater production and how those processes are linked to the narrative construction of personal identity (and correlative concepts of gender and sexuality). Further, La mala educacio´n [Bad Education] (2004) marks a new phase in the director’s work in which storytelling and sexuality are linked intimately to the reconstruction and representation of Spanish history. In many of Almodo´var’s films, the self-reflexive inclusion of films and plays within the narrative draws attention to the constructedness of the filmic medium while simultaneously pointing to the processes undergone by the protagonists, who in effect ‘‘produce’’ their own personae. I conclude by repeating my introductory assertion: narrative self-consciousness is everywhere. From the films of Almodo´var, Spike Jonze, and Michael Winterbottom to the music videos of Michel Gondry, and from literary novels by John Edgar Wideman, Italo Calvino, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Umberto Eco, Margaret Drabble, Kjell Westo¨, and Yann Martel to children’s books by Barbara Lehman and Anthony Browne, it is clear that narrative self-consciousness continues to evolve and develop as a trope. The popularity of self-consciousness in contemporary cultural contexts does not foretell the end of the novel or signify a descent into a cultural space of moral relativism and meaningless simulacra. Nor should metafiction be condemned as a mere narcissistic game. As Brian Stonehill suggests in his book, The SelfConscious Novel (1988), ‘‘[F]ar from being decadent, gratuitous, or morally irresponsible, self-depicting fiction may, at its best,

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remain playful while retaining serious literary claims to ethical responsibility’’ (18). Through their continued exploration of the many possibilities of self-conscious narrative strategies, contemporary Spanish authors show how metafiction is ‘‘one of the most convincing and compelling forms available to our writers for the expression of what is truly important today’’ (18). When we peer into our narratives in order to contemplate the multifarious processes of literary creation, we can also understand better the ways in which we write our own histories, our identities, and ourselves. The novels that I discuss here not only draw attention to the creative process, but also seek to question the relationship between reality and make-believe, to examine the dynamic nature of the formation of personal identity, to problematize the historiographical enterprise, to evaluate critically the processes of canon formation, and to parody themselves and the poetics of self-consciousness. Human beings are innately self-conscious, and as long as we continue to think, we will carry on wondering about the workings of the human mind. In the same way, as long as they go on writing, novelists in Spain and elsewhere will continue to use narrative as a vehicle for understanding the formation of literary texts. Narrative is a way for us to examine who we are and how we perceive, interpret, and report our disparate experiences of reality. I think it is safe to say that that the self-consciousness that played such an important role in the first modern novel—Don Quixote—will continue to exist and evolve. As long as we endeavor to understand ourselves, the intricacies of human consciousness, and our experience of the world, so will our novels continue to reflect this search through their own self-conscious self-examination.

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Notes Introduction 1. Gonzalo Sobejano (1989, 4) recapitulates Spire’s taxonomy of modern Spanish metafictional novels in his essay ‘‘Novela y metanovela en Espan˜a’’ [Novel and Metanovel in Spain] and adds many works to the list. The novels that Spires already included in Beyond the Metafictional Mode appear in boldface. Sobejano designates the following as ‘‘metanovels of writing’’: Tiempo de destruccio´n [Time of Destruction] (1962–63), Recuento (1973), Juan sin tierra (1975), Los verdes de mayo hasta el mar (1976), La novela de Andre´s Choz (1976), La isla de los Jacintos Cortados [The Island of the Jacintos Cortados] (1980), La trı´bada falsaria [The Lying Lesbian] (1980), Paisajes despue´s de la batalla [Landscapes after a Battle] (1982), Mazurca para dos muertos [Dance for Two Corpses] (1983), Cartas de amor de un sexagenario voluptuoso [Love Letters by a Voluptuous Sexagenarian] (1983), Papel mojado [Wet Paper] (1983), La trı´bada confusa [The Confused Lesbian] (1984), Estela del fuego que se aleja [Trace of an Ever-Distant Fire] (1984), El hijo adoptivo [The Adopted Son] (1984), Letra muerta [Dead Letter] (1984), La orilla oscura [The Dark Shore] (1985), and El desorden de tu nombre (1989). ‘‘Metanovels of reading’’: Fragmentos de Apocalipsis (1977), La muchacha de las bragas de oro (1978), La co´lera de Aquiles (1979), El castillo de la carta cifrada (1979). ‘‘Metanovels of oral discourse’’: Sen˜as de identidad [Marks of Identification] (1966), Reivindicacio´n del Conde Don Julia´n [The Vindication of the Count Don Julia´n] (1970), Dia´logos del anochecer [Dusk Dialogues] (1972), Fabia´n (1977), El cuarto de atra´s (1978), Makbara (1980), Teorı´a del conocimiento [Theory of Knowledge] (1981), Sabas (1982), and Dia´logos de alta noche [Late-Night Dialogues] (1982). 2. In his book, Metaficcio´n espan˜ola en la posmodernidad [Spanish Metafiction of Postmodernity] (2003), Antonio Sobejano-Mora´n revisits many Spanish authors of the mid-1970s to the mid-1980s included in Spires’s study. The ´ lvaro Cunqueiro, and Miguel Esauthor also includes novels by Juan Benet, A pinosa. 3. Holloway makes a compelling final case for a more nuanced understanding of the contemporary Spanish novel, which he divides into roughly four categories: 1. the experimental novel; 2. the postmodern novel; 3. the novela social (the social novel); and 4. the novela de crisis subjetiva (the crisis of subjectivity novel). I have chosen, however, to resist the taxonomical impulse in my discussion of Montero, Milla´s, Amat, Marı´as, Cercas, and Can˜eque, because so many of their novels defy concrete categorization. Montero’s La hija del canı´bal, for example, is a decidedly postmodern novel about a narrator’s crisis of subjectivity. An important part of the work, furthermore, is comprised

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by another narrator’s reflections on his experiences before, during, and after the Spanish Civil War.

Chapter 1. Rosa Montero 1. Translations of all literary works and primary sources immediately follow the original Spanish quotations. All critical and theoretical sources are quoted either in the original English or in English translation. These translations are my own, unless otherwise noted. 2. Lucı´a sees reflections of herself throughout the novel. Aside from her explicit doubles, she makes sustained references to mirrors and reflections, especially insofar as men are concerned: a male love-interest becomes for Lucı´a an ‘‘espejo oscuro’’ (Montero 1997, 154), [a dark mirror]. She refers to ‘‘el espejo oscuro, esa perversio´n que nos refleja’’ (246) [a dark mirror, that perversion that reflects us]; and the mystery of Constantino, her supposed lover, is an ‘‘espejo encantado’’ (160) [enchanted mirror] and an ‘‘espejante quimera’’ (161) [a reflecting chimera]. 3. In this chapter and throughout this book, I refer to many of the intertexts and Borgesian narrative strategies that represent a recurring structural element in contemporary Spanish novels. Of those works included in this book, the narrator of El corazo´n del Ta´rtaro refers to Borges’s ‘‘El traidor Mirval’’ [Mirval the Traitor] as a thematic model, and Carlos Can˜eque’s Quie´n makes a concentrated use of a Borgesian subtext as its fundamental narrative device. Borges also appears throughout Milla´s, Marı´as, and Cercas both explicitly and through buried intertextual references. 4. Lucı´a is not unlike the eponymous narrator of Las barbaridades de Ba´rbara (1996), who takes pride in her talent of creating stories—‘‘Escribo y cuento historias, y las cuento tan bien que cuando abro la boca los dema´s me escuchan’’ (Montero 1996, 23). [I write and tell stories, and I tell them so well that when I open my mouth everyone listens to me.] Storytelling functions as Ba´rbara’s survival device. In describing her own skill as a narrator, Ba´rbara uses language very similar to that employed by Lucı´a to describe the African Rosa Montero: ‘‘[S]ı´ se´ que gracias a este truco encontre´ un sitio. Y que ahora abro la boca y los dema´s me escuchan’’ (Montero 1996, 33). [I know that thanks to this trick I was able to find a place for myself. And that now when I open my mouth everyone listens to me.] 5. While Concha Alborg has argued convincingly that metafiction functions in Montero’s earlier work as a method of emphasizing feminist issues (1988, 73), in La hija del canı´bal metafiction takes on a more universal relevance, as it allows the narrator to engage critically with the problem of personal identity and how narrative gives shape to human consciousness. Javier Escudero emphasizes the universal themes of Montero’s fiction and suggests that the sociopolitical and feminist issues that predominated in her early work have been progressively substituted by metaphysical preoccupations. He writes that ‘‘Rosa Montero confirms that literary creation has become for her an instrument for metaphysical exploration that allows her to investigate the unfathomable mysteries of the human condition’’ (1999, 98).

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6. She informs the reader, for example, that she changed the date of her husband’s disappearance for a better dramatic effect, having written that he was kidnapped on December 28th—the Day of the Innocents—while in fact he had disappeared on the 30th. 7. A recurring theme in the novel is the relationship between children and their progenitors, and the transmission of family characteristics. The hereditary transformation of a woman who becomes, in middle age, her mother, is described with the gothic language of the cannibal and vampire. If her father is a cannibal, the influence of Lucı´a’s mother is described with vampiric terms. She refers to ‘‘la cadena maternal interminable de vampirizadas y vampiras’’ (Montero 1997, 115) [the interminable maternal chain of vampirizations and vampiros] and an ‘‘invasio´n gene´tica de la hija, una posesio´n diabo´lica de su cuerpo y su espı´ritu’’ (115) [a genetic invasion of the daughter, an almost diabolical possession of her body and spirit]. 8. We may relate Lucı´a’s obsession with teeth and tooth loss to the cannibal trope. In La hija del canı´bal, Lucı´a’s loss of her upper teeth is linked explicitly with the loss of her unborn child in a car accident. Psychoanalysis provides a lens for reading the symbolism of this event. Cirlot points out the association between the loss of one’s teeth and infertility (1962, 332). This explains, in part, Lucı´a’s discomfort when she visits the office of Marı´a Martina, the federal judge investigating her husband’s implication in government corruption. The judge, the secretary, and even the judge’s cat had all given birth, causing Lucı´a to admit, ‘‘[E]estaba deseando irme de ese cuarto asfixiante, de ese despachou´tero’’ (Montero 1997, 274). [I really wanted to get out of that suffocating room, that office-uterus.] In Las barbaridades de Ba´rbara, the eponymous narrator articulates a similar obsession with tooth loss (Montero 1996, 10). 9. This same dynamic can be seen also in some of Montero’s earlier fiction. In her excellent essay, ‘‘Postmodern Fantasy and Montero’s Temblor: The Quest for Meaning,’’ Anne Hardcastle concludes that throughout Temblor, ‘‘we can see both the pessimistic and the optimistic aspects of Postmodernism as it strives to deconstruct and reconstruct meaning’’ (2000, 435), and much like Lucı´a Romero, the protagonist of Temblor ‘‘learns to create her own provisional meaning and dares to live without any external validation of it’’ (Hardcastle 2000, 435). By considering competing philosophical perspectives, Hardcastle qualifies as one of several critics who have sought to distance the discussion of Spanish postmodernism from the negative school.

Chapter 2. Mapping the Storied Self I owe the title of the ‘‘Mapping the Space’’ section to Matthew J. Marr, whose essay, ‘‘Mapping the Space of Self: Cartography and the Narrative Act in Esther Tusquets’s El mismo mar de todos los veranos,’’ analyzes how a narrator who ‘‘resides in a space of uncertainty and alienation’’ (2004, 228) seeks through writing a way ‘‘to define spatially . . . the here-and-now of her own condition, the geography of the self’’ (218). Marr argues that Tusquets’s novel ‘‘presents a protagonist who, despite her much-studied predisposition to process reality through the illusory filter of myth and literary fantasy . . . emerges

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periodically in a conscious struggle to chart and comprehend the ‘geography’ of the external world, the space within whose chaotic flux she finds herself immersed’’ (218). He persuasively concludes that the text therefore represents a kind of ‘‘cognitive map’’ (a term borrowed from Fredric Jameson), by which the implied author is ‘‘able to lay claim to a more cogent glimpse into the intricacies of her authentic reality’’ (229). These are very much the same dynamics that come into play in Milla´s’s fiction, especially in La soledad era esto. 1. Milla´s’s El orden alfabe´tico [Alphabetical Order] (1998) and No mires debajo de la cama [Don’t Look under the Bed] (1999) are also metafictional novels. The former, for example, is a sort of metafictional fantasy in which the letters of the alphabet progressively disappear, causing havoc in the world. The novel cleverly describes a fantastic reality that begins to unravel as the linguistic symbols used to describe it disappear. As the signifiers disappear, the world becomes a chaotic, shapeless mass. The novel is narrated from the point of view of a young boy who, we find out in the second part, is in fact insane. The latter novel deals with Elena Rinco´n, a judge living in Madrid, who falls in love with a woman she sees on the metro who is reading a novel called No mires debajo de la cama. The novel’s discourse is split; on the one hand, we have Elena’s experience and that of her beloved Teresa; on the other hand, interspersed throughout the novel are chapters taken from the fictional novel of the same name, which is narrated from the point of view of people’s shoes. 2. In an interview with Gutie´rrez Flo´rez, Milla´s mentions the fundamental importance of writing in constructing personal identity, and how his own writing is a personal necessity: ‘‘I keep writing in order to keep constructing myself’’ (Gutie´rrez Flo´rez 1992, 10). 3. Thomas Franz discusses in greater detail the theme of the double in Milla´s, noting that the novelist resembles Unamuno in his exploration of how personal identity is linked to a literary act (1996, 131). Franz concentrates his study on the theme of the double in Unamuno’s Niebla, Abel Sa´nchez, and El otro and compares them to Milla´s’s own treatment of the theme in Volver a casa (1990). According to Franz, the main difference between Milla´s and Unamuno is that in Milla´s the metaphysical component of the protagonists’ struggles has disappeared, although the characters of his novels continue to search for the answers to important questions: ‘‘[W]hat we have in Volver a casa is a strong evocation of certain Unamunian premises that are explored fully in their epistemological frame, but definitively secularized insofar as their refusal to explore the metaphysical dimension’’ (1996, 140). 4. Dale Knickerbocker points out that Tonto, muerto, bastardo e invisible has a dual structure, based upon the protagonist’s alienation from his surroundings and upon an acute social criticism of Spanish society in the early nineties: ‘‘[T]his work constitutes a convincing commentary on the insuperable situation of the individual in a society that is more and more inhumane and dehumanizing’’ (1997, 230).

Chapter 3. Narrative Schizophrenia and the Anxiety of Influence 1. Capdevila-Argu¨elles argues that the main discursive threads of the novel are ‘‘the genesis of a female authorial voice, her very particular relationship

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with an influential male authority and also her observation and dialogic interaction with canonical voices of the history of literature’’ (2000, 10). She points out, however, that ‘‘these discursive threads will not hold the text cohesively. The desire for literary representation is what holds together the apparently chaotic texts’’ (10) that comprise the novel. Although it is apparent that the narrator has clearly represented something in the construction of this narrative, she is never able to go beyond her preoccupation with her relationship with the great male authors of literary history. Amat’s novel emphasizes the creative process over any final product. 2. A further, perhaps more minor, inconsistency in this formulation of the ‘‘sadistic writer’’ is the fact that Sade’s own text, Les 120 journe´es de Sodome [The 120 Days of Sodom], is reader friendly, and the narrator goes to great length to facilitate the reader’s work. As Steven Kellman points out in his book Loving Reading: Erotics of the Text, Sade is intent even on pandering to the reader; he is ‘‘solicitous toward our tastes and deficiencies. He is frequently at great pains to assist in the task of reading his book, clarifying and recapitulating matters through strategically placed synopses, charts, indices of dramatis personae, and statistical tallies of the fates of forty-six characters. The whole is scrupulously arranged to facilitate our grasp of the pattern of relationships and events’’ (Kellman 1985, 37). 3. Nuria Amat herself has discussed the ambiguity of the protagonist’s identity in an interview with Isolina Ballesteros: ‘‘In La intimidad, the protagonist is a narrator without a name. Only on the last page does the name Nuria appear (like my own). It is there that one part of the picture is revealed, an ending that is more poetic and dazzling than it is explanatory . . . I spent some time wondering whether or not to give the narrator a name from the beginning, but I resisted the temptation. Among other reasons, I wanted to give greater force to the story, to the word, the pain, to the intimacy, to make it, if possible, more unautobiographical’’ (1998a, 680).

Chapter 4. Indeterminancy for Indeterminacy’s Sake 1. This chapter of True Lies and the next originally represented two parts of one longer chapter. Inspired in part by a conversation I had with Javier Cercas in Urbana, Illinois, in October 2003, I finally reevaluated my initial decision. These two chapters now emphasize the marked differences between the two authors. 2. In addition to his chapter on Marı´as, Orejas dedicates sections to Torrente Ballester, Juan Goytisolo, Carmen Martı´n Gaite, Luis Goytisolo, Gonzalo Sua´rez, Manuel Va´zquez Montalba´n, Eduardo Mendoza, Jose´ Marı´a Merino, Juan Jose´ Milla´s, Ramo´n Buenaventura, and Juan Manuel de Prada. Unfortunately, he leaves out Javier Cercas and fails to include many contemporary women novelists. Perhaps most conspicuously absent are Nuria Amat and Rosa Montero. 3. Wyatt Mason would disagree with my assertion, as he finds this dynamic to be an integral part of Marı´as’s appeal. Mason writes that Marı´as’s deliberate cultivation of a ghostlike, partially hidden narrator is a compelling

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literary technique that is characteristic of Marı´as. The author’s classic narrator ‘‘speaks to us as if from the lip of a stage, in darkness. The lights never come on. His face is never revealed’’ (2005, 91–92). 4. I join David Herzberger in disagreeing with Julio Ortega’s somewhat extreme claim that Negra espalda represents one of the sixteen best novels written during the twentieth century in Spain. I also take issue with Ortega’s unfortunate exclusion of many important Spanish women writers: he includes only two women in his list, Carmen Laforet and Carmen Martı´n Gaite (Ortega 1999). 5. I have left out of my discussion the novel’s infelicitously dry extended investigations and ruminations on an obscure British author named Gawsworth, whom Marı´as appears to have discovered during his time at Oxford. Stephen Miller (2004, 109) has traced Marı´as’s interest in Gawsworth also through the author’s anthology of tales, Cuentos u´nicos [Unique Stories] (1989).

Chapter 5. Narrative Truth and Historical Truth 1. In the conclusion to his essay on perception and the objectivity of visual experience in the Catalonian experience of exile after the war, Joan Ramon Resina criticizes Cercas’s novel rather harshly for its uncertain generic nature. The author asserts that by deliberately confusing fictional and historical reportage Cercas renounces ‘‘his answerability to either category’’ (2005, 344), and that his aesthetic argument is therefore specious: ‘‘It does not vindicate the eye or seek to dispel the ideological shadow that falls upon his narrative world . . . although much in the novel turns around the issue of visibility, of seeing and being (or not being) seen, the author appears insensitive to the localization of sight’’ (344). Resina takes issue with the novel on two counts: its ‘‘silly’’ attempt to find ‘‘the meaning of the look that graced a posthumous Mazas’’ (344), and ‘‘the novel’s affectation of political aloofness and its vindication of fascist writers on dubious aesthetic terms’’ (344, italics in original). In the pages that follow, I suggest that Cercas is not really concerned with the meaning of this historical episode (in spite of the fact that his narrator seems to be obsessed with precisely this issue). Nor does he finally vindicate the memory of fascist figures. While the unknown militiaman’s gaze is the cause of much of the novel’s mystery and ostensibly offers the narrator his starting point, the novel is not ultimately so much about looking as it is about narrative. Soldados de Salamina is about the problematic nature of historiography, the value of storytelling as a method of approximating truth, and the importance of recuperating those accounts of Spanish history that were lost after the defeat of the Republic and the consolidation of Franco’s repressive regime. 2. The puzzle metaphor that the narrator uses to describe the process of writing history recalls the Rubik’s cube that appears in Rosa Montero’s Corazo´n del Ta´rtaro, in which the narrator proposes that our perception of reality is made possible by piecing together many narrative pieces and perspectives. This is the narrative simulacrum of order that interests Vargas Llosa also (see Vargas Llosa 2002, 19). 3. In his article ‘‘Depolarization and the New Spanish Fiction at the Mil-

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lennium,’’ Robert Spires follows Vargas Llosa in his appreciation of Soldados de Salamina, a novel in which ‘‘historical accuracy is less important than artistic cohesion’’ (Spires 2005, 500). Spires argues that Cercas’s novel ‘‘suggests artistic invention as a means to restore the human element to what we call knowledge’’ (500). The author compellingly challenges popular generational taxonomies and the polarizing tendencies that continue to exist in Spanish studies and posits that even novelists as profoundly different as Cercas and Jose´ ´ ngel Man˜as ‘‘project the common denominator depolarization, and therefore A each participates in and contributes to [a] fundamental discursive trend’’ (507) in contemporary Spanish fiction. Interestingly, in a paper published shortly before, Gonzalo Navajas analyzed briefly Soldados de Salamina in terms of how Miralles and Sa´nchez Mazas are polar opposites, and how the novel ‘‘elaborates explicitly a semantic and ethical duality’’ (Navajas 2004, 114). While I agree that the novel explores how the past can offer important lessons about the present, I disagree with Navajas’s final assertion that the novel represents merely a nostalgic—albeit problematizing—return to heroic values of the past. 4. I owe my appreciation of Art Spiegelman’s Maus to Hayden White’s essay ‘‘Historical Emplotment and the Problem of Truth,’’ in which the author writes that Maus is ‘‘one of the most moving narrative accounts of [the Holocaust] that I know, and not least because it makes the difficulty of discovering and telling the whole truth about even a small part of it as much a part of the story as the events whose meaning it is seeking to discover’’ (White 1997, 396). Cercas, for his part, makes the difficulty of discovering and telling the truth about Miralles as much a part of the story as the historical events whose meaning he purports to discover.

Chapter 6. Carlos Can˜ eque 1. The epigraph of Quie´n reads: ‘‘Me pregunto si, a pesar de mis precauciones, no estare´ hablando de mı´’’ (Can˜eque 1997) [I ask myself if, in spite of my precautions, I am not talking about myself.] Beckett’s protagonist, as he begins his stories about his protagonist named Saposcat, reflects back upon himself, saying, ‘‘I wonder if I am not talking yet again about myself’’ (1959, 257). 2. In his book, Borges Revisited, Martin Stabb outlines some of the structural and thematic patterns that characterize Borges’s fiction. I am indebted to his analysis of ‘‘Pierre Menard, Author of The Quixote,’’ in which the author notes ‘‘Borges’s feigned pomposity, the inside jokes, the caricature of the literary world’s petty feuds’’ (68), and how the main thrust of ‘‘Pierre Menard’’ ‘‘may well be the subversion of the critical act itself’’ (68). This chapter shows how these issues provide Quie´n with a substantial thematic and structural model. 3. In a humorous footnote, the narrator/critic cites the research of Professor Toshiro Fukuyama, whose fictional monograph El syndrome Gilabert [The Gilabert Syndrome] (published in 2013) studied how Gilabert’s novel had a particularly negative impact in Japan, and even caused identity crises in young readers who were unable to return to their original selves after losing themselves in the virtual novel. These public reactions caused the Japanese govern-

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ment to prohibit the book on the grounds that it might be hazardous to the reader’s mental health (Can˜eque 1997, 49). 4. While it is not a sequel, in keeping with Can˜eque’s penchant for metafiction both of these protagonist/narrators do in fact reappear in the author’s next novel, Muertos de amor [Dying for Love] (1999); in it Antonio and Gilabert talk together at a reception for yet another literary prize.

Conclusion 1. The last twenty years have seen an explosion of fine self-conscious Spanish fiction, but to write the last word on recent Spanish metafiction would be a gargantuan undertaking. Francisco G. Orejas’s 645-page La metaficcio´n en la novela espan˜ola contempora´nea [Metafiction in the Contemporary Spanish Novel] (2003) comes as close as possible to a complete study of Spanish metafiction. Tracing metafiction from its beginnings in Europe and Spain to the present, Orejas offers an expansive description of a broad range of metafictional novels written over the last thirty years by at least twelve wellknown writers.

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Index ´ lvaro, 87–94. See also Dos Abril, A mujeres en Praga; personal identity Alborg, Concha, 194 n. 5 Almo´dovar, Pedro, 191 Alter, Robert, 15–19, 21–22, 142 Amat, Nuria, 15, 29–30, 47, 85–86, 95–124, 167, 168, 174, 189, 190, 197 nn. 1 and 3; narratives of, 98; narrators/protagonists of, 95, 98, 110, 120–23; novels of, 96–98 Amor breve (Amat), 97 ‘‘Antonio Mun˜oz Molina and Jorge Luis Borges: Buried Intertextualities in Beatus Ille’’ (Gurski), 168 anxiety of influence, 95–124. See also narrative schizophrenia As Lonely as Franz Kafka (Robert), 105–6 author, 20; authority of, 43; awareness of, 18; fictive, 23; identity of, 126, 172; personae of, 40, 136; process of, 20; responsibility, 45 autobiography, 145–49 Baah, Robert, 16, 69 Barth, John, 14, 25, 26, 27 Barthes, Roland, 144, 165 Bartz Petchenik, Barbara, 76–77 Baudrillard, Jean, 14, 25–26, 28 Beautiful Fables (Lucente), 13 Beckett, Samuel, 167, 174, 199 n. 1 ‘‘Bella y oscura, de Rosa Montero: Entre el resplandor y la muerte’’ (Escudero), 194 n. 5 Beyond the Metafictional Mode (Spires), 15, 22, 25 ‘‘biblioteca de Babel, La’’ (Borges), 169 Black Metafiction (Jablon), 13

Bloom, Harold, 29–30, 99, 109–10, 120–23, 174, 188 Borges, Jorge Luis, 38–39, 43, 75–77, 79, 92–93, 136, 147, 168–74, 180, 186, 194 n. 3, 199 nn. 1 and 2; iconoclasm of, 172; identity of, 140–41; Marı´as and, 139–43; Spain influenced by, 39, 168–74 ‘‘Borges y yo’’ (Borges), 136, 140–41; paradoxes of, 141–42 Bosteels, Bruno, 75–76 Bou, Enric, 27 Bronte¨, Charlotte, 121 ‘‘busca de Averroes, La’’ (Borges), 171 ‘‘Bu´squeda del ser aute´ntico y crı´tica social en Tonto, muerto, bastardo e invisible’’, 196 n. 4 Can˜eque, Carlos, 15, 29, 30–31, 95, 98, 141, 166–87, 189–90, 200 n. 4; Borges influencing, 168 cannibalism, 32; cultural, 51; dialectics of literary, 50–51; as discursive tool, 50; literary, 32, 48–56; symbolic, 49. See also La hija del canı´bal Capdevila-Argu¨elles, Nuria, 96–98, 104, 110, 118, 196–97 n. 1 Caribbean: discourse, 53; postcolonial culture, 51–53; texts, 50 cartography, 65–94; limitations of, 77 Cercas, Javier, 15, 29, 30, 82, 93, 95, 98, 125–28, 142, 144–65, 189–90, 198 n. 1, 199 nn. 3 and 4; Marı´as compared with, 126–28, 189–90; narrative self-consciousness in fiction of, 127–28; as narrator of Soldados de Salamina, 144–45, 151–54, 158–59, 161–63, 165; nar-

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rators/protagonists of, 126, 146, 148–49, 151 Cervantes, 15, 43, 174, 189 Challenging Gender and Genre in the Literary Text: The Works of Nuria Amat (Capdevila-Argu¨elles), 96 Chambers, Iain, 77 Christensen, Inger, 17, 18–19 ‘‘Cities without Maps’’ (Chambers), 77 co´lera de Aquiles, La (Goytisolo), 24 Collins, Jim, 14, 25–27, 52 ‘‘Condition of Postmodernity, The’’ (Harvey), 45 Confederacy of Dunces, A (Kennedy Toole), 174 Consciousness and the Novel (Lodge), 128, 129 Consciousness Explained (Dennet), 128 Conversaciones sobre Borges (Can˜eque), 169 corazo´n del Ta´rtaro, El (Montero), 44–48, 61, 198 n. 2 Crowley, Patrick, 129, 146–47 cuarto de atra´s, El (Martı´n Gaite), 24 Cuerpo desnudo blanco (Amat), 96 cultural syncretism/synthesis, 51–53 Currie, Mark, 97–98, 178 deconstruction, 124 Dennet, Daniel, 128 desorden de tu nombre, El (Milla´s), 78, 82, 89; personal identity in, 68; points of view in, 68; protagonist of, 67 diegesis, 13, 19, 82, 95, 100, 147, 159, 180 ‘‘doble vida del escritor, La’’ (Amat), 121–22 Dos mujeres en Praga (Milla´s), 65, 70, 86–94; authorial awareness in, 89; experience of reality in, 87, 89–90, 92–93; narrative of, 87–88, 91; points of view in, 89–91; setting of, 88–89; structure of, 89, 91; suspension of disbelief in, 90 doubling: in La hija del canı´bal, 34– 41, 47, 49, 55, 63, 194 n. 2; psycho-

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logical, 35; romantic, 35. See also narrative doubles Eagleton, Terry, 14, 25–26 Eco, Umberto, 14, 25–27 Edwards, Lee R., 102–3, 124 ‘‘Envidia y existencia en Milla´s y Unamuno’’ (Franz), 196 n. 3 ‘‘Escribir sin cuarto propio’’ (Amat), 122 Escudero, Javier, 194 n. 5 Estrade, Juan, 80–83. See also personal identity; Volver a casa Fabulation and Metafiction (Scholes), 16 fiction: experimental, 16; literary criticism compared with, 98, 174–79; narrative self-reflection vs., 16; practice of, 18; reality vs., 15, 17, 19, 22, 37, 82, 87, 91–94, 125–28, 142–43, 192, 198 n. 1; theory of, 18 Finnegans Wake (Joyce), 101, 112 first person. See points of view Foucault, Michael, 45, 144, 152–54 Fox-Genovese, Elizabeth, 156, 159 Fragmentos de Apocalipsis (Ballester), 24 frame breaks: in La hija del canı´bal, 39–40 Franz, Thomas, 196 n. 3 Freud, Sigmund, 49 ‘‘Funes el memorioso’’ (Borges), 171 Gass, William, 15 generative wordplay, 19 Gilbert, Sandra, 102 Go¨del, 128–29 Goytisolo, Luis, 23–24 Gubar, Susan, 102 Gurski, Edward T., 168 Gutie´rrez, Fabia´n, 68–69 Hampl, Patricia, 129, 133 Hardcastle, Anne E., 195 n. 9 Harvey, David, 45 Hassan, Ihab, 14, 26 Herzberger, David, 131–32, 135, 137, 189, 198 n. 4

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hija del canı´bal, La (Montero), 29, 32–65, 71, 147, 159, 188, 190, 193 n. 3, 194 n. 5, 195 nn. 7 and 8; complexity in, 42–48; fiction/reality in, 42; indeterminacy in, 42–48, 58–59; irony used in, 37; making of meaning in, 42–48; narration in, 34–36, 35–36, 44, 56–64; nihilism in, 57–58; optimism in, 58; points of view in, 34–37, 39, 46–48, 55, 60, 190; pragmatism in, 60; self-consciousness in, 36–37, 41, 44; structure/themes of, 34, 46–48, 53, 55, 58, 62; systems of representation in, 43; third-person narrative in, 36, 37, 48, 55; worldviews in, 63. See also cannibalism; doubling; personal identity; Romero, Lucı´a Hispanism, 25 historical truth: narrative truth vs., 149–56 historiographic metafiction: modes of narration in, 159–60 historiography, 145–49, 198 n. 1; New Historicist views of, 156, 160; selfconscious, 156–59 history: effective, 154; effective vs. traditional, 153; fiction and, 159–63; perception of, 153; problems in writing, 164–65; readers of, 152; representing, 156–57, 164–65 Holloway, Vance R., 26, 95, 193 n. 3 Huggan, Graham, 70 human consciousness, 14 human subjectivity, 130 Hutcheon, Linda, 13–15, 17–20, 25– 27, 159–60, 174–75 Huyssen, Andreas, 14, 25–27 identity: narrative, 146–47. See also personal identity indeterminacy, 42–48, 62, 125–43. See also postmodernism intertextual victimization, 121–24 intimidad, La (Amat), 30, 95, 98, 107, 110, 116–21, 190; as feminist work, 118; illegible texts in, 118; isolation in, 118; literature in, 117–19; narration in, 116–17; originality in, 119;

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paternalistic influence in, 117; points of view in, 116; reader/writer in, 116–21 Jablon, Madelyn, 13 Jameson, Fredric, 14, 25–26, 28, 160 ‘‘Javier Marı´as’s Tu rostro man˜ana: The Search for a Usable Future’’ (Herzberger), 135 Jencks, Charles, 14, 25–27, 52 Jesu´s, 83–86; psychological struggle of, 84–85. See also personal identity; Tonto, muerto, bastardo e invisible Johnson, Warren, 48–49 Joyce, James, 100–101, 104, 110, 114, 115; relationship to daughter of, 101, 112–13; as sadistic writer, 112, 114 Juan sin tierra (Goytisolo), 23–24 Kafka, Franz, 71, 73, 100, 104, 106, 109–11, 111, 115; relationship to father of, 106, 111, 117. See also Todos somos Kafka Kellman, Steven G., 17, 20, 197 n. 2 Kellner, Hans, 144, 164–65, 180 Kennedy Toole, John, 174 Knickerbocker, Dale F., 196 n. 4 Korzybski, Alfred, 76 Kunz, Marco, 168 Labanyi, Jo, 26–27 Lacan, Jacques, 79–80, 84–85 ladro´n de libros, El (Amat), 95–97 ‘‘Language and Historical Representation’’ (Kellner), 165 ‘‘Lax Habits of the Free Imagination, The’’ (Hampl), 129 Letra herida (Amat), 98, 121 Letra muerta (Milla´s), 69–71, 82 ‘‘Letter to His Father’’ (Kafka), 106, 111, 117 Li-Chao, 60–61, 63 literary cannibalism, 48–56; functioning as, 54 literary creation, 130 literary criticism, 97–98; fiction com-

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pared with, 98; schizophrenia in, 102–3 ‘‘Literary Criticism and the Politics of the New Historicism (FoxGenovese), 156 literary indebtedness, 121–22 literary technique: self-criticism, 39–40; stream of consciousness, 19 loca de la casa, La (Montero), 57 Lodge, David, 13, 14, 25–27, 44, 128–30 Lo´pez, Antonio, 166–87; diary/novel of, 166–67, 173–74, 177, 179–83; obsession with Borges of, 171; personal redemption of, 166–67; sense of reality of, 171. See also Quie´n ‘‘loterı´a de Babilonia, La’’ (Borges), 48, 169 Lucente, Gregory, 13 Lyotard, Jean-Franc¸ois, 14, 25–26, 28 Madrid, 88–89 Madwoman in the Attic, The: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination (Gilbert, Gubar), 102 Magias parciales del Quijote (Borges), 75, 172 Magritte, Rene´, 129 making of meaning, 18, 42–48 mala educaci, Lao´n, 191 Malone Dies (Beckett), 167 ‘‘Mapping the Space of Self: Cartography and the Narrative Act in Esther Tusquets’s El mismo mar de todos los veranos’’ (Marr), 195–96 maps: in La soleded era esto, 76–79; literary texts compared with, 77; in literature, 70, 75; popularity of, 76; symbolism of, 76, 79; in Tonto, muerto, bastardo e invisible, 84; usefulness of, 76. See also cartography Marı´as, Javier, 15, 30, 80, 82, 93, 98, 125–43, 168, 189–90, 197–98 n. 3, 198 n. 5; Borges and, 139–43; Cercas compared with, 126–28, 189–90; metafiction used by, 139–40; narrators/protagonists of, 126; self-

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consciousness in fiction of, 127–28; techniques of, 130 Marr, Matthew J., 195–96 Martı´n Gaite, Carmen, 24 Matibag, Eugenio, 50–54 Merino, Jose´ Marı´a, 23 ‘‘Metaficcio´n y feminismo en Rosa Montero’’ (Alborg), 194 n. 5 metafiction, 14, 15–16, 22, 62–63, 97– 98, 129, 142, 178; Amat’s use of, 98, 124; criticism of, 182–83; as experimental fiction, 16; fundamental opposition of, 44; Marı´as’s use of, 139–40; Milla´s’s use of, 94, 196 n. 1; as parody, 16; as schizophrenia, 99; Spanish, 93–94, 148; structure of, 180; theme in, 148; traditional realism vs., 44; truth about, 186–87. See also narrative self-consciousness, postmodernism metaficcio´n en la novela espan˜ola, La(Orejas), 126 Metafiction (Currie), 97 Metafiction (Waugh), 18 metafictional mode, 22–23 metafictional novels: types of, 22–25 Metamorphosis, The (Kafka), 71, 73, 106 Milla´s, Juan Jose´, 15, 29, 65–94, 95, 168, 189–90, 196 nn. 1, 2, and 3; awards of, 65; early fiction of, 67–70; metafictional novels of, 196 n. 1; narrators/protagonists of, 66, 81, 85, 92, 94, 190; personal identity conception of, 66; psychoanalytic theory in fiction of, 84–85; Unamuno vs., 196 n. 3 Miller, Stephen, 130, 133, 198 n. 5 Milton, John, 109 mimesis, 13, 19, 147 mirrors, 194 n. 2 Misreading of Maps, A (Bosteels), 75 modernism, 27; postmodernism vs., 13–14; in Spain, 27; writers of, 109 Monstruos (Amat), 97 Montero, Rosa, 15, 29, 32–65, 71, 82, 93, 95, 111, 159, 168, 188–90, 193 n. 3, 194 n. 5, 195 n. 9, 198 n. 2; fiction

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of, 47, 56–57; fictionalized, 39, 42– 43, 47, 53, 194 n. 4; personal identity conception of, 57–58. See also La hija del canı´bal ‘‘muerte y la bru´jula, La’’ (Borges), 169 multiple selves, 34. See also doubling Mun˜oz Molina, Antonio, 15, 168, 188 Narciso y Armonı´a (Amat), 96 narcissism, 16, 19–20, 187 Narcissistic Narrative (Hutcheon), 19 Narcissus, 20 narration, 129; in La hija del canı´bal, 56–64; modes of in historiographic metafiction, 159–60 narrative, 13, 18; Amat’s use of, 98; consuming, 51; in Dos mujeres en Praga, 87–88; evolution of, 13; human consciousness and, 85, 128–30; human need for, 57; hybrid, 51; limitations of, 130; power of, 69, 126, 130, 186; of Lucı´a Romero, 54; as symbolic cartography, 70; in Tonto, muerto, bastardo e invisible, 85–86; voices of, 35–36 narrative doubles: creating, 38; importance of, 39. See also doubling narrative schizophrenia, 95–124. See also anxiety of influence narrative self-consciousness, 13, 124; as alienating fiction, 17; in contemporary Spanish novel, 29–31, 93–94; critics of, 18–19; evolving functions of, 14, 15; in fiction of Cercas, 127–28; in fiction of Marı´as, 127–28; in fiction of Milla´s, 67, 70; in historiography, 156–59; as narcissism, 16; positive aspects of, 18; in Quie´n, 176–78, 183; in Spain, 21–25; theories of, 15–21; versatility of, 189, 192. See also metafiction; postmodern narrative truth: historical truth vs., 149–56 narrator: relationship with reader of, 18, 37, 114; self-acknowledgement, 36 Nature of Maps, The (Bartz Petchenik, Robinson), 76

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Navajas, Gonzalo, 26, 188, 199 n. 3 Negra espalda del tiempo (Marı´as), 15, 30, 125–28, 130–38, 147, 198 n. 4; graphic elements in, 134; hermeneutics in, 131; interpretive uncertainty of, 131, 137–38; narration of, 135, 137, 143; narrative in, 131–32, 135–36; personae of, 141–42; reality/fiction in, 131–32, 134, 136–39, 142, 189; with Soldados de Salamina, 144; style of, 132–36; themes of, 131, 134–35; Todas las almas related to, 131, 138–39 ‘‘Neurology of Narrative, The’’ (Young, Saver), 99 Niebla (Unamuno), 21–22, 173, 186, 189, 196 n. 3 Nietzsche, 153 ‘‘Nietzsche, Genealogy, History’’ (Foucault), 152 nihilism, 29; in La hija del canı´bal, 57–58; in Tonto, muerto, bastardo e invisible, 83 novel: death of, 188–89; experimental, 95, 172; success of in Spain, 188–89 Novela de Andre´s Choz (Merino), 23 Olsen, Lance, 186 Orejas, Francisco, 126 ‘‘Otro, El’’ (Borges), 38 paı´s del alma, El (Amat), 98 Pan de boda (Amat), 96 Papel mojado (Milla´s), 68 Paradise Lost (Milton), 109 parody, 16, 19 Parody/Meta-Fiction (Rose), 16 Partial Magic (Alter), 15, 21, 142 Pereiro, Peregrina, 58 Pe´rez Reverte, Arturo, 15, 25 personal identity, 15, 196 n. 2; articulating, 42; in Dos mujeres en Praga, 88; in El desorden de tu nombre, 68; in El vientre de la ballena, 147; indeterminate nature of, 47, 57, 83; in La hija del canı´bal, 32–34, 41– 42, 55, 60–61, 63, 194 n. 2; in La soledad era esto, 71, 74–75, 79–80;

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Montero’s conception of, 57–58, 63; provisional nature of, 36; in Todos somos Kafka (Amat), 104; in Tonto, muerto, bastardo e invisible, 83–86; true, 42; understanding, 56–57; in Volver a casa, 80–83. See also doubling; Romero, Lucia; selves ‘‘Pierre Menard’’ (Borges), 43, 170, 180–81, 199 n. 2 plurality, 52–53. See also postmodernism poetic influence, 122–23 points of view, 36, 48, 159–60; in La hija del canı´bal, 36, 37, 48, 55, 60; third person, 36, 37, 48, 55 Portoghesi, Paolo, 14, 25–26 posmodernismo y otras tendencias de la novela espan˜ola, El (Holloway), 26, 95 postcolonial writers, 50 ‘‘Postmodern Fantasy and Montero’s Temblor: The Quest for Meaning’’ (Hardcastle), 195 n. 9 postmodernism, 27, 142; apologists of, 25; approaches of, 45; architecture of, 52; authors of, 120; celebration of pluralism in, 52; criticism/ critics of, 14, 25–27; culture of, 52–53; as eclecticism, 51–52; fiction and history in, 160; historians of, 45; humor in, 186; indeterminacy of, 39; literary, 20–21; metaphor/literary cannibalism in, 48–56; modernism vs., 13–14; philosophy of, 51; Spanish, 25–29; strategy of, 51; style of, 51–52. See also metafiction; narrative selfconsciousness Primavera de luto y otros cuentos (Milla´s), 66 process over product, 179–80 psychoanalysis, 195 n. 4 psychoanalytic theory, 84 Quie´n (Can˜eque), 31, 141, 166–87, 190, 199 nn. 1 and 2; authorial identity in, 172; Borgesian elements of, 171; criticism within, 177, 181–83;

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discourse of, 167; fiction within, 175–78, 181, 184; indebtedness to Borges of, 169; indeterminacy of, 166; intertextuality in, 172–75, 178, 186; metafictional play in, 184–87, 190; narrators of, 166, 173; parody in, 175–77, 184; points of view in, 166, 182; reading/writing in, 180–81; reality/fiction in, 174– 75, 184; self-consciousness in, 176– 78, 183; structure of, 171–73, 187; textual elements of, 166; writing process in, 179, 187. See also Borges; Lo´pez, Antonio ‘‘Quie´n: Can˜eque, Borges y las paradojas de la metaficcio´n’’ (Kunz), 168 Quixote (Cervantes), 15, 22, 43, 172– 73, 185–86, 188, 192 reader, 20; modern, 115; relationship with narrator of, 18, 37, 114; responsibility of, 20, 45; reading and coming-into-being, 180–86 reading/writing, 95–96, 122; in Quie´n, 180–81; in Todos somos Kafka, 100 reality: comprehending, 46, 128–29; fiction vs., 15, 17, 19, 22, 37, 82, 87, 91–94, 125–28, 142–43, 192, 198 n. 1; human experience of, 38; problems in representing, 154 Recuento (Goytisolo), 23 Regazzoni, Susanna, 96, 98 Reina de Ame´rica (Amat), 96, 98 Relatos reales (Cercas), 142, 145–47, 151 Rico, Francisco, 125 Ricoeur, Paul, 129–30, 146 rigor en la ciencia, Del (Borges), 75–76 Rinco´n, Elena, 70–83, 87–88, 196 n. 1; as author, 72–74; personal transformation of, 71, 73; as reader, 73; relationship of to detective, 72–74, 79. See also La soledad era esto; personal identity Rivas, Manuel, 133 Robert, Marthe, 105–6 Robinson, Arthur H., 76–77 Romero, Lucı´a, 32–41, 53–, 71, 111,

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159, 190, 194 nn. 2 and 4, 195 nn. 7 and 9; narrative of, 54; pessimism of, 61; points of view of, 36, 37, 48, 55, 60; relationship to family of, 53, 195 n. 7; self-perception of, 32, 54, 55. See also doubling; La hija del canı´bal; personal identity Rorty, Richard, 58–60 Rose, Margaret A., 16 ‘‘ruinas circulares, Las’’ (Borges), 170 Ruiz Zafo´n, Carlos, 15, 168, 188 Sa´nchez Mazas, Rafael, 144, 149–54, 157–58, 163 Satorras Pons, Alı´cia, 158, 160 Saver, Jeffery L., 99 Schank, Roger, 99, 149 schizophrenia, 123–24, 124; in literary criticism, 102–3; manifestations of, 103; as metafiction, 99; narrative, 47; as postmodern disease, 124; in sexual expression, 35 ‘‘Schizophrenic Narrative’’ (Edward), 102–3 Scholes, Robert, 15–16, 21 self. boundaries between, 36; relationship between, 35; writing about, 147. See also personal Identity ‘‘Self-consuming Fictions: The Dialectics of Cannibalism in Modern Caribbean Narratives’’ (Matibag), 50 Self-Begetting Novel, The (Kellman), 20 Self-Conscious Novel, The: Artifice in Fiction from Joyce to Pynchon (Stonehill), 21, 191–92 Soldados de Salamina (Cercas), 30, 125–28, 144–65, 188, 198 n. 1, 199 n. 3; conclusion of, 161–63; interpretation of, 161; narrative of, 160; Negra espalda del tiempo with, 144; points of view in, 151; reality/fiction in, 144–45, 151–52, 165, 189–90 soledad era esto, La (Milla´s), 65, 70– 80, 87–88; detective’s role in, 71–74; maps in, 76–79; personal

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identity in, 71. See also Rinco´n, Elena Soria Olmedo, Andre´s, 27 Spain: Borges’s influence on, 39, 168–74; modernism in, 27; narrative self-consciousness in, 21–25; novel’s success in, 188–89; postFranco, 26–27 Spanish Civil War, 32, 38, 150–51, 156–57, 164 Spires, Robert, 15, 21–25, 199 n. 3 Stabb, Martin, 172–73, 199 n. 2 Stonehill, Brian, 17, 191–92 storytelling, 64, 94, 127, 149, 191, 194 n. 4. See also narration ‘‘sur, El’’ (Borges), 171 symbolic cartography, 75; as narrative, 70, 73 systems of representation, 43 Tell Me a Story (Schank), 99 Territorial Disputes (Huggan), 70 third person. See points of view Time and Narrative (Ricoeur), 129–30 Todas las almas (Marı´as), 127, 130–38; interpretive uncertainty of, 131, 137–38; Negra espalda del tiempo related to, 131, 138–39; reality/fiction in, 137–39 Todos somos Kafka (Amat), 30, 47, 85–86, 95, 97–124, 167, 190; as feminist work, 118; inconsistencies of, 115; mental illness in, 101–2; narration in, 115; negative terms in, 107; patriarchal influence in, 104–6, 110–11; personal identity in, 104, 110, 115; points of view in, 100– 101, 106; readers/writers in, 112–16; reading/writing in, 100, 105–12; self-consciousness in, 100, 108; structure of, 100, 104–5, 110; themes of, 100, 104–5; trauma in, 105–7. See also anxiety of influence; narrative schizophrenia Tonto, muerto, bastardo e invisible (Milla´s), 70, 83–86, 196 n. 4; alternative reality in, 83; maps in, 84; narrative in, 85–86

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Totem and Taboo (Freud), 49 Tower of Babel, 86–87 Treason of Images, The (Magritte), 129 truth. See historical truth Ulysses (Joyce), 101 Unamuno, 21–22, 173–74, 186, 189; Milla´s vs., 196 n. 3 urban spaces/personal places, 80–83 Vargas Llosa, Mario, 14, 63, 155, 157, 161, 198 n. 2, 199 n. 3 velocidad de la luz, La (Cercas), 146, 151 verdad de los mentiras, La (Vargas Llosa), 63, 155 verdes de mayo hasta el mar, Los (Goytisolo), 23 Viajar es muy difı´cil: Manual de ruta para lectores perife´ricos (Amat), 97 vientre de la ballena, El (Cercas), 147–49, 154–55; personal identity

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in, 147; reality in, 147; reality/fiction in, 155–56 Volver a casa (Milla´s), 70, 80–83; points of reference in, 81; structure of, 82 Waugh, Patricia, 13–15, 14, 15, 17–20, 44, 62, 142, 159, 174–75, 178, 187 Ween, Lori, 97 Western canon, 115 White, Hayden, 144, 160, 199 n. 4 Woolf, Virginia, 122 worldviews, 45; in La hija del canı´bal, 45, 63; of Marı´as, 137; nihilistic, 83; in Tonto, muerto, bastardo e invisible, 83 writing: filial metaphor of, 102; process, 23, 179; sadistic, 112–15, 197 n. 2; self-referential, 43; in Todos somos Kafka, 100, 105–12. See also reading/writing Young, Kay, 99 Yushimoto del Valle, Carlos, 160

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