Interactive Fictions: Scenes of Storytelling in the Novel (Contributions to the Study of World Literature)

Interactive Fictions

Recent Titles in Contributions to the Study of World Literature Immigrant Narratives in Contemporary France Susan Ireland and Patrice J. Froulx, editors Aristocracies of Fiction: The Idea of Aristocracy in Late-Nineteenth-Century and Early Twentieth-Century Literary Culture Len Platt Salman Rushdie's Postcolonial Metaphors: Migration, Translation, Hybridity, Blasphemy, and Globalization Jaina C. Sanga Imagining Africa: Landscape in H. Rider Haggard's African Romances Lindy Stiebel Seduction and Death in Muriel Spark's Fiction Fotini E. Apostolou Unorthodox Views: Reflections on Reality, Truth, and Meaning in Current Social, Cultural, and Critical Discourse James L. Battersby Judgment and Justification in the Nineteenth-Century Novel of Adultery Maria R. Rippon The Late Modernism of Cormac McCarthy David Holloway The Colonial Conan Doyle: British Imperialism, Irish Nationalism, and the Gothic Catherine Wynne In My Own Shire: Region and Belonging in British Writing, 1840-1970 Stephen Wade Multicultural Literature for Children and Young Adults: Reflections on Critical Issues Mingshui Cai Interfering Values in the Nineteenth-Century British Novel: Austen, Dickens, Eliot, Hardy, and the Ethics of Criticism Jeffrey Moxham

Interactive Fictions Scenes of Storytelling in the Novel

Yael Halevi-Wise

Contributions to the Study of World Literature, Number 123 Donald Palumbo, Series Adviser

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PRAGERs

Westport, Connecticut London

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Halevi-Wise, Yael, 1965Interactive fictions : scenes of storytelling in the novel / Yael Halevi-Wise. p. cm.—(Contributions to the study of world literature, ISSN 0738-9345 no. 123) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-313-32007-1 (alk. paper) 1. Fiction—History and criticism. 2. Storytelling in literature. I. Title II. Series. PN3352.S74H35 2003 809.3—dc21 2003040374 British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data is available. Copyright © 2003 by Yael Halevi-Wise All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced, by any process or technique, without the express written consent of the publisher. Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 2003040374 ISBN: 0-313-32007-1 ISSN: 0738-9345 First published in 2003 Praeger Publishers, 88 Post Road West, Westport, CT 06881 An imprint of Greenwood Publishing Group, Inc. www.praeger.com Printed in the United States of America

The paper used in this book complies with the Permanent Paper Standard issued by the National Information Standards Organization (Z39.48-1984). 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Copyright Acknowledgments Grateful acknowledgment is given for permission to quote from the following sources: Yael Halevi-Wise, "Storytelling in Like Water for Chocolate" in Kristine Ibsen, ed., The Other Mirror: Women's Narrative in Mexico, 1980-1995 (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1997). Yael Halevi-Wise, "The Rhetoric of Silence of Marlow's Audience in Lord Jim" in Ann R. Cacoullos and Maria Sifianou, eds., Anatomies of Silence (Athens: University of Athens, 1998). Yael Halevi-Wise, "Little Dorrit's Story," The Dickensian 94.3 (winter 1998): 184-94. Laura Esquivel, Like Water for Chocolate, copyright Translation © 1992 by Doubleday, a division of Bantam, Doubleday, Dell Publishing Group, Inc. Used by permission of Doubleday, a division of Random House, Inc. A. B. Yehoshua, Mr. Mani, translated by Hillel Halkin, copyright © 1992 by Doubleday, a division of Bantam, Doubleday, Dell Publishing Group, Inc. Used by permission of Doubleday, a division of Random House, Inc. J. M. Cohen, trans., Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, The Adventures of Don Quixote (London: Penguin Classics, 1950). Translation copyright 1950 by J. M. Cohen. Every reasonable effort has been made to trace the owners of copyright materials in this book, but in some instances this has proven impossible. The author and publisher will be glad to receive information leading to more complete acknowledgments in subsequent printings of the book and in the meantime extend their apologies for any omissions.

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To my beloved Dani

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Contents Preface

xi

1.

The Story within the Novel

1

Part I: Interactive Fictions

1

Part II: Storytelling Events as Markers of Fictionality

6

2. 3.

4.

Part III: Integrative Poetics

16

Don Quixote and Sancho Learn Each Other's LanguageExpedient Manipulations of Genre and Enchantment

21

Narrative Pleasures and Inhibitions: The Eighteenth-Century English Novel

51

Part I: Tristram Shandy: Erotic and Temporal Solidifications of a Storytelling Performance

51

Part II: Fielding's Modern Comic Epic

63

Part III: Between the Gothic and the Midlands

71

The Realist Agenda: Metafiction and Romance Swept under the Carpet

79

5.

The Rhetoric of Anxiety in Conrad's Lord Jim

103

6.

Interactive Fictions in the Contemporary Novel

129

Contents

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Part I: A.B. Yehoshua's Mr, Mani

132

Part II: The Power of Storytelling in Laura Esquivei's Like Water for Chocolate

145

Notes

157

Bibliography

169

Index

185

Preface "To persist in paying attention to genres," wrote Tzvetan Todorov in 1978, "may seem to be a vain if not anachronistic pastime" (Genres in Discourse 13). During the last three decades, despite momentous contributions to genre theory by critics and metacritics such as Bakhtin, Todorov, Frye, and Jameson, sociological approaches to literature largely displaced interest in generic issues. The new millennium, however, has been welcoming genre back into its essential role in our understanding of narrative. Michael McKeon's anthology, Theory of the Novel (2000), furthermore embraces a historical approach that had been banished as a result of the postmodernist suspicion of master narratives. Other recent anthologies on genre— David Duff's Modern Genre Theory (2000), for instance, which includes material previously unavailable in English—will likely pave the way for applications of genre theory to texts we have been favoring for their identity politics. My exploration of storytelling events in the novel takes the reader on a historical "tour" of this genre, organized around a series of dramatic storytelling scenes that open a window into the social and aesthetic concerns of their framing novels. By focusing on storytelling acts where characters argue about how to tell a tale that meets their social status and aesthetic expectations, I hope to redress an imbalance between sociological approaches that displace aesthetic considerations and aesthetic analyses that bracket cultural phenomena. Each storytelling event presented in the following chapters demonstrates how social and aesthetic interests compete and reinvent themselves during the construction and reception of a narrative. Much as social interactions cannot be displaced indefinitely in the study of narrative fiction, genre cannot be ignored in the study of identity

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politics. Genre emerges as a corollary and mediator of the social interactions governing a narrative moment. Jeffrey Williams observes that "the strange thing about post-partum prefaces is that they really introduce the book that you have come to want to write more so than the one you have already written" (xi). Although the distance between this project's final form and original intention is not as great as Williams describes, the focus of my interest indeed shifted from a desire to understand how narrative creativity works to an awareness of the intricacies of genre and its historical permutations. Only after completing the project did I notice that all the cases I selected for sustained analysis depict characters in unlikely friendships across conventional markers of class, nation, generation, ethnicity, and intellectual capacity. These bonds of friendship are deepened by shared moments of storytelling in which social boundaries are renegotiated to determine the nature of fictions that emerge or are stifled by a cooperative endeavor. Lively arguments about how to tell a story result in closer communion between the characters involved. Although countless novels contain embedded tales, the highly charged scenes that form the basis of this book are characterized by a protracted argument about how a tale should be told. This argument acquires such momentum that it sometimes encroaches upon an incipient tale and strangles it so that the promised story never materializes. In most cases, however, narrative options rooted in social tensions are pitted against each other until each option is incorporated or repackaged within what may or may not become a unified generic front. As storytelling performances, then, interactive fictions invite a discussion of why a tale is constructed and how it is received in a specific social setting. From a mimetic point of view, they alert us to salient cruxes in generic expectations at different historical junctures, thus yielding a diachronic image of the novel's development. The problem of applying a mimetic approach to embedded storytelling scenes is compounded by a decision to trace this knotted affair through a historical continuum. I believe, however, that there must be a way to observe and talk about a creative tale's stylistic and generic nuances as they emerge from the relationship between a teller's intention and an audience's desire, always circumscribed by a specific cultural context. Interactive fictions in the novel are therefore situated at the seams of a narrative event, on the frame of a storytelling episode within a novel, in the interstices of social relations and historical periods marking junctures of generic transformation. The cases presented in this book span four centuries and cover several national literatures, a choice that to an extent derives from my personal background. As an Israeli who grew up in Mexico and studied English and Comparative Literature in Israel and the United States, my perspective is necessarily comparative, for to participate simultaneously in

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several cultures one must shuttle between different value systems, sympathizing with each culture on its own premises. The method that I employ here for reading novelized storytelling debates as windows into their framing texts can be adapted to any novel in which an embedded tale emerges from a dynamic relationship between its teller and audience. However, because I have a special interest in the historical development of the novel, the majority of storytelling events examined in the following chapters come from texts that dramatize with particular poignancy a range of social and aesthetic influences reconfigured during pivotal reassessments of this genre's scope and status. In Cervantes' Don Quixote (1605 and 1615), a series of highly comic tales that Sancho and Don Quixote tell each other illustrate how knight and peasant learn to manipulate elements from each other's private worlds, and through this process, reach a mutual understanding that was inconceivable initially. Fielding's storytelling scenes in eighteenth-century England, though not fully interactive, articulate a didactic drive to refurbish the novel's parameters. Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy (1759-1767), which like Fielding's work is indebted to Cervantes, plays more brazenly with the tacit rules of genre, rhetoric, and interpersonal relations that enable us to enjoy narrative. Sterne's storytelling scenes revel in the idea of storytelling as a physical object and narrative as a psychological and chronological device. A single interactive storytelling moment in Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey (1818) encapsulates Austen's decision to step away from romance "into" realism. Plumbing the depth of realism's debt to romance, Dickens' striking storytelling moment in Little Dorrit (1855-1857) expresses a keen awareness of the artifice that realism tries to conceal. Here Dickens exposes with particular clarity the struggle between aesthetic and psychological expectations, social consensus and intellectual daring, and metafictional games and folk storytelling, all of which characterize storytelling debates throughout the history of the novel. Although the audience's stance is not voiced explicitly during the storytelling episode that occupies virtually all of Conrad's Lord Jim (1900), it is suggested through the storyteller's insistent appeal for a new world-view capable of accommodating transgression and difference. If Austen's Northanger Abbey steps from romance into realism, then Conrad's Lord Jim moves beyond a self-assured illusion of ideological consensus into the anxieties of modernism. Lord Jim, like all the novels in this study, straddles and exposes conflicting world-views. A final chapter concentrates on two contemporary novels from areas of the world that have reinvigorated a genre, which, instead of dying as some had presaged, continues to surprise us. The contact between history and the novel, crucial to our conception of fact and fiction, is pertinent to any definition of postmodernism despite critical attempts to ignore or deny the burden of history in order to readjust the way we carry it. A. B. Yehoshua's

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Mr, Mani (1990), an Israeli example from the literature of a nation deeply concerned with history and identity, tells Jewish history backward through a series of fallible narrators who stage dramatic storytelling situations in order to connect with figures of authority and judgment. Mr, Mani's revision of the boundary between history and fiction is matched by an ethnic revisionism that posits an interface, rather than a conflict, between experiences of Jews from different cultural environments. My final example represents a genre and an area of the world that has produced the most vital body of novels during the second half of the twentieth century. Rendering homage to Latin American Magic Realism, I trace a Third World mediation between traditional genres and postcolonial pressures in Laura Esquivei's Like Water for Chocolate (1989). By internalizing the communicative possibilities available to each ethnic group that surrounds her, Like Water for Chocolate's protagonist ekes out a semblance of emancipation from her tyrannical parent. Yet this emancipation, mirroring Mexico's sociopolitical reality, marks only the beginning of a modern identity that is both effective and satisfying. My method of extracting an embedded tale from its surrounding plot before recontextualizing it within its fictional world helps distinguish different facets of a storytelling event, such as teller and audience motivation, social constraints, generic expectations, and stylistic choices. The coexistence of these facets within a dramatized storytelling scene begs, in turn, for a parallel convocation of critical approaches that have targeted these topics. While activating such an interactive poetics, I nonetheless avoid technical jargon as much as possible in order to humanize the interpretation of each storytelling event without losing sight of the contextualized debate that surrounds it. I hope this decision facilitates recognition of interactive fictions as a convenient entry point into specific novels and as an accessible springboard for discussing topics in narrative composition, genre development, and fictionality. Interactive fictions invite us to observe how intentionality and response, as well as generic interplay and narrative structure, work when they are "at home." The fact that the entire process occurs within a work of fiction governed by its own rhetorical agendas is discussed at length in the introduction to defend the usefulness of this playful approach. Friends and mentors who are also inspiring scholars offered valuable help during every stage of this book. Gregory Heyworth, Yvette Louis, Suzanne Fleischman (z"l), Kristine Ibsen, Thomas Keenan, Alban Forcione, Sandra Bermann, H. M. Daleski, Michael Wood, and Daniel Schwarz commented on different drafts. Brief but incisive conversations with Ross Chambers, Claudia Brodsky, Thomas Pavel and Tony Hunt made me rethink the premises of my arguments. Billy Flesch, Laura Quinney, and Maggie Kilgour motivated me during the last months of production. Thanks to Alison Lemoine, the excellent research assistant that McGill facilitated for the

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completion of this book, as well as to the anonymous readers chosen by Greenwood Press, who will find their constructive criticism gratefully implemented. I am especially grateful to my parents, Bracha and Peter, and parents-in-law, Batya and Mike, not only for encouraging and helping my husband and me succeed with two academic careers and a growing family, but also for setting an example of professional achievements laced with fun. To my wonderful husband, Dani, who being a mathematician forced me to prove every thought I ever aired with him, I appreciatively dedicate this book. Tali, Steven and Ari, born in the midst of it all, brighten our days—not to mention nights.

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The Story within the Novel PART I. INTERACTIVE FICTIONS It is dark. In the forest, a thunderous racket terrifies Sancho. Don Quixote, though afraid, feels compelled to charge against the mysterious noise. Yet Sancho, who by now has experienced the brunt of his master's adventures, resolves to keep safe at least until daylight. To distract Don Quixote, Sancho tells him a story, a story that fails to proceed in a mutually pleasing manner, though, for it is subjected by teller and listener to twists and turns of aesthetic, generic, and status arguments. Such heated fictional negotiations about storytelling conventions—narrative and social—constitute the subject of this book. Scenes of storytelling embedded within larger fictions are common in the history of literature, yet only sometimes does the surrounding dialogue feature a debate on how the tale should be told. When a storytelling event dramatizes the cogs and wheels of creative communication, it exposes the framing narrative's generic struggles and, by extension, a genre's evolution. As cultural constructs, interactive storytelling moments reflect social roles derived from differences in gender, class, generation, ethnicity, individual intelligence, and nature. They thus provide a convenient entry point to discuss a framing text's structural and thematic choices. Their complex interpersonal tensions, which enfold nuanced generic expectations, futhermore alert us to shifts in the historical status of fictionality. Interactive storytelling debates are widespread in periods marked by a playful exploration of fictionality, such as the baroque and postmodern age. Alongside other metafictional devices, they tend to appear in texts that selfconsciously expose their fictionality. This does not imply that interactive

2

Interactive Fictions

storytelling moments are confined to metafictional texts. Although they are subdued when fictionality is negated—as generally occurs in realism and romance—the very manner in which fiction is camouflaged behind a cohesive or seemingly consensual front, emerges in storytelling events from periods that pretend "to have abjured artifice—a pretense which is of course itself the nth degree of artifice" (Morgan 214). Since the interactive degree of a storytelling event depends on complex character relationships and sustained attention to hidden agendas motivating storytelling and response, it is not surprising that interactive fictions abound in metafictional texts of all periods and genres, but are rare in early romance, where sophisticated character portrayals are not yet achieved, or in realism, where make-believe's creative processes are concealed.1 However, when realism is openly linked to romance, as in Austen's Northanger Abbey or throughout Dickens's oeuvre, interactive scenes of storytelling do rear their head. The fact that they exist in all modern manifestations of the novel except strict realism invites one to reconsider paradigmatic accounts of the genre that privilege this mode. It is perhaps easiest to define interactive storytelling events according to what they are not. Embedded storytelling scenes prefaced by the simple announcement that Character So And So will tell a story, followed by a straightforward presentation of his or her tale and sealed by a formulaic statement about the audience's delight in a story well told, are not interactive fictions. No storytelling scene can be regarded as an interactive fiction if it is told by what Tzvetan Todorov calls "narrative men" (hommes-recits). These utilitarian characters, pervasive in the Arabian Nights, are introduced into the narrative for the sole purpose of telling a story. Their manner of composing and delivering the tale has little to do with their own or their audience's individual character, although social tensions of a hierarchical nature may motivate their storytelling relationship. Generally speaking, hommes-recits and their entire tales can be excised from the framing text without causing much structural damage to it. Interactive storytelling events, on the other hand, can never be removed from their frame without forcing a large-scale revision of the framing narrative. Consequently, a primary criterion for identifying interactive storytelling scenes in the novel is that it is impossible to discuss them without referring to a surrounding fictional context. For instance, Little Dorrit's story in Dickens' novel is a relatively detachable interactive fiction, yet it cannot be removed from the text without altering references to this story in subsequent sections of the novel and, more important, without damaging the relationship between Little Dorrit and Maggy (her audience). Marlow's account of Jim's life in Conrad's Lord Jim, and a number of storytelling moments in contemporary novels such as Mr, Mani and Like Water for Chocolate, are so intertwined with their frame that they actually carry the entire novel.

The Story within the Novel

3

By contrast, when it comes to building character through action "only the coldest travel narrative can compete" with the impersonality and barrenness of character in the Arabian Nights, one of the earliest collections of framed storytelling scenes (Todorov, "Les hommes-recits" 78). Typical of the Arabian Nights' bare-boned storytelling context is the sequence between two Sinbads, the famous sailor and a simple porter, where the porter repeatedly comes to the sailor's splendorous mansion to hear an account of how his host lost and reacquired enormous wealth during several voyages. Uninterrupted, the sailor relates his life to the porter, whom he politely addresses as "brother" despite their enormous economic and social disparity. Although the contrast between the material position of the two Sinbads' is the main reason for linking them together through name and storytelling frame, a "moral" lesson also lurks behind this sequence. The wealthy Sinbad intimates that his "brother" should not despair in a hard life of poverty, for "only after long toil, fearful ordeals, and dire peril did I achieve this fame." Or perhaps the wealthy Sinbad wishes to show his less fortunate counterpart that the comforts enjoyed by the rich should not be taken for granted: "I suffered [hardships] before I rose to my present state and became the lord of this mansion" (Tales from the Thousand and One Nights 114). Besides these brief messages from teller to listener, and several formulaic storytelling expressions paralleling the sequential structure, although not the motive, of Shahrazad's involvement with King Shariyar, the only further contact between the two Sinbads occurs when the rich Sinbad offers the poor one a hundred pieces of gold plus an invitation to share the feast prepared for "an impressive company of nobles and mighty sheikhs" who also listen to the tales, but are dramatized even less than Sinbad the porter. The porter thanks the sailor for his generous gift, and departs "pondering over the vicissitudes of fortune and marveling at all that he had heard." From his part, the sailor thanks his poorer counterpart for delighting "us with your company this day" (121). The same limited interaction is repeated on subsequent nights. Although the tales themselves afford a glimpse into the storyteller's character, neither he nor his audience is developed psychologically. In fact, the sailor's story could just as well be told by Shahrazad or any other storytelling figure in the Arabian Nights, Why, then, is a story-within-a-story-within-a-story device employed here?2 First of all, the existence of "narrative men" and their audience counterparts, which we could designate as " n a r r a t e men" or audience constructs, renders Shahrazad's story more vivid, and thus more entertaining and captivating to her threatening husband. Sinbad the Sailor's alternate sequence of misfortune and success embodied in the contrast between the poor and rich Sinbads, parallels Shahrazad's perils and hopes vis-a-vis Shahriyar. True enough, in contrast to the Sinbad sequence, the storytelling situation linking the Arabian Nights primary storyteller and her audience

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is more dramatized, yet even this sustained interaction between Shahrazad and Shahriyar appears insubstantial when compared to Sancho Panza and Don Quixote's heated arguments over how to tell a proper story. Likewise, Uncle Toby's qualifications of Trim's tales, Marlow's use of storytelling to distill experience and appeal for tolerance, and other representations of storytelling analyzed in the following chapters depict a far more intense negotiation between storyteller and audience regarding the way that a tale should proceed. Given that an analysis of interactive storytelling scenes profits from knowledge of the framing text's historical context, an expert in medieval Persian and Arabic narrative will likely perceive greater depth in the Arabian Nights' storytelling frames. As far as I can tell, though, the storytelling tension between Shahrazad and Shahriyar is so formulaic that some editors altogether dispense with repeated references to its framing device. Of course this reveals as much about changing conceptions of fictionality that guided editors at various historical moments as about the text itself. Still, the tales engulf their framing plot even in those editions that duly note each nightly contact between the imperiled storyteller and her powerful husband. The opposite occurs in interactive storytelling events. The focus on the framing plot is strengthened as the storytelling exchange progresses and the tale itself appears as an adventure that bolsters plot and character. Embedded storytelling scenes on various levels of the Arabian Nights illustrate narrative dynamics to some extent, but the emphasis always remains upon the embedded tales rather than on their surrounding plot. In interactive fictions, on the other hand, the storyteller's intentions and the audience's responses are fully dramatized and play a specific role within the framing structure. Moreover, the embedded story itself bears the mark of an interaction between its storyteller and audience. What this means is that interactive storytelling situations can exist only where character is fully developed, and only when the storytelling experience is relevant to its surrounding context. Across Periods and Genres Interpolated self-reflexive structures exist in all ages and literary forms. In drama, they appear as plays within a play that highlight boundaries between reality and illusion, thus exposing the seams of each stage of a theatrical performance.3 In the novel, interactive storytelling events characterized by a socially conscious debate on how to tell a story appear extensively during periods of transition, when a subgenre, such as chivalric romance or the realist novel, begins to break its mold. The "perception that literary genres are dynamic rather than static entities—that they change or 'evolve' across time"—is the single most important characteristic of modern genre theory (Duff 232). This transformative process, wrapped up in dy-

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namic social tensions, lies at the heart of what I define as interactive fictions. Such highly charged scenes of storytelling can be found in the Odyssey (eighth century B.C.), but not in the Aenead (1st century,B.C.). A remarkable case appears in Yvain (a chivalric romance of the twelfth-century), but none in the sixteenth century's most elaborate work of chivalry, Montalvo's Amadis of Gaul, Cervantes' Don Quixote (1605 and 1615) is replete with interactive storytelling episodes. However, in terms of their potential to expose and build character as well as a relationship between characters, none are fully developed in Avellaneda's spurious Quixote (1614) nor in Fielding's Joseph Andrews (1742) nor Dickens' Pickwick Papers (18361837), even though all three are heavily indebted to Cervantes. On the other hand, Sterne's Tristram Shandy (1759-1767), equally indebted to Cervantes, exaggerates Don Quixote's interplay among storyteller, tale, and audience to the point where parody borders on nihilism. This attitude characterizes postmodern fiction, where self-reflexive narrative structures of all types are pervasive, although they have not necessarily become more sophisticated than their counterparts in former periods. The absence of a clear-cut progressive development of interactive fictions in the novel raises a question regarding the appropriateness of employing a historical approach to study these structures.4 A historical approach, as I will explain in greater depth later, is nonetheless useful as a structural device and is moreover essential as a means of recognizing intertextual influence. Because of a self-reflexive potential linked to generic properties, interactive storytelling events are subdued in nineteenth-century realist novels, yet are better tolerated in that period's shorter fiction. Analyzing sophisticated storytelling scenes in "art tales" and other forms of nineteenthcentury fiction, Ross Chambers and Peter Brooks approach dramatized storytelling situations as hints that determine a framing text's interpretation. 5 In light of their observations, it appears that the differences between embedded storytelling situations in short fiction versus interactive storytelling events in the novel derive from generic properties distinguishing these two forms of literature.6 First of all, the interactive dynamics that surround a tale embedded within the short stories targeted by Chambers guide the reader toward an interpretation of the framing text's point precisely because the framing text is expected to have such a rigorously directed impulse. In general, short stories are characterized by a concerted drive toward a moment of crisis, a "curious, striking turning-point in the action" (Reid 12). Reflecting this generic requirement, representations of storytelling within short stories concentrate upon a single effect and are constrained by limited length, while the novel diffuses conflicting points into characters, character relationships, and social tensions that provide embedded tales within a novel with a wider range of surrounding dynamics. Despite the fact that, in the epic, information is frequently relayed

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through a character that tells his or her adventures to other characters, most of these storytelling scenes do not exhibit motivation and response in a manner that warrants an analysis of the represented storytelling performance. Notable exceptions occur in the Odyssey, whose hero's love of adventure is matched by his love of storytelling, notably of the "crafty" type. Odysseus usually concocts an alter ego to escape from danger, acquire information, or pursue a course of action that requires him to conceal his identity through physical or narrative disguise. This method, emerging from his psychological make up, provides ample material for a study of character and storytelling performance unrivaled in ancient literature. Dramatized, though not always interactive, scenes of storytelling abound in the Bible, Greek romance, the two extant Roman novels (Apuleius' Golden Ass and Petronius' Satyricon), pastoral romance, chivalric romance, and the picaresque novel. Moreover, storytelling by characters to characters constitutes the very definition of a framed collection of short stories such as The Arabian Nights, The Decameron, The Heptameron, and The Canterbury Tales,7 It is important to reiterate, however, that while character development in these forms does not necessarily lead to interactive storytelling events, storytelling scenes in which characters argue about how to tell a tale cannot surface in a substantial manner except where character is fully developed. PART II: STORYTELLING EVENTS AS MARKERS OF FICTIONALITY A Reconfigurational Theory of the Novel Interactive storytelling scenes in the novel present characters whose social and generic expectations color their attitudes toward and determine the extent of their engagement with a fictional narrative. It is quite natural, then, that novels that dramatize storytelling as a negotiation of social and aesthetic expectations should stimulate a discussion of cultural processes accompanying epistemological change. As Foucault explained on a grand scale, when a reigning cultural system gives way to a new reconfiguration of knowledge and power, many of the old system's salient characteristics are pushed to the background and new features, some of them belonging to previous epistemological grids, are brought to the foreground. Roman Jakobson describes this operation specifically for literature. "In the evolution of poetic form it is not so much a question of the disappearance of certain elements and the emergence of others as it is the question of shifts in the mutual relationships among the diverse components of the system . . . [Elements which were originally secondary become essential and primary. On the other hand, the elements which were originally the dominant ones become subsidiary and optional" ("The Dominant," 108).8

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Among all genres, the novel embodies most saliently this reconfigurational process: [N]ovels are—among other things—readings of earlier novels, readings of particular texts and more generalized series of texts as well as readings of the much broader cultural field of narrative precedents and possibilities. Generally speaking, such historical self-reflexiveness is common to all literary texts—perhaps even to all cultural artifacts. But in the case of the novel, the reflexiveness puts special emphasis on the fictive, self-made quality of the authorizing past. A "tradition" of the novel is a story of the novelist's own choosing and devising . . . [A] novel reads out the conflicting codes according to protocols of its own fabulation. The particularity of individual texts may capture the imagination of subsequent novelists, but these two are immediately subject to the novel's experimental and recombinatory process." (Reed 265) Given that interactive storytelling scenes are genre specific, I have opted to concentrate on their role in the novel.9 Yet to speak of the novel is to inevitably touch upon the other genres against which this form continuously refashions itself. Unlike poetry, drama, or the epic, the novel has been exempt from strict compositional rules because none were developed for it in classical times. Furthermore, until classical rules of composition ceased to dominate authors' structural and rhetorical decisions, narrative fiction, often referred to as romance, was not regarded as prestigious enough to warrant serious attention. 10 This does not mean, however, that the novel was ever formless, even in its premodern variations.11 Bakhtin's description of the novel's dialogic, heteroglossic, polyphonic, comic, and carnivalesque nature defines this genre according to its intrinsic wideranging and malleable characteristics, so that its complexity and richness is no longer confused with baggy messiness. My conception of the novel has taken shape under the influence, or perhaps I should say the freedom, of Bakhtin's theories—freedom because Bakhtin's definitions liberate the novel from disadvantageous comparisons with genres whose structure and rules of composition are more transparent. However, without detracting from the originality and brilliance of Bakhtin's theories, it may be that Bakhtin strikes a vital chord in our contemporary reasoning because his observations fit a current world-view that privileges relativity, multiculturalism, and dialogue. Both BB and AB (before and after Bakhtin's work was formally imported into French and English scholarship), literary theorists such as Scholes and Kellogg, Reed, Shklovsky, Todorov, and Jameson, among others, also described the novel as a genre in continuous transformation: a genre that periodically foregrounds/backgrounds a subset of its constitutive elements; a genre composed of alternative generic forms that are internalized and ironized within its "loose baggy monster's" inclusiveness.12 Henry James' derogatory re-

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mark acquires new meaning in a postmodern age, when the novel's strength is viewed as an ability to include a variety of styles and points of view. Thus, from a praiseworthy rather than a derogatory perspective, the novel can be truly described as an all-encompassing narrative medium. I therefore disagree with Wallace Martin's contention that a theory of the novel that defines it as a mixture of genres implies that the novel has no essential identity (Martin 37 and 57). Martin argues that such an encompassing theory is paradoxical, but perhaps it is no more so than describing salad as a food composed of any creative assembly of fruits or vegetables. Together with Bahktin's malleable definitions, Foucault's and Jauss' extension of the Saussurean revolution provide a coherent framework for a dynamic theory of the novel that teaches us to be wary of any epistemological system that smugly categorizes its objects of study. In the course of this project, while identifying aesthetic expectations and social relationships at work in interactive storytelling scenes embedded in texts from various cultures and eras, I remain aware of the inescapably mediated and possibly illusory nature of an historical and mimetic approach. This is not, however, a positivistic history of literature which would reduce "the experience of literature to causal links between work and work and author and author" disregarding the "historical communication between author, work, and reader" (Jauss 52). One hopes that some of the pitfalls of such a deterministic approach can be avoided through an analysis that pays close attention to multilayered links between a storyteller, tale, and audience operating in the context of a self-consciously represented "horizon of expectations." From this contextual perspective, "literary evolution can be comprehended within the historical change of systems, and on the other hand pragmatic history can be comprehended within the processlike linkage of social conditions" (Jauss 18).13 A cross-fertilization of social and aesthetic expectations lies at the crux of heated storytelling debates where contact between characters from disparate cultural positions engenders new social and narrative configurations. Models of Fictionality My approach to the novel via a series of interactive storytelling scenes read as markers of fictionality and by extension, gauges of the genre's historical transformations, hinges upon two assumptions that must be addressed at this point. First, the performative dimension of this approach treats strategically constructed objects numerically; second, its historical dimension ultimately yields no more than a selective and derivative image of the past. I claim that interactive fictions in the novel dramatize notions of fictionality underlying the text that frames them, namely, that they function as models of real notions of fictionality. The risk of this argument is that "you

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can see only as much as your model permits you to see; that the methodological starting point does more than simply reveal, it actually creates, the object of study" (Jameson, The Prison-House of Language 14). Models, though limiting, are nonetheless practical and capable of yielding significant insights. As Jameson further shows in his analysis of formalist and structuralist theories, their attempt to separate real from conceptual frameworks eventually becomes stymied by an inability to take historical forces into account, even though our very access to history is already mediated by a series of models. The only reality "accessible to the theoretician is the relationship of the individual philosophical position or idea to the essential model or problem-complex on which it is based" (136). In this spirit, interactive storytelling debates may be regarded as models of fictionality. My approach to a text's creative environment through its own embedded constructs does not derive from a naive belief in a direct correspondence between embedded constructs, fictional worlds, and the real world. Neither is this a straightforward study of metafictionality in the novel.14 It is rather an attempt to speak of the novel's continual creativity in terms of a multifaceted interplay that activates every facet of a storytelling event (intention, response, style, context). A diachronic progression of interactive storytelling events in turn yields an image of the constraints that operate upon writers at specific historical junctures. Keeping these caveats in mind, one proceeds with one's chosen method, albeit suspiciously. Even a deconstructionist like Paul de Man, adept at uncovering fallacious presuppositions hidden under the claims of sophisticated thinkers, resorts to pragmatic compromises in his own analyses. He questions the wisdom of approaching Proust's conception of reading by way of a scene in which Marcel is represented as a reader, for "we cannot a priori be certain to gain access to whatever Proust may have to say about reading by way of such a reading of a scene of reading" (57), Yet he nonetheless launches into an analysis of Proust's representation without adopting a categorical position regarding the viability of this model. De Man concludes that "one would have to unite the complex interlacing of truth and lie in A la recherche du temps perdu in order to decide rigorously whether or not the work corresponds to the model of a novel that is an allegory of reading which accommodates in itself the 'contradictions of reading' " (72). In Story and Situation Ross Chambers likewise feels compelled to justify the connection he makes between embedded storytelling situations and real narrative processes. Chambers asks whether "the evidence of 'narrational' (artistic) texts [is] valid for 'narrative' (informational) situations," and recognizes the contradictory tension "that must arise between the seductive thrust of storytelling and the power of literary narrative to analyze itself and reveal its mechanisms, that is, between an agency favoring blindness, on the one hand, and lucidity, on the other" (212-13). Although Chambers

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describes real narrative acts through their embedded narrative situations, he does so self-consciously, like De Man, to the extent of acknowledging a philosophical disagreement between his analytical model and the model produced by his analysis (22). The fundamental thrust of Chambers' project is based upon a belief that "one of the important powers of fiction is its power to theorize the act of storytelling in and through the act of storytelling" (23, his italics). This premise underlies my own study of represented storytelling debates. The plural fictions in my title points to an awareness of a double, and even triple, degree of fictionality lurking under the suggestion that represented performative acts are capable of serving as a gauge of aesthetic and generic concerns imbricated within evident historical transformations. Interactive fictions are fictional both as an analytical tool and as a literary construct, since they are mere representations of a communicative experience. It is in this respect that I view them as mimetic constructs, where the very identification of mimeticism distinguishes them from real storytelling exchanges studied by linguists and social scientists.15 Interactive fictions in the novel are doubly fictional because they are strategic representations of storytelling constructed by a novelist to fulfill thematic or stylistic purposes that may not coincide with, or may even contradict, their mimetic dimension. Sancho Panza's story by the watermill helps Cervantes develop the complex relationship between his two main characters at the same time as it exposes the conflicting generic impulses underlying Don Quixote as a whole. This episode also provides the kind of entertaining interlude expected by Cervantes' readers. Interactive storytelling debates are therefore representations of the dynamics of storytelling, embedded within a strategically constructed fictional world. They are fiction within fiction. Finally, the interactive tales of this study are usually fictional from the point of view of their framing novel's fictional world; that is, they are fiction within the fiction. The tale that Sancho tells Don Quixote by the watermill is actually a well-known joke bolstered by bits of folklore and snatches of romance expediently put together. Yet Sancho assures Don Quixote that his tale is based on a true incident. The obvious expediency of Sancho's construction is thus pitted against formulaic assurances of truth, highlighting the empty conventionality of such assurances. A reverse example occurs in the wonderful story that Little Dorrit tells Maggy. Officially this story is no more than a fairytale about a Princess and a poor cottager, yet it reveals much about its teller and audience under a thin veneer of make-believe. Most interactive storytelling events portray makebelieve stories or at least a thematization of make-believe simply because true histories such as straightforward biographical tales rarely warrant an elaborate dramatization of intention, construction, and response. Life stories are expected to exist independently of the narrative situation that hap-

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pens to express them. This very assumption, however, is challenged in Lord Jim, where an account of a man's life is conditioned by the world-views, value judgments, and linguistic limitations of an audience and a series of storytellers. The Transactive and the Oral Model Because of their multiple dimensions, interactive storytelling events spark a fruitful discussion about the nature of creative communication. As representations of an act of creative communication, interactive fictions challenge two widely held ideas about storytelling. One is that any storytelling performance entails a contract between its participants, and the other is that all written storytelling is but a pale version of an oral ideal. The best known proponent of the first opinion is Roland Barthes, for whom the bartering of sexual favors in exchange for a tale in Balzac's "Sarrasine" symbolizes the contractual nature of all texts. Barthes conceives of all texts as "legal tender, subject to contract, economic stakes, in short, merchandise" (S/Z 89). In my view, transactive contracts are by no means a primordial characteristic of interactive storytelling events in the novel. The storyteller's manner of delivering a story and the audience's manner of responding to it are far more important, so that contact between storyteller and audience shapes a narrative much more than a specific contract between them. Narrowly understood, this Barthean notion of storytelling misrepresents a relationship that is far more dynamic, messier, less bilateral and less equal than a tit-for-tat contract with material implications. In the novel, the relationship between characters involved in a storytelling event reads more like a friendship that, through storytelling contacts, actually destabilizes a relationship's material and social boundaries. Peter Brooks' and Ross Chambers' respective work on embedded narrative situations relies heavily on Barthes' economic model of transactive exchange. For Brooks, the transactive impulse arises as a consequence of what Walter Benjamin describes as the modern storyteller's alienation from a communal chain of orally transmitted experience. However, from the time that Benjamin wrote "The Storyteller" (c. 1936) new literary forms such as Magic Realism have decidedly overturned many observations applicable to the depressing inter-World War spirit that suffuses Benjamin's essay.16 According to Benjamin, the ancient storyteller, operating thanks to a living transmission of information, was capable of communicating actual experience, while the modern storyteller, the novelist from Cervantes onwards, can pose mere ontological questions about life. For Benjamin, novelized storytelling fails to convey the "slightest scintilla of wisdom" because it is disconnected from communicable experience (87-88). Yet as we will witness through interactive fictions in novels from before and after the interwar period, storytelling characters do communicate experience. The

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desire and need to communicate experience comes across clearly through Dickens' Amy Dorrit and Yehoshua's Hagar, in a comically distorted way through Sancho Panza's Clavileiio story, as well as in the history and metaphors of Uncle Toby's wound. Even modernist examples portray a storyteller's sustained attempt to convey experience, as in Marlow's tale.17 Moreover, the capabilities and preoccupations of modern storytellers portrayed in fiction are by no means confined to ontological issues alone. Conversely, as we have seen above, representations of traditional storytellers— the most obvious example being Odysseus—can also reveal a preoccupation with ontological issues. Regarding the contention that all written storytelling is but a pale version of an oral ideal, it may be argued that if represented storytellers in the modern novel appear to communicate experience it is only because dramatized storytelling scenes simulate oral, and thus traditional, storytelling exchanges. Elaborating on Benjamin's ideas about storytelling, Brooks observes that the "simulation of orality in writing appears to want to restore this situation of live communication in a medium that is necessarily marked by detachment, solitude, privacy, and lack of context" ("The Storyteller" 36). A contextualized analysis of interactive storytelling scenes reveals, however, that novelistic storytelling dynamics do not simulate orality. Most storytelling events in the novel take advantage of the communicative potential available to a teller and audience who meet face-to-face, yet this apparent trace of orality differs from an actual oral base. Stressing the difference between orality and textuality, Ann Banfield has argued that to assume traces of actual orality in a written text is to posit a hybrid or transitional text, which cannot exist given that the two realms separate when writing takes over (254). Moreover, even in terms of intertextual influence, the epic's oral roots cannot be transposed to apparent traces of orality in the novel, for the epic singer tells his tale from "the reverent point of view of a descendent," a reverence that is virtually obsolete in the novel. This presents a fundamental difference in attitude. Moreover, the space between an epic singer and his audience is already the space "of a man speaking about a past that is to him inaccessible," while the novelist—this becomes more complicated in the case of the historical novelist—portrays events on a "time-and-value plane" that he inhabits and shares with his contemporary audience (Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination 13-14). Although character storytellers in novels sometimes claim that their tales are tried-and-true ones wielding epic authority, their storytelling act exposes the opposite. A character-led storytelling scene in the epic usually takes place during a banquet or in the underworld, formulaic storytelling scenarios that enable a tale to proceed in an orderly straightforward fashion with no interruptions. Novelized storytelling events, on the other hand, show that a tale is the product of

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personal and expedient forces stemming from a storyteller and an audience's combined and sustained effort. Interactive storytelling scenes in the novel remind us of the novel's kinship to drama more than to the epic. Novelistic storytelling events seldom include features of oral storytelling such as memory, rhythm, and formulaic repetition,18 but they do take advantage of the dramatic potential of a frontal interaction. This face-to-face setting illustrates, in fact, one of the most important characteristics of interactive fictions in the novel, namely, the expedient construction of a story in response to active audience participation. In a number of cases the storyteller has already internalized the audience's position, and builds a story in response to a previous conception of the audience's expectations, as is particularly obvious in Conrad's Lord Jim and Yehoshua's Mr. Mani, In general, the more dramatically oriented a novelist is, the more he or she will take advantage of the face-to-face potential. Acknowledging Maggy's idiosyncratic requests by a slight nod of the head allows Little Dorrit to set her audience at ease without actually incorporating Maggy's bizarre requests into the "text" of her tale. Sancho Panza is indeed forced to cater to Don Quixote's demands and alter the style of his tale, yet the physical acts that surround Sancho's storytelling, irreverent acts such as tying down his master and laughing at him, extend the relevance of his tale far beyond its linguistic parameters. Physical gestures frequently expose a story's generic boundaries as much as the actual story does. Thus, although interactive fictions represent an oral storytelling event, they are novelized constructs. Traces of orality characterizing traditional storytelling lose their original form in the process of joining the other generic and structural components of the novel. Novelized Storytelling Events Tales embedded within a novel typically take the form of short stories, romances, mini-biographies, gossip, sketches, yarns, anecdotes, parables, or a mixture of any of these. In other words, tales embedded in a novel are usually not novels.19 However, as occurs in regard to their deceptively oral dimension, properties of alien genres are swallowed into the interactive fiction's agenda: they become novelized. While the thematic and stylistic concerns of some storytelling debates reflect quintessential novelistic concerns such as this dialogic tug-of-war between genres, others have more to do with literature's perennial preoccupations, notably the troubled boundary between fact and fiction. Most interactive fictions dramatize a state of tension between self-expression and authority, individuality and tradition, and personality and ideology. This tension, this disordering of established power structures, is supremely comic in novelized storytelling events. To protect Don Quixote from danger, Sancho Panza binds him and only then tells him a story to pass the time. Uncle

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Toby interrupts so often that Trim never delivers his story. Marlow refuses to admit in front of Jim that, under certain circumstances, he, too, might have jumped to save his life, yet when Jim describes the impulse to jump, Marlow surreptitiously estimates the distance between his chair and some soft bushes. Disregarding age and ideological differences, Hagar forces her mother to listen to a preposterous tale of sexual experimentation, hysterical pregnancy, and attempted suicide punctuated with grandiosely selfcentered, yet humorous, fantasies. In their limited capacity to mirror historical tensions, interactive fictions engage complex questions such as those that Foucault raised in The Order of Things: "Perhaps knowledge succeeds in engendering knowledge, ideas in transforming themselves and actively modifying one another . . . but how?" (xxiii). Since interactive storytelling scenes stage a negotiation or clash between world-views and genres, they demonstrate shades of this complicated process, echoing the more sustained reconfigurational process of their framing novels. Sancho and Don Quixote's struggle to control Sancho's joke/romance in the forest, as well as Sancho and the Humanist's mistrust of Don Quixote's "chivalric romance" by the cave of Montesinos, approximate Cervantes' collision with virtually all the genres of his time: chivalric and picaresque novels, pastoral and sentimental romances, neoclassical philosophy, Byzantine novels, etc. Sterne's play with the book as an object, and his mockery of literary conventions employed to represent a fictional life, reverberate in Uncle Toby's finessed references to his genital wound in terms of a point on a map and a battlefield model. Reexaminations of the boundaries between history and romance surface when Fielding criticizes the supernatural in his semi-interactive storytelling scenes, when under Henry Tilney's gothic romance (in Northanger Abbey) lurks a sobering dose of realism, and even when Little Dorrit's fairytale eases her very real misgivings about love. Austen and Dickens ride the line that is supposed to divide realism from metafiction and romance. As overt metafictional devices, their interactive storytelling scenes comment on the relationship between history and romance. Conrad's Lord Jim also troubles the boundaries of fiction and history, but rather than contest romance, it challenges history's objective status as well as the reliability of all confessions, biographies, and second-hand observations. By acknowledging his doubts about interpretation and expression, Marlow admits a new world-view that collides with Victorian values, leaving him floating in an ideological limbo. Almost a century later, and from a different cultural perspective, A. B. Yehoshua examines the role of fictionality and subjectivity in every portrayal of character, story, and history. His storytellers annoy their audiences by exposing the speculative and subjective nature of their reports on various Mr. Manis. Finally, more obviously than in any other novel studied here, Like Water for Chocolate

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plays with genres previously foreign to the novel. This is reflected in its protagonist's culinary fight against her domineering mother's behavioral "script," which she contradicts by making use of all the modes of selfexpression that surround her. A panoramic examination of interactive storytelling moments reveals that the gap between reality and individual desires is often expressed through the notion of "enchantment," derived from folklore and chivalric romance. In Don Quixote, this notion comes in handy whenever Don Quixote and Sancho, who learns this trick from his master, wish to "explain away" some mishap or interpret a situation differently from what their senses register. Expedient and strategic gap-bridging techniques in the history of the novel—in Dickens or Mark Twain, for instance—attest to Don Quixote's influence on the genre's development. Yet the portrayal of a character's imagination as a means of addressing the gap between private desires and reality is a perennial function of storytelling, which Cervantes exploited masterfully. Narrative time and timing, two building blocks of fiction that are particularly prominent in the novel, are also highlighted in its interactive storytelling scenes. The duration of a narrated event, as well as the duration of story time, is often subjected to debate, as when Sancho and the Humanist scholar reject Don Quixote's adventures in the cave of Montesinos because they know he has been in the cave for only one hour while his tale alleges a stay of three days. The interplay between represented time and narrative time is taken to an extreme in Tristram Shandy, where a number of storytelling events, such as Trim's undelivered story of Captain Le Fever, dramatize the problem of time in narrative as vividly as the narrator's irreverent teasing of the reader. Timing plays a significant role in Like Water for Chocolate, for here the failure to recount a story at the right moment results in death. Mr. Mani's five storytellers schedule their accounts to captivate and dominate their audiences. Even Little Dorrit's single but prominent interactive fiction exhibits an awareness of the role of narrative time and timing, since the storyteller gains time to grieve privately in her prison garret by promising to tell a story later. In the history of the novel, mimetic story time plays a seminal role in picaresque literature, which, along with romance, contributed most significantly to shaping the modern novel.20 Early picaresque novels often stage a storytelling scene when the rogue needs to move from one place to another: his trajectory on the road thus takes the form of a storytelling episode that in and of itself constitutes an adventure.21 About to set off on a journey, a character in Guzman de Alfarache's company typically says something like, "And now, to enliven our way with some entertainment, I will tell you a story . . . " ("Agora bien, para entretener el camino con algun alivio . . . les contare una historia . . ." Aleman 49). Arrival at the journey's destination normally coincides with the end of the storytelling episode.

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PART III: INTEGRATIVE POETICS An analysis of the performative dimension of an embedded fiction—the dramatized interaction between its storyteller, tale, and audience—benefits greatly from the insights of literary theories that have treated narrative construction, style, and response. Although during the 1960s and 1970s New Critics favored partitioning and even excluding some of these facets from academic discussion, intermittent calls for an integrative poetics surfaced from time to time—notably Wayne Booth's Rhetoric of Fiction (1961, 1983)—and influential critics such as M. H. Abrams occasionally acknowledged that the total situation of a work of art involves an interaction between four elements: work, artist, audience, and universe (6).22 Nonetheless, these sporadic calls for an inclusive poetics were not enough to dissipate a scholarly climate dominated by the dread of committing what Wimsatt identified as the affective fallacy, that is, confusing the effect of a text with its content or form, or the intentional fallacy, interpreting literature according to psychological and biographical assumptions (21). Eventually, every observation about a narrative's reception or intentionality became suspect.23 In the 1980s theorists began to reinstate some of the excluded aspects, especially the reader or audience's perspective, but they did so by claiming preeminent status for the facet they wished to explore. This situation reminds one of the parable about four blind scholars, or in this case scholars with self-imposed blinders, who touch different parts of an elephant and insist on defining the whole animal according to the part they happen to hold. When placed side by side, however, such exclusionistic tendencies amount to a mutually corrective procedure that spreads out a broad collection of analytical tools and hermeneutical data capable of illuminating the subject's full dimensions. Grounds for deeper and more nuanced analyses of the interaction between various facets thus improve. My ad hoc application of tools and insights developed by narratologists, reader response theorists, speech act analysts, and metafictionists when their observations are particularly pertinent to any aspect of my analysis, may appear limiting to readers who endorse any one of these theories. Moreover, a reader who is acquainted with these approaches will "hear" them resonating in the background more often than he or she will find them cited or summarized. I opted for this oblique approach in order to avoid encumbering the reader with professional jargon as well as to keep my analytical focus on storytelling scenes that are already brimming with a complex dramatization of the whole business of narrative. In schematic terms, structuralist/narratological methods promote close analysis of an embedded story viewed as a "text" told by a characterstoryteller to a character-audience. From this perspective, interactive storytelling events invite questions such as: Why does the storyteller choose this particular type of story? How is the story told? Why is it told in one

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manner rather than any other? Narratology helps define the function of an embedded construct within the context of its frame.24 Since interactive storytelling events play a significant role within the text that contains them, one cannot regard an interactive fiction employed for the sake of furthering a novel's action in the same way as a storytelling interlude that serves to illustrate character or the arbitrary nature of fiction. This facet of represented storytelling raises questions about narrative embeddedness: Why is this particular type of narrative device chosen to further a novel's action, construct character, or develop the relationship between characters? How would its elimination alter the framing text? Why is a storytelling debate introduced at point X in a novel, rather than at point Y or Z? How does its location affect our interpretation of both the framing novel and the storytelling scene? These questions allow us to speak of the strategic construction of a fictional world, bringing us closer to the theme of creative motivation without pulling us away from the text itself. In turn, reader response approaches provide a theoretical basis from which to analyze the reactions of represented audiences or narratees. This axis of the analysis elucidates the way that a story is received by its represented audience, how and why that audience interferes in the construction of the tale, and why the tale is received in one way rather than another. Such questions are prominent in an analysis of interactive storytelling events because the represented audience's response to a tale, as it is being constructed, is intimately connected with the portrayal of character relations in the framing novel. Moreover, as opposed to other types of embedded storytelling scenes, the audience's role is so pronounced in interactive fictions that one can virtually identify them by the audience's constant interruptions of an ongoing tale. The context of novelized storytelling interactions extends beyond the audience-tale axis to the audience-storyteller axis because the audience's ongoing observations, requests, and criticism cause the storyteller to mold and shape a tale according to the requests and reactions with which he or she is challenged. The tale at the core of each interactive storytelling event is thus a joint product of storyteller and audience in a way that can only occur when teller and audience respond immediately to each other. From this point of view, interactive storytelling events in the novel do not correspond at all to real-life reading situations in which one encounters a narrative that is stylistically and thematically complete, even if in terms of its meaning and patterns we may define it as an "open" text.25 Ultimately, one seeks to fathom how creative imagination shapes a story or the interpretation of a story, how one entity can draw upon images and literary conventions to conjure up situations, descriptions, characters, and fictional worlds that other entities can then picture in their own imaginations. Speech Act theory and Pragmatics address these issues in real communicative situations and, more recently, in interchanges involving fiction.

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Studies of metafictionality also shed light on these questions, especially since they were among the first to draw the notion of intentionality back into academic discourse. The notion of intentionality is crucial to an assessment of storytelling scenes in which character-storytellers and character-audiences are portrayed as independent consciousnesses who "choose" to tell and listen to a story.26 Undeniably, storytelling characters are only represented as selecting an appropriate genre, narrative mode, tempo, setting, and characters, and then altering these choices according to their audience's reactions. At this level of the analysis the mimetic model becomes most slippery, for, as Manfred Schmeling says about characters performing in a play within a play, character-actors and character-audiences are always confined to a script, while their real counterparts may react in any number of ways (7). Nevertheless, the frame of an embedded play or story clearly portrays characters "choosing" to perform a play or tell a story. To ignore this fact, either because of the danger of expressing oneself numerically, or because literary theory cannot provide adequate tools to probe real authorial intentions, implies that we accept one set of blinders rather than another. Although an ad hoc application of the tools and insights suggested by the various theories delineated above has many advantages, it may compromise these schools' founding premises. Nonetheless, pluralistic and eclectic studies do not entirely lack supporters. In a book published almost twenty years after his Rhetoric of Fiction, Wayne Booth asks whether a truly eclectic theory is actually possible or whether such an approach harbors "a secret skepticism or monism" that "inevitably becomes, for everyone else, just one more monism to be either refuted or dissected in the search for useful parts" (24-25). He concludes that a valid perspectivism may be one that faces tough and interesting questions "about how the differing truth claims of various perspectives relate and about how they are to be assessed." At least, he adds, "we must find some way to talk about how the various perspectives relate to each other and are mutually tested" (33). In Booth's words I find the perfect expression of my desire to work with, or at least talk about, the integrative and mutually dependent dimensions of the creative products that constitute the objects of our studies. Although Lyotard views eclecticism as a negative characteristic of our era ("Answering the Question" 120), I think that it can also be regarded as a healthy openness to ideas and a mature tolerance of their commensurability. Our current pluralistic and eclectic world-view leads us "to interrogate the nature of language, of narrative closure, of representation, and of the context and conditions of both their production and reception" (Hutcheon 54). It therefore fans an interest in interactive processes of enunciation and response viewed within their own determining context. In the course of developing this project, I have wondered whether my examination of embedded storytelling debates as patterns of generic evo-

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lution symbolizes a postmodern poetics of the novel despite its historical approach. According to Linda Hutcheon, such a project coincides with the spirit of our times: To examine the conditions, act and nature of enunciation, to look at the "kinds of effects which discourses produce, and how they produce them," and to do so by examining the institutional, historical, political and social constraints upon production and also the "discursive cultural" (that is, internal) systems that provoke and assimilate literary production would certainly be an important step in formulating a poetics of postmodernism. (86) A historically oriented and generically grounded poetics may appear to be incompatible with a postmodernistic climate, since, even if it is conducted self-consciously, such an approach is too mindful of the traditional master narratives that postmodernism opposes. However, to avoid the pitfalls of a genuinely antihistorical disregard for context—in this case of the generic, intertextual, and historical context of the representation of an enunciative act—one is forced to pay attention to information that comes to us in predetermined packages. Ultimately, this project is no more than a serious and informed game conducted upon a series of petites histoires examined within the context of their respective fictional worlds and our received notions of genre and literary history pitted against a background of literary theory. Hutcheon's effort to tailor the definition of postmodernism to fit contemporary texts that far from ignoring history, play with it self-consciously,27 is matched by Marjorie Perloff's broadening of postmodern poetics to include generic considerations. The most fundamental questions about postmodern culture—epistemological, ontological, political, and aesthetic—are derived from considerations of classification and genre. The underlying rationale for genre—with its assumption that rational demarcation and taxonomy are possible—falls within the larger category of post-Enlightenment culture. But. . . genre—our postmodern sense of genre—is . . . "always culture-specific and, to a high degree, historically determined" . . . In this, there is no unity of genre, but only the historical determinations of "genres." (Perloff viii) My account of interactive storytelling events as nuggets of fictionality that reveal transformations in the novel's historical development can evidently be accommodated under the auspices of such a poetics. Pursuing an awareness of the boundaries between linked yet opposing forces of expression, I cannot offer a totalizing and ideological approach that judges "literature according to some standard of aesthetic good and bad" (Reed 2)— except insofar as I designate some representations of storytelling as illustrative of the creative and interactive dimensions of fiction and reject others.

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Neither does this study render homage to a "best" or "highest" type of novel. The beginnings of the genre are blurred due to an unclear "first," and no end of the novel is presaged.28 What unfolds here is a multifaceted, permeable, and interactive model of creative communication that opens a window to the generic climate enveloping a work of fiction at a given historical juncture, revealing its position within a network of dynamic social and aesthetic expectations. Does an approach to representations of storytelling grounded in such a view of the novel amount to a postmodern poetics? If one could answer this or any question about this approach categorically, then of course it would not qualify. At any rate, interest in the dynamics of storytelling transcends the boundaries of any particular set of theoretical considerations, for "Storytelling has always been, and will probably go on being, one of the main continuities of culture. By that token, it has been, and should continue to be, especially protean in its successive adaptations to cultural change" (Levin 464). In the following pages, a series of interactive storytelling debates illustrate a resistance and adaptation to cultural, personal, and aesthetic change.

2

Don Quixote and Sancho Learn Each Other's Language: Expedient Manipulations of Genre and Enchantment STORYTELLING STRUCTURES IN THE QUIXOTE Cervantes' El Ingenioso Hidalgo Don Quijote de la Mancha is a gold mine of dramatized storytelling adventures that acquire significance through an accretion of generic and social permutations. Among these storytelling events are several instances where Sancho and Don Quixote argue about how to tell a story. The debates strengthen their relationship, which becomes more complex and intimate as the plot progresses. From the time that Cervantes published the first part of the Quixote in 1605, there has been an ongoing scholarly debate about the appropriateness of its embedded storytelling episodes. Connected to this is the more recent question of whether or not the Quixote ought to be considered a modern novel, namely, are we to judge this work as a collection of entertaining episodes or as a protorealistic narrative with characters that develop in tandem with their experiences? Ian Watt, Felix Martinez-Bonati, and Anthony Close, without denying Cervantes' innovation and influence, exclude the Quixote from the modern novel canon on account of its comic episodic nature and archetypal characters. Yet when we look at the relationship between the episodes and the frame rather than at the serial nature of the episodes themselves, Don Quixote and Sancho transcend their archetypal stamp. The three storytelling episodes chosen for close analysis in this chapter complement each other by unfolding the main characters' malleable attitudes toward genres each initially represents. Sancho, the peasant rooted in folklore, learns to imitate, parody, and manipulate chivalric romance. Don Quixote, a waning aristocrat, becomes less obsessed with de-

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fending the "proper" conventions of romance and allows humor and deception to enter his fictional world. During one of their earliest adventures, Sancho tells Don Quixote a generically shapeless tale that illustrates a dissonance between their respective narrative expectations and social backgrounds. Although Sancho tries to entertain his master with the only kind of narrative Don Quixote understands, chivalric romance, the best Sancho can manage at this point is a folkloric joke sprinkled with elements from romance. Later, Don Quixote tells Sancho and the Humanist scholar a tale that has perpetually shocked critics (as it does Sancho and the Humanist in the novel) due to Don Quixote's loose treatment of chivalric conventions he formerly upheld in pure form. Finally, a story that Sancho tells the aristocrats who set him up to "fly" on a wooden horse reveals Don Quixote and Sancho's complicit manipulation of the conventions of romance for any expedient purpose. The growing intimacy between Sancho and Don Quixote owes much to a symbiotic evolution of their attitudes toward the conventions and uses of storytelling. The conflation of folk and literary genres in all three of these embedded storytelling episodes details a process of generic malleability characteristic of Don Quixote as a whole and of the novel as a genre. Before delving into a specific analysis of these scenes, it is therefore pertinent to situate the Quixote's overall system of embedded storytelling within the notions of fictionality that operated in Spain at the beginning of the seventeenth century. In the guise of Don Quixote, Alonso Quijana projects himself into an alter ego based on chivalric romances that were extremely popular in Europe during the middle of the sixteenth century, but were actually waning by the time Cervantes published the first part of the Quixote.1 Critics have always argued about whether Cervantes revived an interest in a decaying genre or gave it a checkmate. Don Quixote's ambiguous position regarding chivalric romance becomes clear, however, through a simple comparison with Avellaneda's "spurious" version, which leaves no doubt about what an zmambiguous treatment of Don Quixote's anachronistic obsession with chivalric codes would look like.2 The original Quixote's simultaneous condemnation and celebration of chivalric romance was aptly described by another of its early imitators, the seventeenth-century French author Charles Sorel: Mais enfin pour dire tout en un mot ce que je pense de Thistoire de Dom Quichhotte, elle n'a garde de faire beaucoup contre les Romans, veu que mesme elle est entremeslee d'une infinite de contes fort romanesques & qui ont fort peu d'apparence de verite, si bien que comme telle, elle peut estre mise au rang de tant d'autres qui ont trouue icy leur attaque" (quoted by Riley, "Cervantes" 50).

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[Ultimately, my opinion about the story of Don Quixote, expressed in one word, is that it hardly attacks Romance. It is itself mixed with such an infinite number of Romanesque stories bearing little appearance of truth, that it can be placed in the same category as so many others that find themselves here attacked.] (My translation) The inherent ambiguity of this novel's attitude toward the chivalric romance it purports to attack stems partly from the overlapping narrative voices that Cervantes created to parody not only Don Quixote's chivalric zeal but also virtually every literary convention practiced in his time. The three narrators, which Alban Forcione calls a triptych, do not interact directly with the characters whose adventures they record, translate, and relate, although they supposedly populate the "real" world that Don Quixote so comically fails to acknowledge. Ruth El Saffar lists the instances in which the fictional first author (the Arab Cide Hamete Benengeli), the translator (hired by "Cervantes" to render Cide Hamete's manuscript into Castilian), and the narrator/editor (responsible for relaying the translated material to the reader) "are referred to as existing within the time of the characters about whom they write." However, "these suggestions of contemporaneity are undermined . . . by other indications that the authors of Part I of Don Quixote have to rely on archives for their source material" (Distance and Control 69, n.2). Each of the narrators ironizes the other two by embodying a position from which his counterparts can be "perspectivized" (Spitzer 225). The style of the general narrator, the "second" author/editor who refers to Cide Hamete and the translator in the third person, differs from the style of the Prologues. Cervantes therefore provides no fixed point of view for his narration. 3 The story of Don Quixote's adventures is thus relayed to the reader through the combined perspectives of a translator and two narrators. 4 Yet, as Riley points out, four variations of Don Quixote's history are actually interwoven within the text: (1) Cide Hamete's fictional manuscript plus the "anonymous" source of the first eight chapters; (2) the translator and editor's version; (3) Avellaneda's spurious Quixote against which the general narrator takes issue in Part II, Ch. 59; and finally (4) the chronicle of Don Quixote's adventures as he imagines them recorded by the prophet/sage/ scribe figure that conventionally narrates chivalric romances (Suma Cervantina 78). Don Quixote, and later Sancho, fantasize about the imaginary chronicle of their adventures. Thus, when at the beginning of the second volume Don Quixote finds out that Cide Hamete has noted his embarrassing downfalls as well as his moments of glory, he declares that, despite his own allegiance to truth, it would have been preferable to omit such unflattering details. He must nonetheless accept the first part of his adventures as they have been recorded, for their publications now exists independently of him. In

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Cervantes' sequel, published ten years after Part I in reaction to Avellaneda's "spurious" sequel, Cervantes introduces characters who, like the Duke and the Duchess, have read Don Quixote's first adventures and are eager to participate in the game he offers. Incidents in which characters play Don Quixote's game to amuse themselves or trick him into returning home occur in the first volume as well as in the sequel. In Part I, the curate, barber, and Dorotea, pretending to be Princess Micomicona, create scenarios similar to those that Samson Carrasco and the Duke and the Duchess invent in Part II. These performances within the novel, "invented and enacted by possibly two or more characters for the purpose of deceiving other characters concerning their understanding of actual events," always include Don Quixote and Sancho (El Saffar, Distance and Control 26, my emphasis). Opposed to them are interpolated narratives in which characters tell stories about their present or past circumstances to an audience from which Don Quixote is sometimes excluded. These "digressive" episodes, prevalent in Part I, could easily be removed from the novel, and could be even published independently as exemplary tales (Riley, Suma 72-74). 5 In the first volume Don Quixote does not participate in many storytelling episodes. For example, he falls asleep during Dona Clara's tale and during the reading of "The Tale of Foolish Curiosity"; he is interested in Dorotea pretending to be Princess Micomicona, but is indifferent to Dorotea's "real-life" story. Had Cervantes involved his hero in more embedded stories at this point, the freshness of Don Quixote's enthusiasm would overwhelm every other agenda, while in Part II, Don Quixote's acquired experience becomes a topic in itself. E. C. Riley interprets Don Quixote's increased involvement in storytelling episodes as proof that Don Quixote has become less mad. This change in Don Quixote's madness—which I prefer to regard as a self-conscious game played by Don Quixote to amuse himself and others— stems as much from the development of Cervantes' narrative technique as from an alteration in his conception of the main character's cognitive core. Mindful of the criticism that had been leveled at him because of long digressions in Part I, Cervantes avoided the same mistake in his sequel. In the initial volume, the juxtaposition of too many different "regions of style" prevented Cervantes from mixing styles without neutralizing Don Quixote (Martinez-Bonati 58), while in the sequel, as we shall see, diverse styles are integrated more smoothly with Don Quixote's own evolving literary notions. Don Quijote's structural complexity can be examined mimetically at the level of its embedded storytelling episodes, where aesthetic and structural devices deemed necessary for creating narrative unity and verisimilitude are discussed by characters who construct and respond to tales. Don Quixote's rejection of Sancho's story derives from the knight's initial obsession with

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"pure" forms of chivalric romance. Tables are turned when Sancho and the Humanist deplore the lack of unity and verisimilitude in Don Quixote's tale at the cave of Montesinos. The rhetorical arguments that surround this tale emphasize the consequences of the knight's venture into hybrid narratives as well as Sancho's newly acquired ability to recognize the essential elements of romance. At the end, in a complicit wink, Sancho and Don Quixote learn to laugh at and with each other. Although, as we have seen in the previous chapter, embedded acts of storytelling appear in every age and all forms of literature; in the Quixote the fictional audience's participation is wondrously innovative. Its storytelling devices "may be judged to be the logical development in the Renaissance climate of literary theorizing of the narrative situation observable in the romances of chivalry, in which the act of recitation is dramatized but the audience is, as it were, imagined" (Forcione, Cervantes, Aristotle and the Persiles 134). The important dimension added here is that Don Quixote's internal audiences are not passively acquiescent or merely inferred by the reader, but they actually engage and interfere in the creation of a tale and/or in its interpretation. In keeping with the literary history of storytelling as a narrative device, it is worth noting that in the fourteenth century, improving upon Boccaccio's Decameron, Geoffrey Chaucer created a framed collection of storytelling where characters with strongly defined social identities transcend the role of passive listeners. A "multicultural" narrative pilgrimage allows Chaucer to dramatize social and aesthetic possibilities coalescing during the Middle Ages.6 Cervantes was not acquainted with The Canterbury Tales, yet it is likely that during his stay in Italy, he came across what would then be a mutual source in Boccaccio's Decameron (Alarcos 35ff.). Unlike the Decameron, however, where characters quarantined in a pastoral bubble of status, time, and place exchange stories while they wait for an infectious plague to abate, Cervantes' tales are tied to the psychology of characters involved in a storytelling performance as well as to the Quixote's overarching theme. This is true even of the most detachable "Tale of Foolish Curiosity," relating the tragicomic plight of suspicious spouses whose fiction-making spills into reality. The characters listening to this tale are passive during its public reading at an inn, yet once the reading performance is over, they enter into a heated discussion of the boundaries between storytelling and reality, which the characters in the embedded story had confused to their detriment. While the Indian pongos (hacienda workers) were not slaves in the Cervantes acknowledged in the prologue and opening chapters of his sequel, the original readers of Don Quixote, Part I, were unimpressed by the thematic unity linking its interpolated tales with the frame's general impetus. From the Renaissance to the Enlightenment, neoclassical scholars regarded formal unity as crucial to the construction and evaluation of a

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work of art. Aristotle's Poetics, translated into Spanish in 1626—though known earlier to Spanish scholars, probably to Cervantes as well, through Greek and Italian translations (Riley, Teoria 18)—stipulated that the representation of character and events on stage should adhere to the unities of action, time, and place. Judging the new brand of chivalric romances against a classical paradigm of Greek romances such as Heliodorus' Aethiopica, neoclassic scholars debated the nature and extent of digressions acceptable within a work of literature. The objections of Cervantes' contemporaries to what they perceived as a lack of unity in the first part of the Quixote brings us back to the connection between this issue and our contemporary discussion regarding the status of this work. Adapting structuralist techniques to Riley and Forcione's research on Cervantes' classical and neoclassical sources, MartinezBonati recently reevaluated Don Quixote's generic premises in the context of its own time and ours. His discussion centers on the nuanced relationship between a neoclassical preoccupation with the unity of a work of art and the belief that nature or reality can be portrayed only by imitating classical models. Evaluating this aesthetic through the prism of modern realist objectives, he concludes that, due to its generic variety, Don Quixote should not be classified as a novel in the modern sense. Martinez-Bonati's rejection of the Quixote as a paradigm for the novel is grounded on a special consideration of its generic variety rather than on a lack of appreciation of its episodic sophistication. "The pastoral world is joined to the picaresque, the heroic-fantastic world of chivalry to comedy; erotic court-country intrigue is linked, if not to Byzantine wanderings and shipwrecks, then at least to military autobiography and Moorish romance. These heterogeneous worlds are not only juxtaposed but contaminated by each other" (92). This abundant generic variety underscores a reading of the Quixote's embedded storytelling scenes as mimetic and historically grounded narrative moments where a storyteller and an audience argue about expression and interpretation. In the Quixote even characters that tell their experiences as innocently as possible are represented as choosing a style. The self-styled shepherdess Marcela, for instance, and her would-be lover Grisostomo, decide to embrace the pastoral as a means of expression as well as a way of life. Gines de Pasamonte compares his autobiography in progress to the picaresque Lazarillo de Tormes because in the seventeenth century a life of crime narrated in the first person implied a picaresque genre. Playing the role of Princess Micomicona, Dorotea consciously adopts the chivalric mode in order to enter Don Quixote's fictional world and lure him out of it. Moreover, a problematic selection of genre or a hybridization of genres

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is always challenged, as when Don Quixote and Sancho criticize each other for departing from accepted styles. Through varied dramatizations of generic options, many of which take the form of interactive storytelling events, Cervantes parodies and overturns virtually all the genres and literary conventions existing in his day. He "objectified the whole system of literary regions, then ironized and subverted it. In doing so he exposed the traditional and natural limits of the human imagination" (Martinez-Bonati 75). Due to the obvious playfulness of this intrageneric endeavor, Martinez-Bonati proposes that we recognize Don Quixote as an inauguration of the ironic space of the modern novel rather than an instance of the genre itself. He views the Quixote as a work that, by exploding the possibility of dogmatic unanimity, "cleared the way for the realistic and uniregional sphere of the imagination of the modern novel" (25, 75). However, as we shall witness through storytelling debates in the modern novel, where, in my view, imagination is by no means uniregional either, the main difference between Don Quixote and subsequent novelistic milestones lies in the amount and extent of generic versatility condensed within Cervantes' creation. The Quixote's paradigmatic status as "first" novel or superlative example of realism has often been exaggerated by enthusiastic critics. Yet Martinez-Bonati's assessment of the genre, despite its attention to the context of both neoclassic and modern realist aesthetics, likewise produces too narrow a definition. Permeability and malleability, not a set of formal achievements, characterizes this genre at every historical juncture. Thus, when judged according to its ability to interact with contemporary surroundings and existing literary forms in order to transform their boundaries, Don Quixote undoubtedly "qualifies" as a novel that moreover illustrates in a profound way the dynamics of the genre. In Don Quixote's fictional world, anachronistic aesthetics represented by a succession of storytelling characters are imposed on the seventeenth-century space to expose the preposterousness of arbitrarily choosing a genre that disregards social realities. Such a tension between contemporary life and available genres has actually been articulated as the definition of the novel as a genre, whether Cervantes' role is privileged (Harry Levin) or downplayed (Ian Watt). The tale that Sancho tells Don Quixote by the watermill fails as a unified aesthetic object, yet succeeds as a manipulation of the storyteller's environment, which is a man-made environment. Here the unsuccessful and ridiculous mingling of generic registers stems from the teller and listener's lack of familiarity with modes of expression available to and preferred by each of them. After this adventure, narrative possibilities are modified and expanded as a result of the negotiations that take place between storyteller and audience. An altered perception of literature and life's ludic potential arises from this interaction.

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SANCHO AS STORYTELLER: THE WATERMILL EPISODE . . . they began to move forward through the meadow, feeling their way, for the night was so dark that they could not see anything. But before they had gone two hundred yards a great noise came to their ears, like the roar of a waterfall tumbling from some huge, high cliff. (I, 20, 149) The strange loud noise in the forest terrifies Sancho. Don Quixote, also afraid, feels compelled to venture out against the source of the mysterious noise; yet his companion, who has by now experienced the brunt of the knight's adventures, resolves to keep his master safe at least until daylight. In this scene Sancho tricks Don Quixote for the first time. He immobilizes him physically by fastening Rocinante's reins and emotionally by engaging him in an act of storytelling. Sancho will later become an expert player in his master's game of enchantment, for he finds it very useful to explain away discrepancies between reality and one's desires. Yet even at this early stage of their relationship, when Don Quixote insists that it is God's will that drives him to proceed with the adventure, Sancho invokes the same authoritative source to claim that the heavens, taking pity on Sancho's tears and prayers, ordained that Don Quixote should stay still. In fact, Sancho surreptitiously ties down his maser, and to divert him, he then promises to tell a story. The core of Sancho's narrative is a popular childish joke, which in order to effectively detain his master, Sancho must draw out as much as possible. He therefore expands and bolsters this childish core with bits of folklore, aphorisms, stock phrases, and claims of veracity characteristic of his own nature and background. 7 In an attempt to emulate the storytelling style that Don Quixote prefers, he packages this folkloric bundle in lame evocations of chivalric romance. At this early stage of his relationship with Don Quixote, Sancho's stylistic ambitions prove to be ineffectual, but Don Quixote's interruptions and corrections of the narrative are nevertheless instrumental in promoting Sancho's rapid learning process. Sancho and Don Quixote's arguments over Sancho's tale are easier to follow if we first become acquainted with the tale itself. I therefore transcribe it below in italics and emphasize the core of the story in bold script. As an embedded tale extracted from its novelistic context—that is, stripped of the arguments between teller and listener as well as the surrounding narratorial comments—Sancho's "text" runs as follows: Once upon a time; may good befall us all and evil strike the man who seeks it. Notice, your worship that the ancients didn't begin their stories just as they pleased, but with a sentence by Cato, the Roman censor, who says—"Evil strike the man who seeks it"; and that fits in here like a ring on a finger, meaning that your worship must stay quiet and not go any-

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where seeking harm, but that we must turn up some other road, since nobody is making us follow this one, where there are so many terrors to frighten us. [. . . ] in a village in Estremadura there was once a shepherd—a goatherd I should say, for he kept goats—and this shepherd or goatherd, as my story tells, was called Lope Ruiz. Now this Lope Ruiz fell in love with a shepherdess called Torralba, which shepherdess called Torralba was the daughter of a rich herdsman; and this rich herdsman. [. . . ] [. . . ] this shepherd fell in love with the shepherdess Torralba, who was a plump, high-spirited girl, and rather mannish, for she had a slight moustache—J can almost see her now [. . . ] I didn't know her [. . . ] but the man who told me this story said that it was so true and authentic that when I told it to anyone else I could swear on my oath that I had seen it all. So, as the days came and the days went, the Devil, who never sleeps and tangles everything up, brought it about that the love which the shepherd had for the shepherdess turned to hatred and ill-will; and the reason was, as evil tongues told, that she caused him a number of little jealousies, such as exceeded the bounds and trespassed on the forbidden; and thereforth the shepherd loathed her so much that, to avoid her, he decided to leave the country and go where his eyes should never see her again. But when Torralba found that Lope scorned her, she immediately fell to loving him more than she had ever loved him before [. .. ] It came about that the shepherd put his resolution into effect [. . . ] and set out driving his goats across the plains of Estremadura to cross into the kingdom of Portugal. Torralba heard of his plan, and followed him at a distance, on foot and barelegged, with a pilgrim's staff in her hand and a satchel round her neck, which contained, the story goes, a bit of mirror and a broken comb, and some little bottle or other of washes for the face. But whatever it was she carried, I don't mean to set about inquiring now. I'll only say that the story tells how the shepherd came with his flock to cross the Guadiana river, which at that season was swollen and almost overflowing; and at the place he struck it there wasn't a boat of any kind, nor anyone to ferry him or his flock to the other side. This put him very much out, because he saw Torralba coming near, and she was sure to bother him a great deal with her entreaties and tears. He went on looking about him, however, until he saw a fisherman close beside a boat, which was so small that it could only hold one man and one goat. But, all the same, he hailed him and arranged for him to take himself and his three hundred goats across. The fisherman got into the boat and took one goat over, came back and fetched another, and came back once more and took another. Keep an account of the goats which the fisherman is taking over, your worship, for if you lose count of one the story will end, and it won't be possible for me to tell you another word of it. [... ] the landing place on the other side was very muddy and slippery,

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which delayed the fisherman a good deal in his journeys backwards and forwards. But, all the same, he came back for another goat, and another, and another [... ] "How many have got over so far?" asked Sancho. "How the devil should I know?" replied Don Quixote. "There now, didn't I tell you to keep a good count? Well, there's an end of the story. God knows there's no going on with it now." (152-54) Below I include also the Spanish version, for linguistic nuances between folkloric registers and evocations of romance are significant here, and more important, the core of the story, a pun on the verb "contar"—which means to count as well as to narrate—gets lost in translation. Erase que se era, el bien que viniere para todos sea, y el mal, para quien lo fuere a buscar [. . . ] Y advierta vuestra merced, senor mio, que el principio que los antiguos dieron a sus consejas no fue asi como quiera, que fue una sentencia de Caton Zonzorino, romano, que dice: "Y el mal, para quien le fuere a buscar," que viene aqui como anillo al dedo, para que vuestra merced se este quedo y no vaya a buscar el mal a ninguna parte, sino que nos volvamos por otro camino, pues nadie nos fuerza a que sigamos este, donde tantos miedos nos sobresaltan. [. . .] en un lugar de Extremadura habia un pastor cabrerizo, quiero decir, que guardaba cabras, el cual pastor o cabrerizo, como digo, de mi cuento, se Llamaba Lope Ruiz; y este Lope Ruiz andaba enamorado de una pastora que se Llamaba Torralba; la cual pastora Llamada Torralba era hija de una ganadero rico; y este ganadero rico [. . . ] [. . . ] este pastor andaba enamorado de Torralba, la pastora, que era una moza rolliza, zahareha, y tiraba algo a hombruna, porque tenia unos pocos bigotes, que parece que ahora la veo [. . . ] No la conoci yo pero quien me conto este cuento me dijo que era tan cierto y verdadero que podia bien, cuando lo contase a otro, afirmar que lo habia visto todo. Asi que, yendo dias y viniendo dias, el diablo que no duerme y que todo lo anasca, hizo de manera que el amor que el pastor tenia a la pastora se volviere en omecillo y mala voluntadf y la causa fue, segun malas lenguas, una cierta cantidad de celillos que ella le dio, tales, que pasaban de la raya y llegaban a lo vedado; y fue tanto lo que el pastor la aborrecio de alii adelante, que, por no verla, se quiso ausentar de aquella tierra e irse donde sus ojos no la viesen jamas. La Torralba, que se vio desdenada del Lope, luego le quiso bien, mas que nunca le habia querido [. . . ] Sucedio que el pastor puso por obra su determinacion, y, antecogiendo sus cabras, se encamino por los campos de Extremadura para pasarse a los reinos de Portugal. La Torralba, que lo supo, se fue tras el, y seguiale a pie y descalza, desde lejos, con un bordon en la mano y con unas alforjas al cuello, donde llevaba, segun es fama, un pedazo de espejo y otro de un peine, y no se

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que botecillo de mudas para la cara; mas llevase lo que llevase, que yo no me quiero meter ahora en averiguallo, solo dire que dicen que el pastor llego con su ganado a pasar el rio Guadiana, y en aquella sazon iba crecido y casi fuera de madre, y por la parte que llego no habia barca ni barco, ni quien le pasase a el ni a su ganado de la otra parte, de lo que se congojo mucho, porque veia que la Torralba venia ya muy cerca, y le habia de dar mucha pesadumbre con sus ruegos y lagrimas, mas tanto anduvo mirando que [. . . ] vio un pescador que tenia junto a si un barco, tan pequeno, que solamente podian caber en el una persona y una cabra; y con todo esto, le hablo y concerto con el que le pasase a el y a trescientas cabras que llevaba. Entro el pescador en el barco, y paso una cabra; volvio y paso otra; torno a volver, y torno a pasar otra. Tenga vuestra merced cuenta en las cabras que el pescador va pasando, porque si se pierde una de la memoria, se acabard el cuento y no sera posible contar mas palabras del. [... ] el desembarcadero de la otra parte estaba lleno de cieno y resbaloso, y tardaba el pescador mucho tiempo en ir y volver. Con todo esto, volvio por otra cabra, y otra, y otra [... ] -<;Cuantas han pasado hasta agora?- dijo Sancho. -^Yo que diablos se?- respondio Don Quijote. He ahi lo que yo dije: que tuviese buena cuenta. Pues, por Dios, que se ha acabado el cuento; que no hay pasar delante. (182-84) Despite this surgical abstraction of Sancho's "text," it will become evident in the course of my subsequent analysis that it is impossible to isolate the tale effectively from Sancho's immediate interaction with Don Quixote and from their predicament in the forest at that particular moment. Furthermore, historical and philological material is key to understanding some of Sancho's choices. This multidimensional background characterizes every dramatized storytelling event where characters argue about how to tell a narrative that fits their respective moods, abilities, and tastes. In the particular case of Sancho's story by the watermill, a generic argument emerges from the clash between Sancho's illiterate background and Don Quixote's highbrow expectations. The discrepancy between their social expectations and aesthetic registers dictates thematic and generic shifts in Sancho's narrative. Sancho's opening, "Once upon a time (erase que se era)," is of course the conventional opening of folktales. Common in Spain during Cervantes' time was the addition of "may good befall us all and evil strike the man who seeks it," to which peasants and children often added "May evil leave, may good come; evil for the Moors, goodness for us" (Clemencin, 123).9 Losing no opportunity to further his cause, Sancho capitalizes on these standard statements in order to remind Don Quixote that accidents befall those who invite them. From this point of view the prologue is geared

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toward warning Don Quixote, an attitude that Don Quixote rebuffs because it disagrees with his self-image and transgresses the social hierarchy between him and his servant: "Go on with your story, Sancho . . . and leave the road we are to follow to me" (152). Sancho's story is thus a continuation of his argument with Don Quixote about their predicament in the forest. Sancho's delight in popular sayings and proverbs is a source of comedy throughout the novel. When he is about to become governor of the Barataria Isle, Don Quixote counsels him against overusing and misusing refrains in his speech: "You must not interlard your conversation with the great number of proverbs you usually do; for though proverbs are maxims in brief, you often drag them in by the hair, and they seem more like nonsense" (II, 43, 741). Nonetheless, Sancho's interpretation of every situation through cockamamie aphoristic associations proves to be a valuable asset in his role as governor, and his strings of popular sayings actually reveal a quick perception of reality in marked contrast with his master's slower, and at times nil, understanding. In the context of the relationship between servant and master, Sancho's reliance on aphorisms and refrains plugs into a tradition of medieval counsel narratives with folkloric roots, such as Rabbi Sem Tob's Moral Proverbs and Don Juan Manuel's Conde Lucanor, where a servant routinely offers advice to his master. Though in his prologue Sancho does not allude directly to these respected sources of gnomic literature, he does attempt to legitimatize his literary credentials by producing "authorities" to forestall Don Quixote's impatience. First of all, he name drops Cato, the Roman author of a Latin reading primer to whom aphorisms and refrains were commonly misattributed. The irony is that Sancho cannot read Spanish, let alone Latin. According to Cortazar and Lerer, it was not uncommon for illiterate people to call upon Cato as an insinuation of literacy (144, n.18, annotated edition of Don Quixote). As Maurice Molho notes, Sancho comically confuses Cato's role as a censor (a literary censor) with the adjective zonzo (stupid), hence the epithet censorino becomes zonzorino (241-44). However, in contrast with Cervantes's prefatory tongue-in-cheek apology for Don Quixote's lack of token "sentences from Aristotle, Plato and the whole herd of philosophers, as to impress readers and get their authors a reputation for wide reading, erudition and eloquence . . . " (I, Prologue, 26), Sancho's tale is "officially" prefaced. After the blend of appropriate and inappropriate prologue material, the actual launching of Sancho's tale once again echoes the opening of the novel that frames it. Sancho's In a village in Estremadura recalls Don Quixote's famous opening lines: "In a certain village in la Mancha, which I do not wish to name . . . " (I, 1, 31) ("En un lugar de la Mancha, de cuyo nombre no quiero acordarme . . ." (I, 1, 35)) But then Sancho spins into a " . . . and the ox that swallowed the goat that swallowed the cat" folkloric

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singsong, which grates against the pastoral romance loosely evoked by his initial choice of setting and characters. Consequently, Don Quixote stops the storyteller and demands that he proceed "like an intelligent man, or else be quiet." Although Sancho defends his style, he does take better care to resume the narrative in a manner more closely related to pastoral romance. The problem is that Sancho has little knowledge of the conventions of romance, given that this type of narrative hardly circulated among peasants, to whom books of proverbs, considered to be edifying, were more likely to be read. Sancho's description of his heroine's physical and moral attributes again clashes with the conventions of romance, a description that reverberates five chapters later in Sancho's recognition of Don Quixote's Dulcinea as the masculine Aldonza Lorenzo who "pinches a bar as well as the strongest lad in the whole village" (I, 25, 209). To dispel doubts generated by his unlikely plump, moustached, and promiscuous heroine, Sancho immediately vouches for the truthfulness of his tale. And the fact that Don Quixote accepts Sancho's reliability here illustrates a sacred premise underlying the authority of a storyteller in oral and written traditions. The mere vouchsafing for a tale's reliability is sufficient to generate a willing suspension of disbelief. Sancho's allusion to real geographical locations such as Extremadura and Portugal provides a trustworthy touch of realism for his tale, a tactic employed in short popular versifications of low pastoral romance such as the Serranillas. A typical Serranilla identifies real geographic locations as an anchor for its narrator-meets-pretty-young-girl formula: Faciendo la via del Calatraveno a Santa Maria vencido del suefio por tierra fragosa perdi la carrera do vi la vaquera de la Finojosa. ("Walking from Calatraveno to Santa Maria, tired by the uneven terrain I lost my speed, when I saw the cowgirl of Finojosa" Santillana 291-92, my translation.)

The basic plot of Sancho's tale combines the typical love plot of pastoral romance with a Sanchoized version of adolescent psychology. Lope Ruiz loves Torralba, and she enjoys teasing him. Disgusted by her behavior, Lope Ruiz gives up, but then of course she becomes interested. When he decides to leave, Torralba chases him, making herself altogether odious to him. The image of Lope Ruiz with Torralba at his heels has a comic effect

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in the context of the chivalric tradition, where running away from a woman, in particular from a damsel in distress, challenges one of chivalry's staunchest values. Sancho distorts chivalric romance at its most fundamental levels. Cervantes' parody of romances and his comic treatment of Sancho's coarse attempts to evoke them trickles down into the smallest details of Sancho's story. Thus, Sancho's inventory of petty articles in Torralba's purse—a broken mirror, a comb, cosmetics—recalls the lists of symbolic objects carried by characters of sentimental romances. In Diego de San Pedro's Cdrcel de Amor (c. 1484), for instance, the narrator meets Leriano followed by a savage-looking knight " . . . who carried in his left hand a powerful steel shield and in his right hand the image of a woman incrusted in clear stone" (44-45). The feminine icon symbolizes adoration of a beautiful woman who enthralls the lover but exists in a sphere removed from him, while the shield stands for the Knight's status and profession. The irony here is that since in the sentimental novel the objects in themselves have literary value, Sancho's shrugging them off exposes his lack of familiarity with the code he so roughly follows. At this point—like the tale's swollen and almost overflowing Guadiana River—Sancho's narrative is ready to burst its pseudo-romantic bounds and come to light as the silly joke it really is. Up to the point where he mentions the river, Sancho evokes a medley of folkloric and aristocratic literary conventions in order to please his master and gain time. Yet all along, knight and squire have stood at opposite sides of the narrative embankment, for while Sancho was driving toward a simple-minded joke, Don Quixote expected the higher literary mode that Sancho clumsily affected. When Lope Ruiz reaches the river, even a semblance of aristocratic modes collapses into what will become exposed, retroactively, as the core of a slapstick narrative. Into this blend of chivalric and pastoral romance Sancho adds elements usually found in folktales that draw upon mythological archetypes such as fishes, wishes, bodies of water, and small boats— "He saw a fisherman close beside a boat, which was so small that it could only hold one man and one goat." Then the narrative relapses into the " . . . and the ox that swallowed the goat that swallowed the c a t . . . " rhythm Don Quixote forbade at the beginning. Sancho now reaches the heart of his story, and is ready to deliver the rhetorical directive upon which it hinges:

Keep an account of the goats which the fisherman is taking over, your worship, for if you lose count of one the story will end, and it won't be possible for me to tell you another word of it. (Tenga vuestra merced cuenta en las cabras que el pescador va pasando, porque si se pierde una de la memoria, se acabard el cuento y no sera posible contar mas palabras del.)

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This self-referential statement relies upon an audience's failure to heed the storyteller's warning. Indeed, when Sancho drops the anticlimactic punch line—"how many have got over so far?"—Don Quixote falls right into the trap by retorting, "How the devil should I know?" Predictably, he had not bothered to keep track of the goats that crossed the river, and thus it is impossible to continue counting/recounting. The climax of the narrative turns out to be a pun on the double meaning of the verb contar (to count): contar cabras (one, two, three . . . ) and contar un cuento (to tell a story). Widely known in Cervantes' time (Rodriguez Marin 192), as it is today in the Spanish-speaking world, the core of Sancho's story turns out to be a common slapstick jest. In Avellaneda's version of the Quixote, Sancho uses geese instead of goats, and in folklore the joke alternates with other farm animals. Having grown-up in Mexico, I remember a condensed version of this jest: "$Que cuentas?" followed by "Pues uno, dos, tres, cuatro . . . " which elicited a jaded grimace. Maurice Molho explains that, as a counting game, this story is traditionally used to lull children to sleep (223), a context in which it is known in many languages that rely upon the repetitive counting of animals rather than on the double meaning of the Spanish verb contar. Certainly Sancho would have liked Don Quixote to fall asleep, since this would settle their dispute over whether or not to explore the mysterious noise in the forest. In either case, the joke is on the audience. The appropriate reaction and closure for this type of burlesque should be laughter—healthy laughter joining storyteller and audience in mutual enjoyment of a deflated buildup. Laughter would prove that the audience understood what the storyteller knew all along: that storyteller and audience were on opposite banks of the narrative river, but that once the pun on the verb contar should be exposed, they would flow together. Carnivalesque laughter is universal in scope, directed towards everyone and anyone. "The entire world is seen in its droll aspect, in its gay relativity." It is an ambivalent laughter, "gay, triumphant and at the same time mocking, deriding." Everyone participates in it—those who laugh and those who are laughed at. Like carnival itself, it is a regenerative experience supposed to end with an eventual return to social order (Bakhtin, Rabelais 11-12). Since here the joke is on the master, laughter would entail an acceptance of temporary weakness and comradeship that Don Quixote is unwilling or unable to tolerate at this point.10 Having missed the pun on the verb contar, Don Quixote asks, "Is it so essential... to know exactly how many goats have crossed?" His utter lack of familiarity with the joke exposes the distance between his ivory tower and village folklore just beyond his hacienda. Hoping for a more adequate closure, he insists pathetically, "The story is finished, then?" He comments on what he supposes is the originality of the story, on its ambiguous genre, and on Sancho's faulty style. "Really, you have told me one of the strangest

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tales—true or false—that anyone could imagine in the whole world; and never in a lifetime was there such a way of telling it or stopping it, although I expected no less from your excellent intelligence. But I am not surprised, for this ceaseless thumping must have disturbed your brains" (154-55). Oblivious or unwilling to accept his servant's burlesque slap in good spirit, Don Quixote complains that he hadn't expected anything better from Sancho's addled entendimiento. Yet the one who in this case has no entendimiento (understanding)—either of the story or of the best way to deal with the mysterious and possibly dangerous noise—is Don Quixote. As a pleasurable act of communication, Sancho's story fails. Indeed, it entertains teller and listener by delaying them, but rather than amuse, this heterogeneous narrative exposes how the storyteller and his audience operate on opposed narrative registers: The crazy idealist operates according to anachronistic aristocratic codes and the squire according to basic forms of folk humor. Yet given that Don Quixote pushes Sancho's narrative ability to its limit by censuring Sancho's manner of telling a story—recalling Cato's "censorship," which Sancho interpreted as "idiocy"—Sancho feels compelled to adopt a "higher" literary mode that, as a peasant untrained in romance, he can merely evoke. On the other hand, because Don Quixote is unwittingly tied down—he has been surreptitiously tied down by Sancho—he must submit to his servant's clumsy blend of folklore and romance. Thus, in the context of the chapter as a whole, Sancho's tale succeeds as a scheme to pass the time, which was Sancho's first and foremost intention. When daylight finally comes and Sancho quietly unties his master, Don Quixote delivers one last self-bolstering speech and, with Sancho crouched between Rocinante's legs, sets off to explore the mysterious thumping in the forest. "Oh, good reader!" warns the narrator before dropping the anticlimactic punch line of the chapter: "It was . . . six fulling-hammers whose regular strokes made all that din" (157). The mysterious noise comes from something as innocuous as the mechanical rotation of a watermill! Don Quixote is so surprised this time that he admits his initial disproportionate reaction to the noise. Both Sancho and Don Quixote are fully aware of the comical gap between their original speculations and the banality of the actual source of their fears. In contrast, during the aftermath of an earlier 'mill' adventure—the famous episode of the windmills—Don Quixote never desists from his idea that the windmills are giants. After receiving a sound beating from their vanes, he maintains that Sancho's lack of familiarity with chivalric literature prevents the peasant from realizing that the same evil magician who stole Don Quixote's books is responsible for transforming giants into windmills in order to rob Don Quixote of a glorious victory (I, 8, 82). In that earlier hallmark episode, Don Quixote refused to acknowledge that there had been no giants. Yet in the case of the mysterious noise that turns out to be nothing more

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challenging than a watermill, Don Quixote uncharacteristically acknowledges plain reality. He acknowledges the comic gap between reality and his expectations to such an extent that, inspired by Sancho, he actually bursts out laughing: . . . when Don Quixote looked at Sancho and clearly saw from his swollen cheeks and his laughing mouth that he was on the point of exploding, despite his own gloom he could not help laughing . . . (157-58) At last! The laughter and camaraderie missing at the end of Sancho's story appear at the end of the watermill episode, gathered into a second deflation funnier and more effective than the first because suspense has been heightened by Sancho's intercalated narrative. Carnivalesque laughter, as we have seen, is characteristically marked off by a return to authoritarianism. Seeing that even Don Quixote cannot repress laughter, Sancho gives unrestrained vent to his own giggles and mocks Don Quixote's valorous speeches in expectation of a dangerous encounter with . . . a watermill. This much chutzpah the master cannot tolerate, and raising his lance, he hits and scolds Sancho. "I was only joking," Sancho apologizes. "You may be joking," Don Quixote responds, "but I am not" ("Pues porque os burlais no me burlo yo"). When they calm down, Don Quixote admits that their unwarranted fear was indeed worthy of laughter, but not of telling, for although Don Quixote is willing now to laugh at himself, he still cannot tolerate others laughing at him. Through the stinted yet intimate comradeship that takes place on different levels of this episode, Sancho and Don Quixote have an opportunity to closely observe the sources, possibilities, limitations, and motivations of each other's fiction-making. The episode prompts a reassessment of the squire and master's relationship, and despite misunderstandings between them, it inspires greater flexibility towards each other's narrative registers in the future. Generic variety in the Quixote is not only a characteristic of its style, but also a byproduct of its seminal struggle with genres that eventually will become integrated more smoothly in the modern novel, as maintained by Martinez-Bonati. The clash as well as the subsequent integration and contagion of genres is a theme in its own right, dramatized in slow motion through storytelling debates of the kind that are analyzed in this study. Each storytelling debate builds upon the generic interplay achieved in preceding engagements. We shall see how the clash between seemingly incompatible generic modes and the failed gesture towards their integration in the watermill episode paves the way for a subtler, albeit more problematic, coupling of genres in the Montesinos episode.

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DON QUIXOTES INTENTION AT THE CAVE OF MONTESINOS Unlike the clear motivation that drives Sancho's joke-story, Don Quixote's motivation for the tale that he tells by the cave of Montesinos is hidden from his audience as well as from the reader. Throughout the second part of the Quixote, this problematic episode is revisited several times to determine its verisimilitude. Since this extreme ambiguity does not occur in the Quixote's first volume where the watermill episode appears, Cervantes' increased sophistication and greater sensitivity to criticism reminds us of the significant ten-year lapse between the composition of each part. The Montesinos incident appears well into Part II, following Basilio and Quiteria's successful deceit of Quiteria's rich bridegroom. Don Quixote uncharacteristically praises this deceit by affirming that tricks designed for a good purpose should not be called deceptions (II, 22, 608). With this remark still reverberating among the wedding guests, Don Quixote expresses a wish to visit the famous cave of Montesinos in order to corroborate whether the romances told about it are true. Again, his stated goal is somewhat out of character, for where else does Don Quixote seek to corroborate romance? Blind belief in romance generally defines him. Under the guidance of a young man recommended for his expertise in chivalric literature (Cervantes refers to this neoclassical scholar as a Humanist), Don Quixote and Sancho set off toward the cave. During the trip they engage in a lively discussion of the scholar's endeavor, which Don Quixote and Sancho denigrate: "there are some who tire themselves out learning and proving things which, once learnt and proved, do not concern either the understanding or the memory a jot" (II, 22, 611). As part of Cervantes' global ironization of existing genres, the Montesinos episode targets pseudo-scholarly collections of disparate and often groundless data such as Pero Mexia's Silva de Varia Leccion (1540), which recounts in authoritative fashion how a pope, found to be a woman, gave birth to a baby in the middle of the Vatican; how children left in the wild spontaneously speak Hebrew; and other improbable or sensational phenomena recorded by neoclassical authors. This kind of pseudo-scholarship provides the key generic and philosophical backdrop to Don Quixote's tale. At the threshold of the adventure—also the threshold of the cave—Sancho as usual attempts to dissuade his master from setting forth. On a similar occasion, when he witnessed Don Quixote's wild preparations for penitence in the Sierra Morena, Sancho even suggested that they pretend the adventure had already taken place and report it as true. "As for the three days allowed me for seeing your mad pranks, please reckon them as already passed. For I take everything you've said for granted and I'll tell wonders to my lady [Dulcinea]" (I, 25, 207). Although at the time Don Quixote rejects this ungentlemanly option, it seems to have struck roots in

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his imagination, for, consciously or unconsciously, he puts this advice to use in the construction of his Montesinos tale. Despite Sancho's worries, Don Quixote enters the cave tied to a rope and armed with last-minute commendations. More important, he is commissioned to bring back information that might prove useful for a book that the scholar is writing: I beseech your worship, Don Quixote, to be observant and to examine with the eyes of a lynx what lies below. Perhaps there may be things for me to put into my book of transformations. (II, 22, 612) It is essential to recall at this point that on their way to the cave Sancho and Don Quixote had denigrated the Humanist's "research." This derision foreshadows Don Quixote's opinion of the projected book and colors his attitude toward the information he is asked to provide for it. Making his way down the cave, Don Quixote fights obstructing crows and overgrowth and calls for more and more rope, until Sancho and the scholar become alarmed when they cease to feel his weight at the other end of the line. They start pulling the rope back, to no avail, and when after an hour or so Don Quixote is finally hauled out, he appears to be asleep. The wording of the original text does not enable the reader to determine whether Don Quixote is truly sleeping or merely pretending to be asleep. Most critics endorse the former view and interpret his adventures in the cave as a dream (Avalle-Arce, Suma, 54-65; Duran, 221-25; Riley, Don Quijote, 172). Anyhow, as soon as he is awakened Don Quixote complains that the sweetest experience of his life has been interrupted. In contrast with his usual love-struck loss of appetite, here he uncharacteristically asks for food. Then he begins to tell his story. He claims that he has seen the knight Montesinos, who introduced him to the literally heart-less Durandarte (alive and complaining nonstop) and to the emaciated Lady Belerma (whose bad looks, Montesinos had explained, were not caused by "that time of the month," but by the suffering and privations endured during more than five hundreds years of enchantment). He also claims to have met his beloved Dulcinea, not in her original form as the peasant Aldonza Lorenzo, but as the random peasant that, twelve episodes earlier, Sancho—having learnt the power of expedient enchantments—designated as the enchanted Dulcinea on her way to Toboso. In Don Quixote's account of his experience in the cave, this translated Dulcinea at first runs away from him, but afterwards asks to borrow six reales, leaving her cheap skirt as collateral. Manuel Duran suggests that this situation should conjure up a burlesque image of a half-naked lady eagerly waiting for the money (215). Quixote only possesses four reales, though. Dispensing with the collateral, he sends these to the lady with a heavy heart, supposedly not because he is loath to

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part with the money, but because he is shocked to discover that even enchanted nobility can suffer common deprivations. But isn't Don Quixote shocked that his lady behaves in such a vulgar fashion? Perhaps not, since the real Aldonza Lorenzo—coarse and rustic—is already removed from Don Quixote's inner image of Dulcinea. Lara Zavala notes that if at this point Sancho and the Humanist wanted to corroborate the truth of Don Quixote's assertions, then they could check his pockets. If the coins were still there, there would be no doubt that Don Quixote had been dreaming or fabricating a story (129). Of course Don Quixote might have disposed of the money deliberately or in a somnambulistic fashion, but this is not the issue. Presented with authority and a straight face, Don Quixote's experiences, like the scholar's disparate data, are delivered and enjoyed precisely for their outlandish effect. Due to its length, I cannot quote the entire "text" of Don Quixote's story, delivered in three portions interrupted by his audience's comments. Suffice it to say that the tale is generically incongruous and replete with ridiculous ambiguities.11 Indeed, this tale contains as many grating generic incongruities as Sancho's tale by the watermill. But while the generic hybridity of Sancho's tale can be easily explained by a peasant's ignorance of chivalric literary codes he felt compelled to adopt due to the circumstances surrounding his telling, Don Quixote's generic incongruity is perplexing, for Don Quixote is well versed in the art of romance. Aside from incessant allusions to chivalric characters and incidents whenever he embarks on an adventure or sums it up—not to mention his constant coaching of Sancho in the role of a proper squire—several instances attest to Don Quixote's ability to tell perfect chivalric romances. Immediately after the watermill incident, for example, he paraphrases Tirant lo Blanch for Sancho (I, 21), and to defend romances against the Canon of Toledo he tells the tale of the Knight of the Lake (I, 50). Yet in his own tale by the cave of Montesinos, Don Quixote astonishes his audience by introducing bizarre and burlesque elements into the chivalric mold. This is so obvious that even Sancho recognizes the incongruous generic mix. As for the scholar, initially he rejects the time discrepancy between Don Quixote's short stay in the cave and the numerous events he claims to have experienced there, though he stops objecting as soon as he realizes that Don Quixote's sensational information is too attractive to be disqualified for the projected book. The scholar then milks Don Quixote's outlandish report for "historical" facts to publish. From the enchanted Durandarte's reported card playing idiom, "paciencia y barajar" ("patience and shuffle the cards"), the Humanist concludes that cards must have existed in Charlemagne's time, when Durandarte supposedly lived (II, 24,714 (624)). Sancho, on the other hand, never ceases to reject his master's tale, for Don Quixote has taught him to distrust generic incongruity to the same

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extent as he would distrust a lack of verisimilitude. Moreover, what particularly damages Don Quixote's credibility in Sancho's eyes is that Don Quixote cites Dulcinea's enchanted state—a state that Sancho himself invented—as evidence that the events he describes really happened. Sancho is fully conscious of having lied about a random peasant in order to extricate himself from Don Quixote's preposterous demands to see the "real" Dulcinea. In marked contrast to the ambiguous nature of Don Quixote's tale, Sancho's inner debate and intention prior to declaring that a random peasant is Dulcinea are bared before the reader in a soliloquy (II, 10).12 Don Quixote's reliance on Sancho's version of Dulcinea may thus appear to be the argument least likely to convince Sancho about the veracity of Don Quixote's tale. From Sancho's point of view, that Don Quixote should base his sense of verisimilitude on Sancho's own willful fabrication merely serves to convince him that his master is either lying or confusing a dream with real events. From my point of view, however, this is one of Cervantes' subtle touches exposing Don Quixote as a clown rather than a madman. Don Quixote's claim locks Sancho into a bind. Sancho cannot refute Don Quixote's story without exposing his own lies, a situation which casts Don Quixote's tale both into a delicate double-edged reply to Sancho's enchantment of Dulcinea and a tongue in cheek mockery of the scholar's endeavor. Don Quixote is certainly conscious of the slippery nature of his chivalric lady. The first time he sends Sancho with an errand to the actual peasant Aldonza Lorenzo, he explains that he makes believe she is a chivalric lady. "I am quite satisfied . . . to imagine and believe that the good Aldonza Lorenzo is lovely and virtuous . . . I think of her as the greatest princess in the world" (I, 25, 210). Yet he is not always willing to jest with or compromise an item he has invested with the highest chivalrous stakes and deepest emotional/sexual value. It is undeniable that, in the cave, aspects of Don Quixote's inner world become confused with his external situation, but this does not differ greatly from his general tendency to mend discrepancies between reality and his desires by imaginatively filling the gap to suit his needs. Thus, when he longs for a guide to take him through the cave, Montesinos "appears." Moreover, given that Don Quixote has a vested interest in romance and he set out to investigate popular romances attributed to the cave, he can hardly come out and declare he saw nothing but overgrowth. His surreal tale thus manages in one breath to affirm that he saw Montesinos, Durandarte, and Belerma, propagating the cave's reputation, yet also to deny their very essence, since his incongruous tale contradicts their chivalric nature. This preserves the game of romance that Don Quixote endorses. The generic incongruities in Don Quixote's tale, like those he tolerates regarding his chosen lady, further expose Alonso Quijana's (Don Quixote's original self) inability to get rid of the prosaic banality against which he struggled before fashioning himself into a Don Quixote (Duran 218).

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Avalle-Arce regards these discrepancies as the beginning of a process of disillusionment that culminates in Alonso Quijana's deathbed retraction of the chivalric world (Suma 56-57). If Don Quixote actually fell asleep in the cave and is aware of having dreamt a romance with jarring incongruities, then he may be unwilling to admit what Avalle-Arce and Duran regard as his increasing doubts about the status of romance, as well as about his own personal ability to represent it. Avalle-Arce therefore reads the Montesinos story as a tragic dream that exposes Don Quixote's sad inner life. In contrast, I read the Montesinos incident as one of Don Quixote's supreme ludic adventures. His previous exposure to Sancho's brand of storytelling "loosens him up," showing him that storytelling can come in different guises, even in adulterated mixtures of incongruous genres that surpass Sancho's own expedient antics. Don Quixote wields this new freedom in order to tease a scholar willing to swallow anything publishable as "historical" information. Alban Forcione stresses that Don Quixote's tale by the cave of Montesinos ridicules the Humanist's absurd "attempts to encroach upon the realm of literature and the imagination. . . . Once the double-edged quality of its parody is recognized, the episode of the cave of Montesinos points directly to the major problems of Renaissance literary theory—truth, verisimilitude, and . . . the 'legitimizing of the marvelous' " (Cervantes, Aristotle and the Persiles 141-42). Forcione proceeds to show that as an aftermath of Don Quixote's sport with the scholar, Cide Hamete teases readers who insist upon a concrete and coherent interpretation of this event. "It is now the Arab historian's turn to bring his audience into the work, and treat it just as Don Quixote has treated his participating audience . . . [Cide Hamete] proceeds to disavow directly what he has just upheld . . . The object of parody here is . . . the neo-Aristotelian mode of subjecting literature to the laws of empirical reality . . ." (ibid., 144-45). "Would Don Quixote lie?" (II, 23, 621) asks the Humanist. Because it seems so out of character, his shock has been echoed to this day by critics disturbed by a Don Quixote deliberately lying about his experience in the cave. Preoccupied by this possibility, Madariaga exclaims, "Don Quixote a humorist; Don Quixote a realist; Don Quixote irreverent!" (115). The ambiguous context of Don Quixote's story plays with the implications of such a choice. Let us retrace our steps for a moment and we will see that Don Quixote is forced to perform out of character no matter what course he adopts. What are his options? He has descended into a dark cave, Sancho has commended him for his valor, and the scholar has eagerly asked him to bring back information. If he comes out saying that he saw nothing and nothing happened in the cave, popular romance is devalued more than in his implausible tale, for the cave was considered a shrine for those who value romance. Moreover, lying is as foreign to Don Quixote's character as having nothing to show for an adventure.

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Making-believe, though, represents the core of Don Quixote's character. The cave is dark, the old man is tired, and he is afraid to explore the cave alone. Perhaps at this point he falls asleep. To admit that he has fallen asleep in the midst of an adventure is in itself problematic. Once before, when Sancho tied Don Quixote down and suggested that he try to sleep instead of seeking dangerous adventures in a dark forest rumbling with mysterious thumping, the valorous knight angrily retorted: "Am I by chance one of those knights who take their rest amidst dangers?" (I, 20, 152). As a figure of exciting romance, then, Don Quixote behaves perfectly in character when he denies that he fell asleep in a boring cave. He maintains psychological and stylistic coherence when he insists that his vision really occurred. That Cervantes should seek to mock the inverisimilitude and generic incoherence of the neo-Aristotelian endeavor is understandable. Yet would he risk compromising the integrity of his main character in order to do so? First of all, are we to believe—from the point of view of the fictional world—that Don Quixote would lend himself to mislead the "general public" by allowing the scholar to publish invented material? The answer is negative, for Don Quixote doesn't believe that the scholar will succeed in publishing his material. "Supposing . . . you are granted a license to print these books of yours, which I doubt..." says Don Quixote to the scholar when they leave the cave (II, 24, 625, my italics). And, as mentioned before, on the way there he concurs with Sancho regarding the worthlessness of the trivia their guide collects so enthusiastically. Don Quixote's assessment therefore discriminates between different modes of fictionality and deception. Following the Montesinos tale, Cide Hamete Benengeli, the Quixote's inner narrator, reports that it "is certain that finally [Don Quixote] retracted [this tale] on his death-bed and confessed that he had invented it" (II, 24, 624). Then he declares that the incident may be "apocryphal" since it is inconceivable that Don Quixote lied, and every other rational explanation for his conduct seems implausible. Aside from rejecting on moral grounds the possibility that Don Quixote would deliberately lie, Cide Hamete, as well as the Humanist in his first reaction to Don Quixote's tale, cite a temporal incongruity as empirical evidence against Don Quixote's claims. During the hour he spent in the cave, Don Quixote simply didn't have enough time to experience so many events. The Montesinos incident strains the limits of heterogeneity that this novel practices as well as the generic and philosophical homogeneity it mocks. What, nevertheless, is so special about the Montesinos tale that it has elicited such a volume of ambiguous commentary within Cervantes' novel as well as conflicting critical interpretations ever since the second part of the Quixote appeared?13 Emphasizing why this particular adventure is singled out for retraction on Don Quixote's deathbed, Henry Sullivan traces a purgatory-like process of purification that links the puzzling ambiguity

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of the Montesinos episode with Cervantes' concern with death and spiritual salvation at the time he composed Part II. Indeed, instead of bewailing the property he destroyed, the basin he stole from the barber he scared, the limbs he broke, the sheep he slaughtered, or the criminals he let loose, we are told that on his deathbed Don Quixote felt particularly ashamed of this harmless tale he told Sancho and an aspiring Humanist scholar. It seems to me that the Montesinos tale is singled out because it exposes Don Quixote's—or rather Alonso Quijana's—essential nature: a man who delights in the traffic of verbal inventions, who enjoys "being" a story, and who in the Montesinos episode irresponsibly plays with what it means to tell a story. We are reminded that even the telling of an implausible story carries a measure of responsibility. Don Quixote mocks the scholar's hunt for outlandish "encyclopedic" data, but nonetheless he contributes to it in order not to compromise his own ability to continue playing the chivalric game. Don Quixote's tale about his alleged adventures in the cave of Montesinos, as well as Sancho's tale about his alleged adventures aboard the Duke and Duchess' wooden horse, discussed in the next section, showcase the creation of fiction as a game with ethical implications that are deliberately pushed to the margins. THE LAST LAUGH: FLYING ON A WOODEN HORSE Not only does Sancho learn from Don Quixote, and Don Quixote from Sancho, but each repackages the other's system of making-believe, retorting with the altered form. While Sancho becomes adept at manipulating Don Quixote's game of enchantment whenever it comes in handy, Don Quixote admits humor and diluted genres into his imaginary constructions. This intersection of their expedient artifices reveals a healthy awareness of the limit of rules they respectively obey. In the following sequence we can clearly observe the malleable nature of this dynamic. After Don Quixote frees the King's prisoners on their way to the galleys, Sancho advises him to flee from the Holy Brotherhood, a fierce body of law enforcers charged with keeping order throughout the land. For once, Don Quixote follows Sancho's advice to be careful, although not before securing Sancho's promise "never . . . to tell anyone that I retreated and withdrew from this peril out of fear" (I, 23, 181). Indeed, there is no fooling around with the very real threat of the Holy Brotherhood. The fact that Don Quixote recognizes this, even at the earliest stage of his adventures when he is mauled so often, suggests that from the very beginning Don Quixote is more of a clown than a madman. Yet as he flees, Don Quixote already declares that he will head toward the mountains to perform acts of penance for his beloved. This notion conforms so well with Don Quixote's other anachronistic chivalric actions that the reader easily forgets that it serves as an expedient protection from

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the real danger of arrest and punishment by the royal law enforcers. The prospect of more wild pranks does not please Sancho, though. Since he just agreed to deny that Don Quixote fled from danger, Sancho now suggests that they likewise pretend that the three-day penance has already taken place and describe it in the past tense. "I take everything you've said for granted and I'll tell wonders to my lady" (I, 25, 207). Don Quixote rejects this shortcut. In the Montesinos tale, however, he puts to practice the idea of conjuring up three days of impossible adventures where none took place. The time discrepancy between the single hour that Don Quixote stays inside the cave and the three days that he claims to have spent there is one of the main bones of contention raised by Sancho and the Humanist scholar against the reliability of Don Quixote's tale. As they continue to debate the role and style of make-believe, Sancho and Don Quixote's attitudes toward storytelling begin to converge. Furthermore, the wooden horse episode, which forms part of an extended drama staged by the Duke and the Duchess to have fun with Don Quixote and Sancho, is linked to Sancho's story by the watermill, as well as to Don Quixote's tale by the cave of Montesinos, in its use of storytelling as a humorous self-protective device. All of these events are both an adventure and a story, yet while the watermill tale is told to prevent an adventure, and the Montesinos tale is told as a substitute for an adventure, the Clavilerio story is told in sarcastic response to an adventure. Don Quixote and Sancho, famous after the publication of their initial exploits in Part I, are courted by aristocrats eager to partake in Don Quixote's chivalric game. These aristocrats' power and financial means raise the level of make-believe to unprecedented dimensions, as when Sancho is invited to realize his fantasy of governing an Isle. The climax of the Duke and Duchess' disport with their chivalric heroes centers around a wooden plank that represents a flying horse which they promise will help disenchant Dulcinea. The hobbyhorse—called Clavileno, wooden nail—is loaded with firecrackers that explode to simulate flight in outer space. To ride on it, Don Quixote and Sancho must allow themselves to be blindfolded by the Duke and Duchess' servants. Not too happy about the prospect, though, Sancho threatens to sabotage the project, a threat to which Don Quixote replies with a brief anecdote about a lawyer named Torralba, the very name that Sancho had given his heroine in the tale by the watermill. Is Don Quixote reminding Sancho of a previous juncture where a tale mediated between a potentially dangerous impulse and a harmless outcome? Indeed, facing the wooden horse, Don Quixote refers explicitly to that adventure: "Since the memorable adventure of the [watermill] . . . I have never seen Sancho in such a fright as now" (II, 4 1 , 728). Don Quixote persuades Sancho to mount the wooden horse and be blindfolded. They "fly" to the tune of firecrackers set off by the Duke and Duchess' servants, and once the nobility has had its fill of laughter and Don

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Quixote and Sancho get up from among the wrecks of the prank, Sancho is asked to describe his experience. He replies by offering a tale more outlandish and impossible than any other in this novel. Sancho begins by admitting that he peeked under the blindfold. This is a problematic admission, for it implies that he knows he and his master were the butts of a hoax. Anthony Close contends that the heroes remain blind to their status as figures of fun for aristocrats, which tempers their potential mortification (330). It could be that Sancho is trying to appear brave after the event. Yet at closer inspection we see that by explaining that he peeked only a little under his nose and above his eyebrows, Sancho allows his audience to save face while subjecting them to the brunt of a double-edged sarcasm similar to that wielded by Don Quixote during the Montesinos tale. I believe that Don Quixote and Sancho are fully aware of their role as butts of the Duke and Duchess' merriment, a role that delights Don Quixote more than Sancho. Rather than expose his jesting tormentors directly, Sancho chooses a euphemism to describe his awareness of their tricks: I felt. . . that we were going, as my master said, flying through the region of fire [this is because of the furnaces that the Duke and Duchess have set up] . . . and looked down towards the earth. And the whole of it looked to me no bigger than a grain of mustard seed, and the men walking on it little bigger than hazel-nuts. (II, 41, 733) When the Duchess points out the incompatibility of sizes between Sancho's globe and its population, Sancho impudently draws upon his now standard explanation for any discrepancy between reality and his fabrications: "as we flew by enchantment, by enchantment I could see the whole earth and all the men from it wherever I looked" (734). He goes on to relate how the Pleiades constellation reminded him of the goats he used to tend in his native country, which enticed him to dismount and play for almost three-quarters of an hour while Don Quixote stood by, supposedly not noticing Sancho's absence. (Goats, we might recall, were the real protagonists of Sancho's earlier tale by the watermill.) To this Don Quixote objects, citing concrete "scientific" evidence that disproves Sancho's arrangement of the regions of the sky through which they flew (the Duke and the Duchess had blown air and fire to simulate these "regions"). Don Quixote thus concludes—more harshly than Sancho dared by the cave of Montesinos—that the storyteller is either lying or dreaming, and he reassures his hosts that he, at least, did not slip "the bandage either up or down" (734). The Duke and the Duchess cannot second Don Quixote's condemnation of Sancho's story, though. For just as Sancho was unable to rebuff Don Quixote's Montesinos tale without exposing his own lie about Dulcinea, so the Duke and the Duchess cannot categorically refute Sancho's lie

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without admitting why they know it is a fabrication. The tale gives Sancho a chance to get even with his hosts without ceasing to play the role that amuses them. Having conquered his initial fear, he manages to turn the Clavileno experience into an amusing adventure that gives him "a subject of talk for ages" (735). The reader enjoys the dramatic irony of participating in the aristocrat's joke at the expense of Sancho and Don Quixote, as well as in Sancho's creative way of calling their bluff. Yet this is not the end of the Clavileno episode, which concludes with a very interesting and controversial exchange between Don Quixote and Sancho. The knight whispers in his squire's ear, If you want me to believe what you saw in the sky, I wish you to accept my account of what I saw in the Cave of Montesinos. I say no more. (735) Sancho, pues vos quereis que se os crea lo que habeis visto en el cielo, yo quiero que vos me creais a mi lo que vi en la cueva de Montesinos. Y no os digo mas. (837) As in the Montesinos episode, for Avalle-Arce this represents a low moment in Don Quixote's history. "This is the saddest moment in the entire work, for it reflects the total moral disintegration of a man who at one stage knew very well that one does not trade with truth." ("Don Quijote, o la vida como obra de arte" 231). In a footnote to his annotated edition of this novel, Avalle-Arce further writes that this is "a passage of deep sadness, when Don Quixote seeks to establish with his squire an unworthy exchange that compromises truth, or what is thought to be true" (356, n.39, my translations). As we have seen, however, this is by no means the first time that Don Quixote enters into a make-believe pact with Sancho, nor the first time that the pact involves a renegotiation of the boundaries between truth and reality. This very pact, however, like the Montesinos tale itself, invites a supremely sane and ludic interpretation of what otherwise would be merely mad or unrealistic behavior. If I could stage the Clavileno episode, I would have Don Quixote approach Sancho discreetly and accompany his whispered remark with a sly wink of comradeship. Here Sancho and Don Quixote are finally true comrades of storytelling and make-believe. Sancho has learnt from Don Quixote the use of enchantment as an expedient trick to fill the gap between reality and his desires, and Don Quixote has learnt from Sancho that it is possible to tell stories that do not necessarily subscribe to the rules of romance. Most important, both Don Quixote and Sancho have discovered that they like playing chivalry and other make-believe games for their own sake: for fun. Illustrating the incorporation and transformation of alien genres into the novel's social and formal structure, the three storytelling debates analyzed in this chapter mirror a pattern of generic permeability and malleability

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achieved through negotiations between a storyteller and his audience. Over and above the generic reconfigurations represented in Don Quixote's dramatized acts of storytelling, Cervantes examines the relationship between imaginary fabrications and generic expectation, separating the two issues by distinguishing between social structures and empirical truth. He makes fun of a tendency to confuse generic verisimilitude with actual or probable truth. That the two issues are separate seems obvious to us today, but it was hardly so in Cervantes' neoclassical age, when genres with fixed rules were invested with a corresponding relationship to the faithful representation of nature. Furthermore, the idea of fiction for its own sake was an untenable position then and long afterwards. Even the flimsiest fictions claimed to provide instruction as well as entertainment. If there was ever a question of divorcing the two aims of art, it was usually voiced as an exhortation for literature to be more austere, and occasionally there were arguments extolling the therapeutic benefits of an imaginative escape into alternative worlds. 14 In the Quixote Cervantes flirts with the idea of fiction for its own sake, but he does so within the context of his era. At the time, "discrimination between genres was based on criteria of style, social status, cathartic effect, denouement." Comedy, in neo-Aristotelian terms "is assumed to feature low or middling characters . . . [whose] base is ipso facto risible" (Close 8). Anthony Close contends that the Quixote's primary aim is an incitement to laughter, reminding us that Sancho and Don Quixote are in a certain respect buffoons who enjoy a fool's or madman's license (8, 330). While Sancho and Don Quixote's storytelling increasingly becomes a game, the question of their tales' internal validity never ceases to ignite a debate that mounts along with the stakes of their tales. In recent years there has been a movement to reconcile the Cervantes of the exuberant Don Quixote (1605, 1615) with that of the more controlled La Galatea (1585) and Los Trabajos de Persiles y Segismunda (1616); or the metafictional writer of exemplary novellas such as "El coloquio de los perros" with that of the conventionally styled "El amante liberal" or "Las dos doncellas." 15 In other words, Cervantes, the perceptive satirist, is brought to confront Cervantes, the writer of romance; the realist is encouraged to make peace with the stylistic innovator who has a penchant for mocking any categorical delimitation of truth and fictional play. Let us assume for a moment that Cervantes fully means his emphatic assertion that the Quixote was written against works of chivalry. That is, let us ignore his stylistic celebration of the imaginative enterprise that romance represents. We might ask, then, whether Cervantes condemns the writers of marvelous events or the readers who believe these events are true? Is he deploring the portrayal of impossible and improbable events, or the way they are portrayed? If he objects to the manner in which impossible or improbable events are portrayed in the gamut of styles available in his

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day, then we are not dealing with a problem of truth versus falsehood but rather with issues of form, historical taste, and conventions. This is a problem of verisimilitude. Looking at this crux from the perspective of Sancho and Don Quixote's cumulative storytelling endeavors, it appears that Cervantes consistently mocks empty conventions requiring a storyteller to claim that a tale is true even when it obviously is not or that a product of the imagination must exist empirically. Satire against these empty conventions endorses an assessment of fiction that does not have to pose as truth or history, yet must maintain coherence and verisimilitude within the boundaries of its constructed fictional world. Coherence and verisimilitude are challenged when the relationship between a teller, tale, and audience is troubled. Thus, as Sancho and Don Quixote's relationship progresses, we see how conflicting styles and attitudes permeate and transform one another. Under such malleable circumstances, truth can be sought in the intersection between a storyteller's projection of his motivation, predicament, and abilities and an audiences' similar expression of its situation and expectations, despite all the unpredictable ambiguities and shady compromises that such a meeting involves. These dilemmas were carried over to the neoclassical reconfiguration of the novel in eighteenth-century England, where novelists who were heavily influenced by Cervantes' masterpiece applied its dichotomies to completely new problems and settings. The coming chapter explores aesthetic innovations and social insights manifested in the interactive fictions of Laurence Sterne, Henry Fielding, and Jane Austen.

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Narrative Pleasures and Inhibitions: The EighteenthCentury English Novel PART I: TRISTRAM SHANDY: EROTIC AND TEMPORAL SOLIDIFICATIONS OF A STORYTELLING PERFORMANCE Time and Timing The successful transmission of a story depends upon a set of conventions that normally go unnoticed, unless an obvious discrepancy renders them suspect. Among these conventions, temporal dynamics form the main invisible threads that string a narrative together. A story, according to E. M. Forster's classic definition, entails a basic chronology of events such as "The king died and then the queen died." A plot, on the other hand, demands causality, as in "The king died and then the queen died of grief" (93). Fiction does not necessarily offer story and plot elements in logical order, but rather requires the reader to reconstitute them in his or her imagination. The distinction between a logical chronology of events and a text's actual layout constitutes narrative's backbone and has therefore elicited special attention from narratologists. 1 Gerard Genette identifies three categories of temporal correlation between a story's chronological events and their presentation in a text. The order of a text lays out basic information, which the reader must arrange into a coherent story and plot. The duration of an event matches mimetic span to the number of pages or lines it takes to narrate that event. And the frequency of a narrated event marks the number of times a particular event is mentioned in a text (77-182). Genette distinguishes between "temps de l'histoire" (which he calls "diegese") and "temps du recit" (the order of the words in a text). An additional dimension

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noted by Shlomith Rimmon-Kennan is real-time or reading time, the time it takes an individual to actually read a given text (51-52). Time in narrative is featured as the central theme of Laurence Sterne's The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, published in installments between 1759 and 1767. As Watt and McKeon have shown, the novel as a genre blossomed in England when a major overhaul in epistemological and generic expectations, accompanied by social and economic change on a scale unprecedented since the end of the Middle Ages, led to an expansion of the reading public and publishing industry. Narrative fiction in this period reacted to new standards of scientific objectivity, yet subsisted nonetheless on a growing demand for imaginative entertainment. Laurence Sterne and other writers of fiction capitalized on this contradiction. They presented their work as if it were a true record of past events, yet at the same time sabotaged this assertion by portraying occurrences that are obviously fabricated, drawing attention to the conventions that govern generic expectations and sustain social interaction. In Tristram Shandy the content of a story is not important. A storytelling event might be meticulously staged, with storyteller and audience ready to participate, but the actual tale never materializes. Debates about the nature of fictionality and the roles of teller and listeners are emphasized instead. This section examines how several of Sterne's interactive fictions physically displace a story pregnant with social and sexual tension. Trim's projected tale about the King of Bohemia metamorphoses into an autobiographical account of his erotic "knee" wound. Trim is later displaced as the main narrator of Captain Le Fever's story, which gets told at a different time and in a different setting, a change of venue that generates a new social dynamic. In a more extreme case, Uncle Toby's elided account of his war wound leads to the transposition of a psychological inhibition into a concrete architectural device capable of deflecting the requirements of direct social communication. Sterne's digressions and displacements of a promised story denied or delayed flout the rules of storytelling at its basic levels and illustrate narrative organization as a spatial and social construct that poses as logical and chronological causality. In the previous chapter we observed how, due to a gross incongruity between time frames, Sancho Panza and the Humanist dispute Don Quixote's alleged adventure's in the cave of Montesinos. The humanist scholar hurries to point out the discrepancy between the amount of time Don Quixote actually spent in the cave and the many adventures he claims to have experienced there: "I do not know . . . how your worship could have seen so many things and heard and said so much in the short space of time you were down below." "How long was I down?" asked Don Quixote. "A little more than an hour," answered Sancho.

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"That cannot be right," said Don Quixote, "for night fell there and morning rose, and three more nights and mornings; so that by my reckoning, I must have stayed three days in those remote and secret regions." (620) Sancho concludes facetiously that since his master's improbable adventures could occur only through enchantment; by the same token, an hour outside the cave might equal three days and nights within it. "That will be right," Don Quixote expediently agrees in order to extricate himself from further accounting for his story's inconsistencies. Tristram Shandy builds on Don Quixote's aesthetic and social scaffolding. As narrator, Tristram invokes the "Gentle Spirit of sweetest humour, who erst did sit upon the easy pen of my beloved CERVANTES" (443). He names Don Quixote rather than the Enlightenment's much admired Greco-Roman models as his own literary ideal: "by the bye, with all his follies, I love [the peerless knight of La Mancha] more, and would actually have gone farther to have paid a visit to, than the greatest hero of antiquity" (15). The relationship between Uncle Toby and his servant Trim is modeled upon Don Quixote and Sancho Panza's intimate yet hierarchized symbiotic relationship. 2 Sterne's playful manipulation of narrative conventions exaggerates, however, the deconstruction of generic and epistemological conventions adumbrated in Cervantes' novel. Sterne's play with a story's temporal relation to life experience, narrative construction, and interpretation prove to the reader that "story-time, conceived as a linear succession of events, is no more than a conventional, pragmatically convenient construct" (Rimmon-Kenan 44). In Tristram Shandy, text time "is a spatial, not a temporal, dimension" (ibid.). To depict text as space rather than as time or event, Sterne repeatedly treats his book as a solid article, "objectified" through the narrative's chronological link to lines, chapters, and volumes rather than events. This parody of empirical standards and of the use of epic models to depict contemporary life culminates in Sterne's graphological rendition of Tristram's autobiography, presented as a series of precise squiggles in chapter 40 of the sixth volume. Though fully cognizant of every twist and turn in his "unsuccessful" linear plan, the novel's protagonist/narrator is presented as a scatterbrained gentleman who succumbs to the eccentric desires and limitations of his characters. A digressive narrative is nonetheless a narrative of sorts, here featuring the comic derailment of a linear course. The three episodes from Tristram Shandy that are discussed in this chapter—the King of Bohemia's tale turned into Trim's amorous adventures, the story about Captain Le Fever, and the account of Uncle Toby's war wound turned into a fortification—are intrinsically connected to each other and to the central concerns of Stern's novel through a network of allusions and digressions. From the point of view of Tristram Shandy's fictional world, Trim's projected story about the King of Bohemia is fiction that miscarries because

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Uncle Toby cannot enjoy abstract pleasures unrelated to his personal problems or the people he cares about—a limitation through which Sterne parodies the neoclassic demand for unity of action, space, and time. Right from the start, Uncle Toby interrupts and qualifies Trim's story, requesting in advance that it be neither merry nor grave, since his present mood prevents him from enjoying a merry tale. Echoing Tristram's famous opinion about the optimal relationship between authors and readers, Uncle Toby explains that a man listening to a story "should ever bring one half of the entertainment along with him." Similarly, Tristram observes that a sensible author should amicably halve a subject with the reader, leaving the reader something to imagine, thus keeping the reader's imagination as busy as the author's (77). Trim is indeed predisposed to halve his matter amicably with the audience, but Uncle Toby altogether runs off with the tale, charting its course even more egotistically than Don Quixote does Sancho's tale during the watermill episode discussed in the previous chapter. Bound more by their mutual experience of the Flemish battlefields than by their socioeconomic interdependence, master and servant sit leisurely in the open countryside next to an elaborate model of Namur's fortifications, a model they build, repair, and enjoy together. Trim settles down by Uncle Toby's feet, while the widow Wadman, who would like to conquer Uncle Toby, eavesdrops behind a tree. After several prefaces and clarifications, Trim launches off with "There was a certain king of Bo—he " and already Uncle Toby requires him to halt in order to replace his hat, which prompts a digression about the limited life span of objects, feelings, and thoughts, at the end of which Trim opportunely returns to his story "with the same look and tone of voice" as before, only to be interrupted again: There was a certain king of Bohemia, but in whose reign, except his own, I am not able to inform your honour I do not desire it of thee, Trim, by any means, cried my Uncle Toby. It was a little before the time, an' please your honour, when giants were beginning to leave off breeding-, but in what year of our Lord that was 1 would not give a half-penny to know, said my Uncle Toby. Only, an' please your honour, it makes a story look the better in the face 'Tis thy own, Trim, so ornament it after thy own fashion; and take any date, continued my Uncle Toby, looking pleasantly upon him take any date in the whole world thou choosest, and put it to thou art heartily welcome (396).3 Politely acknowledging his master's permission to choose a date, Trim fixes upon 1712 for its relevance to the battles that figure so prominently

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in Uncle Toby's imagination. Trim's gimmick, intended to capture Uncle Toby's interest, backfires, though, for Toby rejects the date precisely because of its personal implications. Trim is then reduced to haggle over the time scheme of his make-believe story, and then to defend the appearance of giants in it, for according to Toby the use of giants should determine the dating. The result is that the proposed tale is endlessly deferred. This unfortunate King of Bohemia, said Trim Was he unfortunate then? cried my Uncle Toby, for he had been so wrapt up in his dissertation upon gun-powder and other military affairs, that tho' he had desired the corporal to go on, yet the many interruptions he had given, dwelt not so strong upon his fancy, as to account for the epiteth Was he unfortunate then, Trim} said my Uncle Toby, pathetically The corporal, wishing first the word and all its synonimas at the devil, forthwith began to run back in his mind, the principal events in the King of Bohemia's story; from every one of which, it appearing that he was the most fortunate man that ever existed in the world it put the corporal to a stand: for not caring to retract his epithet and less, to explain it and least of all, to twist his tale (like men of lore) to serve a system. (400) Unlike most interactive fictions in this study, one cannot transcribe this story separately from its surrounding dynamics. First of all, nothing much would be left of it, and second, here the surrounding dynamics encroach upon the story to the point where it is impossible to separate "text" and "commentary." Trim's story runs aground because Uncle Toby's idiosyncrasies conflict with requirements for the construction and reception of fiction, recalling when Sancho tries to tell Don Quixote a story early on in their relationship, but their divergent generic expectations and storytelling abilities hinder a successful interaction. Like Sancho's story by the watermill, Trim and Uncle Toby's lack of communication showcases storytelling's basic dependence on both the storyteller and the audience's ability to strike a balance between discipline and flexibility in the realms of genre as well as social interaction. Yet unlike Sancho and Don Quixote, Trim and Uncle Toby do not learn from their impasses. Although "The Story of the King of Bohemia and His Seven Castles" never gets told, presumably it lodges somewhere in Trim's imaginative repertoire. As a narrated communal event it evaporates, having missed both its audience and timing. Instead of ending with a bang and a whimper, like Sancho's story by the watermill, Trim's tale imperceptibly melts into an alternative narrative. By way of Trim and Uncle Toby's obsession with battles, the King of Bohemia story trails off into an intimate account of Trim's "knee" wound during the battle of Landen, and his subsequent love affair with the nun who nursed him. The King of Bohemia's storytelling scenario thus finds an effective use, although for a story entirely different

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from what was originally intended. From this point of view, Trim's pastoral performance recalls framed storytelling competitions such as Boccaccio's Decameron and Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, rooted in a classical genre noted for its sexual connotations. 4 The context of Trim's intimate story is compounded by the hidden presence of Mrs. Wadman, who had been spying on Uncle Toby from the beginning of this storytelling event. Although we are informed early on that the widow is eavesdropping, we are not reminded of her presence until Trim's narrative turns to sexual matters. At this point, Mrs. Wadman's presence raises the stakes of the entire episode, and at the end she takes advantage of the erotic atmosphere generated by Trim's story to flirt with Uncle Toby. Trim's personal account thus intersects with Toby's unconsummated liaison with the widow, another botched affair that occupies a central place in Sterne's novel. Wayne Booth suggests that since the reader of Tristram Shandy is ensnared early on by the promise of reading about Uncle Toby's amours, the fulfillment of this promise in Volume IX settles positively the controversial question of whether or not the novel was completed ("Did Sterne Complete Tristram Shandy}"). At first "It was not love," Trim explains about his feelings toward the young woman who sheltered him, dressed his wound, and nursed him through a high fever. Although this woman belongs to a religious order, the Dutch Beguines, she is allowed to leave her cloister if she wishes to marry. One gets the impression that this young Beguine is interested precisely in such an option, and her eagerness to seduce Trim therefore provides an ironic parallel with the eavesdropping Mrs. Wadman, who has similar designs upon Uncle Toby. The corporal's feelings toward the young woman soar one afternoon when they are left completely alone, and Trim complains that his wound's inflammation has turned into an insufferable itching "both above and below my knee." Although Trim speaks of a knee, the connotation of the rubbing is obviously erotic. (Here it is particularly easy to extract the story from its surrounding dynamics because there are very few interruptions or narratorial comments. I therefore italicize the "text" of Trim's tale.) Let me see it, she said, kneeling down upon the ground parallel to my knee, and laying her hand upon the part below it It only wants rubbing a little, said the Beguine; so covering it with the bed cloaths, she began with the forefinger of her right-hand to rub under my knee, guiding her forefinger backwards and forwards by the edge of the flannel which kept on the dressing. In five or six minutes I felt slightly the end of the second finger and presently it was laid flat with the other, and she continued rubbing in that way round and round for a good while; it then came into my head, that I should fall in love 1 blush3d when I saw how white a hand she

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had 1 shall never, an3 please your honour, behold another hand so white whilst I live Not in that place: said my Uncle Toby. [. . . ] The young Beguine, continued the corporal, perceiving that it was of great service to me from rubbing, for some time, with two fingers proceeded to rub at length, with three till by little and little she brought down the fourth, and the rubb'd with her whole hand [. . . ] till I fear'd her zeal would weary her "I would do a thousand times more,33 said she, "for the love of Christ33 In saying which she pass3d her hand across the flannel, to the part above my knee, which I had equally complained of, and rubb3d it also. I perceived then, I was beginning to be in love As she continued rub-rub-rubbing J felt it spread from under her hand, an3 please your honour, to every part of my frame The more she rubb'd, and the longer strokes she took the more the fire kindled in my veins till at length, by two or three strokes longer than the rest my passion rose to the highest pitch J seiz'd her hand (404-06) And at this climactic moment, chaste Uncle Toby steps in abruptly to redirect the story's ending. He has Trim clap the fair Beguine's hand to his lips . . . and make a speech. Since the King of Bohemia tale metamorphoses into a personal account of Trim's amorous adventures, Trim does get a chance to tell a story for which his master settles down as a relatively docile audience, until the ending threatens Toby's prudish sensibilities and again he interferes. Denis Diderot turned this master-servant storytelling vignette into the core of Jacques le fataliste et son maitre (1796). However, he chose not to exploit the titillation of the reader through the slow build-up of the woman's sexual gesture. Robert Alter attributes this change to Diderot's interest in transmitting the scene "as a narrated event, not in recreating it as an experience to be felt on our pulses" (Alter, Partial Magic 61). Sterne's hypnotic to-and-fro rhythm is thus eliminated in favor of a race to the entire novel's climax: "Puis Denise se mit a frotter avec sa flanelle audessous de la blessure, d'abord avec un doigt, puis avec deux, avec trois, avec quatre, avec toute la main" (Diderot 314). 5 Since Jacques le fataliste's main storytelling situation strings the reader along in expectation of the tale of Jacques' amours, its deferment plays with narrative predestination and timing, dramatizing "the indeterminacy of fictional events and fictional endings" (Alter 62). Trim's projected "fictional" tale about the King of Bohemia likewise evaporates into thin air, to be displaced by the "autobiographical" story of Trim's amours. And even this personal story is prevented from running its full titillating course, for Uncle Toby abruptly caps it.

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Another narrative displacement illustrated through Tristram Shandy's storytelling interactions occurs when a tale about to be told by a characterstoryteller to a character-audience at the intrafictional level is instead delivered by the main narrator directly to the reader many pages later. This leaves the character-audience hanging at the previous juncture, along with the reader who identifies with the original audience. Posing around the kitchen fire, in yet another typical storytelling setting, the Shandy servants are ready to hear Trim recount the story of Captain Le Fever. But no story follows. We imagine Trim assuming a pose similar to the declamatory pose he had stricken several volumes earlier in the Shandean parlor, when he had been asked to read a page from Yorick's sermons for the edification of Dr. Slop and the Shandy brothers. Yet in the kitchen setting—where servants of a rank lower to Trim's position as Uncle Toby's corporal, wait transfixed to hear him speak—Trim never gets a chance to perform. His promised story, prefaced by the bold declaration that "the corporal begun [sic]" (257), turns inexplicably to an entirely different matter, one left hanging by the scatterbrained narrator in a previous section. Much later, in the midst of a reference to captain Le Fever's son, Tristram all of a sudden remembers that he failed to deliver the captain's story through Trim: "fool that I was! nor can I recollect, (nor perhaps you) without turning back to the place, what it was that hindered me from letting the corporal tell it in his own words;—but the occasion is lost—I must tell it now in my own" (292). The story about Captain Le Fever is thus officially introduced again, and this time is indeed delivered, albeit on the general first person narratorial level rather than on the hypodiegetic level of characters telling stories to each other. Tristram nonetheless relays a great part of the actual tale through Trim's direct discourse, for Trim plays a central role in connecting the Shandys to the ailing soldier, Le Fever. The information that Trim presents to Toby about Le Fever's condition is delivered in grand storytelling manner at a village inn: "Trim, I'll fill another pipe, said my uncle Toby, and not interrupt thee till thou hast done; so sit down at thy ease, Trim, in the window seat, and begin thy story again" (294). Trim's first-person report of his initial acquaintance with the ailing soldier, who is consequently placed under Shandean protection, occupies two (brief) chapters, and only then is resumed in the third person through Tristram. Before long, eager to return to his "own" life story, Tristram proposes to summarize Captain Le Fever's. Yet instead of following this plan, he once again digresses, or perhaps we should rather say continues to narrate Le Fever's story. This involves an analysis of the sermon that Yorick delivered at the Captain's funeral and consequently an evaluation of Yorick's sermons in general, which once again ties up with the earlier storytelling scenario, mentioned above, where Trim had declaimed one of Yorick's sermons in the Shandean parlor. The sermon in question is in itself

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displaced from a real life situation, for it was actually delivered by Sterne to the congregation of the cathedral of York, and was published in 1766 among his Sermons of Mr. Yorick (Wright 215; Hunter, "Response as Reformation" 132-33). Trim . . . loved to hear himself read almost as well as talk . . . He stood before them with his body swayed, and bent forwards just so far, as to make an angle of 85 degrees and half upon the plain of the horizon . . . his right leg from under him, sustaining seven-eighths of his whole weight, the foot of his left leg, the defect of which was no disadvantage to his attitude [a reference to his wounded knee], advanced a little, not laterally, nor forwards, but in a line betwixt them; his knee bent, but that not violently, but so as to fall within the limits of the line of beauty. . . . (8587)6 We can imagine that this is the manner in which Trim would have delivered the Le Fever story in the kitchen had he been given a chance. Through this unlikely association of performative gestures among Le Fever's story, Trim's relationship with Uncle Toby, and the various love, life, and death matters underpinning Sterne's novel, pulsates a disruption of our habit of equating story time with real time. As Jean-Jacques Mayoux puts it, once alerted to the arbitrariness of narrative conventions, we are less willing to suspend disbelief for narratives that take for granted such conventions or treat them carelessly (3). The Book as an Object and Uncle Toby's Wound as a Fortification On the novel's main narrative level, Tristram claims that "since the creation of the world," he is the first biographer to observe that I am this month one whole year older that I was this time twelve-month; and having got, as you perceive, almost into the middle of my fourth volume— and no farther than to my first day's life—'tis demonstrative that I have three hundred and sixty-four days more life to write now, than when I first set out; so that instead of advancing . . . I am just thrown so many volumes back . . . as at this rate I should just live 364 times faster than I should write It must follow, an' please your worships, that the more I write, the more I shall have to write and consequently, the more your worships read, the more your worships will have to read. (207) In this often quoted passage, Tristram takes credit for an idea already expressed by Gines de Pasamonte, that cocky picaresque criminal who, when freed by Don Quixote, explained that the autobiography he was writing could not be completed until his life was over. Gines's tale is a ghost text. It does not exist in the real world, and even in Don Quixote's fictional

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world it remains pending. Tristram's life in print, on the other hand, spans nine volumes and lies very concretely on the lap of the reader. Sterne compels us to acknowledge that the "life" we are reading exists thanks to his creative distribution of information into volumes, chapters, lines, words, letters, pauses, and dashes, and that these physical spaces take a specific amount of time to read and write. A predecessor of metafictional games in the twentieth century, Tristram Shandy's obsession with the book as an object is arguably the most extraordinary aspect of Sterne's response to the epistemological reconfigurations that contributed to the emergence of the English novel in the eighteenth century. Tristram Shandy's exaggerated metafictional play with the notion of the novel as an object reflects the period's heightened tension between storytelling conventions and empirical expectations. A striking illustration of this eighteenth-century preoccupation appears in the surprising number of stories narrated by objects, as documented by Christopher Flint. According to Flint, the proliferation of fiction narrated by inanimate objects such as The Adventures of a Pin, Supposed to be Related by Himself, Herself, or Itself not only invites a restructuration of boundaries between fact and fiction in complicity with an enlightened reader, but also reflects a momentous change in a print economy where suddenly every narrative has become a marketable commodity. In a reversal of the paradigm of the speaking object that bares all, Uncle Toby avoids the vulgarity of sharing information about his wartime wound by directing his audience to a physical model of a battlefield, the preoccupation with which becomes a pretext for deflecting attention away from the particulars of his wound. If we agree with Wayne Booth regarding the central role played by Uncle Toby's amours (or lack thereof) in this novel, then the account of the wound that Toby received in his groin while serving as a British officer in Flanders is arguably the narrative's pivotal event, for it thwarts Toby's single potential love affair. Uncle Toby is all too willing to talk about the long war in which he participated, relating every possible detail about it, except the circumstances, location, and implications of the wound that discharged him from military duty. Contrary to what might be expected, Uncle Toby was not wounded honorably in battle. A loose stone fell from the parapet of Namur's fortifications and landed on the most compromising spot of his body. The delicate nature of this wound, compounded by Uncle Toby's intense prudishness, impedes his speedy recovery. Initially, believing that company will bring cheer to the sickbed, Walter Shandy sends every visitor up to his brother's room. Yet soon it becomes apparent that visitors merely remind Uncle Toby of his tragedy, and what is worse, they cause him great shame and anxiety by expecting to hear full details about the nature and location of the wound. The creative device that Uncle Toby invents in order to extricate himself

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from this embarrassing situation becomes the backbone of his character. "If he could purchase such a thing . . . as a large map of the fortifications of the town and citadel of Namur... he could stick a pin upon the identical spot of ground where he was standing in when the stone struck him" (59-60). In this manner, whenever Uncle Toby is confronted with the perennial "where exactly . . . ?" he can turn to the map and diffuse attention away from his body. This system proves counterproductive when, before committing herself to marry him, Mrs. Wadman wishes to verify the extent of Uncle Toby's injury. Uncle Toby treats her question as he does all other inquiries regarding the "where exactly . . . ?" He promptly sends Trim to fetch the map of Namur, striving to conceal the real answer behind finessed geographical precision. This gives Sterne occasion for high humor: "You shall see the very place, Madam; said my Uncle Toby. Mrs. Wadman blush'd. . . . You shall lay your finger upon the place—" (440). This humorous double-entendre, a travesty of Trim's consummated experience with the young Beguine, constitutes the climax of Uncle Toby's often mentioned lack of experience with women and his only embryonic "love affair." The plain story of Uncle Toby's wound is displaced and transformed into an inanimate object. Concerned visitors and curious ladies, who would like to know exactly where their friend received his wound, must submit to a lengthy exposition of the battle of Namur, complete with visual aids, so that Uncle Toby may avoid embarrassment. (Uncle Toby's propensity to diffuse sexual themes by means of a non-verbal response manifests itself also in his habitual whistling of Lillabulero whenever Walter mentions their sister's elopement with the coachman.) The initial map of Namur's fortifications is soon replaced by a three-dimensional model, which engages Trim's attention as much as Uncle Toby's. While the anxiety of having to mention his damaged genitals almost kills Uncle Toby, his hobbyhorse "carried [him] so well, that he troubled his head very little with what the world either said or thought about it" (55-56). Tristram's life experience, like Uncle Toby's wound, gives way to a concrete object that becomes an obsessive and idiosyncratic project. Tristram's own hobbyhorse is an autobiographical book in which—as the novel's fictional author—he sports ridiculously short chapters (one and a half lines short), a chapter on chapters, a torn out chapter, and two empty chapters that are filled in "later." As narrator, Tristram tells the story of Yorick's death by means of a dark page, describes Mrs. Wadman with a blank page so that the reader may paint her "as like your mistress as you can as unlike your wife as your conscience will let you" (38), and represents his narrative plan through a series of squiggles. This humorous solidification of storytelling strategies goes hand in hand with Sterne's treatment of narrative time as if it were made of rubber, stretching fiction's possibilities (and the reader's tolerance) to the maxi-

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mum. The reader is forced to recognize that fiction is an arbitrary structure measured by the reader's chronological reading time rather than by the emotions and experiential relevance that fiction is expected to generate: "It is about an hour and a half's tolerable good reading since my Uncle Toby rung the bell, when Obadiah was order'd to saddle a horse, and go for Dr. Slop the man-midwife;—so that no one can say, with reason, that I have not allowed Obadiah time enough, poetically speaking, and considering an emergency too, both to go and come" (73). The anxiety that an imminent birth might generate in a conventional narrative becomes here a pretext for discussing fiction in terms of its duration as an act of reading and writing. Cervantes' perspectivism of character, identity, and point of view is replaced in Sterne's novel by a perspectivism of time in relation to life and narrative. Noting the reader's prominent role within Sterne's novel, critics have gone as far as to contend provocatively that the reader is the "true protagonist of Tristram Shandy. . . . Even when he is not on the printed page as 'Sir,' 'Madam,' or 'Your Worship,' he is present for the conception of the work, presumably working alongside Tristram and helping design the work . . ." (Hunter, "Response as Reformation", 137). 7 Sterne unrelentlessly plays with his readers, thwarting our expectations and taunting us for failing to understand Tristram's convoluted narrative: " How could you, Madam, be so inattentive in reading the last chapter? . . . I do insist. . . that you immediately turn back, that is, as soon as you get to the next full stop, and read the whole chapter over again" (40-41). The satirical tone and self-referential substance of the relationship between narrator and reader in this novel set the atmosphere for all its embedded storytelling acts as well. From this point of view, the embedded storytelling situations hardly constitute digressions from the novel's "main" concern. This is true even if we relate to the digressions as a distraction from the protagonist's life, for "much of what [Tristram] is to be is decided by what other people said and did long before he was born, so that the digressions which had seemed peripheral do further the main business of the work" (Anderson 969). What is being parodied here is the very possibility of narrating a life systematically and chronologically as Sterne's contemporary Henry Fielding does, or Daniel Defoe with his heavy reliance on a picaresque type of fictional autobiography. Fielding opens The History of Tom Jones (1949) by describing the antecedents of the hero's family and "as Much of the Birth of the Foundling as Is Necessary or Proper to Acquaint the Reader." He saves for last the real circumstances of Tom's parentage, which constitutes the novel's main mystery. Sterne parodies Fielding's biographical structure by opening his hero's Life with three volumes of extraneous details related to Tristram's pathetic conception, birth, and naming. Similarly, Tristram Shandy's fuddled yet intense preoccupation with the parceling out of time mocks Tom

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Jones's neat chronological demarcations of its hero's life into "the Time of the Year," "a Portion of Time Somewhat Longer Than Half a Year," "About Three Weeks," "Three Days," etc. Our conception of time as a force capable of shaping character and history changed during the Renaissance and again during the Enlightenment. "The novel is in nothing so characteristic of our culture as in the way it reflects this [time bound] characteristic orientation of modern thought" (Watt, The Rise of the Novel 21-23). Not satisfied with Richardson's and Fielding's handling of contemporary philosophical conceptions of time in narrative, Sterne "proceeds to take to its logical extreme the ultimate realist premise of a one-to-one correspondence between literature and reality" (291-92). By comparison, even though vital aspects of Fielding's novels are metafictional, that is, their fictional world contains explicit statements about its own construction, their general impetus is ethical.8 While Sterne's novel, although concerned with human nature, is first and foremost about fiction—even about itself as an object whose pages the reader must turn in order to (try to) extract a narrative, Fielding viewed the novel as an epic genre suitable for depicting the moral development of his society. In this explicit preoccupation with the status and use of the novel lies the main difference between Sterne's Tristram Shandy and Fielding's novels. PART II: FIELDING'S MODERN COMIC EPIC Interpolated Tales in Joseph Andrews and Tom Jones Before continuing to map the role of storytelling debates in the eighteenth-century English novel, it is important to reiterate that the term novel was not used then as it is today. The term romance was closer to our generic conception of the contemporary novel, although it had its defenders, it was considered a lowly genre compared to classical models such as tragedy and the epic. The Italian term novella denoted a short story in prose like the tales collected in Boccaccio's Decameron, which despite their lewd material, were accepted as exemplary or moralistic.9 Henry Fielding, combining neoclassic criteria for the construction of fiction with his admiration for Don Quixote, included short exemplary narratives within longer works of fiction. Although short tales were commonly interpolated within eighteenth-century prose fiction, stories told by characters to characters seldom involve interactive and metafictional discussions at the complex level of the Quixote. Tristram Shandy is an exception. Looking at Richardson's novels from the most basic level of storytelling exchange, one could argue that every epistle represents a text relayed from one character to another, and that a semblance of interactive fiction appears when Lovelace informs Belford of his plots to trick Clarissa, or when Clar-

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issa and Miss Howe design responses to these attempts. Representations of characters collaborating to produce make-believe stories appear also in Defoe's Moll Flanders, as when Moll helps the widow from Redriff spread false rumors about an ex-suitor. Moreover, like all picaresque characters, Moll fabricates stories in order to survive in a hostile environment. A relationship between embedded tales and the picaresque mode is further apparent in Fielding's Tom Jones, where two of the main storytelling episodes—the tale of the Man of the Hill and Mrs. Fitzpatrick's story— emerge precisely when the narrative takes a picaresque bend, that is, when Tom, dispossessed and repulsed from society, turns to the road to fend for himself. Historians of the novel experience considerable difficulty in presenting a comprehensive image of eighteenth-century generic development. As Michael McKeon observes, "whereas Ian Watt's emphasis on 'formal realism' leads him to focus on Defoe and Richardson and to slight Fielding, Bakhtin's exclusive affirmation of heteroglossia permits only Fielding, of the three, to qualify as a 'characteristic and profound model of novelistic prose' (Origins 14).10 Although McKeon's Origins of the English Novel includes at least a brief chapter on each of these authors, as well as on Cervantes, he too presents a "biased" picture. His dialectic of virtue and truth within a historical context of generic and economic change necessarily privileges Richardson's role. This inherent critical selectivity need not be regarded in a negative light, though, for it attests to the proliferation of directions charted for the novel in this period. My description of the eighteenth-century novel privileges Sterne and Austen's roles because of the generic stakes that are richly dramatized through their storytelling interactions. Storytelling episodes in Fielding's novels are not fully interactive, in the sense that their audience does not actively participate in the construction of a tale. Yet their prominence and especially their influence on Sterne, Austen, and Dickens, whose work I examine in more detail, warrant a sustained analysis of what Fielding's storytelling scenes reveal about his conception of the genre. Fielding's novels exhibit more storytelling scenes than any other eighteenth-century English novel except Tristram Shandy. It is therefore surprising that despite a pervasiveness of embedded tales, none of them constitute full-fledged interactive debates between a storyteller and audience who jointly fashion a fictional narrative. However, Fielding's storytelling scenes do reflect a preoccupation with a new venue for prose fiction as a means to address human nature, morality, and manners. Considerable attention has been paid to Fielding's interpolated tales in Joseph Andrews and Tom Jones.11 These tales, largely biographical or autobiographical from the point of view of their framing fictional world, are told by one character to several listeners, usually including the protagonist, and the audience's response is to some extent dramatized. Although the relationship

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between the embedded story and the characters participating in the storytelling act is minimal here, it can be argued that the audience's response functions as a "demonstration of how such interpolations are received into the novel's main action" (Hunter, "Response as Reformation" 140). By systematically showcasing the elasticity and subjectivity of fiction, Fielding's representations of storytelling train their reader not to rely on hasty value judgements. In Joseph Andrews (1742), for instance, Parson Adams questions two men drinking at an inn about the owner of a house he noticed as he walked toward the inn. One of the men describes the homeowner in the vilest possible terms; the other extols him. Perplexed, Adams turns to a third source, the innkeeper, who explains that the homeowner in question is a magistrate who recently settled a dispute between the two men. "I think," the innkeeper adds, "I need not [answer which of the men he decided in favor of] . . . It is not in my business to contradict gentlemen while they are drinking in my house, but I knew neither of them spoke a syllable of truth" (84-86). Since this episode emphasizes the subjectivity of a random storyteller, one might expect that Adams' newly acquired insight would influence his interpretation of storytelling in the future. But no such buildup occurs. Shortly after the episode at the inn, Adams continues his journey in a coach where an anonymous lady, described as "well bred," offers to amuse her fellow travelers by telling a story. Like Adams' inquiry at the inn, "The History of Leonora, or the Unfortunate Jilt" is inspired by a fleeting glimpse of a roadside house associated with the central character of the interpolated account. The traveling lady describes Leonora's seduction by a false suitor, who interferes between Leonora and a sincere suitor, whom the young lady then hurries to reject in such an insensitive manner that at the end she is left empty-handed. Although the moral of the tale condemns Leonora's inconstancy and meanness rather than the false suitor's foul play, the sharp contrast between this inconstancy and the "faithfulness against all odds" that drives Joseph Andrews' main plot is not voiced explicitly at any level of the novel. Leonora remains confined to the embedded (hypodiegetic) level of the text, and the "well-bred Lady" who tells the tale figures mainly as a femme recit employed to tell a story and disappear (Todorov, "Les hommes-recits"). The brief mention of the storyteller's social status is significant, however, in that the storytelling event generates "a space that transcends the protocols and expectations of normal and ordinary social relations—a kind of utopic storyworld [where] characters are joined by a common and seemingly natural and innate interest in storytelling to form a narrative circle" (Jeffrey Williams 87). This narrative circle is nonetheless poignantly disbanded as soon as the storytelling moment ends, for when the coach stops, so does the listeners' willingness to engage with each other. The pretentious Mrs. Grave-Airs immediately rebuffs Slipslop's friendliness, demonstrating

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that, like Leonora, she is sensitive only to those who might advance her material interests at a particular moment. In the novel's fictional world, then, nothing is learned from the storytelling experience. As mentioned, Adams' earlier lesson on the subjectivity of storytelling is similarly disconnected from its contiguous moral episode, and the embedded story's potential to offset the novel's main concerns is left up to the reader. Neither does Joseph Andrews reproduce the complexity and depth of Sancho and Don Quixote's learning process, although its subtitle declares that it is written "in imitation of the manner of Cervantes." However, the contiguity between Joseph Andrews' two embedded episodes, which take place in two of the most stereotypical storytelling settings, an inn and a coach, does function as a rhetorical device inviting a moral and intellectual development in the reader, who notices what the simpleminded characters overlook. Tom Jones, written seven years after Joseph Andrews and in a much more self-conscious spirit, illustrates succinctly how the reader is expected to decode the moral of an embedded story that fails to reach its represented storyteller and audience. The scenes that precede and follow the Man of the Hill's tale, in which Tom and Mr. Partridge come upon a hermit, teach the reader that even hermits need friends, and, moreover, that even hermits are morally obligated to disengage from their solipsistic existence in order to be friends. It is interesting that in the third edition of Tom Jones, Fielding deleted the Man of the Hill's recognition that "what has happened to-night shows that even here I cannot be safe from the villainy of men, for without your assistance I had not only been robbed but very probably murdered" (Tom Jones, Appendix 854). Fielding's decision to remove this avowal reinforces the assumption that by portraying oblivious characters he wished to force the reader to articulate the moral of each episode. Although the hermit learns nothing from Tom and Mr. Partridge's timely intervention on his behalf, in limited gratitude he tells them his life's story, a tale of meanness and treachery, but offers no dinner, bed, or breakfast, as hermits traditionally do. 12 Moreover, when after the tale he joins Tom for a walk during which they stumble upon a rape scene, Tom alone rescues the victim, while the hermit, who had just experienced the good fortune of being rescued himself, placidly contemplates the struggle from a hilltop without using his gun to interfere. In this case Fielding makes sure that we notice that the hermit learnt nothing from his recent need for assistance, and, more importantly, that his tale of treachery did not damage Tom's sense of responsibility either. Like the contrast between Leonora's inconstancy in the traveling woman's story and the steadfast commitment that unites Joseph Andrews to his beloved, Tom's heroic behavior is set in opposition to the miserly content and context of the embedded tale. In each case the character-audience remains untouched by the story's example, whether positive or negative.

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Is the reader to conclude that human nature is fixed and no amount of experience or example can alter it? Paul Hunter answers this question specifically in relation to the tales interpolated in Tom Jones, which he views as seeking to define "not only an acceptable morality but describing a successful method of inculcating morality" ("Response as Reformation", 14344). Partridge, and the same can be said about Parson Adams in Joseph Andrews, acts as a "surrogate for the typical reader, good-natured in his intention to learn but ultimately more anxious to justify himself and preserve his own views and his own comfort. Tom, more like the ideal, attentive reader Fielding wants for his own novels, finally evaluates the morality and efficacy of a tale not in terms of abstract belief but in terms of its ethical application" (ibid.). According to Ian Watt, this ability to evaluate right and wrong is not progressively learned by Tom, but is rather innate. Fielding sees "no need to detail. . . temporary and superficial modifications of a moral constitution which is unalterably fixed from birth" (Rise 275). Indeed, the deliberate avoidance of an explicit connection between main and embedded narrative layers—even if rhetorical or self-conscious—emphasizes that Fielding's characters are not designed to develop in tandem with their experiences, but rather to serve as moral emblems for the reader, who is edified by these perspectivized representations of human nature. In this sense, Fielding's embedded storytelling episodes may be defined as instances of dramatic irony rather than integrated cases of interactive storytelling. This is true even though, unlike the storytelling lady travelling in Joseph Andrews and the misanthropic hermit in Tom Jones, most dramatized storytellers in Fielding's novels do play a role in the main action. Preserving a semblance of the classical unities that Cervantes was criticized for disregarding when he included the lengthy "Tale of Foolish Curiosity" in Don Quixote without connecting it directly to the heroes' adventures, Fielding's embedded storytelling episodes usually advance the action in a manner akin to storytelling scenes in the picaresque novel, where a tale is told when the protagonist needs to travel from one place to another. A large number of Fielding's storytelling events serve to close a gap between story time and text time, the gap which forms the backbone of Tristram Shandy's playfulness. Fielding's playfulness carries an ethical dimension that resonated with his own public function as a magistrate. Paradoxically, he often activated this connection to criticize the corruption and pettiness of figures of authority. As in the example of the conflicting opinions that Parson Adams hears about a provincial magistrate, a number of Fielding's interpolated tales detail the effects of legal judgement on the common individual. In the midst of the Man of the Hill's tale, the storyteller-hermit wonders why a certain gentleman whom he once robbed declined to prosecute him. Mr. Partridge

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jumps to answer this question by telling a tale of his own, so that we get a tale within a tale within a novel—two layers of embeddedness. In contrast to the hermit, about whom we know little other than what he tells Tom and Mr. Partridge about his misanthropic life—confirmed later when he refuses to aid the woman in distress—Mr. Partridge is a central player in the novel and we can judge his story and storytelling in light of what we know about his character. Moreover, as we shall further see, the subject of Mr. Partridge's tale offsets Fielding's preoccupation with a delimitation of suitable subjects for modern fiction. Remorse, a feeling absent in the hermit, is emphasized in Mr. Partridge's digression within a digression. Mr. Partridge tells about a young man named Frank, who accuses someone of stealing his horse, yet during the ensuing public trial realizes that the defendant might be innocent. The alleged thief is nonetheless hanged without further ado, thus linking Mr. Partridge's story to many other incidents in which Fielding criticizes a miscarriage of justice. Henceforth, Frank stumbles into the hanged man's ghost in every dark corner, and, on one occasion, having drunk "a quart or two," he even scuffles with it. Mr. Partridge declares, and apparently also believes, that "all this is most certainly true, and the whole parish will bear witness to it," and so he is irked when the hermit smiles and Tom outright laughs. In response to their derision, Mr. Partridge compares them to a squire who dared suggest that Frank had not fought a ghost, but rather "a calf with a white face found dead in the same lane the next morning" (386-87). Fielding leaves the supernatural versus psychological interpretation of Frank's vision in the hands of the reader in a way that predetermines a rational decision. The bias towards a rational interpretation is moreover colored by the narratorial preface to this section, in which Fielding condemns the irresponsible use of supernatural material in modern fiction. As a response to the hermit's puzzlement about why someone he once robbed refused to call upon public justice, Mr. Partridge's story indeed offers a plausible reason for declining to prosecute—namely, that the outcome might haunt the accuser. Tom and the hermit's responses to Mr. Partridge's tale do not include, however, any awareness of this conclusion. Aside from their respective smile and snicker, the only other response to Mr. Partridge's tale is Tom's complaint about the interruption of the hermit's tale, which then proceeds. Fielding's consistent avoidance of explicit links between narrative levels illustrates what Watt brands a "realism of assessment," in which counterpointed scenes reflect ironically upon each other (Rise 293). Fielding's understated storytelling debates leave moral and intellectual conclusions to the reader, who instead of passively observing the represented audience's assessments, is required to take an extra cognitive step on his or her own. In a different type of potential interpolated episode bonding author and reader at the expense of a character, Fielding returns to Mr. Partridge's

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obsession with ghosts. Tom and Mr. Partridge attend a production of Hamlet during their sojourn in London. Mr. Partridge, who had never been to the theater, refuses to believe that a walking armor can be a ghost, for "though I can't say I ever actually saw a ghost in my life, yet I am certain I should know one if I saw him" (733). The naive schoolmaster is confused by what Diderot defined as the actor's paradox: an actor must convincingly display the feelings of the character he is portraying, yet remain detached enough to act intelligently. During the course of the performance, Mr. Partridge begins to differentiate between actor, acting, and theatrical script, but as soon as the play within the play is staged, he again confuses the actors' responses with those required from him as a spectator. By the end of the performance, it appears that Mr. Partridge failed to understand the theater's mimetic nature. He concludes that the acclaimed actor Garrick hardly merits his excellent reputation, for any man who meets a ghost, or whose mother is as attractive as Hamlet's, "should have looked in the very same manner and done just as he did" (736). Mr. Partridge's reaction to drama differs from the destruction of Master Peter's puppet show in the Quixote, for Don Quixote, seeming to act as a madman, has a lucid a fortiori reason for attacking someone who had taken advantage of him earlier. It turns out that the puppeteer is none other than that picaresque Gines de Pasamonte who had ungratefully stolen Sancho's ass after Don Quixote freed him from the gallows, so that Don Quixote's interference in his show settles a just account. Unlike Don Quixote, Mr. Partridge never transcends the role of a naive laughingstock who cannot properly assess the boundaries that separate experience from action or fact from fiction. Yet Mr. Partridge's deficiencies do serve to distinguish Fielding's own work from "productions of romance writers on the one hand and burlesque writers on the other" (Preface to Joseph Andrews, x). In the preface to Tom Jones3 Book IV, Fielding reiterates that "truth distinguishes our writings from those idle romances which are filled with monsters, the production not of Nature but of distempered brains," and "on the other hand, we would avoid any resemblance to that kind of history" which is inspired by and read with "a tankard of good ale" rather than through the light of true genius and Classical learning (126). In terms of their implausible coincidences and happy endings, Fielding's novels nonetheless resemble the Greek or Byzantine romances whose lovers' reunions and resurrections Fielding's contemporary Voltaire mocked in Candide. Fielding admits that he refrained from calling his work a romance only on account of "that universal contempt which the world . . . [has] cast on all historical writers who do not draw their materials from records. And it is the apprehension of this contempt that hath made us so cautiously avoid the term romance, a name with which we might otherwise have been well enough contented" (Preface to Book IX, Tom Jones 410-11).

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While Fielding's novels rely on the formal principles of romance, epic, and classical drama, they also exhibit an original portrayal of contemporary places, social possibilities, and manners. Fielding therefore labored to distinguish his fiction from marvelous events unacceptable to an age that discredited miracles, but was equally troubled by the need to distinguish his "biographies" or "histories" from writings that "draw their materials from records." Caught between two inadequate poles, he anxiously struggled to define a new genre that drew, yet was qualitatively different, from both history and romance. To improve the status of his work, Fielding initially compared it to the classical epic, arguing that his fiction should be considered a comic epic similar to the genre for which Aristotle's rules were lost. Even if we view these remarks as ironic (Reed 122), the classical form undoubtedly provided Fielding with a model to emulate and refashion. He wrote in prose rather than verse, in English rather than Greek or Latin, and invented original scenes, while the epic relied on mythology and allegedly recounted historical events. Drawing both on the epic and his personal involvement in drama—Fielding was a successful dramatist living in a great age of theater—he tried to adhere to the unities of place, time and action. However, in the scope of the novel, his attempt to construct a connection between some interpolated tales and the main action creates implausible scenarios. A man who tells Joseph Andrews an autobiographical story on the roadside turns out to be Joseph's father, a woman who tells Sophia Western about her escape from a terrible marriage turns out to be Sophia's cousin, and so forth. These imaginative leaps of faith, grounded on aesthetic and generic premises, were acceptable to Fielding, yet he attacked the use of the imagination when it was enlisted to engender supernatural creatures. Tom Jones' general narrator discourses against the employment of fantastical elements in modern fiction: "The only supernatural agents which can in any manner be allowed to us moderns are ghosts, but of these I would advise an author to be extremely sparing" (336). This warning appears in the preface to the section that includes Mr. Partrige's derided ghost story, where through Partridge's thickheadedness Fielding parodies even a short digression on ghosts, and the storyteller who believes in such fantasies gets treated as an inconsequential numbskull. Elves, fairies, "and other such mummery" are thus banished from Fielding's reconfiguration of romance, which advocates an interest in human nature instead. The ordinary individual in a contemporary setting becomes "the highest subject. . . which presents itself to the pen of our historian or our poet; and in relating his actions, great care is to be taken that we do not exceed the capacity of the agents we describe" (337). This notion of portraying ordinary people in a contemporary setting defines the agenda of the realist novel in the next century. Before plunging into realism through Jane Austen's consolidation of the

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achievements of her diverse predecessors, it is pertinent to underscore the influence of the gothic novel, with all its supernatural paraphernalia, despite or rather against a reigning empirical epistemology. The emergence of gothicism in the eighteenth century "suggests a resistance to the ideas of rising, progress, and development, either historical or individual, which lead to the attainment of individuation and detachment" (Kilgour 37, my emphasis). However, gothic fiction, initially "denounced and now celebrated for its radical imaginative lawlessness," was also "feared for its encouragement of readers to expect more from life that is realistic" (10). As we shall see in the next section, these dichotomies are finely balanced in Austen's vision of the novel, which incorporates and transcends the impact of romance in general and of gothic romance in particular. PART III: BETWEEN THE GOTHIC AND THE MIDLANDS Sixteen years after Fielding sought to control the reception of his fiction by demarcating the boundaries that according to him were suitable for a dignified version of modern romance, Horace Walpole inaugurated a countermovement that pronounced itself firmly against the banishment of supernatural elements from fiction. "Walpole despised the novelists of his time for their tameness. He found Richardson's novels 'deplorably tedious lamentations,' Fielding and Smollett boorish, Tristram Shandy 'insipid.' This man of sense and reason scorned a theory of fiction that limited fiction to sense, reason, the common light of day" (Mudrick, Castle of Otranto 9). At first anonymously, for he feared Enlightened ridicule, Walpole published a novel with a plot that hinges upon supernatural occurrences in a dark medieval castle populated by an irate father and his family, as well as a prospective bride for the young son, all of whom the father attempts to manipulate. A glamorous peasant who appears at the end rescues the damsel in distress and claims a lineage that had been usurped by the ancestors of the tyrannical patriarch. All this takes place amidst general signs of spooky interference, which raises the stakes of the bareboned romance. Far from denying the social and intellectual spirit of the times, the Gothic narrative exposed fiction as fiction and encouraged individualism through an erosion of authority. Furthermore, Walpole insisted that rationality itself would enable his readers to enjoy fiction more than ever before, for predisposed toward a rational interpretation of the world, enlightened readers could enjoy the gripping suspense of a marvelous plot heightened by a skeptical awareness of "knowing better." Given that at first Walpole did not dare present The Castle of Otranto (1764) as an original work, the first edition may be called a fiction within a fiction. Walpole disguised his original novel as a translation of an ancient Italian manuscript, which he presented to the rational reader as a fiction

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that could be merely laughed at. Although the purported ancient manuscript was "laid before the public at present as a matter of entertainment," an apology was still deemed necessary to account for its ghosts, visions, oracles, and supernatural paraphernalia (Preface to the First Edition 1 5 16). Whether rationally or not, the late eighteenth-century English readership took so well to Walpole's reconfiguration of romance that a new subgenre of fiction emerged from it.13 The Castle of Otranto became an instant success. Heartened by such a favorable reception, Walpole introduced the second edition of his novel as a creative attempt that had sought to blend the inventiveness of ancient chivalric romances with the mimetic neoclassicism of eighteenth-century fiction. Yet even while his novel was being re-edited for the third time in a matter of two years, Walpole insisted that he had not devised this new genre for those who could "endure nothing but cold common sense" (quoted in Scott's Introduction to The Castle of Otranto 119). Despite his employment of the supernatural, Walpole, like Fielding and Richardson before him, claimed to be a transcriber of reality, presumably one that includes imaginative faculties alongside rational thought. In 1764, when Walpole first published his Castle of Otranto, "gothic" connoted anything "belonging to, or characteristic of, the Middle Ages." It signified a romantic rather than classical sensibility and was used chiefly as a term of reprobation. Synonyms ranged from "in bad taste" and "unpolished" to "barbarous," "uncouth," and "rude" (OED).14 As a reaction to Walpole's achievement, during the latter quarter of the eighteenth century and the first quarter of the nineteenth the term "gothic" lost some of its negative connotations and began to signify an infusion of new art forms that legitimized an entertaining reading experience. Further scholarship on the genre has identified its challenge to an established world order, in particular a blunt rejection of authority, which opened horizons "beyond social patterns, rational decisions, and institutionally approved emotions. . . . It became then a great liberator of feeling" (Sedgwick 3). Gothicism reached an apex of popularity with Ann Radcliffe's bestsellers at the turn of the century.15 At this point, Jane Austen took special issue with the most popular of these, The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), subverting its salient characteristics to establish her own brand of prose fiction. In Northanger Abbey, begun in 1798 but published only in 1818, Austen measures herself not only against the gothic genre, but also responds to the routes charted by novels we discussed in the preceding pages. Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey: Romance Stepping into Realism Emphasizing the allegedly negative effect of gothic fiction upon naive readers, Jane Austen began to compose a parody of this genre, making use of its narrative techniques and the relationship it had established with the

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reading public to affirm, like Cervantes, a new double-edged reconfiguration of the novel. A parody of genres in the tradition of Cervantes—who influenced Austen via Sterne, Fielding, and Charlotte Lennox's Female Quixote (1752)16—Austen's first major novel, Northanger Abbey, shows most clearly how realism developed in concerted opposition to both metafiction and romance. Like Fielding, Austen initially used metafiction to distance herself from romance. Then, combining Fielding's notion of the novel with Richardson's, she took the decisive step of designing novels around familiar places, common objects, and prosaic problems set in a contemporary framework and narrated without recourse to alleged memoirs, letters, or manuscripts. In this sense, Austen reaffirms the image of placid social order and domesticity that gothic romance to a certain extent erodes.17 F. R. Leavis maintains that by conflating the various novelistic traditions that preceded her, Austen "not only makes tradition for those coming after, b u t . . . creates the tradition we see leading down to her" (5). Through favorable reviews of her novels, Austen's influential contemporaries Scott and Whately defined realism (Levine 36). Austen herself expressed a new status for the novel by means of Northanger Abbey's leering narrator. And what are you reading. Miss—?' 'Oh! it is only a novel! . . . [0]nly some work in which the greatest powers of the mind are displayed, in which the most thorough knowledge of human nature, the happiest delineation of its varieties, the liveliest effusions of wit and humor are conveyed to the world in the best chosen language. (22) Yet, Charming as were all of Mrs. Radcliffe's works, and charming even as were the works of its imitators, it was not in them perhaps that human nature, at least in the midland counties of England, was to be looked for. (160) At the end of the eighteenth century, fiction, still known mainly as romance, was not considered a serious art form. In 1801 Maria Edgeworth refused to call her Belinda a novel, offering it instead as "a Moral Tale." We may recall how Fielding explained that if the term romance had been less undervalued, he might have adopted this label for his own work (Tom Jones, Preface to Book IX). Instead, Fielding called Tom Jones a comic epic in prose because the epic enjoyed better academic standing. Jane Austen, on the other hand, decided to write a novel and call it by that name. Her reservations about the genre were focused entirely upon the subject matter of some novels.

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What Jane Austen expressed as an aesthetic and thematic program for the novel in Northanger Abbey is indeed what she faithfully implemented in her subsequent fiction. Her program circumscribes realism in England as a practice that "belongs, almost provincially, to a 'middling' condition and defines itself against the excesses, both stylistic and narrative, of various kinds of romantic, exotic, or sensational literatures" (Levine 5). But, paradoxically, as soon as Northanger Abbey's heroine learns that this "middling condition" is her only realistic option, she achieves what we expect from any heroine of romance: she marries her beloved against all odds, acquires wealth and social status, and lives happily ever after. The heroine's original expectations, based on an admiration of the gothic novel, are therefore misguided in form rather than in content. From this point of view, Northanger Abbey's realism preserves many of the comic and comforting patterns of romance, adapted to the portrayal of local geography, recognizable furnishings, and contemporary manners. As a tongue in cheek parody of the gothic craze, the tale that Henry Tilney tells Catherine Morland is already scaled down to a domestic environment that displaces the supernatural. While driving Catherine to visit his family's estate, Henry amuses her and himself by fabricating a stylized and misleading picture of his home, which happens to be an abbey, though not a dilapidated ghost-filled one. Tilney's storytelling is triggered by Catherine's romantic notion of an abbey. She expects it to be "a fine old place, just like what one reads about" and believes that anyone who has dwelt in such an extraordinary home would find any other disagreeable. Tilney, who matches Catherine's generic expectations to the appropriate gothic adventure, playfully warns his gullible companion that when a young lady is (by whatever means) introduced into a dwelling of this kind, she is always lodged apart from the rest of the family. While they snugly repair to their own end of the house, she is formally conducted by Dorothy the ancient housekeeper up a different staircase, and along many gloomy passages, into an apartment never used since some cousin or kin died in it about twenty years before. (124) Udolpho's heroine was conducted to precisely such a chamber, but in a haunted castle far away from England. "Oh, but this will not happen to me, I am sure," Catherine cries. Yet in her heart she longs to be exactly like those heroines "one reads about." Henry knows this, and, enjoying himself immensely—for, after all, he has confessed that he also likes gothic novels—he continues to construct his enticing story from patches of wellknown contemporary romances. Abstracted from the narrator's comments and the dialogue between storyteller and audience, Henry's tale runs as follows:

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Dorothy [. . . ] struck by your appearance, gazes on you in great agitation, and drops a few unintelligible hints. To raise your spirits, moreover, she gives you reason to suppose that the part of the abbey you inhabit is undoubtedly haunted, and informs you that you will not have a single domestic within call. With this parting cordial she curtseys off—you listen to the sound of her receding footsteps as long as the last echo can reach you— and when, with fainting spirits, you attempt to fasten your door, you discover with increased alarm, that it has no lock. Nothing further to alarm perhaps may occur the first night. After surmounting your unconquerable horror of the bed, you will retire to rest, and get a few hour's unquiet slumber. But you will probably have a violent storm. Peals of thunder so loud as to seem to shake the edifice to its foundation will roll round the neighbouring mountains—and during the frightful gusts of wind which accompany it, you will probably think you discern (for your lamp is not extinguished) one part of the hanging more violently agitated than the rest. Unable of course to repress your curiosity in so favorable a moment for indulging it, you will instantly arise, and throwing a dressing-gown around you, you will discover a division in the tapestry so artfully constructed as to defy the minutest inspection, and on opening it, a door will immediately appear—which door being only secured by massy bars and a padlock, you will, after a few efforts, succeed in opening,—and, with your lamp in your hand, will pass through it into a small vaulted room . . . your eyes will be attracted towards a large, old-fashioned cabinet of ebony and gold [. . . ] Impelled by an irresistible presentiment, you will eagerly advance to it, unlock its folding doors, and search into every drawer [. . . ] At last, however, by touching a secret spring, an inner compartment will open—a roll of paper appears:—you seize it—it contains many sheets of manuscript—you hasten with the precious treasure into your own chamber, but scarcely have you been able to decipher e(Oh! thou—whomsoever thou mayst be, into whose hands these memoirs of the wretched Matilda may fall33—when your lamp suddenly expires in the socket, and leaves you in total darkness. (125-26) Tilney evokes the atmosphere of the supernatural without including ghosts and other fantastic elements in his tale, and some of the situations he describes actually happen to Catherine during her stay in the abbey. Much to her chagrin, though, they are steeped in banality. In fact, banal or at least realistically plausible explanations of mysterious and supernatural occurrences are offered even in Radcliffe's novels. Unlike Walpole, who built a theory around the value of preserving the supernatural in literature, Radcliffe bows to enlightenment and reason in her supernaturally evocative fictional worlds. She eventually explains, for instance, that the ghosts that seemed to prowl a castle at night were actually smugglers searching for a hiding place, a pedestrian explanation that disappointed

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Radcliffe's contemporaries. 18 As Tilney's tale suggests, from the start Dorothy gives you reason to suppose that the part of the abbey you inhabit is undoubtedly haunted. Likewise, Radcliffe's mysteries turn out to be fabrications of the servants' exalted imaginations. The reader, however, is kept in a heightened state of suspense until released from the storyteller's grip at the end of the tale. In vastly different ways, then, Radcliffe and Austen sit together in the center of a pendulum that swings between concealment and exposure of the premises that underlie their fictional constructions. By insisting that Henry's gothic suggestions cannot happen to her, Catherine reveals that she believes they are, in principle, possible. Terrified yet stimulated, just as Henry portrays her in the embedded tale, Catherine allows curiosity to get the best of her: "Well, what then?" she pleads, eager to hear the rest of his story. But Tilney, overcome by his own amusement and perhaps a budding tenderness toward the woman with whom he eventually falls in love, can no longer maintain the detachment necessary to produce an electrifying gothic style. Only when he begs to stop does Catherine realize that she has revealed too much of her personal weakness for fantasy, not to mention that she has pressed him beyond what was deemed proper for an English lady. She then "grew ashamed of her eagerness, and began earnestly to assure him that her attention had been fixed without the smallest apprehension of really meeting with what he related" (124-27). In the context of the novel, Henry's tale functions as a preface to the surprises that do await Catherine in the actual abbey. When she finally reaches it, neither the building nor its furniture afford her the sensations she expected. The low building with modern and elegant furniture, and even the famous pointed windows, which in this remodeled abbey allow plenty of light and air, fail to generate an atmosphere of ancient agony and mystery. "[T]o an imagination which had hoped for the smallest divisions, and the heaviest stone-work, for painted glass, dirt and cobwebs, the difference was very distressing" (128). Noticing Catherine's critical gaze, her friends' father, under the false impression that Catherine is an heiress, apologizes for not receiving her with even more manifestations of modern comfort. Instead of a superstitious housekeeper, Henry's sweet sister, Eleanor, shows Catherine to a comfortable chamber contiguous to her own and devoid of any old furnishings. Catherine is about to change into her dinner dress, hurrying as she had been asked to, when a large chest partly concealed by the fireplace catches her eye. Earlier, Henry described such a chest in his story: How fearfully you will examine the furniture of your apartment!—And what will you discern? [. . . ] a ponderous chest which no efforts can open, and over the fire-place the portrait of some handsome warrior, whose fea-

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tures will so incomprehensibly strike you, that you will not be able to withdraw your eyes from it. (125) In Catherine's room there is no portrait and no gloominess, but at least there is a chest! It is not locked but it is heavy and, after considerable effort and delay, Catherine manages to throw back the lid to discover nothing more exciting than a cotton bedspread. At this anticlimactic moment, Eleanor Tilney walks in, catching her delayed guest nosing about the room. Catherine's untimely and inappropriate inquisitiveness, which stems from her belabored imagination, is thus added to the list of embarrassing social blunders she commits during her stay with the Tilneys. Some of Catherine's social blunders result from her lack of familiarity with the mindset and lifestyles of aristocrats who inherit prestigious property such as an abbey, for Catherine belongs to a social and financial status much lower than the Tilneys. In Austen's novel—and to a lesser extent also in the gothic form she parodies—the ghosts and horrors that lurk behind chests and curtains turn out to be products of social tensions and expectations. Yet as many critics have pointed out, the real nature of horror is accentuated when General Tilney, Henry and Eleanor's father, realizes that Catherine is no heiress and her visit to the abbey becomes an actual nightmare. Catherine is not immune to Henry's charms or the pressures to meet Mr. Right. The General, however, assumes that she had basely cheated him in order to marry his son and callously throws her out of his house without providing safe transportation back to her parents. Against realistic odds, Northanger Abbey ends with a spirit of social and sexual regeneration derived from the world of romance and ancient comedy (Frye 167ff). The heroine marries the hero amidst Austen's ongoing disclaimers regarding the differences between fiction based on reality and the improbable situations described in traditional romance, so that the doses of bitter realism that all of Austen's heroines are forced to swallow as they learn about their place in the world do not translate into naturalistic tragedy. Austen's realistic agenda is reined in by a final "capitulation" to romance, as well as by a calculated selection of the historical and political data included in her portrayal of turn-of-the-century midland England. Harry Levin writes that "it never occurred to Austen that the young officers, who figure as dancing partners for the heroines of her novels, were on furlough from Trafalgar or Waterloo" (79). Rather than not occurring to her, the decision to develop a circumscribed mimetic agenda tallies with her declared desire to focus on "human nature . . . conveyed to the world in the best chosen language" (Northanger Abbey 22). International battles such as those that preoccupied Uncle Toby and Corporal Trim in Tristram Shandy, or those that later padded the plot of Thackeray's Vanity Fair, would have chipped away from the harmony between realism and romance that underscores Austen's domestic realism.

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Northanger Abbey's heroine triumphs, overcoming the adverse social circumstances that had formed a greater impediment to her happiness than the illusions and misunderstandings from which she is weaned by the end of the novel. As a matter of fact, had she had no illusions, not to mention conversational material afforded by gothic novels, she might have been uninteresting to the Tilney siblings. Since Catherine's intuitions prove to be fundamentally correct even as her fantasies are exposed and labeled as such, her improbable wishes become real at a fundamental level, for eventually, like her better known counterpart Emma Woodhouse, Catherine Morland does marry her handsome educator in shiny socioeconomic armor. However, although in Emma this achievement does not involve the removal of social barriers, Emma Woodhouse learns a harder lesson about the world and her place in it. Austen's realism in Northanger Abbey is a budding realism taken much further in her subsequent fiction. Especially in the satirical rendition of the gothic tale that Tilney tells Catherine, Austen challenges pure romance's subsequent ability to enchant readers. She will never expose the seams of her own fiction as she does those of the gothic novel, an antimetafictional care that will become one of the hallmarks of realism. The overt generic parody that characterizes Northanger Abbey gives way to more measured narratorial commentary in the rest of Austen's work. In Northanger Abbey, however, the sharp contrast between familiar settings and circumstances and romance's far-fetched subject matter already offsets realism to advantage, even while enhancing the illusion of any representation of the world. The overt metafiction that characterizes Northanger Abbey disappears from Jane Austen's later fiction, and her biting irony—what Litz calls her "cleansing irony" (6)—is toned down and channeled into nonnarratorial forms of expression. Although a degree of stark irony remains in the later fiction, it is better integrated with plot and character.19 Already in Pride and Prejudice (1812), Austen tailored her criticism of contemporary fiction and society into a more uniformly realistic plot. Between Emma (1815) and Persuasion (1817), her plot "shifts from a narrative of correction" to one which exposes the heroine's need for "separation from a social order that no longer functions properly" (Ermarth, Realism and Concensus 146). Still, compared to Balzac or Flaubert, the narrators of all of Austen's novels are intrusive and ironic in a way that could be construed as metafictional to some degree. Indeed, due to its occasional narratorial intrusiveness, Austen's work is not considered quintessential realist by continental standards. Nonetheless, her style and ideology, which retailors the seams between romance, realism, and metafiction, provide a foothold for the establishment of realism as a primary literary convention in the nineteenth century.

4

The Realist Agenda: Metafiction and Romance Swept under the Carpet The antithetical collocation of romance in opposition to historical truth, adumbrated so strikingly in the Renaissance, intensifies during the Enlightenment when the subjectivity of perception is exposed more systematically. History becomes categorized as a distinct genre at this time, partly as a reaction to fiction's new tendency to internalize historical consciousness more deeply than ever before. One consequence of fiction's adaptation of history as an empirical discourse is that fiction now guards itself from any metafictional displays that might compromise its claim to testimonial genuineness. From this point of view, romance itself becomes a metafictional liability. Thus, nineteenth-century realism, defined in opposition to romance as in Harry Levin's The Gates of Horn but also against metafiction as in Robert Alter's Partial Magic, shuttles between an ideological rejection of these two aesthetics, hiding them both under its progressive agenda. In this chapter, I would like to explore realism's avoidance of romance as a metafictional liability at a time when romance becomes a casualty not only of a growing distrust of non-empirical observations, but also of a correlated devaluation of any narrative that is clearly invented. However, since romance itself traditionally eschews metafictional expressions, realism and romance's kinship already manifests itself in this mutual concealment of their imaginative core. Furthermore, the realist novel's impulse to hide its fictional nature, including its debt to romance, paradoxically clashes with an empirical agenda. For after all, isn't a novel offered as a strategic object, or storytelling expressed as rhetoric, a more verifiable construct than narrative's alleged capacity to represent the world? A seminal comparison of realism and romance in Clara Reeve's Progress

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of Romance (1785) describes the novel as a synonym for what eventually came to be called realism. The Romance is a heroic fable, which treats of fabulous persons and things. The Novel is a picture of real life and manners, and of the times in which it is written. The Romance in lofty and elevated language, describes what never happened nor is likely to happen. The novel gives a familiar relation of such things, as pass every day before our eyes, such as may happen to our friend, or to ourselves. (Ill) Although the term novel signifying "a fictitious prose narrative or tale of considerable length" appeared in England as early as 1643 (OED), it entered common usage only during the eighteenth century with fiction's turn toward a sustained portrayal of ordinary people in familiar surroundings and situations. The term realism did not exist in Reeve's time; it was coined in France toward the middle of the nineteenth century and was imported into England soon afterwards. We must also remember that roman, as the novel is called in French, exposes the novel's identification with romance in a way that is obscured by the English and Spanish adaptation of the Italian term novella. As if to disavow an obvious connection, it was actually the French novelists of this period who distanced themselves most radically from metafiction and romance. 1 Naturalism in particular, realism's "scientific" sibling and a genre of autochthonous French origin, rejected every overt trace of formulaic and fantastic literary aesthetics. Shunning the romantic and rhetorical elements with which novelists have embroidered "the homespun fabric of experience," this extreme form of realism negated "all that is not firmly based on the actual life of human beings, all, in short, that is grotesque, unreal, nebulous, or didactic" (Gosse 386-87). However, while rejecting romance's hallmarks, defenders of this new mandate to represent character, experience, and place substituted age-old literary tastes with a new expected link between literature and experience. The realist and naturalist agenda is after all by no means devoid of didacticism, but this didacticism is built into its conception rather than trumpeted formulaically. This, too, downplays its status as a work of art woven from strands of linguistic and literary conventions as much as from observation, ideology, and experience. Rather than admit to artifice, though, realist and naturalist novelists consciously guarded their work from obtrusive manifestations of fictionality. Alongside a rejection of fantastic and supernatural elements, they reduced the presence of explicit rhetorical and didactic remarks, including scenes of storytelling, especially the interactive type in which characters debate how to tell a potential story that fits their respective expectations. Robert Alter explains that aside from a genuine desire to record contemporary society, novelists in this period are disinclined to play with the Active status of their

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work because "they are such intent imaginists—writers caught in the autonomous power of their own fantasy world" (Partial Magic 97). In a later publication, Alter exhorts us to keep in mind that Sterne's Tristram Shandy, possibly the supreme example of a self-conscious novel that "systematically flaunts its own necessary condition of artifice" managed to enjoy considerable popularity throughout the age of realism "because of the convincing mimesis it produces through its maze of flaunted artifice" (Motives for Fiction 12-13). Indeed, metafictional devices do not entirely disappear in the nineteenth century. Ross Chambers has identified a rich class of self-reflexive expressions in the period's "art tale," a highly stylized form of short fiction that shares many features with realism but does not conform to this mode as single-mindedly as the period's longer narratives. While the realist novel strives to imprison its reader in a slice of life unhampered by notifications of its construction, the art tale purposefully vaunts its beauty as a wellcrafted artifact. Metafictional remarks are not as jarring in this context. Barbara Hardy contends that any form of narrative communication (narratorial, figural, biographical, psychological, true or false, public or private) represents a mimetic encoding of the relationship between real tellers and listeners. From this point of view, "storytelling" events in the realist novel abound, though they are normally employed to develop plot and character through dialogue and are rarely framed as a distinct storytelling event. Interactive fictions, on the other hand, are never simple instances of biographical exchange between characters, nor are they misrepresentations of reality that arise from illusion, perversity, or ignorance overcome in order to affirm reality. Storytelling scenes with a distinct storytelling atmosphere, where characters moreover debate the manner of telling a tale that is evidently constructed, are rare in nineteenth-century fiction. When they appear, it is mostly in works rejected from the canon of mainstream realism, works that have not entirely banished the ghosts of romance or overcome an indulgence in metafictional markers. Of course strict realist texts devoid of any overt trace of romance and metafiction are a Utopia. Nevertheless, the minimization of interactive fictions in this period confirms that this construct is consciously perceived as capable of exposing genre and fictionality's inner workings, thus compromising a narrative's claim to an unmediated reporting of the world. The storytelling moments analyzed in this chapter come from the pen of an author whose status within the realist canon is problematic in large measure because of obvious traces of romance in his work. Among nineteenth-century realists, Dickens exhibits the greatest propensity to stage full-blown storytelling events, which furthermore tallies with his keen dramatic sense and prolific delight in fiction making. This chapter surveys the status of imaginative storytelling in Dickens' ouvre, concluding with a de-

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tailed discussion of how Little Dorrit exposes realism's double-edged relationship to romance as metafiction. Through storytelling moments in Dickens' novels we can pinpoint social and aesthetic conventions resisted by realism, for if the existence of interactive fictions in this period represents a breakdown of realism—interactive fictions in every period are in fact a breakdown of smooth communication—then the disrupted mechanism facilitates an understanding of the expected conventions. "As soon as the author shows his hand," asserted Emile Zola, "the illusion stops" (quoted in D. A. Williams 11). In a similar vein, the nineteenth-century American writer William Dean Howells, for whom realism was practically a religious doctrine, objected to overt manifestations of fictionality as fiercely as he did to residues of romance in realism. He mocked Thackeray for creating narrators that barge into a story to give "little essays about [the] characters," and accused Dickens and Balzac of "falsifying nature, refining and subtilizing sentiment, and modifying psychology after their own fancy" because they allowed elements of romance into their work (Howells 99, 39).2 Henry James disparaged Anthony Trollope for taking "a suicidal satisfaction in reminding the reader that the story he was telling was only, after all, a make-believe" (Levine 184). Trollope, on the other hand, took care to distance himself from romance, and in 1853 he proudly wrote to George Eliot that he had "shorn his fiction of romance" (Beer 68). Howells acknowledges this "achievement" in Trollope's work, likening him to Austen "in simple honesty and instinctive truth." Howells regrets, however, that by imitating Thackeray's caricatures and intrusive narrator, Trollope departed from the otherwise "wholesome ideal" of realism (39). Howells was evidently not familiar with Austen's very metafictional Northanger Abbey, or he would have likely ventured some caveat about that. As we saw in the previous chapter, in her first major novel, Austen deployed metafiction to articulate her decision to step into realism through romance. She would never again use metafiction in this particular manner, though. By the end of the nineteenth century, objections to metafiction are voiced as strongly as the tirades against romance at the beginning of the century. However, as we saw in the previous chapter through reference to Austen and Fielding, avoiding supernatural incidents by merely populating one's fictional worlds with probable, possible, and familiar characters, events, and places, does not in and of itself efface the novel's structural and stylistic reliance on literary conventions derived from romance. Harry Levin reaches the conclusion that realism and romance differ as a matter of degree rather than in essence. Realism emerges from the gate of horn, romance from the gate of ivory, and the distinctions between them center on whether the events described are more probable or less so (39). Yet as soon as a realist

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text admits this, it enters into the realm of metafiction, and becomes a narrative that "lays bare the conventions of Realism" (Waugh, Metafiction 18). Dickens consciously walked the tightrope between realism and romance, a balancing act that emerges through metafictional scenes in his work, including various types of dramatized storytelling events that reveal realism's continuous reliance on the conventions of romance. Yet although Dickens may have produced his best work by emphasizing "the romantic side of familiar things" (Preface to Bleak House), by and large his agenda was a realist one. Indeed, when his novels first appeared in France, French writers and critics admired them particularly for their realistic dimension (Becker 15). However, strict realism never suited Dickens' personality. He shattered the realist mold either by allowing his exuberant imagination to give shape and color to the harsh realities he portrayed, or by occasionally letting his audience glimpse the artist's studio or take a peek behind the curtains of the official show. Dickens was well aware that explicit references to the artifice of his fictional worlds compromised an audience's willingness to suspend disbelief. He understood that readers expecting a faithful and unmediated representation of reality paradoxically perceive such remarks as a distortion of a tacit bond between reader and writer. It is odd, then, that he chose to express this awareness within a novel, as he does through the conversation between little Nell's grandfather and the operators of a Punch and Judy show in The Old Curiosity Shop (1840-1841). Nell and her grandfather come upon this travelling show when its operators are fixing the artifacts of their trade in the secluded outskirts of a village in which they plan to perform later that evening. Noticing the look of surprise on the grandfather's face, one of the operators remarks that perhaps this is the first time he has seen a Punch puppet offstage: "Why do you come here to do this?" said the old man, sitting down beside them, and looking at the figures with extreme delight. "Why you see," rejoined the little man, "we're putting up for tonight at the public-house yonder, and it wouldn't do to let 'em see the present company undergoing repairs." "No!" cried the old man, making signs to Nell to listen, "why not, eh? why not?" "Because it would destroy all the delusion, and take away all the interest, wouldn't it?" replied the little man. "Would you care a ha'penny for the Lord Chancellor if you know'd him in private and without his wig?" (18283)

The grandfather's gestures to Nell are Dickens' way of enlisting the reader's full attention at this juncture. At the end of the day, however, it

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turns out that a backstage view of artistic performance harms only those who believe in fantasy to begin with. The selfish though merry-faced operator is not affected, but his partner's enjoyment of life has been dampened by an insider's knowledge of theatrical life: "when [he] played the ghost in the reg'lar drama in the fairs, [he] believed in everything—except ghosts. But now [he's] a universal mistruster . . . " (183). A character's need for illusion correlates here with sensitivity toward the plight of others. The merry-faced man, who can dispense with fantasy, proposes to betray Nell and her grandfather in exchange for a reward, while the sour-faced man, who resents the mechanical side of artistic illusion, helps them escape. Given that discomfort with artifice is represented here as a sign of moral rectitude, one wonders why Dickens felt compelled to occasionally draw attention to his craft. From a bibliographical point of view, The Old Curiosity Shop actually grew into a novel from a short story due to Dickens' attempt to cover up its initial artificiality. The original short story was planned as a tale to be told by Master Humphrey to his friends in Master Humphrey's Clock, a weekly periodical that Dickens published between April 1840 and November 1841. After the first few installments of Master Humphrey's storytelling situation, the novel burst through the magazine's material, completely taking it over, and The Old Curiosity Shop became another serialized novel, albeit in weekly rather than monthly portions. More interestingly for the purpose of our subject, the seminal tale initially presented as a fictional story, told by a dramatized narrator to his friends, was subsequently connected directly to the narrator's "real" life by declaring him to be the long lost relative who helps Little Nell and her grandfather at the end. Here Dickens seemed to be laboring under the impression that it was necessary to give the storytelling situation a realist narrative context even if it had not been substantiated all along. In this attitude one perceives a certain anxiety about whether to declare or hide fictionality—on one hand, a discomfort with the presentation of fiction as if it were true, on the other, a reluctance to "offend" the public by admitting that the material is imaginary. To clinch The Old Curiosity Shop's status as a novel, its original storytelling scenario depicting Master Humphrey's friends gathered to hear fictional tales, is sucked into the fabric of the fiction and an allegedly realistic narrative context is provided to account for the relationship between teller and tale, teller and audience. Ultimately, metafiction collapses into realism here, and only when an occasional metafictional remark nonetheless surfaces can one distinguish the seams.

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QUARANTINED IMAGINATIONS: UNACCEPTABLE DEGREES OF FICTION IN THE PICKWICK PAPERS AND OF FACT IN HARD TIMES Unlike the central storytelling event that takes place in Little Dorrit, interpolated tales in The Pickwick Papers (1836-1837) do not fully dramatize a multifaceted interaction between a storyteller and an audience. Nonetheless, they are worth mentioning in some length because they consistently address the boundary between fact and fiction, a relationship that shifted in Dickens' hands, reflecting key aspects of his connection with contemporary readers. As noted earlier, while Dickens' novels "are full of travelers' tales, confessions, lies, reports, warnings, autobiographies, tall stories, anecdotes, narrative jokes, books, readings, and fairy tales" (Hardy, "Dickens' Storytellers" 71), few of these storytelling situations showcase an aesthetic and socially charged process of production, transmission, and response. Among Dickens' novels, The Pickwick Papers exhibits the greatest quantity of embedded storytelling structures, yet their surrounding dynamics are least elaborate. Although most of the tales in The Pickwick Papers are told to an audience that includes the normally talkative Pickwickians, strangers usually utter the few reactions that mark the conclusion of each tale. The tales themselves are often told by characters that function very much like what Todorov identified as "hommes recks" in The Arabian Nights: their only role is to tell a story, and they have no other context or presence in the fictional world. Nonetheless, it is significant that the sparse remarks contextualizing these interpolated tales typically include a storyteller's affirmation of truth coupled with an audience's desire for reassurance, more as a formulaic activation of neoclassic storytelling conventions than because of the tales' very obvious lack of reliability or verisimilitude. Dickens thought fit to introduce his first novel by attributing its authority to "papers" supposedly found in a certain Pickwick Club. There is some truth to this deference of authority in that Dickens was in fact commissioned by a publisher to narrate the adventures of a sporting club. Soon, however, Dickens' personal interests overshadowed the publishers' requests and especially the plans of the illustrator to whom he had been originally assigned (Kinsley vii-viii). As Dickens acquires greater authority, his reliance on the papers' purported authenticity declines, and in inverse proportion, his use of interpolated tales increases, becoming as well more gothic and improbable. According to Frank Gibson, this pattern is reversed when Dickens' disregard for the prefatory papers is compared to his decreasing use of interpolated tales in subsequent novels (100). The Pickwick Papers' global attribution of truth to obviously fantastic constructions has a parallel in the storytelling situation surrounding each interpolated tale. In both

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the intercalated stories and this comic novel, somersaults in the air are executed to show that the narrated events have a factual source. At the same time, the stubborn unwillingness to examine the empirical sources of a story is mocked in a Fieldingesque and Quixotesque vein. In claiming that adventures at all levels of The Pickwick Papers derive from historical data, the general narrator and the characters involved in each storytelling event follow a convention as old as narrative itself. Whether or not the reader believes these assertions—the represented audiences of the embedded tales usually do—the point is that nineteenthcentury authors still feel compelled to evoke the wowfictionality of their work with formulas that are now adjusted to support a new type of allegedly unmediated portrayal of the world. Already in The Tattler of October 22, 1709, Steele mocked the French custom of disguising novels as memoirs, yet the presentation of events in a novel as if witnessed by its author prevailed long afterward (Hemmings 22). The repetition of empty assurances of truth also functions as a way to make fun of the convention itself. Several of Pickwick's intercalated stories mock storytellers who refuse, as does Fielding's Mr. Partridge in Tom Jones, to recognize that what looks like a ghost is just a dead white calf in a ditch. Like Mr. Partridge, the majority of Pickwick's storytellers claim to have heard their story from the person to whom the adventure befell. Their affirmation of its truth is therefore a manifestation of trust and friendship, as well as an unenlightened attitude that persists in regarding empirical observation as a perversity. Overall, however, the failure to examine empirical evidence in The Pickwick Papers is exposed as a greater perversity than the persistent attribution of material tangibility to what is obviously a fictional fabrication. This message, conveyed humorously in the novel's framing level, has weightier consequences in the embedded stories. On one occasion, Mr. Pickwick receives a manuscript presented to him as probably fictional, yet possibly "the genuine production of a maniac" (123, my emphasis). Entitled "A Madman's Manuscript," this is a horror story about a man so convinced that he suffers from a congenital streak of madness that he actually goes mad. The obsessed narrator is conscious of his logical fallacy: "I mix realities with my dreams, and having so much to do, and being always hurried here, have no time to separate the two from some strange confusion in which they get involved . . . " (132). At the end of the manuscript a doctor corroborates that this real psychosis stems from the narrator's delusions about a congenital streak of madness in his family. A fantasy about lunacy thus becomes real lunacy. This intercalated story, which at first seems to have no context other than Mr. Pickwick's reading it one night when he cannot sleep, is immediately followed by an incident that targets the Pickwickeans' lack of genuine introspection. Mr. Pickwick is universally acclaimed and "elected an honorary member of seventeen native and foreign societies" when he dis-

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covers what he believes to be an ancient inscription on a stone. The stone becomes such an icon of Pickwickean prowess that when a scientifically minded member of the Pickwick Club actually interviews the original owner, and discovers that the mysterious inscription merely spells fragments of the owner's name, he is accused of harboring "a mean desire to tarnish the lustre of the immortal name of Pickwick" and is summarily dismissed from the honorable club (135-36). This incident and the interpolated tale that precedes it illustrate Garret Stewart's insightful interpretation of the relationship between Pickwick's interpolated tales and the Pickwickians' adventures. According to Stewart, the tales exhibit the diseased imagination that must be "quarantined" or "framed off" in order to protect Mr. Pickwick's placid mentality (32). Coming as it does on the heels of the madman's tale, where the madman's real disease is a lack of effective self-examination, the antiquarian fraud reveals the extent to which the Pickwickeans are eager to shrug off any complication that may disturb their sport. Many scholars have observed that as Dickens comes into himself during the composition of this first novel, Mr. Pickwick becomes less credulous and Mr. Jingles' lies and crassness give way to Sam's saucy skepticism. This change is also reflected in Dickens' direct comments to his readers. In an early "Publishers' Advertisement" he assures his audience that: The Pickwick Travels, the Pickwick Diary, the Pickwick Correspondence— in short the whole of the Pickwick papers, were carefully preserved, and duly registered by the secretary, from time to time, in the voluminous Transactions of the Pickwick Club. These transactions have been purchased from the patriotic secretary, at an immense expense, and placed in the hands of 'Boz' [Dickens' pseudonym]. (Appendix, Pickwick 720) Already by the end of the first chapter, however, Boz' readers are begged to forgo the actual "letters and other MS. authorities, so unquestionably genuine" and accept instead the "narration in a connected form" (6). In November 1837, as he completed what turned out to be a phenomenal bestseller, Dickens allowed himself to complain intimately to his now wellproven and adoring readership: "It is the fate of most men who mingle with the world . . . to make many real friends, and lose them in the course of nature. It is the fate of all authors or chroniclers to create imaginary friends, and lose them in the course of art" (717). Here Dickens openly avows the imaginary nature of his characters, yet his relationship to them is posited in terms of flesh and blood friends. Thus, the tension between fact and fiction remains present up to the very last installment of this novel. At the end of its cycle, The Pickwick Papers legitimatizes an author's right to construct a fictional world, while its interpolated tales and framing adventures mock a blind reliance on fiction. Fiction is thus "quarantined"

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into a socially acceptable degree of make-believe and into a finite time and space beyond which it becomes grotesque. Throughout his career Dickens continued to probe the fine balance between a desire to portray honest and brave facts and a propensity for exuberant fiction. Janice Carlisle correlates the small deceptions practiced by Dickens' heroes and heroines with the author's own struggle to legitimatize fiction as a lofty artistic convention and a necessary psychological tool. Little Dorrit, one of Dickens' kindest and sweetest characters, admits that she would never have been of any use had she refused to pretend a little in order to assist those around her (Little Dorrit 211). The most categorical endorsement of a universal need for fiction appears in Hard Times (1854), where storytelling deprivation, equated with a lack of fantasy life, cripples those who venerate Facts! Facts! Facts! In this novel, Sissy Jupe's free imagination contrasts with minds and hearts deformed by a lack of human sympathy, attributed to a lack of imagination. Sissy, who comes from a circus that exposed her to suffering as well as playfulness, is adopted by the Gradgrind family, where play and fantasy are despised. Although Mr. Gradgrind initially fears Sissy's influence on his children, she turns out to be the family's only measure of salvation. Ultimately, however, even Sissy's sympathetic imagination is just a measure of salvation, for Louisa and Tom's early emotional starvation has crippled them for life. When young Louisa Gradgrind asks Sissy a forbidden question about what it was like to be the daughter of a clown, Sissy does not recall the excitement of a circus act, but rather the stories she used to read to her father between performances. Rejected by Gradgrind's positivism, these tales from books such as The Arabian Nights distracted Sissy's father from his troubles and helped him temporarily stave off depression and failure. Like Scherezade, Mr. Jupe depends on an ability to keep his audience entertained, and Sissy depends on an ability to distract her father. Yet although in The Arabian Nights' magical world Scherezade succeeds in her impossible endeavor, in Dickens' semirealist story, Sissy's efforts fail and Mr. Jupe abandons the circus and his daughter. 3 His child is then transferred to the care of the Gradgrinds, where she is brought up in an exaggerated scientific environment. Because of her earlier experiences, though, this strict utilitarian environment harms Sissy less than it does the Gradgrind children, who have been exclusively raised in it. Louisa Gradgrind stares at the chimney fire for hours as solace from the "ologies" that mark her life of rigorous study: "You seem to find more to look at in the fire than I could ever find," said [her brother]. He went and leaned on the back of her chair, to contemplate the fire which so engrossed her, from her point of view, and see what he could make of it. "Except that it is a fire," said Tom, "it looks to me as stupid and blank as everything else looks. What do you see in it? Not a circus?"

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"I don't see anything in it, Tom, particularly. But since I have been looking at it, I have been wondering about you and me, grown up. . . . I have such unmanageable thoughts . . . that they will wonder." (42) Louisa's thoughts likewise wander when her father suggests that she accept a marriage proposal from a man she abhors. Since it had been drilled into her that feelings and subjective likes and dislikes are not valid claims, instead of protecting herself, she stares out the window and finally mumbles something about the factory chimneys that blacken the sky. Barbara Hardy summarizes this scene as follows: "Louisa wants to tell her father about her reluctance to marry Bounderby but because he has repressed the storytelling and story-listening of childhood she can only make enigmatic statements, lyric rather than narrative, about the fires of Coketown" ("Dickens' Storytellers" 74). Louisa tries to describe the dangers of a capped passion when she points at the sooty chimneys and explains that "There seems to be nothing there but languid and monotonous smoke. Yet when the night comes, Fire bursts o u t . . . " (77). Having cultivated a lack of imagination, however, Mr. Gradgrind cannot interpret his daughter's metaphors. He is not devoid of sympathy or pity for others—Gradgrind is basically a decent man—but his belief in positivism and utilitarianism precludes true empathy and communication. Only when his children collapse does he begin to understand that Sissy Jupe, the clown's daughter, was wiser all along. In The Old Curiosity Shop, a fire serves again as the only source of pleasure available to an industrial worker whose experience of the world is reduced to one corner of a grimy factory. Its furnace has been a friend, home, and even mother: "the fire nursed me," he explains. Although this poor worker rarely speaks with human beings, by pretending to communicate with the fire, he develops a sense of human empathy which allows him to save little Nell and her grandfather. He shares its warmth with them, and when Nell wakes up frightened in the middle of the night, he shares also the soothing attitude he attributes to his fire. "It's like a book to me. . . . The only book I ever learned to read; and many an old story it tells me. . . . It has pictures too. You don't know how many strange faces and different scenes I trace in the red-hot coals. It's my memory, that fire, and shows me all my life." The reader knows that the man receives from the fire only what he puts into it, but the poor old man is content in his illusion of reciprocal communication. Communication, even at the most pitiful levels, is described as an innate faculty nurtured by romance and untainted by artifice, even if the artifice is inevitable. Louisa Gradgrind, whose imagination has been stifled, can merely stare at her fire, while the poor man "communicates" with his, mirroring the warmth each is capable of evoking thanks to their respective degree of fantasy. We may recall as well how the sour-faced Punch and Judy operator who prefers illusion assists Little Nell and her grandfather,

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but the merry-faced operator who traffics in fantasy without caring for it, betrays them. Dickens' most sophisticated representation of a deep relationship between a character's imagination, social situation, and moral struggles appears in an extended and fully interactive storytelling scene in Little Dorrit (1855-1857), where the generic and social factors informing Dickens' art are dramatized through the creativity of a storyteller as she communicates with a particular audience during an important turn in the novel's plot. LITTLE DORRITS FAIRYTALE: A WINDOW INTO THE NOVEL There is hardly a better example of what Harry Levin calls "the imposition of reality upon romance, the transposition of reality into romance" (55) than the story that Amy Dorrit tells Maggy in Little Dorrit. This story is not really about a Princess, and yet it seems natural to describe it as such. It has the veneer of a fairytale about a Princess who visits a poor woman's cottage, but in reality it is about Amy Dorrit herself, a little working woman who patiently guards a secret, as does the protagonist of the embedded story. The tale is fictional from the perspective of the novel's fictional world. On a deeper level, the story parallels Amy's hopeless love for Arthur Clennam, which, as a young woman who "knows her place," she cannot declare. Amy's best Victorian manners likewise cannot alter her status as the daughter of a debtor imprisoned in the Marshalsea, a situation that changes, however, when Mr. Dorrit inherits a fortune and is released from prison. Yet even beyond the prison, the Dorrits never shake off its impact, and this awareness shapes Amy's inner life as much as her role in society. The love cry that Amy cannot utter publicly, she nonetheless shares in encoded language with a mentally retarded friend, who understands as a precocious child would what is at stake in a sad tale that Amy tells her. Dickens' choice of a sympathetic yet handicapped audience for this tale facilitates a tacit interpretation of its premises without conferring authority on the audience's perspective. Structurally, the tale marks an important moment of transition in the novel. Prior to its telling, Amy's life has been impacted by the appearance of Clennam, whom she hardly dares to love, let alone hope that he will return that love. She nonetheless succumbs to these impulses, and soon finds herself unable to refrain from dwelling on them. The tale marks the point at which Amy's hopes are dashed to the ground, in part due to real circumstances and in part through her self-denial. Clennam is not entirely indifferent to Amy. From the moment he meets her, he professes a humane and paternal interest in her and it is he who tenderly dubs her "Little Dorrit." By doing so, however, he emphasizes Amy's inseparable connection to her socially compromising father, and in a nonromantic way, his

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genuine affection for Amy extends to a patronage of the entire Dorrit family. Even as Amy sits crying in her room immediately before the telling of the Princess story, Arthur Clennam is practically knocking at her door. Yet on this occasion, she refuses to see him, for she has just concluded that they will never be intimately connected, and she therefore needs to rearrange her feelings toward him. Although telling the metaphorical story helps Amy recompose her attitude toward Clennam, the new controlled version of her love remains strong. Like the little spinning woman in her story, during the rest of the novel Amy struggles with the secret of an apparently hopeless love. The period of her disillusionment—the beginning of which is marked by the Princess' tale in Book I, Chapter 24—lasts practically until the end of Book II, when she and Arthur are finally united. Still, their fairytale-like union at the end is only a pale version of romance, for by the time that Amy marries the man of her dreams, he has become an old and broken man, imprisoned for debt at the Marshalsea, like her father had been. The embedded story is set on a late afternoon when Amy sits in her prison garret, grieving. She is not a prisoner herself but the daughter of the Marshalsea's senior inmate, whose family is entitled to rent rooms in the prison. Her protege, Maggy—the mentally retarded woman who calls Amy "Little Mother" and whose mental handicap manifests itself primarily in a lack of inhibition regarding social mores—knocks on Amy's door to announce that Arthur Clennam has come to visit and is waiting in Mr. Dorrit's room. Among these characters, only Mr. Dorrit is legally confined to the Marshalsea, yet the rest suffer from psychological forms of imprisonment that although not as obvious as the prison's gray walls and iron doors, nonetheless prevent them from fully enjoying their lives. To gain a little privacy and solitude, Amy promises to tell the childish Maggy a story in exchange for being left alone a while longer while Maggy informs Clennam that Amy cannot see him that day. Once Maggy has performed her part of the bargain, she returns to Amy's garret, and promptly requests a story about a princess. Due to this initial appellation, subsequent references to the tale are euphemistically referred to in the novel as "the story of the Princess."4 The storytelling scenario sketched by "Phiz," Dickens' illustrator, shows a young woman leaning on the sill of an open window, her beautiful face and figure lit by the last rays of the afternoon sun. This radiant portrayal contradicts the text's descriptions of Little Dorrit thinness, frailty, and poverty, for unlike many of Dickens's other heroines, this one is not particularly beautiful. Moreover, her lodgings, which "Phiz" draws as a cozy chamber, are described in the text as no more than "a Marshalsea garret without compromise . . . ugly in itself, and [with] little but cleanliness and air to set it off. . ." (338). Yet although "Phiz's" illustration romanticizes

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the heroine's physique and surroundings, it successfully manages to capture Amy's sense of ease in the single place where she can be private and comfortable. Maggy, on the other hand, is drawn just as Dickens describes her: ugly and grotesque with her silly face and messy bonnet, sitting on the box "which was her seat on story-telling occasions" (339), her knees hugged tightly in excited anticipation of the story.5 The embedded tale, abstracted from its context in the novel—that is, quoted as a flowing "text" from which I have momentarily displaced the narrator's comments and Maggy's interruptions—runs as follows: There was once upon a time a fine King, and he had everything he could wish for, and a great deal more. He had gold and silver, diamonds and rubies, riches of every kind. He had palaces, and he had [. . . ] a daughter, who was the wisest and most beautiful Princess that ever was seen. When she was a child she understood all her lessons before her masters taught them to her; and when she was grown up, she was the wonder of the world. Now, near the Palace where this Princess lived, there was a cottage in which there was a poor little tiny woman, who lived alone by herself [. . . . ] The Princess passed the cottage nearly every day, and whenever she went by in her beautiful carriage, she saw the poor tiny woman spinning at her wheel, and she looked at the tiny woman, and the tiny woman looked at her. So, one day she stopped the coachman a little way from the cottage, and got out and walked on and peeped in at the door, and there, as usual, was the tiny woman spinning at her wheel, and she looked at the Princess, and the Princess looked at her [....] The Princess was such a wonderful Princess that she had the power of knowing secrets, and she said to the tiny woman, Why do you keep it there? This showed her directly that the Princess knew why she lived all alone by herself spinning at the wheel, and she kneeled down at the Princess's feet, and asked her never to betray her. So the Princess said, I never will betray you. Let me see it. So the tiny woman closed the shutter of the cottage window and fastened the door, and trembling from head to foot for fear that any one should suspect her, opened a very secret place and showed the Princess a shadow [....] It was the shadow of Some one who had gone by long before: of Some one who had gone on far away quite out of reach, never, never to come back. It was bright to look at; and when the tiny woman showed it to the Princess, she was proud of it with all her heart, as a great, great treasure. When the Princess had considered it a little while, she said to the tiny woman, And you keep watch over this every day? And she cast down her eyes, and whispered, Yes. The Princess said, Remind me why. To which the other replied, that no one so good and kind had ever passed that way, and that was why in the beginning. She said, too, that nobody missed it, that nobody was the worse for it,

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that Some one had gone on to those who were expecting him [. . . ] and that this remembrance was stolen or kept back from nobody. The Princess made answer, Ah! But when the cottager died it would be discovered there. The tiny woman told her No; when that time came, it would sink quietly into her own grave, and would never be found [. . . . ] The Princess was very much astonished to hear this, as you may suppose [....] So she resolved to watch the tiny woman, and see what came of it. Every day she drove in her beautiful carriage by the cottage-door, and there she saw the tiny woman always alone by herself spinning at her wheel, and she looked at the tiny woman, and the tiny woman looked at her. At last one day the wheel was still, and the tiny woman was not to be seen. When the Princess made inquiries why the wheel had stopped, and where the tiny woman was, she was informed that the wheel had stopped because there was nobody to turn it, the tiny woman being dead [....] The Princess, after crying a very little for the loss of the tiny woman, dried her eyes and got out of her carriage at the place where she had stopped it before, and went to the cottage and peeped in at the door. There was nobody to look at her now, and nobody for her to look at, so she went in at once to search for the treasured shadow. But there was no sign of it to be found anywhere; and then she knew that the tiny woman had told her the truth, and that it had sunk quietly into her own grave, and that she and it were at rest together. (1, 24, 339-42) The tale ends with death, one of the two typical endings in narrative. Or perhaps one should say that it ends with love beyond death, thus including the second typical ending. It begins with the traditional folk tale opening of 'once upon a time' and has all the trappings of a fairytale: King, Princess, riches, and all. This is Amy's gesture toward her audience, her part of the bargain. The audience is indeed satisfied. Compared to Don Quixote's comments during Sancho's joke or Uncle Toby's during Trim's attempt to tell the story of the King of Bohemia, Maggy's interruptions are not aimed at imposing herself on the teller and force her to utter or refrain from uttering certain phrases. Maggy's interruptions are simple expressions of genuine delight and involvement in the story. But both types of interruptions illustrate the extent to which audiences seek conventional storytelling frames and familiar objects and situations with which to identify. Little Dorrit's story easily accommodates her audience's idiosyncratic predilections. Yet although she politely assents to Maggy's suggestions, she never actually incorporates them into the 'text' of her tale. To the list of the King's riches, Maggy adds hospitals "because they're so comfortable. Hospitals with lots of Chiking." (During a grave illness, Maggy had been taken to a hospital and fed chicken, and since then this became the high

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point of her existence.) Amy nods in sympathy with her friend's idiosyncratic addition to the conventional list of fairytale riches, yet by not repeating the alien element, she officially leaves it out of her tale. Maggy's interruptions also serve to clarify the most obvious connections between the tale and Little Dorrit's life. As soon as the generic opening begins to evolve into an allegory of Amy's emotional predicament, Amy finds herself correcting Maggy's assumption about the spinning woman's age in a way that emphasizes the similarities between this storyteller and her imaginative projection. Maggy is right in supposing that the tiny little spinning woman might be old, for in the fairytale tradition lone cottagers are normally hags, but Amy stresses that this woman is young. Moreover, she later corroborates that the special "Some one," whose shadow this young woman hides, is a man. Since Maggy's responses are nonetheless limited and childlike, the tale, at the time of its initial telling, appears to be an instance of dramatic irony in which the storyteller and reader know something that the character audience does not. Yet later in the novel, Maggy correctly connects the Princess tale with Amy and Arthur's relationship, thus proving the extent to which she did understand what was really going on. The nuances and phases of Maggy's reactions correspond to the various functions fulfilled by the embedded tale and its subsequent references in the novel. In the first scene, Dickens uses Maggy's innocence as a pretext to establish a sense of dramatic irony that draws the reader into the storytelling atmosphere; later on, he manipulates Maggy's sharp observations, coupled with her innocent stupidity, to heighten the growing tension between Amy and Arthur. But first and foremost, the tale functions as a device to elicit sympathy toward Amy Dorrit. It affords a special glimpse into her innermost thoughts and feelings, which awaken the reader's own emotions, ensuring his or her interest in the protagonist's fate. It also functions as a fixed reference point for future developments in the novel's main love interest. Further in the novel, Clennam notices that Amy seems troubled and asks her whether she suffers from a secret love or sorrow. Under the circumstances, Arthur's obliviousness borders on cruelty, and protecting herself, Amy assures him that she harbors no secret. Maggy, however, who is strategically present during this meeting, suggests that "If you an't got no secret of your own to tell him, tell him that about the Princess." Before Amy can stop her, Maggy proceeds to retell the so-called Princess story in her own convoluted yet still politely encoded manner: It was the little woman as had the secret, and she was always a spinning at her wheel, and so she says to her, why do you keep it there? And so the t'other one says to her, no I don't; and so the t'other one says to her, yes you do; and then they both goes to the cupboard, and there it is. And she wouldn't go into the Hospital, and so she died.

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Scrambled as it is, Maggy's re-telling of Amy's story puts Amy into a tight spot from which she extricates herself as best she can by explaining that it was "only a fairy tale." She seems to be lying when she assures Arthur that "there was nothing in it which she wouldn't be ashamed to tell again to anybody else, even if she could remember i t . . ." (434). But of course the syntax of her disclaimer avows that she would be shamed.6 A few lines later, when Clennam asks Amy point blank whether she has no unhappiness or anxiety, she replies that she has almost none (435). The Princess tale invites the reader to decode its psychological connection with the teller's plight, about whom we know much since the framing novel focuses on her. Thus, when Amy explains that the Princess is the King's most important asset, we cannot help but recall Amy's relationship with her father. In her modesty, however, it is not about herself that Amy is thinking when she describes the Princess as "wisest," "most beautiful," and "the wonder of the world." The Princess in the embedded tale plays the role of focalizer rather than protagonist; it is through her eyes that the story's events are recorded. 7 It is true that she has "the power of knowing secrets," but this power amounts to a knowledge that the little woman has a secret. The Princess cannot guess the little woman's thoughts, nor can she see into the future. She must ask questions and corroborate the little woman's assertions about the future, and these are the medium through which the narrative unfolds before the listener. Like most third person narratives in realist fiction, the story itself is narrated from an omniscient point of view. The little woman, or rather the little woman's preoccupations, constitutes the real subject of the story. At first we get the impression that spinning engrosses her, yet soon we realize that Someone's shadow dominates her inner life and the spinning is a social cover up. The connection between the private fantasy, Amy's work ethic, and the tiny woman's spinning, depicted as a soothing and welcomed activity, is reversed in Amy's real life. For while imprisoned, William Dorrit pretends that he doesn't know that his daughters have to "demean" themselves with manual labor in order to survive. When the Dorrits inherit a fortune and leave the prison, however, the father's aristocratic pretensions are enforced and Amy is even forbidden to embroider for her own pleasure. It then becomes clear that in Amy's value system "To have no work to do was strange, but not half so strange as having glided into a corner where she had no one to think for, nothing to plan and contrive, no cares of others to load herself with" (516). The tiny woman in the story is content with her moral and physical burden and, even at the time of the telling of the story, she functions as a model of behavior that Little Dorrit sets before herself. Through her, Amy is trying to teach herself to feel content with the mere shadow of a desired man. Elaborating upon this idea, Janice Carlisle notes a parallelism between Clennam, who upon failing to obtain Pet Meagles' love, fancies himself

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wedded to the ghost of her dead twin, and Amy's double in the fairytale, who at the end of the embedded story "becomes a corpse united to a shadow." Carlisle reads Amy's self-effacing fairytale as an echo of Clennam's conception of himself as Nobody (202). But Nobody is of course also the counterpart of the spinning woman's special Someone. At the end of the novel, Amy reclaims Arthur's self-confidence by turning him back from a nobody into someone whose happiness and well being are important at least to one other human being, a young little "spinning woman" who loved him all along.8 Before she can reclaim someone else's identity, though, Amy must define her own emotional identity. The transposition of her feelings and anxieties into a fictional scenario constitutes a step in this direction. The tiny woman, who cherishes the shadow of Someone rather than Someone himself, represents the disintegration of Amy's hopes to ever love Arthur Clennam in real life. Even Amy's former hope must be kept secret, not only because otherwise it would be impossible for her to continue associating with Clennam, but mostly because she has been led to believe that Arthur belongs to the love of his youth, the now matronly and alcoholic Flora: Some one had gone on to those who were expecting him. By stating that Someone's remembrance was stolen or kept back from nobody, and proving at the end of her story that the secret indeed disappears with the death of its keeper, Little Dorrit reveals her anxiety about harboring even the shadow of a love for someone who does not belong to her. Sigmund Freud would have loved a patient like Little Dorrit. In "Creative Writers and Daydreaming" he suggests that a person that tells herself a fairytale such as Amy's is thereby enabled to enjoy daydreaming without shame or self-reproach. Yet although the tiny woman of Amy's story proves that she is indeed capable of taking her secret to the grave, thus reflecting the teller's need to release her guilt about secretly loving Clennam, the rest of the tale stands at odds with Freud's observations. At no point does Little Dorrit actually fantasize about loving the flesh and blood Clennam or linking herself socially to him. The tale allows only a very small portion of Amy's desires to surface. A further example of a Freudean interpretation that does not tally with a storyteller's psychology as revealed through Dickens's novel and its embedded tale is the frontispiece of Freud's Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis described in detail by Lionel Trilling in his introduction to the 1953 edition of Little Dorrit. The frontispiece depicts a man asleep in a dungeon, dreaming that gnomes are sawing off the thick bars of his window. This emblematizes how the psyche releases itself in dreams and fantasy. But in Amy's case, her very fantasy seems to be controlled and imprisoned: the tiny woman is confined to her cottage, guarding Someone's shadow; the shadow itself is tucked away carefully and hermetically. What H. M. Daleski observes about the entire novel is true of Little Dorrit's

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minuscule tale, which, like the novel, moves structurally and metaphorically from one prison to another (Dickens and the Art of Analogy 196-97). And as far as fantasies go, Little Dorrit's is an inverted fantasy. Rather than free her will, the fairytale merely helps her transcend it temporarily. The symbolism of Amy's story runs even deeper than the parallelisms between her situation and the tiny woman's. Terms that J. Hillis Miller identifies as keys to the novel figure prominently in its embedded story: The word 'shadow' is Dickens' key term linking physical imprisonment and imprisoning states of soul... the word 'secret' is used again and again to express the isolation of the characters from one another either in their in turned selfishness or in their self-effacing goodness. (Charles Dickens 229) Miller's third key term is "gentleman," and we recall how Maggy interrupts Little Dorrit to ask pointedly whether Someone is a man. Elaine Showalter has written on the link between the symbolism of the shadow and the themes of guilt and authority in this novel. She interprets Dickens' use of the shadow as a pervasive and integrative symbol that brings together features of character and theme: "The shadows function as dramatizations of the repressed self, yet allow Dickens a kind of narrative charity towards his characters" (32). By projecting the depth of Amy's suffering into an allegory about Princesses, little women, secrets, and shadows, Dickens is able to elicit a stronger sense of sympathy from his reader than if Amy Dorrit had merely been crying in her garret, asking to be left alone, or if the novel's narrator had described how Little Dorrit felt after she lost all hope of ever loving Arthur Clennam freely. Instead, Dickens channeled the novel's most prominent themes and symbols into a brief storytelling scene that dramatically illustrates the protagonist's feelings during a critical moment in the plot. Perched at her prison window, telling her thinly disguised autobiographical tale, Amy embodies a fourth key term not mentioned by Miller. She is "the small bird, reared in captivity" (144), yet she is a free prison bird. On salient occasions other characters are referred to as birds. For instance, after William Dorrit collapses emotionally toward the end of the novel, "his poor maimed spirit, only remembering the place where it had broken its wings, cancelled the dream through which it had since groped, and knew of nothing beyond the Marshalsea" (710). When Clennam himself ends up in the Marshalsea, John Chi very compares the attempt to feed him with "handing green meat into the cage of a dull imprisoned bird" (793). Amy's love for her father, and her father's pathetic optimism, had always controlled the damage caused by living within the confines of the Marshalsea. However, Arthur Clennam's presence, when Amy's love for him must be stifled, and even later when it is consummated, infects Amy with Arthur's frustration. Just as Some one's shadow is imprisoned in the little woman's cottage, Someone

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himself—or rather Nobody, for so Clennam feels—regards the whole of London as a grim and weighty prison. In the following famous passage, the novel's most prominent symbols (prison, shadows, secrets, and birds) are brought together as a counterpoint to the Princess tale: [Clennam] went along, upon a dreary night, the dim street by which he went, seemed all depositories of oppressive secrets. The shadow thickening and thickening as he approached its source, he thought of the secrets of the lonely church-vaults . . . and then of the secrets of the river. . . . Warding off the free air and the free country swept by winds and wings of birds (596, my italics). At the time of the telling of the Princess story, Amy's need to stifle her new love constrains her thoughts and feelings, imprisoning her spirit for the first time. This frustration increases when Mr. Dorrit is released from prison and Amy Dorrit, as a rich heiress, is taken to tour Europe. She then completely transforms into the tiny little woman of her story. Leaning melancholically on her fancy balcony in Venice, she becomes the target of the gazes of curious onlookers, who wonder about her as the Princess had wondered about the little spinning woman: As she liked no place of an evening half so well, she soon began to be watched for, and many eyes in passing gondolas were raised, and many people said, There was the little figure of the English girl who was always alone. (520) At this point, the main difference between Amy and the tiny lone woman she invented is that Amy is not allowed to spin. Her new secret is that she misses her former life in prison. For while her family celebrates their newfound wealth and freedom, Amy cherishes the memory of the Marshalsea's old gate, "and of herself sitting at it in the dead of the night, pillowing Maggy's head; and of other places and of other scenes associated with those different times" (ibid.). The other "scenes" and "places" actually refer to other people, namely, to Arthur Clennam, whom Amy could at least see on a regular basis before her father was freed. The rich Amy Dorrit feels poorer than she ever did when forced to live in the squalid confines of debtors' prison. In her fairytale, Amy lists the treasures conventionally attributed to Kings and Princesses: gold and silver, diamonds and rubies, riches of every kind. Yet even at the time of the telling of the story, both she and Maggy dream of more personal riches. "Hospitals with lots of Chicking," Maggy begs. Amy describes the secret shadow as an object that the little spinning woman displays before a Princess, feeling proud of it with all her heart, as a great, great treasure. The shadow lies at the center of the poor woman's existence, and it is all she expects to have in death, too. According to its inner logic, Amy's

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story ends successfully when the little woman proves that she has been able to eradicate all traces of her secret by taking it to her grave, with the emphasis on appropriation, for she literally takes it with her. When the little woman ceases to appear at the cottage door, the Princess confirms that indeed no trace of the shadow remains, and that the woman and her secret are finally at rest together. The death of the little woman supposedly represents the satisfactory accomplishment of the protagonist's life and the teller's tale, an ending reminiscent of ballads such as "The Ballad of Barbara Allen" in which two rose bushes intertwine above the graves of lovers thwarted on earth. A variation of this scenario occurs as the Princess' tale is recalled at the end of the novel, when Amy is reunited with her beloved after he loses health and assets. Maggy suggests that he should be taken to a hospital, "And then the little woman as was always a spinning at her wheel, she can go to the cupboard with the Princess, and say, what do you keep the Chicking there for? and they can take it out and give it to him, and then all be happy!' (830). At this point, Maggy has evidently made an even greater muddle between the objects in the original fairytale and her own panaceas, but she understands that a slight variation in the configuration of the original tale could lead to a happy ending in life rather than death. At the end of the novel, Amy is at last united with her beloved in life, but many of her former wishes have been shattered. Her father dies tragically, her brother and sister do not lead the best of lives, and Arthur Clennam, deep in debt after the collapse of his promising enterprise, occupies Mr. Dorrit's old room at the Marshalsea. Little Dorrit is therefore not a Cinderella tale. Like her counterpart in the embedded story, Amy indeed weds the mere shadow of her desires. Despite this limited achievement tweaked by bleakness and sorrow, F. R. Leavis regards Amy Dorrit's situation at the end of the novel as an "affirmation of life" that transcends coarse material considerations (Dickens the Novelist 224-25). It is hard for me to accept this view. The ending of Little Dorrit lies far from a simplistic 'happily ever after' ending. There is, as Janice Carlisle notes, no final reference to the radiant couple surrounded by lively offspring at the hearth of their pretty home in the suburbs. Instead, we are told ambivalently that they "Went down into a modest life of usefulness and happiness. Went down to give a mother's care . . . to Fanny's neglected children no less than their own. . . . Went down to give a tender nurse and friend to Tip . . . who lovingly closed his eyes upon the Marshalsea and all its blighted fruits. . . . They went quietly down into the roaring streets, inseparable and blessed . . ." (895, my italics). Perhaps these assurances may seem comforting after so many hardships, but more likely they leave the reader with a sense of bitter ambiguity.9 In The Form of Victorian Fiction, J. Hillis Miller complains that because artificial endings are imposed on Victorian novels, the reader feels there is more to say after

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closing them (47-48). Art conjures up a sense of life, but the illusion of life thwarts its means and subject. The vision of life that Dickens presents both in the novel and in the embedded story is very disturbing. It is as if he were showing that no matter what harsh lot has befallen an individual, happiness resides in not trying to raise oneself above one's station. Subjugation, patience, and an endless string of self-denying little kindnesses are commended, though not necessarily rewarded. Although Little Dorrit's fairytale helps her organize her feelings and behavior towards Arthur Clennam, it also "helps" her subject herself to more patience and self-denial than she had already been accustomed to bear. Some may say that at the end she is rewarded. But her life at the point when she marries the man she loves is no more of a romance than when her family inherited the riches that made them all unhappier. Thus, it is not true, certainly not in this novel, that "Dickens simply enchanted the Present. . . [and] was the creator of Human Fairyland" (Buchanan 578). It is not uncommon for romance to peep under realism, exposing the debt that realism owes to romance. But in Dickens, fantasy actually masks the hardships of the real world, as occurs in Amy Dorrit's story, where the parameters of the storyteller's sad predicament are transposed into her fabricated romance and vice versa. What is hidden in Amy's story is her reality; realism is here masked by romance. Indeed, as in Hard Times and The Old Curiosity Shop the importance of softening harsh realities with fantasy is portrayed both as a human need and a tool enabling individuals to empathize with each other. In this capacity, too, Dickens' romance functions as a metafictional device that guides our interpretation of the text's relationship to its represented world. While caricature and fantasy play a central role in the realism of Dickens' novels, a very serious agenda courses through them. His metafictional acrobatics may be judged as a challenge to an age that assumes "a universal feeling for . . . reality, science and this world" (Wellek 240), an age, however, that has yet to adjust its lofty ideals to genuine practice. In the 1947 reprinting of The Pickwick Papers Dickens listed social reforms that had been achieved in the decade since Queen Victoria ascended the throne and he began writing novels. In his first novel, Dickens had already attacked a legal system that could imprison Mr. Pickwick and Mr. Dorrit for debt— as Dickens' own father had been traumatically imprisoned—as if they were common criminals. By 1847 "laws relating to imprisonment for debt are altered; and the Fleet Prison [in which Mr. Pickwick was kept] is pulled down!" Like Fielding before him, in his fiction Dickens deplored the scarcity of magistrates with common sense and genuine love of justice. He depicts lazy, venal, and mindless officials in Bleak House's (1953) deadlocked Jarndyce & Jarndyce case; dramatizes the corruption of schools in Nicholas Nickleby (1939); orphanages in Oliver Twist (1838); the need for

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merciful Poor Laws and the impact of ethnic prejudice in Our Mutual Friend (1865); the horrors of poverty in all his novels through an array of unforgettable minor characters such as Miss Flite, Kit, Jo, Maggy, and Stephen Blackpool. Dickens felt a need and duty to tell the story of his actual world, and his sporadic uneasiness with the conventions of both realism and romance never went so far as to prevent him from believing that through his novels he could and should represent the social problems of his nation. Had he doubted the very possibility of portraying such problems in fiction, he would have found himself entering the painful and unstable world view of modernism, which we will confront in the following chapter through the prism of Conrad's storytelling dynamics in Lord Jim.

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5 The Rhetoric of Anxiety in Conrad's Lord Jim THE VULNERABLE NARRATOR

Functioning virtually in its entirety as a dramatized storytelling act such as we have been exploring along this tour of the novel's permutations, Joseph Conrad's Lord Jim (1900) can be enlisted equally effectively to illustrate a modernist collapse of collective beliefs or the consensual drive of Victorianism. Lord Jim pinpoints the tenets and weaknesses of a late Victorian and an early modernist world-view at a time that marks a historical seam between these periods. In Lord Jim, this dual categorization emanates from the subtle presence of an audience whose oppositional stance is imbricated within the narrator's rhetoric. In one direction, this novel drives toward a recognition of the impossibility of judging, recognizing, or attaining experiences that previously had been taken for granted, and in another direction it pulls toward a conservative retrenchment that I would like to cast in terms of disagreement between the storyteller and his audience. Each party adopts a pseudoethical position circumscribed by a threat of dire social consequences. Unlike storytelling events we have examined in previous chapters, the tale told by Conrad's narrator is not fictional from the point of view of the novel's represented world. While Sancho, Don Quixote, Trim, Henry Tilney, and Little Dorrit tell tales that contain a significant dimension of intentional make-believe from the perspective of their fictional world, Marlow is supposed to be narrating an unadorned historical event. Yet considering that he reiterates how impossible it is to judge experience accurately— one's own, let alone others'—his presentation of an event that occurred in

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the past to a third party elicits questions about the boundaries between fact and fiction, history and storytelling. By exposing how an "objective" judgment is imposed upon fluctuating events, and how even a scrupulous examination of motives is intrinsically subjective, Marlow's narrative challenges the premises of positivistic judgment and prods Victorian sensibilities to a point that strains their underlying system of values.1 Skeptical of his liberalism, the audience he simultaneously attacks and defends himself against treats him to a facade of condemnatory indifference that exacerbates the existential anxiety that Marlowe comes to admit as a consequence of his involvement with Jim. In framing the novel, Conrad confronts a smug consensual view of the world in his choice of a first-person narrative mode, which compromises a realist illusion of transparency and consensus. Though third-person omniscient narration is best suited to convey realism's apparent objectivity, firstperson narratives were sometimes employed in essentially realist novels of the nineteenth century, and certainly in the previous century's fiction with its more obvious roots in satirical, confessional, travel, and picaresque genres. Quintessential realist novels by Balzac or Flaubert favor the third person, yet in England, Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre (1847), Dickens' David Copperfield (1849-1850), Great Expectations (1860-1861), and Esther Summerson's sections in Bleak House (1852-1853) are all narrated through the voice and words of their main character. However, since Jane Eyre, Copperfield, and Pip—Esther Summerson's account is more complex—recount their earlier experiences from a mature vantage point, they appear as the highest authority on their own lives and their subjective perception contributes to a generalized standard of moral and material achievement. These fictional imitations of autobiography, confession, or journal writing are therefore based on the assumption that the person who lived through certain events, and is able to recount them from a mature perspective, is a source of information as reliable as the authoritative voice of an omniscient narrator. Wuthering Heights (1847) is the most notable instance of a firstperson nineteenth-century narrative that does not function as a corrective personal history. Here, past events are recounted largely at second hand by a servant who tells her employers' story to an outsider, who in turn narrates it to the reader at second or third hand, depending upon the degree of his source's involvement in the recounted events. Wuthering Heights' framed first-person storytelling situation, with alternating degrees of reliability and narratorial involvement, finds its closest resonance in Lord Jim. Like Wuthering Heights' narrators, Marlow's limited participation and covert self-interest in the events he recounts renders his interpretation suspect. Yet while the question of the reliability of Wuthering Heights' narrators surfaces when their discourse is examined with the intention of discrediting it, Marlow's inconsistencies can in no way be

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avoided, for they constitute one of Lord Jim's central themes. It is thus not the first person narration per se, but rather Marlow's constant mistrust of the power of words and judgment that prevents the reader from taking its narrator's position for granted. Conrad's contemporary, Henry James, fiercely repudiated first-person narration, even though he did use it occasionally in what turned out to be some of his most successful stories. James warns against a first-person narrative technique due to its tendency to draw attention to weak points in the narration and to expose a narrator's vulnerability (320). Conrad confronts this problem head on by having Marlow admit a priori his alleged limitations as a narrator. Yet in admitting an imperfect knowledge of his subject and a reluctance to judge a situation he didn't experience personally, Marlow invites his audience, as Conrad does his readers, to fill the gaps that the narrative leaves open. The conspicuous place occupied by Marlow's ambivalent rhetoric in Lord Jim corresponds to Conrad's caution regarding the narrative mode he chose for this novel. We must keep in mind that Conrad wrote during a period in which third person omniscience had consolidated its supremacy far more definitively than in the middle of the nineteenth century when the Brontes published Wuthering Heights. Moreover, Conrad reached his maturity as a writer at the turn of the century and toward the end of Victoria's long reign, a time that was particularly propitious for evaluating an established tradition of realist writing and the intellectual relevance of the aging regime. Conrad is therefore attuned to the subjective properties of a firstperson mode capable of countering a positivist narration that had become a kind of imperialist standard in itself. Precisely because Marlow describes Jim in full detail while repeating that he is "fated never to see him clearly" (148), we set great store on trying to picture this individual. Marlow invites his audience to stretch their imagination when he regrets that the events and situations he describes get "dwarfed in the telling" (138, 166). At the same time, though, he insists that his audience's imaginations are not strong enough to reenact the narrated events, and therefore enjoins them to suspend judgment indefinitely. Marlow's seemingly modest admission of weakness infuses his narration with pathos akin to the power of supernatural suggestions deployed in a quasi-Gothic tale such as James' "The Turn of the Screw." Yet Marlow's pathos derives from the social tension that emerges from an internalization of his audience's critical perspective, which he attacks out of one corner of his mouth, while out of the other corner he defends himself against his audience's biases. At the same time as Marlow admits a limited ability to evaluate another person's experience, he deflects his audience's judgment away from himself as a narrator and into greater involvement with a story he deliberately complicates. He proclaims his self-doubts and reservations time and again

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as he recounts the adventures of a young English seaman for whom, during the course of several years, he felt responsible in various parts of the Eastern world, as Norman Sherry puts it. Actually, Marlow feels responsible for Jim also in the Western world—more specifically in the Victorian milieu he calls home—for here the young man's reputation continues to concern him beyond Jim's original betrayal of England's moral status in the eastern colonies. The desire to redress Jim's image brings Marlow to retell the circumstances of Jim's story "many times, in distant parts of the world" (21 ).2 However, it is at home—in England among Victorian gentlemen— that Marlow feels the need to purge and clear himself of his involvement with a transgressor. THE ELOQUENT SILENCE OF A SUBTLE AUDIENCE Because it pays exclusive attention to the facts of Jim's case, Marlow ridicules the court of law that had sentenced Jim: "They wanted facts. Facts! They demanded facts from him, as if facts could explain anything!" (18). This condemnation of a narrow utilitarian reliance on dry facts echoes Dickens's diatribes, notably in Hard Times, against the institutionalized repression of empathy and imagination. Accusing his own Victorian audience of prosaic narrow-mindedness, Marlow deplores that the subtle contextualization of his tale and a relativization of its facts will fall on deaf ears. "Frankly," he berates his audience, "it is not my words that I mistrust, but your minds. I could be eloquent were I not afraid you fellows had starved your imagination to feel your bodies. I do not mean to be offensive; it is respectable to have no illusions—and safe—and profitable—and dull" (138). Like Dickens' defense of the imagination, Conrad's suggests that only empathy between human beings can induce healthy psychological and social growth, and that this empathy depends on encounters such as storytelling moments that are capable of mediating between diverse social levels and cultural circumstances. In Lord Jim, however, storytelling without the benefit of life experience appears to have a detrimental effect. After all, Jim's propensity to read romances and dream of bravery during his formative years does not prevent him from committing a lowly unheroic act nor does it safeguard those with whom he comes into contact. Whichever way Marlow chooses to manipulate it, the unalterable fact is that Jim, along with the rest of the European crew transporting 800 Arab pilgrims on the rickety Patna, forsook their charge in the middle of the night, abandoning unsuspecting passengers on a foundering vessel without enough lifeboats. The ship didn't sink, though, and its crew faced public humiliation when a French vessel towed the pilgrims into Aden a few days later. These circumstances are based on the true case of the Jeddah, abandoned on August 1880 by a crew that was under the impression that their

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ship was sinking with 953 pilgrims on board. Jim is modeled on the Jeddah's Chief Engineer, an Englishman named A. P. Williams, who did not willfully jump into a lifeboat as Jim did, but was allegedly pushed into it by his mates. 3 This historical news item becomes the kernel of Conrad's narrative, which begins by emphasizing the epistemological rather than moral implications of the crew's decision to desert their posts. Trusting their eyes and maritime expertise, the Patna's crewmen were certain that their ship was about to founder. Jim's private decision to jump into the captain's lifeboat is therefore based on a misperceived choice between joining the crew on the only activated lifeboat or dying with the passengers. Reality turns out to be much more nuanced and complicated than these polarized options. Jim's choice of safety over a romantic quest for heroic and glorious deeds reveals a moral weakness hidden in everyone, or so Marlow contends (Daleski, Joseph Conrad 85). It also exposes a Darwinian encroachment of the "fittest" under a facade of colonial responsibility. The kinship he feels toward Jim's pure English background, English maritime license, and gentlemanly English demeanor compels Marlow to reassess ingrained opinions about his own formation, possibilities, and morals, a reassessment that results in a devaluation of his trust in "the sovereign power enthroned in a fixed standard of conduct" (Lord Jim 31). This devaluation in the reigning system of values leads Marlow to appeal for a widening of boundaries that might incorporate irregularities such as Jim's impulsive action. What intrigues me more is that Marlow also appeals for sympathy toward his own compulsive association with the transgressor. From a biographical point of view, the emphatic assertion of Marlow's Englishness contrasts with Conrad's irregular situation as a Pole who sails English ships and writes English books. Some of Conrad's biographers have argued that Lord Jim expresses its author's need for community (Gurko), or more radically, his guilt at having abandoned Poland in the throes of a conflict for which Conrad's liberal parents gave their lives (Morf, Baines). Following Eugene Redmond's and Chinua Achebe's analyses of racist undertones in The Nigger of the Narcissus and Heart of Darkness, a branch of Conradian criticism has concentrated on Conrad's alleged failure to sufficiently personify colonized races in his call for a widening of human sympathies.4 Although I disagree with any narrow attribution of racism to Conrad, I would like to suggest a reading of Lord Jim that interprets Marlow's appeal as an urgent and desperate attempt to exonerate himself horn tainted association with an outcast. Marlow is wrapped up in his own anxiety, and Jim, let alone the colonized races, are a pretext for Marlow's tale rather than an end in themselves. Marlow's discomfort with his relationship to the transgressor is greatly compounded, and at times even superceded, by his need to ease the burden of a new cognitive instability developed as a consequence of his interest in Jim. Of course, the ability to

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entertain cognitive ambivalence draws Marlow to Jim in the first place, and so he is trapped in a situation that feeds back on itself. When justifying to a Victorian audience his relationship with Jim, Marlow sometimes tries to belittle his involvement with the transgressor and at other times aggrandizes his role as a minister of light and salvation. Ian Watt interprets the conflict between utterances related to the "group code" and Marlow's "genuine" sentiments as Conrad's device to avoid the "danger of sentimentality" (Conrad in the Nineteenth Century 314 and 317). I see it more as a consequence of Marlow's internalized conflict between the impulse to generalize what he has learnt from Jim's affair and his continuing need to be wholeheartedly accepted by his peers. Since the members of Marlow's audience—referred to as listeners, guests, and later a "privileged" reader—are not willing to revise their values, Marlow's discourse fuses two impulses that are constantly breaking apart, hence its intrinsic contradictions. Uninvited, Marlow launches into a long and complicated after-dinner story, alleging that the dinner guests are probably thinking, "Hang exertion. Let that Marlow talk." He therefore invites himself to "Talk! So be it" (22). There is no evidence that the dinner guests wish to hear him or that they are interested in the old Patna scandal. Their names, number, occupations, and individual characters are not noted in the novel.5 Lumped together in opposition to Marlow, their collective moral position emerges through Marlow's counter rhetoric, for during Marlow's account they barely interfere. According to Barry Stampfl, Lord Jim's repeated use of negations and belief qualifiers (as if constructions) points to Marlow's intrinsic (self-) deception. Edward Said regards this rhetoric of opposition as a preemption of "the wrong sort of interpretation" through "the currency of a rival version" (The World, The Text, and the Critic 95). Indeed, given that Marlow argues vehemently against a position that is not actually voiced by his audience, one must assume that his affirmations, negations, and repetitions reflect an internalization of his audience's objection to a liberal treatment of Jim. Unlike first-time readers of this novel, the members of Marlow's audience have previously heard about the Patna scandal. The text is not explicit about this, but Marlow implies that "everybody" is acquainted with the bare facts of this notorious affair. Marlow's first task is, therefore, to undermine the negative preconceptions that his audience may have already adopted. He initially tries to mitigate their categorical condemnation of Jim by emphasizing the 'hows' and 'whys' rather than the facts of Jim's action. If Marlow can defer Jim's condemnation indefinitely, his rhetoric will succeed; otherwise, his audience will fall back upon their habitual modes of judgment. Initially Marlow alludes vaguely to Jim's fatal action—the "naked fact, about as naked and ugly as a fact can well be"—but calls it "mysterious"

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(22). He pretends that the mystery has to do with hidden aspects of Jim's action rather than with Marlow's own manner of presenting the affair. From the beginning, Marlow's allusions to the Patna scandal are deliberately shrouded in suspense, stalling a direct presentation of the actual details. He adopts this cautious course for two reasons, which are connected to each other. First of all, as becomes apparent even by a surface reading of the novel, Marlow's inherent sympathy for Jim coupled with his knowledge of human beings and the sea, have led Marlow to view Jim's cowardly action as one that he or anyone else might commit under similar circumstances—an admission that no gentleman is happy to endorse. Second, by avoiding a categorical condemnation of the transgressor, Marlow protects his own reputation from the stigma of an intimate association with the transgressor. At the time that Marlow befriends him, Jim has been publicly branded as an outcast, a pariah with whom no gentleman should associate. Nonetheless, during and after the trial, Marlow actively befriends the young man trapped in "the serried circle of facts that had surged up all about him to cut him off from the rest of his kind" (19). While the inquiry is still in progress, he invites the "fellow [who] ain't fit to be touched" (41) to dine with him publicly at the Malabar House. There, during a long after-dinner conversation that parallels Marlow's after-dinner tale years later, Jim confesses to Marlow in a personal way that had been barred from the scope of the public inquiry. Marlow complains that confessions "find" him, that there is some force that "by devious, unexpected, truly diabolical ways causes me to run against men with soft spots, with hard spots, with hidden plague spots, by Jove! and loosens their tongues at the sight of me for their infernal confidences . . . " (21). The truth is that Marlow freely chooses to invite the outcast to his dinner table after the public hearing. They are brought together by Marlow's offhand comment about a yellow dog, which Jim overhears and interprets as a mean insult. Clearing up this embarrassing misunderstanding does not oblige Marlow to associate with Jim, yet he seizes the opportunity to run after the sensitive young man now further humiliated by his self-incriminating imagination. "I kept up," Marlow admits, "anxious not to lose him [and] said hurriedly that I couldn't think of leaving him under a false impression . . . " (46-47). Coupled with genuine sympathy for a young landsman with gentlemanly airs in spite of the base action that now taints him, Marlow's curiosity about Jim grows from the first words they exchange. He offers Jim a "last supper" on the eve of his conviction, creating an environment that gives the young man a perfect opportunity to deliver his private confession. When relating this situation years later, Marlow nonetheless presents himself as a passive receptor of confessions—just as in front of Marlow, Jim presents his jump from the Patna as a passive act.

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The following day, after the court has formally pronounced Jim guilty, Marlow shelters him from demeaning public exposure and from despair. At this point, though, it is clear to both of them that to dine in public again is out of the question: "I can't dine with you again to-night," Jim flings at Marlow. "I haven't the slightest intention of asking you," Marlow shouts back (110). To appear together in public at this time would flaunt a disregard for too many tacit rules. Marlow would be vaunting his alliance with a man who had just been officially cut off from his caste; chatting and eating in public, Jim would give the impression that he has no shame and cares nothing for what has happened or what he has done. Marlow's patronage of Jim is nonetheless public knowledge the morning after their first meeting. Even Captain Chester, who represents the dregs of maritime society, learns about it and does not hesitate to approach Marlow to discuss a murky line of employment for Jim. Under normal circumstances, Marlow with his impeccable credentials would have not been approached by the likes of Chester, a coarse seaman without scruples who dreams of making a fortune by collecting bird manure from an island of dangerous access. In Aden nobody will have anything to do with Chester's projects so that, although Chester's manure, called guano, might be profitably sold as fertilizer, he is not able to "get a skipper or a shipowner to go near the place." He therefore decides to collect the stuff himself, having bought a dilapidated steamer with the money of his new partner, "the notorious Robinson . . . who smuggled more opium and bagged more seals in his time that any loose Johnny now alive." Robinson is also suspected of having eaten his companions after a shipwreck. But, as Chester admits to the horrified Marlow, he has "got a little money, so I had to let him into my thing" (98-99). Knowing that no one in Aden would employ Jim at this point, Chester proposes to make him overseer of the guano island, where he plans to ferry forty Asians to do the dirtiest work: "Somebody must work the stuff!" Somebody must oversee the workers, too. With "six-shooters in his belt. . . . Surely [Jim] wouldn't be afraid of anything forty coolies could do— with two six-shooters and he the only armed man, too!" While Chester grandly offers to make Jim "supreme boss over the coolies," Marlow imagines the sensitive young man "perched on a shadowless rock, up to his knees in guano, with the screams of seabirds in his ears, the incandescent ball of the sun above his head; the empty sky and the empty ocean all a-quiver, simmering together in the heat as far as the eye could reach." (Years later, Jim becomes a Lord Jim in a different Asian island whose natives he unwittingly betrays out of sympathy for yet another representative of the dregs of maritime society and the excesses of imperialistic ventures.) On behalf of Jim, however, Marlow rejects Chester's offer. The disappointed seaman then becomes more adamant: "He is no earthly good for anything," he says of Jim, "He would just have done for me" (102).

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Disgusted by Chester's offer, Marlow instead provides Jim with a letter of recommendation to a friend who owns a rice mill in a distant eastern port, vouching for Jim's integrity as if he had not been publicly branded the untrustworthiest man of the moment. However, when he relates to a Victorian audience how and why he aided Jim, Marlow takes pains to emphasize the tough stance he maintained toward the erring young man at the same time as he helped him. He claims that he repeatedly fired "poisoned" criticisms at Jim while the latter described the circumstances leading to his fateful abandonment of the Patna. These remarks nonetheless managed to stray "wide off the mark" (66), suggesting that either Jim is not as sensitive as Marlow romanticizes him or Marlow's criticisms were quite mild. Throughout his sustained kindness, Marlow claims to have never acknowledged directly to Jim that he, too, might have acted as the young man did. Yet to his Victorian audience, Marlow repeatedly suggests that any of them might have put life before duty. Ian Watt observes that admitting this is tantamount to compromising "the absolute distinction between right and wrong on which the code of solidarity depends" (Conrad 314). To induce his audience to accept such a stance Marlow outlines a revised code of solidarity that includes the possibility of error and transgression. By means of the relayed opinions of Captain Brierly, the French lieutenant, and Stein, Marlow builds a case to prove that anyone would have jumped to save his life under Jim's circumstances. Still, neither Marlow nor the characters whose opinions he quotes endorse this stance categorically. Marlow's seafaring interlocutors hint at past mistakes, fears, and failures, yet even Stein, who comes closest to exonerating Jim, remains skeptical of him. The French lieutenant, commenting on Jim's misfortune, stops short of acknowledging his own shameful acts: "Take me, for instance—I have made my proofs. Eh bien! I, who am speaking to you, once. . . . " Since he has second thoughts about confiding in Marlow, and suddenly refuses to continue, they part in a formal manner that jars their initial intimacy (89). In private, Captain Brierly, another seaman, intimates to Marlow that Jim's action is understandable, yet in public he participates in Jim's condemnation, and then commits suicide. Paul Goetsch notes that the reasons for Captain Brierly's suicide are never officially disclosed, and it is Marlow who suggests that Brierly's despair is linked to a realization that Jim's fate might be in store for even the most tried and true gentleman (188). Everyone is reluctant to openly challenge the "sovereign power enthroned in a fixed standard of conduct," afraid to declare unambiguously that he sympathizes with an action judged as irresponsible, despicable, and scandalous, afraid to be stigmatized for wavering when faced with the necessity of making a judgment. Brierly must hide his sympathy and cease to be truthful, or admit his fear and cease to be a confident manager of empire.

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At a high point of his confession, Jim dramatizes for Marlow the impulse to save one's life: "What would you have done? You are so sure of yourself—aren't you? What would you do if you felt now—this minute—the house here move, just a little under your chair? Leap! By heavens! you would take one spring from where you sit and land in that clump of bushes yonder." Although Marlow's first reaction is to stealthily and foolishly estimate the distance between his chair and the bushes, he tells his Victorian audience that he did not capitulate to Jim's suggestion that the crew's abandonment of their ship was based upon a similar human instinct. "I was being bullied now," he explains to his guests years later, "and it behooved me to make no sign lest by a gesture or a word I should be drawn into a fatal admission about myself . . ." (65). Marlow therefore opts to confront Jim with a facade of condemnatory silence. As we noted, though, while Marlow maintains a moral distance from Jim, he exposes his disregard for the social register by dining publicly with him. Marlow is perfectly aware of the stigma enveloping his patronage of the outcast. He relates how during the Malabar House dinner, when Jim shook with loud laughter, . . . the voices [of the other diners] dropped, the pale blotches of faces turned our way with one accord, and the silence became so profound that the clear tinkle of a teaspoon falling on the tessellated floor of the verandah rang out like a tiny and silvery scream. "You musn't laugh like this, with all these people about," [Marlow] remonstrated, "It isn't nice for them." (61-62) The condemnatory staring is hardly "nice" for Marlow either. Jim does not understand this hint, or he pretends not to: "Oh! They'll think that I'm drunk," he replies. Marlow's social and moral position is compromised through his association with Jim. He is not insensitive to the public stigma even though he is proud of his courage to flout it for the sake of a deeper examination of reasonable doubt. Marlow attributes his initial patronage of Jim to curiosity about someone who appears to be destined for respectability, even greatness; someone who reminds him of himself. Once he has conversed directly with Jim, he feels obliged to succor him. Only when he sends the young man off to remote Patusan—a final exile that Marlow perceives as a living death from the point of view of the Western world—is Marlow's heart reportedly "freed from that dull resentment which had existed side by side with interest in his fate." Only then does Marlow concede that "the sort of formality that had been always present in our intercourse vanished from our speech; I believe I called him 'dear boy'. . . . There was a moment of real and profound intimacy, unexpected and short-lived like a glimpse of some everlasting, of some saving

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truth" (147). This truth, the ability to confront Jim without shame precisely because he is finally washing his hands of him, is what Marlow tries to impress upon his audience retroactively. The intimacy and comradeship that he admits to sharing with Jim at this later point in their relationship is, however, what he would like his smug Victorian audience at home to accept as a general revised standard of judgment. Many critics have been bothered by the botched psychological and structural superposition of the Patna/Patusan episodes. Fredric Jameson, whose analysis of Lord Jim in The Political Unconscious has influenced subsequent poststructuralist readings of Conrad's work, emphasizes the generic and ideological dissonance separating the oral narrative of the Patna fiasco from the epistolary narrative of the Patusan "romance," which ends up equally as a fiasco. For Jameson, Lord Jim's initial foray into modernism— which he casts in terms of a liberal, equalizing, and pluralistic gesture— draws back into an imperialistic comfort that Jameson defines as the "romance" of the Patusan section. Tracy Seeley effaces this dichotomy by reading the Patusan section as an unrealizable romance that marks Lord Jim in its entirety as a modernist admission of the futility of a quest that is nonetheless necessary. Responding to Jameson and Seeley, Jeffrey Williams integrates the oral and epistolary sections of this novel by focusing on the "recurrence of Marlow, the figuring of Marlow's obsessive drive to recover the story of Jim, his compulsion to tell that story repeatedly, and the complicity of the other European characters in that drive" (151). While it is true that focusing on Lord Jim's rhetorical frame minimizes dissonance between its sections, I disagree with the attribution of complicity to Marlow's audience. Marlow's rhetoric is deliberately vague and complex because he doesn't want to be repulsed by his peers. He strives to dislodge the sacred standard of conduct from hypocritical and idealized terms, but he wishes to do so with impunity and in good company. The common opinion, publicly unchallenged and voiced loud and clear by Captain O'Brien years after the Patna scandal, is that Jim's action is "a disgrace to human natur'—that's what it is. I would despise being seen in the same room with one of those men. Yes, sir!" (117). Without knowing that his star employee Jim happens to be one of "those men" to which O'Brien refers, Mr. Egstrom, a shipchandler whose supplies O'Brien regularly purchases, seconds his client's opinion. He tries to pacify his client with a drink, which O'Brien refuses, assuming that Egstrom knows about Jim's past and yet protects him. " 'Dam' your drink, Egstrom . . . when I want a drink I will shout for it. I am going to quit. It stinks here now' " (117). When Marlow reveals Jim's identity to Egstrom, the ship-chandler retracts his pacifying support of O'Brien's statement and agrees now with Marlow that the Patna scandal is history and Jim should be forgiven, es-

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pecially since he had since proved himself as a first-rate runner for Egstrom's firm. Perhaps if Egstrom had spoken immediately in defense of the transgressor, Jim might not have taken to the road, as he did immediately after O'Brien's oblique insult. Jan Verleun reads the irony in this episode as a criticism of Jim, who takes himself too seriously. Jim's self-centeredness prevents him from seeing that "what mainly counts in the intercourse of human beings is not the sense of their past transgressions, but the sense of their present intellectual, moral and emotional use, and—last not least— the sense of their 'practical,' 'collaborative' use" (Verleun 69). As the Patna stigma hounds him in various eastern ports, Jim abandons job after job as impulsively as he once abandoned the Patna itself. Finally, despite his initial success in Patusan, when he realizes that by misjudging Mr. Brown he betrayed the Patusans, Jim allows himself to be killed like a sacrificial lamb. Only during the trial at Aden did he force himself to "stay put" in spite of the mixed fascination and horror that his countrymen evince at the idea of such public exposure. The irony here is that while in Jim's mind shrinking from the pillory would add an ungentlemanly action to the desertion of his post at sea, those who condemn him for compromising the standards of colonial conduct feel that he should avoid further exposure and disappear from the public eye. In a somewhat parallel manner, throughout his habitual narrative Marlow puts himself on trial for befriending the outcast and accepting the deep lessons that emerge from Jim's experience. Along with Marlow's public "confession," though, comes the same type of bullying that Jim practiced on Marlow in the Malabar's dining room. While he explains to his audience what motivated him to befriend the transgressor, Marlow exposes the illusions clouding the understanding of those who are eager to condemn Jim and Marlow for associating with him. In a gesture fully at odds with O'Brien's uncompromising position, Marlow seeks to remain loyal to what the transgressor has come to represent for him and still preserve a secure position within the boundaries of social acceptability. Marlow's "confessors are intended to experience the same kind of compelling entailment that he has experienced in hearing Jim's confession" (Terrence Doody 144), yet they refuse to sympathize with Jim or with Marlow's liberalism toward him. Marlow is therefore in a bind. He feels compelled to justify his transgression of one code of solidarity for the sake of another, and entreats his peers to expand their boundaries of social acceptability so that he can share his insights with them. But his community is not amenable to this mental exercise. Unless faced by an actual life threatening danger, hardly anyone is willing to leave familiar values behind and jump into a murky uncertainty, as Jim had. Looking at Marlow's dual relationship with Jim and Victorian society in this light allows us to give Marlow's favorite phrase an extra interpretative

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twist. When he says over and over that "Jim is one of us"—a phrase that is repeated nine times during the course of Marlow' narrative, giving it structure (Doody 133)—Marlow not only revises his audience's notions about Jim's position, inviting them to include the outcast within their circle of acceptability, but simultaneously hammers into their ears the very notion of "us." Marlow himself needs reaffirmation of his position within the intimate circle of acceptability; he needs to be reassured that he is "in." By repeating time and again that "Jim is one of us," Marlow hears himself affirming, uncontradicted, that there is such a thing as an "us" that includes him. Jim is out, and Marlow and all the Victorian gentlemen are within this circle of acceptability—which Marlow is at great pains to widen in order to include Jim as well. Of course, if Jim is accepted, then Marlow is incontestably within the pale of social approval. To show that he is one with the members of his audience despite his provocative association with a transgressor, Marlow begins his tale by affirming that he is like everybody else. Then, as we noted above, he claims that he doesn't know why men like Jim single him out for confessions, since he doesn't "feel exceptional in any way." Yet we saw that it was Marlow who distinguished himself by daring to approach Jim. He also declares that he has "as much memory as the average pilgrim in this valley . . ." (21), yet he proceeds to repeat conversation after conversation, opinion after opinion, about issues that occurred many years previously. Although such ironic disclaimers can be attributed in part to a formulaic narrative convention, Marlow's self-conscious doubts regarding his ability to do justice to his material is particularly indicative of an anxiety that characterizes modernity. Although Marlow deplores that "at this distance of time I couldn't recall [Jim's or any teller's] very words" (64-65), he histrionically imitates the French lieutenant's French, Stein's Germenglish, Jim's delirium, and Captain Brown's asthmatic chokes, so that his storytelling performance supercedes his human limitations.6 Marlow tries to "sell" his tale to his audience, suggesting that only through him can Jim exist for them (137). According to Walter Benjamin, the modern storyteller is barred from achieving this mediating capacity between experience and community because in modern times experience cannot be apprehended. Marlow indeed fails to create communal solidarity, and the impossibility of judging experience is his mantra, but this is because he insists on altering his community's assessment of character and society in order to admit a new cognitive anxiety. Conrad, however, as an actual modern "storyteller" does manage, I think, to convey to his readers a sense of suspended security leading to existential angst.7 When Benjamin deplores the shrinking possibilities available to storytellers in a mechanical age is he assessing the actual power of the modern teller or succumbing to his period's malaise? Marlow claims that only through him can his audience enrich their sym-

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pathies and intellect in order to understand the conventionality of their assumptions about humanity, morality, and life. He reminds the members of his audience that "we are only on sufferance here and [have] got to pick our way in cross lights, watching every precious minute and every irremediable step." This realization is supposed to be alleviated by the comforting notion that it is easier to trust that "we shall manage yet to go out decently at the end" if we can expect a "little help . . . from those we touch elbows with right and left." The other option is to pass "the whole of life . . . like an after-dinner hour with a cigar; easy, pleasant, empty . . ."—like the men who actually rub elbows with Marlow as he talks into the night (22). The members of Marlow's audience are, in fact, reluctant to strain themselves. They are not interested in perceiving reality in a new unsettling light, despite the promise of comfort in a truer and kinder comradeship. Most of all, they are unwilling to tolerate the unconventional. Marlow waits for an encouraging remark from his audience, but instead he is treated to polite silence thick with rejection. Only the host, "as if reluctantly performing a duty," murmurs "You are so subtle, Marlow" (58). Marlow, who supposedly fired such poisonous barbs at Jim, should be able to grasp the sarcastic rejection lurking behind this remark. But, like his protege during the long confession at the Malabar House, Marlow carries on seemingly oblivious to the irony laced in his host's voice. Of course one can equally argue that, like Marlow vis-a-vis Jim, Charley's guests are intrigued by the story, even as they protect themselves from being morally tainted by it. Jakob Lothe notices that "this rare listener's comment on Marlow's story should provoke him into stressing his difference from Jim." Instead of following the logic of this interpretation, though, Lothe goes on to mention that "the main function of the authorial insertions [in this case, the audience's response] is to remind the reader of the narrative setting, and to confirm that the oral narrative convention is still being adhered to. . . . " Seeing no (textually) visible alternative, Lothe concludes that "the narratee's comment suggests agreement with Marlow's view of Jim and his problems" (157). To me it is apparent that the host, speaking for his guests, rejects Marlow's rhetoric by following a standard of conduct that decrees that a veneer of politeness must be maintained at all costs. Charley's remark is a blow delivered with an elegant white glove; it is the host who is being "so subtle." On another occasion, when Marlow again pauses, a throat is cleared and a calm voice "encouraged negligently, 'Well,' " (194). This utterance is so weak that it doesn't even carry the question mark usually attached to it, ensuring that it not be confused with genuine encouragement or participation. Several times in the course of his narration Marlow tries to elicit a response from his audience, but all he gets is silence. Are Charley's guests— an average sample of Victorian gentlemen, directly or indirectly managers

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of empire—consciously avoiding a sign, gesture, or word which might draw them into a "fatal admission" and compromise their blind trust in themselves or their collective sense of justice? "I was not disposed to take any risk of that sort," Marlow explains about his own listening stance during Jim's confession. "It behooved me to make no sign lest by a gesture or a word I should be drawn into a fatal admission about myself which would have had some bearing on the case. . . . Don't forget I had him before me, and really he was too much like one of us not to be dangerous" (65). Marlow's narration can be dangerous to the placid guests if they let the doubt that torments him touch them also. He is aware of the danger that he poses to them. In this context it is worth repeating his condemnatory warning cited earlier: "I would be eloquent were I not afraid you fellows had starved your imaginations to feed your bodies. I do not mean to be offensive; it is respectable to have no illusions—and safe—and profitable— and dull" (138). These gentlemen, however, represent Marlow's feeling for "home," for belonging and security. If he cannot share his observations with them, if he is rejected by them, then Marlow has no communal resting place, and, like the Ancient Mariner, would be condemned to wander by land and sea, telling his tale to anyone who might be mesmerized into sharing his insights. In opposition to the Ancient Mariner's sin, however, the "sin" that Marlow must expiate is a humane association with a transgressor, and therefore not a repudiation of life, but a propensity to give life and youth a second chance.8 Hence the hypocrisy of a holy standard of conduct that condemns one man for abandoning 800 people for whom he was officially responsible, yet frowns upon another for feeling responsible for the life of that condemned man. Unlike Jim or the Ancient Mariner, Marlow clings to the illusion of a home to return to after his eyeopening experience. He waxes poetic when he describes this need: I was going home—to that home distant enough for all its hearthstones to be like one hearthstone, by which the humblest of us has the right to sit. . . but it seems to me that for each of us going home must be like going to render an account. We return to face our superiors, our kindred, our friends—those whom we obey, and those whom we love . . . a mute friend, judge, and inspirer. Say what you like, to get its joy, to breathe its peace, to face its truth, one must return with a clear consciousness. (135-36, my italics) The members of Marlow's audience are not particularly moved by the plea implicit in this description of home and the desire to return to it with a clear conscience. Furthermore, they do not care to help Marlow settle accounts with himself, with Jim, or with them. As Marlow ends his narration, they drift off "without offering a remark, as if the last image of that incomplete story, its incompleteness itself, and the very tone of the speaker,

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had made discussion vain and comment impossible" (204-5). Lothe interprets this as another "indication that they are deeply moved by Marlow's tale and inclined both to accept its content and to assent to his accompanying reflections and interpretations" (165). Also Jeffrey Williams, as we have seen, and in fact most critics, read Marlow's relationship with his audience as complicitous. Yet from a letter that Marlow drafts some time after the dinner party, we learn that, after all, one of the guests did speak out at the end of Marlow's oral narrative, refuting Marlow's hopes for Jim's social and spiritual redemption in Patusan. This interlocutor had "prophesized for [Jim] the disaster of weariness and of disgust with acquired honour, with the selfappointed task, with the love sprung from pity and youth." He predicted "illusory satisfaction" and "its unavoidable deception," not necessarily as a consequence of Jim's character, original sin, or subsequent decampments, but rather because he considers it worthless to sacrifice a European life for the benefit of other races. We see, then, that far from sympathizing with Marlow (Shires, 23), this "privileged" reader, to whom Marlow sends a written account of Jim's last days, condemned Marlow's sympathy for Jim by rejecting the possibility of Jim's redemption. Articulating the racism that underlies the Patna scandal, the interlocutor who dismisses Marlow's goodwill, affirms that to " '[give] up your life to them' (them meaning all of mankind with skins brown, yellow, or black in colour)" amounts to " 'selling your soul to a brute' " (206). The parenthetical remark is Marlow's, who does not share his interlocutor's racist world view, yet is connected enough to it that he later seeks out the very man who voiced these remarks to offer him the story of Jim's last days. Steven Barza interprets Marlow's need to narrate Jim's story as a pretext for creating wider and wider connections with his audience (227). Indeed, this desire to admit Jim's ultimate failure to the very man whose opinion is most uncompromising resembles a sacrificial offering at the altar of chauvinistic public opinion. The tale of Jim's last days corroborates the privileged reader's objection to Marlow's hope that Jim, who "had achieved greatness" through good works and the trust of the people of Patusan (138), might serve as a model for revising the standard of moral judgment. Why, then, does Marlow send his opponent proof of Jim's failure to live grandly and productively in the Eastern world? According to the dinner guest that is later privileged to receive the account of Jim's demise, a white man's life counts only if he fights within his ranks and subscribes to the homogeneous conduct that Marlow had breached. How can Marlow benefit from admitting Jim's failure to protect himself, his beloved, and the people of Patusan, unless it is to lay this admission as an appeasement of the guest who functions as a mouthpiece of racism and imperialism? By sending his harshest critic a narrative of Jim's final failure, Marlow once again attempts to trace a circle

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of acceptability that includes himself, if not Jim. He reaches out to share his feelings and observations with someone, anyone, just as Jim had sought to justify himself to "somebody—one person at least! You! Why not You?" (50). This plea echoes the words of the novel's epigraph: "It is certain my conviction gains infinitely the moment another soul will believe in it." Yet even though Marlow approaches his most outspoken rival to create a bond, he does not entirely capitulate to his position. It is true that while at the end of his oral narrative, when Marlow recounted Jim's apparent redemption, he was able to assert the fallen man's potential greatness, after Jim's ultimate failure in Patusan he can "affirm nothing" (206). Nonetheless, as Marlow invites the privileged reader to pronounce judgment, he still attempts to soften and widen the scope of that judgment. The dual rhetoric of Marlow's oral narrative, stemming from his conflicting needs to remain socially acceptable yet faithful to Jim, extends to the written narrative. Even here he tries to stave off judgment by continuing to relay opinions with multiple and often contradictory perspectives, which generate doubt about the subject they are supposed to illuminate and make it very difficult to issue a simple condemnation. In both the oral and the written narratives, then, Marlow challenges his audience to review received modes of judgment and create a new circle of consensus. His oral tale does not elicit reassurance; it is tolerated out of indolent curiosity or a hypocritical subscription to dinner party politeness, but no renewed sense of communion emerges. This leaves Marlow somewhat in the lurch, unable to ignore the hypocrisies and imperfections hidden in his original worldview, yet still wishing to belong to the society whose ideals of conduct and progress he now doubts. Even if the members of Marlow's audience are indeed aware that "there are no moral facts whatsoever" and "Morality is merely sign-language, merely symptomatology" (Nietzsche 1), they are unwilling to admit this candidly.9 Marlow also defers his capitulation to anxious vulnerability by persisting in his quest for a new, deeper, and more nuanced collective honesty. Marlow is trapped in the unsatisfying old order, glancing at a new and frightening one: he is and is not one with his audience.

TO BE OR NOT TO BE ONE OF US: BETWEEN THE CIRCLE AND THE ZIG-ZAG Marlow's sense of doubt and alienation destabilizes and displaces the relatively stable world view he inherited, dramatizing a modernist struggle for self-expression and knowledge as it emerges from the bounds of a positivist epistemology. The sustained tension between Marlow's new perceptions and his audience's conventional values—as they appear in Marlow's dual rhetoric—allow Conrad to evaluate existing social and narrative con-

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ventions and challenge the validity of a reigning tradition from within its own logic. In and of itself, the extended use of storytelling in Lord Jim already represents a formal departure from an ideal realist narrative that avoids referring to itself as a constructed artifact. Lord Jim draws attention to the artificiality of fiction by foregrounding processes of (re)construction, transmission, and interpretation operating behind all storytelling experiences and enabling them to take place. This dramatization of an interactive storytelling situation allows Conrad to challenge both the storyteller and the audience's power to affect the presentation of narrated events, and in this sense Lord Jim surprisingly fits the definition of a metafictional work that "sets out to 'represent' the world . . . [and] realizes fairly soon that the world, as such, cannot be 'represented.' In literary fiction it is, in fact, possible only to 'represent' the discourses of that world. Yet, if one attempts to analyze a set of linguistic relationships using those same relationships as the instruments of analysis, language soon becomes a 'prisonhouse' from which the possibility of escape is remote" (Waugh, Metafiction 3-4).10 Conrad gives his vulnerable narrator an extra subjective twist by portraying him as openly doubtful of his or anyone's ability to judge the world, and consequently of his or anyone else's ability to objectively report life experiences. In this respect, Conrad departs not only from the illusion of consensus afforded by a third-person narrative mode—which "may be called the determining principle of [realism's] form" (Miller, The Form of Victorian Fiction 63)—but also from the stability of a first-person "autobiographical" narrator who possesses all the pieces of the puzzle and evaluates his or her past experiences from an enlightened vantage point. Even if we admit that naive realism never existed—that there never was a "simple faith in the correspondence between word and thing" (Levine, The Realist Imagination 12)—we cannot deny that nineteenth-century novelists strove to build an illusion of such a correspondence. Endlessly hesitating, Marlow refuses to pronounce final judgment on Jim's behavior even after Jim dies. This illustrates succinctly how, while realism proclaims judgment at the expense of artificial endings, and postmodernism endlessly defers judgment, modernism hesitates between the two options (Waugh, Practicing 90). This anxious erosion of any possibility of interpretation debunks the notions of fictionality that rendered nineteenth-century realism possible. Of course, expressions of doubt about the possibility of judging and portraying reality are adumbrated in the work of realist writers and, conversely, realist attitudes remain present in the work of many modernists. J. Hillis Miller pinpoints, for instance, the metaphorical deconstruction of collective illusion in Dickens' late fiction, although, as we have seen in the previous chapter, some of Dickens' antirealist features can be interpreted as a technique to soften the harsh reality he portrays. Of Thackeray, Miller says that his "aim is no doubt

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. . . to tell the truth about society and about himself as a member of that society, but he is aware of the difficulty of doing this" (The Form of Victorian Fiction 71). Nineteenth-century awareness of the limitations of realism differs from Conrad's narrative unreliability in that the doubt encoded in the work of skeptical Victorians is always secondary to the construction of their story, while in Conrad the story is almost a pretext for discussing the impossibility of grasping or reporting experience. The painful anxiety that characterizes modernism exists precisely because of the conflict generated by a courageous desire to admit a new, wider, and more honest sense of reality, coupled with the impulse to crawl back into the arms of consensus, into the illusory security of a stable world. As a hesitant protomodernist, Conrad tries to avoid severing himself drastically from his inherited tradition. It is indeed very comforting to feel part of a "human experience which assures us that we all inhabit the same world and that the same meanings are available to everyone" (Ermarth, Realism and Consensus 65).11 But when one realizes, as Marlow does, that such consensual judgment is subjective and hypocritical, the locus of reality shifts from universal consciousness to a fragmentation of points of view. This realization motivates Woolf to evoke character as an ethereal image; it leads Lawrence to widen the range of belle lettres through an honest depiction of sexuality; it inspires Joyce to layer experience in a way that mimics the link between word, world, and thought; it enables Faulkner to chart an extreme fragmentation of points of view that reflect difference and alienation; it drives Proust to conceive of identity through an accumulation of associative experiences over time. In Lord Jim Conrad develops the vulnerable narrator, who presents the story of his younger and more confused alter ego through a series of concatenated and juxtaposed perspectives that are neither homogeneous nor chronological. Lord Jim parades an assortment of minor storytellers who express Marlow's views or are held up as straw men for him to argue against. Chronologically and structurally, this novel follows a "zig-zag method of tale within tale" (Cutler 30), zigzagged because the other characters' opinions of past events are relayed as a series of anachronistic fragments preceded by Marlow's own observations. In this manner, Marlow can deflate each opinion before providing a complete report of the actual interview, thus improving his chances to trace a new circle of consensus around his provocative conclusions. Ford Maddox Ford describes this technique as a timeshift trick that he and Conrad supposedly developed together in order to present the reader with a series of impressions similar to those that life makes upon the brain (Watt, Conrad 290). In "Modern Fiction" Virginia Woolf offers a very similar image of the relationship between mind and world: "The mind receives a myriad impressions—trivial, fantastic, evanescent, or engraved with the sharpness of

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steel." She then echoes Heart of Darkness' opening remark about Marlow's unusual method of spinning yarns, where Marlow's narrative technique is described as an empty kernel enveloped by a glow or a haze that brings out the meaning of a tale (Heart of Darkness 4). In Woolf's words, life "is not a series of gig-lamps symmetrically arranged; life is a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end" (Collected Essays, Vol. 2, 106). Given that Woolf conceives of the task of the modern novelist in terms of a duty to accurately convey "this varying, this unknown and uncircumscribed spirit, whatever aberrations and complexity it may display" (ibid.), one would assume she would have championed Conrad's method. Remarkably, however, Woolf's opinion of Conrad's fiction was that although it was "admirable" and better suited to capturing life than the work of the Edwardians, it could not be considered a living model for English writers like herself due to Conrad's Polish origins! In "Mr. Bennet and Mrs. Brown," Woolf wrote that "Mr. Conrad is a Pole, which sets him apart, and makes him, however admirable, not very helpful" (Collected Essays, Vol. 1, 326). And in an essay written upon Conrad's death, she again emphasized his foreignness, linking it to her inability to make sense of his idiosyncratic first person narrator ("Joseph Conrad," Collected Essays, Vol. 1, 302-8). This type of parochial jingoistic attitude frames the impulse that leads Conrad's narrator to desperately appeal for a widening circle of acceptability. It sheds light on Marlow's plea for reassurance when he repeats again and again that he "knew [Jim's] appearance; he came from the right place; he was one of us" (Lord Jim 27). Criticizing Lord Jim from a postcolonial position, Homi Bhabha imagines an alternative narrative that seeks "to affirm and extend a new collaborative dimension, both within the margins of the nation-space and across boundaries between nations and peoples." Such a postmodern questioning of modernity's ironies, disjunctive temporalities and representational aporia of "the language of rights and obligations" would extend to those who "find themselves on the frontiers between cultures and nations" (Location of Culture 174-75). When we consider the attitude expressed by Woolf's denial of Conrad's relevance to the "progress" of English literature, and her disregard of Conrad's evident influence on her own style and philosophy of fiction, it is easier to understand why Conrad tempered his plea for a widening of boundaries with various layers of narrative buffers. Henry James ridiculed this technique in his review of Conrad's Chance (1913), where Marlow is once again a principal narrator who presents his tale through a series of relayed and subsumed narrations: Mr. Conrad's first care . . . [is] to posit or set up a reciter, a definite responsible intervening first person singular, possessed of infinite sources of refer-

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ence, who immediately proceeds to set up another, to the end that this other may conform again to the practice, and even at that point the bridge over to the creature, or in other words to the situation or the subject, the thing "produced," shall, if the fancy takes it, once more and yet once more glory in a gap (cited in Sherry, "Henry James's Criticism" 266) Paradoxically, Conrad may have learnt his technique from James's own method of character focalization, where a character's perceptions are ironized through an external narrative perspective (Edel 54-55 and Ramsey 137ff.). Moreover, narrarative embeddedness is not foreign to James, who in "The Turn of the Screw" (1898) introduced a narrator who listens to a story told by a man relaying information from a governess' journal (three layers of embeddedness). Conrad, however, designed "a much more extreme and overt break with the distance, impersonality, and omniscience of third-person narration," for as Marlow narrates his past observations and experiences, he performs in the novel's present an act of recapitulation, while in James's story the frame narrators disappear as soon as they introduce the next narrative layer (Watt, Conrad 205, 213). By contrast, Marlow's constant presence gives his audience an opportunity to challenge him. Unlike Woolf and James, many early reviewers of Conrad regarded his employment of an embedded storyteller as a realistic device, a view strengthened when Conrad is read as a romantic spinner of yarns about the sea (Hewitt 6). Richard Curie explained Marlow's presence in terms of Conrad's pursuit of a linguistic reality, and though he felt that it was a mistake to recount Jim's story "at second-hand," he regarded Marlow and his series of sub narrators as a device that allowed Conrad to tell his story colloquially (36, 211). Half a century later—siding against Leavis (and James)—W. Y. Tindall also defended Marlow's realism: "[T]he 'illusion of life' . . . may be improved by a witness's report. Recounted by one who was there, or, if not, by one who has received reports from those who were, the story carries a greater air of verisimilitude than an omniscient narrator commands" (275). Only after the Second World War, when modernism began to be associated with the sense of alienation and fragmentation that climaxed between the wars, did Marlow's narration begin to be interpreted as the embodiment of an antirealist technique. The extent of this shift in interpretation is illustrated by David Daiches' revision of the Conrad chapter for his 1960 re-edition of The Novel and the Modern World. While Daiches' 1939 version focused on the picturesqueness of Conrad's settings, the 1960 revision emphasizes a modernist tension between the individual and society (Batchelor 191). In Perry Meisel's view, Conrad not only extends realism to develop what Lionel Trilling describes as a desperate "will to modernity," but he actually transcends this modernist attitude, which Meisel views as constructed by

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our own assumptions about what is modern (Meisel 1, 39). Leaving to a Marlovian deferment of judgment the question of how much we read ourselves into the objects we study, we can still affirm that Conrad was a harbinger of a modernist turn inward. With his fair share of painful modernist anxiety and keen sensitivity to an outsider's status, Conrad resembles Kafka. Following Deleuze and Guattari's influential essay on Kafka, added to Homi Bhabha's program, cited above, such a parallel between Conrad and Kafka raises the intriguing possibility—which I leave merely as a concluding thought—of analyzing Conrad's work as an expression of minority discourse of foreign nationals in England.

FROM CONSENSUS TO THE PAINFUL AND THE PLAYFUL Through his personal statements and fictional worlds, Conrad repeatedly expresses a mistrust of language's ability to convey experience. In Heart of Darkness, for instance, Kurtz's charismatic eloquence leads to a subjugation of other beings bounded with intoxicating self-confidence. In Lord Jim, Jewel, Jim's beloved, describes death in such emotional terms that she forces Marlow out of his usual refuge in words, the "shelter that each of us makes for himself to creep under in moments of danger" (190). Privately Conrad avowed that "All is illusion—the words written, the mind at which they are aimed, the hands that will hold the paper, the eyes that will glance at the times. Every image floats vaguely in a sea of doubt—and the doubt itself is lost in an unexplored universe of incertitudes" (Garnett 155). But in the belabored preface to The Nigger of the "Narcissus,3> he wrote that his task as a novelist was "by the written word, to make you hear, to make you f e e l . . . to make you see" (147). If both statements are to be believed, Joseph Conrad undertook his task as a novelist with an a priori sense of self-defeat.12 The anxiety of such a self-defeating enterprise—its accompanying painful sense of confusion and alienation—characterizes much of what we have come to identify as the axioms of modernism (Meisel 1). Regret that "good old tradition's at a discount nowadays" (Lord Jim 34) brings a desperate attempt to create a new tradition. Horror and anguish result from a realization that there is no escape from the encroaching emptiness of a world no longer perceived as controlled by either divine justice or progress (Ermarth, The English Novel in History 44). Side by side with this heavy disappointment over a loss of binding ideology emerges another type of opposition to positivism and realism, an approach playfully unconcerned about whether the new or the old way is better. Dismissing anxiety and nostalgia, this approach to literary conventions—fashionable since the 1950s and pervasive in the last quarter of the twentieth century—appears earlier in Stein's The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933), Gide's Les Faux-monnayeurs (1925), Woolf's Orlando

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(1928), and to a certain extent in Beckett's plays and novels (though these are hardly devoid of existential angst).13 As we have seen in previous chapters, this attitude goes back to Tristram Shandy (1760-67), Jacques le fataliste (1778), Northanger Abbey (1818), and Don Quixote (1605, 1615). However, the playfulness of contemporary postmodern fiction (perhaps one should rather call it "postrealist" fiction), does not merely return to notions of fictionality underlying Don Quixote or other metafictional novels of the past. While novels such as Cervantes' and Sterne's reacted against the styles and genres that informed and dominated their respective historical moments, postmodernism rises in response to the influence of nineteenthcentury realism and high modernism. This distinction is crucial for understanding transformations in the novel's generic composition and narrative techniques throughout its history. The difference between modernism, conceived as a painfully anxious mode of expression, and postmodernism, conceived as a philosophically playful approach to the world and literary traditions, is not necessarily a chronological distinction, but rather a matter of attitude. Postmodern texts are notorious for their language games, parody of genres, and all traditional ideological constructions. Many postmodern narratives treat language as a ball to be tossed about, disfigured beyond recognition. Sometimes they are about little else except the deflation of conventions. Beyond playfulness, however, there exists in postmodernism a self-absorbed attitude, described by Alan Wilde as a brazen "je m'en foutisme," in which "the modernist nostalgia over our origins is replaced by a dismissal of them; the frustration of being unable to resolve a dilemma gives way to an acceptance of the impossibility of making any sense whatever of the way as a whole. Acceptance is the key word here" (16). Described "strategically" for the sake of conceptual usefulness (McHale, Constructing 58), realist, modernist, and postmodernist approaches to the world can be imagined as a metaphorical storytelling event acted out in a court where storyteller and audience toss a ball—indeed, a very malleable one if I am to remain faithful to what we have observed about storytelling in the past chapters—which stands for the story itself. The court or playground should be imagined as an enclosed structure, except for two little doors located on opposite walls. Different players have different ideas of what exists beyond the walls that surround them. (For the sake of clarity, let us refer to the tellers as female and to the listeners as male.) The realist storyteller steps outside the court to describe it from an external vantage point. She stands right outside one of the court's doors and looks in. Her audience must also leave the court if he wishes to participate in this description of life in the court. If we think of the story in terms of a ball, we can say that the game between realist teller and listener involves a mutual agreement to withdraw from the court, while tossing the ball back and forth to each other by way of the court. (This is admittedly a very

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complicated maneuver: the realist storyteller must contrive to throw the ball into the court in such a manner that it will bounce back out into the hands of the expectant audience. Then the audience delivers it back to the storyteller, and so forth.) Although both storyteller and audience leave the court in order to look at it "objectively" from a distance, their game involves constant reference to the court itself, that is, to the world in which they live and that they observe. The modernist storyteller watches the movements of the realist players and begins to suspect that all those departures from the court are mere illusions stemming from the realists' habit of not looking beyond their circumscribed boundaries. If the realist teller and listener looked around them while they were playing outside the court, then they would have realized that in leaving their court they had simply stepped into another similar enclosure. The modern storyteller also suspects that although both courts have doors, ultimately there is no way out of the system. Desperate, the modern storyteller dwells on the consequences of having to play in such a claustrophobic environment. She seeks either to confirm her growing suspicions or altogether find a way out of the entire system. She feels anxious about her suspicions, about her doubt, and about the impossibility of escaping from the enclosure. She withdraws into herself to ponder her feelings and tends to sit in corners from which she can comfortably toss the ball back and forth. Looking around, she explores every nook and cranny of a space that she is reluctant to leave, for she might stumble into yet another disappointing enclosure. Although the modern perspective is not a happy one, it is relatively stable. The modern storyteller withdraws into a corner and, from there, suspiciously reevaluates every aspect of life that concerned the realist players, and plenty of other aspects of life that the realists neglected. Many of her listeners—accustomed to the realist game—wait in the same place where they used to play with the realist storyteller, and occasionally the modernist sends them a ball. But when the ball fails to arrive for a long time, one or two listeners decide to track the modern author's movements, and discover that she sits somewhere dark, tossing the ball back and forth between her corner and the various walls. The courageous and avid listeners start to get the point of this new game and catch the ball wherever they can. Like the modern storyteller, the postmodern also suspects that there is no way out of the enclosure; in fact, she is sure of it. But instead of being bothered by this idea, the postmodernist storyteller accepts it. She takes out her ball and decides to be as creative and crazy as possible within the confines of the realist's court, the modernist's corners, and within every possible court. She realizes that there are an infinite number of courts. She runs in and out of them, up and down, everywhere within them. Half the time, the postmodernist runs so quickly through the various enclosures that her audience cannot keep up with her movements. Sometimes she doesn't

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care to keep track of them either, negligent about where she might have started or where she will stop. The important thing is to have fun, to keep playing, and to swing the ball around and within all the different courts. Occasionally she meets other players and throws them the ball. She particularly relishes the games she can play with realist and modernist players. She likes to make fun of their limitations. But if she never bumps into anybody in the course of her frenzied travels from one enclosure to another—if she doesn't even meet her audience—that, too, doesn't particularly matter. To summarize, the illusions and agreement between the realist storyteller and audience set them apart from their modern and postmodern counterparts. The latter define themselves in opposition to such agreement and illusion. However, the moderns and postmoderns differ from one another mainly in their attitudes to the enclosed space that surrounds them, as well as in their attitudes to the kind of game that can be played in such a space. The modernist is desperately anxious about the new sense of space and reality, but the postmodernist couldn't care less. Rather, the hermetic enclosure gives the postmodernist a wonderful opportunity to play new and wilder games. Paradoxically, the postmodern players are the freest, secure in their knowledge that one can go anywhere within the various enclosures. Postmodern players often play the games that realists and modernists had played, but they play them self-consciously. In the imaginations of the postmodern players, the walls of the playground—or actually, playgrounds, as they are now perceived—are covered by mirrors that force them to reflect upon each action and pose. In stressing this attitude, I follow Linda Hutcheon's definition of postmodern fiction as historiographic metafiction, a selfconscious examination of past modes of truth and writing, which is not a mere radicalization of modernist attitudes found, for example, in French New New Novels and American Surfiction (40, 52; see also Spanos 16566). Our postmodern players do not run about the courts in a selfabsorbed, hermetic, or superficial manner. They examine, question, problematize, and ironize all sorts of games, especially combinations of those played by former generations of players. In an ironic, self-conscious manner, postmodern players study and reproduce the games of their predecessors, but they do so according to their own conception of the playground and aware of the views of these predecessors. Regarded in this manner, postmodernism is "not ahistorical or dehistoricized, though it does question our (perhaps unacknowledged) assumptions about what constitutes historical knowledge" (Hutcheon xii). Postmodern narratives are attuned to and adroitly play with the contextual boundaries of former versions of truth and fiction, as well as with an almost unprecedented array of narrative forms. My metaphorical attempt to describe the differences between realist, modernist, and postmodernist narrative dynamics unfortunately does not

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do justice to the point that I have been stressing throughout this book regarding the joint effort through which a (represented) storyteller and audience produce a story. We would have to imagine a ball that records all the fingerprints and pressure points of those who touch it. Neither does this model adequately convey the extent to which the boundaries of these categories intersect or appear achronologically. "[M]odernism and postmodernism are not separated by an Iron Curtain or Chinese wall. . . . History is a palimpsest, and culture is permeable to time past, time present, and time future. We are all, I suspect, a little Victorian, Modern and Postmodern, at once" (Hassan 120). Texts or parts of texts considered to be high manifestations of modernism can be alternately and fruitfully interpreted as manifestations of postmodernism, or, as we have seen in the case of Lord Jim, alternately as realist or modernist (even postmodernist?) examples. This is partly due to the proliferation of a variety of styles in the twentieth century. But it is also due to what Helmut Lethen explains as the tendency of literary historians to cut modernism in half in order to present it as a homogeneous practice. The "other" modernism, the alien part that gets lopped off, is then designated as postmodern or avant-garde. In the following chapter we will follow the interactive dynamics of storytelling exchanges in two contemporary novels that, while not avant-garde, are aggressively postmodern in their response and treatment of traditional genres and habits of thought. In particular, the two contemporary novels presented in the next chapter illuminate central aspects of postmodernism's play with the unreliability of history and a fragmentation of identity.

6 Interactive Fictions in the Contemporary Novel Building on Helmut Lethen's understanding of the processes through which literary movements are crystallized, Brian McHale interprets Lyotard's famous definition of postmodernism—"not modernism at its end but in the nascent state, and this state is constant" (Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition 123)—as a consolidation of the anomalous features of modernism. In other words, for McHale, Lyotard's postmodernism is the recuperation of an avant-garde lopped off from modernism as discussed in the previous chapter. Elsewhere, McHale admits that such an interpretation of Lyotard's phrase is only one way of looking at postmodernism relative to preceding historical movements (McHale, Constructing Postmodernism 56). Indeed, from another point of view, one can claim that Lyotard's statement resonates with David Lodge's assessment of postmodernism as a rule-breaking practice that depends on the very conventions it sets out to break. From this point of view, Lyotard's statement suggests opposition rather than recuperation. Lyotard does say that postmodernism "is undoubtedly a part of the modern," but in the sense that "all that has been received . . . must be suspected" (Lyotard, ibid.). In our times "the most recent modern" has unfortunately been labeled postmodernism, so that we can only wonder what a different kind of discussion we would be conducting if modernism had been called "postrealism," or, for that matter, if realism, modernism, and postmodernism had been labeled X, Y, and Z. Brian McHale recognizes that the scholarly division between modern and postmodern literature is arbitrary, but nonetheless he endorses such a division for strategic reasons. Patricia Waugh emphasizes a humanist postmodern tradition, observing that James Joyce, for one, combines features ascribed to romanticism, mod-

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ernism, and postmodernism to show "how one might preserve some ethical generality and consistency in the midst of epistemological relativism" (Practising 152). Drawing upon Freud's argument that "maturity is the ability to live with hesitation, ambiguity and contradiction," Waugh suggests that postmodernism is a mature attitude because it is able to accept and live with doubts that modernism finds intolerable (Postmodernism 9). This implies that postmodernism grows out of modernism by overcoming modernism's existential anxiety. It seems to me, however, that postmodernism thematizes and plays with anxiety more than it overcomes it. For instance, while Virginia Woolf's Orlando (1928) is freed from the anxiety pervading The Voyage Out (1915) or Mrs. Dalloway (1925), her last novel, Between the Acts (1941), although playful and metafictional, is steeped in personal and war-related anxiety.1 Likewise in Joyce, the religious and familial guilt that weighs upon Stephen Dedalus in A Portrait of the Artist (1916) increases in Ulysses (1922). The postmodern novel emphasizes and thematizes what Bakhtin identified as the dialogic, polyphonic, heteroglossic, and fundamentally comic nature of the novel. In this sense, what distinguishes present playful reconfigurations of fiction from similar experiments in the past is that a selfconscious projection of multiple perspectives is now prevalent and expected. We therefore tend to recognize this phenomenon in works from the past, some of which, like Cervantes' Don Quixote, indeed justify the analogy. Generally speaking, our present intellectual climate favors a reconfigurational paradigm of change rather than a radical substitution of modes of expression and understanding. In the realm of the production and interpretation of literature, this attitude manifests itself in a willingness to tolerate and even welcome a number of coexistent styles. Lyotard views such an eclecticism as a slackening of values ("Answering the Question" 120). Yet it may just as well be regarded as a healthy acceptance of a variety of tastes, manners of behavior, and cultures. As we shall see in the two examples chosen for analysis in this chapter, the authors of Mr. Mani and Like Water for Chocolate draw upon an exceptionally wide range of high and low literary forms, "closing the gap" between elitist and popular literature by incorporating and ironizing divergent attitudes and possibilities of expression (Hutcheon 44). By and large, the realist style and its current adaptations still appeal to contemporary readers who seek a captivating story couched in a great deal of detailed information. The historical novel with a new postmodern twist that challenges a teleological view of history continues to enjoy great popularity. Magic realism, which is the most impressive contemporary variation of realism, differs strikingly from nineteenth-century realism in that instead of defining itself in opposition to fantasy and metafiction, it openly welcomes these modes as imaginative angles that enrich the representation of life through fiction.

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One certainly cannot complain of a lack of embedded storytelling in twentieth-century novels, especially among those that explore the fluidity of experience and narration: Unamuno's Niebla (1914), Andre Gide's Les Faux-monnayeurs (1925), Gertrude Stein's The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933), Nabokov's Pale Fire (1962), Garcia Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967) with the extraordinary twist at the end that places the entire novel in the category of a retrospective storytelling act. A multitude of novels with complicated interactive storytelling events appeared in the last quarter of the century: The Black Prince (1973) by Iris Murdoch, If On a Winter's Night a Traveller (1979) by Italo Calvino, El beso de la mujer arana (1979) by Manuel Puig, and Letters (1980) by John Barth. Also significant is a type of novel that activates the storytelling strategies of ethnic minorities: Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937); Elena Poniatowska's semi-journalistic Hasta no verte, Jesus mio (1970); Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children (1981); and Tony Morrison's Beloved (1987). Through the interactive fictions of A. B. Yehoshua's Mr. Mani (1990) and Laura Esquivei's Like Water for Chocolate (1989), I hope to expose features of the novel that are particularly illustrative of our contemporary period. Mr. Mani illustrates postmodernism's paradoxical obsession with history, an obsession that is particularly intriguing, as Fredric Jameson and Linda Hutcheon have noted, in light of the scholarly tendency to separate postmodernism from history. From the point of view of a Jewish engagement with history, Mr. Mani is also key in that it embodies what Yosef Yerushalmi conceives as a modern crisis in the status of traditional Jewish history, which, as a reflection of biblical scripture, had been considered sacred. Yerushalmi writes that today Jewish memory "is being shaped, not at the historian's anvil, but in the novelist's crucible" (98). From the other side of the world, Like Water for Chocolate evokes a Mexican postcolonial consciousness negotiating new modes of cultural autonomy and authenticity. Doris Sommer and George Yudice observe that the literary "waning of Latin American authenticity which critics like Jean Franco attribute to the Boom turns out to be in [multicultural writers] a greater form of authenticity because it recognizes the heterogeneous and constructed quality of Latin American identity" (197). In her assimilation of every form of expression that surrounds her, Tita, the protagonist of Like Water for Chocolate, represents this "heterogeneous and constructed quality" of Mexican identity. In and of itself the choice of examples for this final chapter constitutes a statement about the status and scope of the novel in our times. Far from dying, as had been presaged since the 1950's, the novel continues to flourish in the hands of clever and accomplished writers able to reconfigure its relatively loose parameters into new combinations of genres, languages, narrative experiments, and notions of fictionality.

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PART I: A. B. YEHOSHUA'S MR. MANI The Playful Subjectivity of History Mr. Mani (1990), structured as a series of concatenated storytelling events, traces over 200 years of Jewish history through the vicissitudes of a Sephardic family surnamed Mani. An Israeli bestseller despite its complicated formal devices, this innovative novel presents a sequence of conversations in which a character who does not belong to the Mani family tells a story about the Manis to an interlocutor who is unacquainted with the Manis. An exception to this pattern is the last conversation, where the storyteller is a Mani and his audience is intimately familiar with the people and places to which the story alludes. Mr. Mani's extraordinary family saga, told through a series of conversations, is furthermore outstanding in that only one side of each conversation appears in the text. This forces the reader to step into the role of the interlocutor who is not acquainted with the Manis. But given that from the storyteller's words one can easily reconstruct the invisible interlocutor's position, Mr. Mani's conversations may be considered genuine dialogues rather than monologues. 2 As was noted in an early review of Mar Mani's English translation, this novel approximates Barthes's ideal modern text—a "writerly" narrative produced jointly between reader and writer rather than a "readerly" classic in which the reader is a passive consumer (Zierler 88). Furthermore, Mr. Mani's. storytellers, like Lord Jim's Marlow, simultaneously internalize and resist the ideological positions of their audiences, which in each case represent figures of authority such as a parent, teacher, or military superior. We "hear" the invisible audience's voice, ideology, and point of view through the words of the speaker, especially when the latter apologizes, disputes, pleads, placates or admires his or her interlocutor (Tzoren 71). The second striking formal feature of this novel is that, although it is an historically grounded fictional account of a family and a nation, the conversations, and therefore the presentation of both fictional and historical events, are arranged antichronologically. The first conversation takes place between Hagar Shiloh and her mother on an Israeli Kibbutz in 1982 after Hagar spent several days in Jerusalem tagging Gavriel Mani (1938- ). The second conversation takes place in Crete toward the end of World War II; here, Egon Bruner, a Nazi soldier, explains to his grandmother how he got involved with Yosef (1887-1941) and Efrayim Mani (1914-1944), who had been exiled to Crete at the end of the previous world war. The third conversation, set in Jerusalem toward the end of World War One, is conducted between a Jewish soldier who belongs to the "liberating" British army and a blind English Colonel appointed to judge Yosef Mani for spying against the British. (This is the same Yosef Mani who meets Egon Bruner

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twenty-two years later in Crete.) In the fourth conversation, staged in the proximity of Aushwitz half a century before the Holocaust, Dr. Efrayim Shapiro relates to his father how the Jerusalemite physician Moshe Mani (1848-1899) killed himself out of desperate love for Dr. Shapiro's attractive sister. The fifth and last conversation takes place in Athens in 1848. Here Avraham Mani (1799-1861) describes to his rabbi how Avraham's son (Yosef Mani 1826-1847) was murdered in Jerusalem, and how Avraham impregnated Yosef's widow. Shocked by his pupil's revelations, the ailing rabbi himself dies in the course of this narration. Salient developments in the lives of the Manis coincide with milestones of Jewish history such as the nineteenth-century rioting in Jerusalem, the first Zionist Congress, the British Mandate in Palestine, the Holocaust, and the Israeli war in Lebanon. These historical events, presented antichronologically, provide more than a mere backdrop to the convoluted lives of the Manis and those with whom they come into contact. Historical events in this novel propel the action. For instance, because Hagar's lover is drafted into the army, she travels to Jerusalem to check up on his father; the British presence in Palestine reawakens Yosef Mani's political tendencies; and meeting a Jerusalemite at the Zionist Congress in Switzerland provides the Shapiros with an opportunity to visit the Holy City. However, in most cases, historical events merely trigger tendencies latent in the characters. Yosef Mani's political obsession could have surfaced during any political crisis; Hagar's imagination and impulsive behavior would have rendered any experience extraordinary; and Efrayim and Linka Shapiro are eager for any opportunity to lose themselves in adventure. As eccentric as some of the Manis are, the characters describing them do not fall far behind. Each has a private motive for telling his or her story to a judgmental figure of authority. And while most admit that their stories are a subjective piecing together of evidence that could be interpreted differently by another observer, they all plead with their listeners for a chance to tell their stories in an idiosyncratic drawn-out manner. 3 When the listener complains, the storyteller sometimes threatens to stop narrating rather than alter his or her narrative style. Describing a Mr. Mani helps each storyteller adjust to recent extraordinary experiences with that Mani. Although the novel as a whole offers a sweeping panorama of history, as well as a fictional account of the Mani family, each episode focuses on the teller's recent experiences rather than on a slice of Jewish history or family life. (Somewhat of an exception to this is the third conversation, where Lieutenant Horowitz systematically reconstructs Yosef Mani's background in order to save him from the scaffold.) The Manis themselves know relatively little about their ancestors because contact between generations is often severed in the course of their tragic relocations. Alternately, what happens to a given Mani is so awful that it can only be uttered by an outsider, or, as in the final conversation,

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by a family member to a listener who will be unable to repeat the compromising information. Before and after each conversation, Yehoshua provides a brief thirdperson biographical entry describing the backgrounds of the tellers and listeners. In an oblique manner, these biographical entries tie together narrative strands left hanging in the previous conversation. This authoritative device is important because, since none of the storytellers are omniscient and their acquaintance with the Manis is always limited, their stories are full of guesswork and disturbing narrative gaps. Some of these gaps are resolved in subsequent conversations, as the history of the Mani family unfolds backwards in time. But many uncertainties remain and at times are even perversely reinforced by biographical or "encyclopedic" entries (Itzhaki 207) that seem to lend an objective anchor to the overall narrative sweep. Gaps and ambiguities are created and then deliberately left open in this strange historical novel. Thus, the idea of not being able to completely fathom someone else's reality is dramatized within the text, which, on a global level, reaches toward a reconstruction of history through a series of conversations aimed at rendering the past concretely present. Mr. Mani's five narrators tell the stories of recently lived experiences rather than the history of the past. Yet the novel as a whole struggles, on the one hand, to reconstruct history out of scraps of information, and on the other hand, sabotages the possibility of such a reconstruction by deliberately reinforcing its gaps and ambiguities. Such a "challenging of certainty, the asking of questions, the revealing of fiction-making where we might have once accepted the existence of some absolute 'truth'—this is the project of postmodernism" (Hutcheon 48). In Mr. Mani the past is made present through a series of historically concretized narrators. But this strategic "I was there" attitude is then shown to have as little authority over the construction of a reliable narrative as conventional historiographies that approach the past from a present vantage point. Globally, Mr. Mani seems to emerge from a conventional historiographical gesture, but internally it is built upon a series of petites histoires that deconstruct the possibility of a coherent, totalizing, or teleological master narrative. For Lyotard, such postmodern representations of reality exist "not in order to enjoy them but in order to impart a stronger sense of the unpresentable" ("Answering the Question" 124). Also for William Spanos, postmodern fiction "is not playful or performative . . . nor does it offer any new myths; on the contrary, it is committed to truthfulness, to disclosing the historicity of man and the contingency of history" (Bertens 21). While Spanos and Lyotard disagree in their assessments of postmodern fiction's relationship to historiography, I differ from both of their stern views of contemporary fiction in that postmodernism to me seems eminently playful.

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It is also philosophical, for, as we shall see in more depth in Mr. Mani and Like Water for Chocolate, postmodern novelists are seriously committed to exposing the fallacies of previous epistemological systems. Yet at the same time they take pleasure in openly playing with those systems. By contrast, one need only recall the painful doubt that suffuses Marlow when he realizes that he will never fully understand his own, let alone Jim's, experience. The epistemological gaps that are exposed and emphasized in Conrad's modernist gesture are couched in terms of a painful and nostalgic drama. Doubt and the desire to crawl back into the arms of a consensusdriven society overwhelm Marlow at certain moments, generating even more inconsistencies in his narrative. This, however, is not the case in Mr. Mani, whose overall spirit is a ludic one (Band 183). Basing themselves on a eulogy that A. B. Yehoshua wrote about his father, Arnold Band and others have noted the indebtedness of the son's playful tfrafr-nostalgic historiography to nostalgic accounts of Jerusalemite history published by Yehoshua senior (Tzoren 78 and Band 182-92). 4 The son toys with a wide range of literary rules, persistently twists fundamental storytelling conventions, and invites Mr. Mani's reader to step into the shoes of each invisible interlocutor to engage in an exciting interpretative adventure. 5 Yet ultimately this interpretative adventure spills into a stymied attempt to coalesce the novel's accumulated antichronological layers.6 It is in this playful spirit that Yehoshua undertakes a systematic reconfiguration of the historical novel, transforming the traditional boundaries of narrative dialogue and the family saga. We have already discussed a precedent for novelistic dialogue in which the words of only one interlocutor appear on the page when we traced the storytelling dynamics of Conrad's Lord Jim. This strategy occurs also in the "Cyclops" chapter of James Joyce's Ulysses. Mr. Mani differs from both in that it is entirely presented through this deliberately playful one-sided conversational scheme. In this sense Yehoshua's novel can be compared to epistolary novels in which we read one communication at a time. However, in Richardson's Clarissa or Pamela and even in John Barth's postmodern Letters, most missives are presented to the reader together with a response from the addressee. The missives are moreover addressed to someone who is absent and unable to immediately interact with the teller, while Mr. Mani's invisible interlocutors sit in front of the teller and challenge the narration at every turn. Furthermore, Mr. Mani lacks a unifying narratorial voice such as Marlow's in Lord Jim or the I-narrator's in Joyce's "Cyclops" because each of Mr. Mani's conversations occur between a different set of characters separated from each other by vast expanses of time and place. Mr. Mani disturbs conventional narrative functions of time and space (Tzoren 71, 74), challenging long-term memory as a unifying structure for the relationship between history and memory, a relationship that here supercedes what Yerushalmi defines as the two polar options of a traditional Jewish record

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of the past. This challenge brings to mind Richard Palmer's call for a postmodern fiction that can accept contingency, fragmentation, and historicity by presenting space as "multiperspectival" and time as "round and whole," thus unifying the past with the present to add "depth to a now that always is" (27-28). Yehoshua impressively renders the past present by relaying it through a series of historically grounded storytelling events staged immediately after the events they encompass, but the very attempt to render the past present is then exposed as an impossible endeavor. In his seminal analysis of the historical novel, Lukacs maintained that nineteenth-century historical novels such as Walter Scott's are able to render past and present equally accessible to the reader because they "concentrate" history in a protagonist "type" who synthesizes "humanly and socially essential determinants" (The Historical Novel 39-40). More significantly, even if "the protagonists in Scott's fiction must struggle painfully to achieve historic vision, there is always one qualified observer present: the narrator himself. His is the authoritative voice, ranging over the past from the perspective of the present, commenting ironically on characters immersed in the immediate, encouraging those who struggle toward the wider vision" (Kermode 271). In the classical historical novel there is always "an objective truth about the past that is attainable" (ibid.), while in the postmodern novel, and specifically in Mr. Mani, subjectivity of interpretation and storytelling is consistently exposed. Even Mr. Mani's "encyclopedic" passages, which tease us with an authoritative unifying perspective at the beginning and end of each conversation, limit the possibility of rendering the past fully present for us. The novel as a genre has repeatedly reconfigured itself in relation to historiography: "It was from historical and pseudo-historical writing that the early realist novel largely stemmed" (Hemmings 43). In fact, publishing novels that drew directly from historical writings, Walter Scott hoped he could serve "real" history by sparking an interest in "what the facts really were, and how far the novelist has justly represented them" (Scott, Introduction to Peveril of the Peak). Mr. Mani, in turn, reconfigures itself against the classical historical novel by presenting history backwards and riddled with gaps, in a gesture that denies the validity of any coherent or objective account of the present, let alone of the past. Mr. Mani further reconfigures itself against the dominant axis of modern Jewish historiography by offering a Sephardic, Jerusalemite, and Mediterranean oriented narrative, rather than an Ashkenazic, Diasporic, and Central European account (Band 186). 7 In addition, while Mr. Mani belongs to the genre of the family saga, it is also an anti-saga and an anti-iamily novel (Shaked 44). The saga, akin to the historical novel, usually appears in a chronological form, and the family saga in particular is generally presented from an insider's or omniscient perspective. The Mani family,

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though, with the exception of the last conversation, is "revealed by neither family members nor by an omniscient narrator but by strangers who [briefly] enter the family's world" (ibid.). Faulkner's chronologically disjointed and narratologically fragmented family sagas are a strong precedent for Yehoshua's postmodern reconfiguration of this mode. Yet Yehoshua's Faulknerian threefold reconfiguration of historical writing, the family saga, and narrative dialogue—coupled with a deliberate philosophical denial of closure—offers an example of a tongue in cheek, self-conscious playfulness that marks postmodernism's most entertaining manifestations. HAGAR'S FANTASIES Just as Mr. Mani's global structure contains a denial of the very genres that inform and constitute it, each of its individual storytelling accounts is filled with ammunition against the storyteller's reliability as interpreter of his or her world. Hagar's conversation with her mother, Ya'el, opens the novel's antichronological sweep. This first conversation takes place in a southern Kibbutz during the winter of 1982, when the Israeli Defense Forces were engaged in a campaign against the PLO in Lebanon. Hagar's lover, fighting in Lebanon, asks Hagar to check up on his father, Gavriel, who is mourning his mother's recent death. After vainly attempting to reach Mr. Mani by phone, Hagar, intrigued and eager for adventure, decides to hop on a bus from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem to inquire personally after her boyfriend's father. On her way back from this expedition, having spent three days nosing about Gavriel Mani's apartment and following him around Jerusalem, the twenty-year-old Hagar Shiloh is seized by a desire to share her recent experience with her mother. Hagar's behavior—her impulsiveness and the propensity to run to her mother with every story—is rooted in a tragic past. Since the death of Hagar's father in the Six-Day War (1967), Hagar had been encouraged to share every thought and experience with her mother. A psychologist sent by the army suggested she "get it all out. How did she put it? To keep the pus of repressed thought from festering, ha ha. Ever since then, Mother . . . I keep blabbing away and you have to hear it all. . . because if you don't, who will. . . . " (14). Storytelling becomes a therapeutic, even compulsive, link between Hagar and Ya'el. But over the years both Hagar and Ya'el change. Ya'el's kibbutz ideology becomes a stalwart defense of old-fashioned socialism in a community seeking change and modernization. On her part, Hagar grows up and leaves the kibbutz. Her free manner of sharing every thought with her mother now conflicts with delicate subjects such as Hagar's first sexual experience and her desire to distance herself from the kibbutz life that Ya'el fervently endorses. Ya'el consequently begins to resist her daughter's readiness to communicate. Now, instead of listening to Hagar's adventures, Ya'el pre-

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fers to "analyze" them according to some watered-down psychological theories learnt at a nearby college. Despite these communicative difficulties, Hagar seeks her mother's approval and wishes to persuade Ya'el that the trip to Jerusalem was crucial because it thwarted Mr. Mani's alleged attempt to commit suicide. Ya'el is skeptical of her daughter's interpretation of Mr. Mani's behavior. Of course, as readers we have access only to Hagar's words, which nonetheless include Ya'el's skepticism enfolded in Hagar's counter arguments. Emerging through Hagar's own retorts and preemptive explanations is Ya'el's certainty that her daughter's actions and conclusions stem from the abnormal psychological profile of a war orphan. In this novel, the author has already abstracted the embedded story from its interactive context, yet the storyteller's arguments with the audience stand out vividly and dramatically. [B]y the simple act of going to Jerusalem on Tuesday, and not budging from the door, I kept that man from killing himself. . . yes, killing himself. . . . —Because while he was standing there in the living room, wishing he didn't have to talk to whoever was on the telephone, I breezed right in [. . . ] and instead of stopping politely in the living room, I kept heading down the hallway until I came to an open door through which I saw, in that dead grandmother's bedroom, which was pitch black except for a bit of light shining through the window from the night outside, something so awful that... I can hardly talk about it even now . . . —There was this hangman's scaffold there . . . —Yes. A scaffold. —Just what I said. I mean, at first all I saw was that the room was in this absolutely frenzied state. The bed was a mess, but really crazy, as if someone had gone berserk in it: the pillows were thrown everywhere, the sheets were ripped, there were books all over the floor, and the desk was littered with crumpled papers . . . but the worst thing, Mother, was the blinds on the big window, which were shut so tight there wasn't a crack in them. The blinds box above them was open, so that you could see the bare concrete and the unpainted wood, and in it, Mother, the belt was dangling from its rod—it was like the one in this room but wider and strongerlooking, yellow with two thin, red stripes down the sides—it was off the pulley and hanging free, with this big noose knotted at the end of it. . . You're laughing at me . . . —No, that is not all. Beneath it was standing a little stool, just waiting to be kicked away . . . everything was ready, I didn't have the slightest doubt . . . it couldn't have been more obvious . . . and if any more proof was needed, it was his own behavior, because the minute he saw me follow him inside and head past him for that room, he went absolutely wild. He [. . . ]

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ran to stop me, to get me out of there, or at least to shut the door and keep me from seeing. I could tell by how frantic he was, all panicky and confused and I guess embarrassed too, that he realized I had understood everything, everything. (26-27) Several alternative interpretations are encoded in Hagar's dramatic portrayal of this scenario: first of all, Hagar could have imagined more than she saw, for, as she herself points out, the room was pitch black except for a bit of light shining through the window from the night outside. The room's untidiness could just as easily be attributed to the recent commotion of the grandmother's last days. Mr. Mani explains later that he had been searching for something, perhaps a will, hidden money, documents, or even family photos that the old woman might have placed anywhere in her room, including the blinds' box. Conversely, Mr. Mani may have been acting out his sorrow, going wild and disrupting his mother's earthly belongings without any intention to commit suicide. Hagar, however, insists upon Mr. Mani's suicidal intentions, based on the observation that as soon as she approached the room with the alleged scaffold, Mr. Mani went absolutely wild. He [. . . ] ran to stop me, to get me out of there, or at least to shut the door and keep me from seeing. Yet even this behavior could be attributed to Mr. Mani's embarrassment regarding the room's untidiness. Or, more likely, to the fact that a strange young woman had just barged into his apartment late at night (I slipped inside uninvited, because I knew I had to find out what was going on in there (23). Still, this does not explain why, when Mr. Mani grabbed [her] from behind and tried wrestling [her] out of there [. . . ] He didn't say anything . . . that's the whole point. If we had spoken to each other it might have been different (27). Eventually Mr. Mani manages to push Hagar out of the grandmother's room and lock himself within. Yet at this point, instead of leaving the apartment, Hagar behaves as strangely as she claims Mr. Mani does. She quietly establishes herself in an armchair in his living room, feeling that her presence might deter him from proceeding with the horrible act upon which she believes she stumbled. Ya'el doesn't buy her daughter's story. She contends that Hagar imagined the existence of a scaffold and misinterpreted her silent wrestling with an older man, who might have felt that she had come to offer herself sexually. Ya'el doesn't doubt that Hagar went to Jerusalem and spent three nights in a strange man's apartment, but she does resist Hagar's interpretation of sights and situations obviously foreign to an Ashkenazic, kibbutz raised, inexperienced, and impulsive young woman. Other aspects of Hagar's account clash with her macabre interpretation. The morning after the scaffold ordeal, Mr. Mani goes as usual to work in the courtroom where he serves as Justice of Peace. Once there, he performs his duties in a completely normal fashion, even with a sense of humor.

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When he notices that Hagar has followed him to the courthouse instead of leaving Jerusalem as she intended, he turns to her politely, seemingly unperturbed. Of course it is strange that Mr. Mani does not confront Hagar directly, neither asking why she follows him, nor ordering her to desist. This patient reticence may be attributed to his Sephardic politeness and to Hagar's status as the girlfriend of his son; a soft-spoken Middle Eastern gentleman would be reluctant to insult a prospective daughter-in-law. Yet this behavior conflicts with the silent wrestling of the previous evening. Perhaps as he tells Ya'el years later, he operated under the impression that Hagar herself was mentally disturbed. In addition to challenging her daughter's interpretation of Mr. Mani's behavior, Ya'el also rejects Hagar's style of storytelling. Hagar shrouds her story in a veil of mystery that bothers Ya'el: —Vm not being mysterious. Stop being so critical. . . —All right, fine, so I am a little mysterious . . . maybe mysterious is even the best word for it. . . but so what? Whafs wrong with a little mystery? [. . . ] but the mystery, you see, isn't the horrifying part, because anything really horrifying has to be obvious and isn't mysterious at all. The mystery is in the encounter, even if it just seems like a coincidence. —But there isn't a quick version. There's no quick way to tell it, mother. —Because if I did, it really would sound like a figment of my imagination ...(11). Hagar knows that if she tells her story quickly as a straightforward collection of facts, then her mother will immediately conclude that Hagar's interpretations are erroneous. But telling the story in a paced manner, with mounting suspense and liberal doses of subjective interpretation, equally invites Ya'el's disapproval. Hagar nonetheless opts to deliberately stylize and dramatize her narrative because the process of telling the story is as important to her as having lived through the events she claims to have experienced. Early on Hagar stages a storytelling atmosphere which is only to her liking: how about doing it properly, so that we can sit here in peace and quiet? Let's draw the curtains to keep the light in, and let me lock the door for once [. . . ] let's shut out the world to keep it from knowing we're here, so no one comes and bothers us (12). Although according to a pioneer socialist lifestyle, Ya'el prefers to keep her door always open, Hagar's will prevails. She captures and then retains her mother's attention by acknowledging, preempting, and responding to her mother's resistance. It does not occur to Hagar that just as she seeks privacy and secretiveness to process her recent emotional experience, so might have the "mysterious" Mr. Mani when he refused to answer phone calls and doorbells.

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Hagar manipulates Ya'el into listening to a drawn out dramatic narrative by threatening to otherwise refrain from communicating at all. As soon as she is assured of her mother's interest, Hagar pushes Ya'el's patience further by relating how, when she reached Mr. Mani's apartment building, she began to feel as if she were a novelistic or cinematic character, as if someone had put me on the opening page of a book (which Yehoshua the novelist has done, of course). Mostly it was the feeling of eyes being on me all the time, even my own eyes, which kept watching me from the side as though tracking me. I don't mean in reality, but in a book . . . as if I were being written about on the first page of some story, where it said . . . something like . . . something like . . . an old book that began like this: "One winter afternoon a fatherless student left her grandmother's apartment in the coastal metropolis on an errand for her boyfriend, who had asked her to find out what had happened to his father in the inland capital, all contact with whom had been lost. . ." Something simple- and innocent-sounding that was about to become very complicated. (22) From this point onwards, the cinematic/novelistic fantasy remains an integral part of Hagar's narrative. She returns to it at key moments: perhaps because of the book I was in now, or because I knew I'd be protected by the photographer and the director and the whole camera team that was following my every movement, I decided not to take that head shake of his for an answer and I slipped inside uninvited, because I knew I had to find out what was going on in there (23). The next day, there they were, waiting for me in the stillness . . . I mean that author or that director with his big black camera. Apparently, I had forgotten that we had arranged to meet there, and they were sitting on a stone terrace next to some drippingwet trees, their heads in their hands just like yours is (43). Ya'el diagnoses this aspect of her daughter's narrative as a "delusion of grandeur." But Hagar insists that rather than glorifying herself, she was caught up in someone else's story for the sake of a narrative continuity more important than her own life at that moment (39-40). Hagar's fantasy usually pops up when she needs a pretext to energize a new daring step. In the Quixotic fashion we observed in an earlier chapter, Hagar's imaginary crew helps her deal with the risky adventures she undertakes. It gives her the creative energy to make adventures happen and sustains her through frightening moments. The crew initially appears when she reaches Mr. Mani's private domain and twice as she prepares to barge into his apartment (23, 47). It suddenly reappears when, instead of remaining on a bus driving her out of Jerusalem, Hagar impulsively gets off and crosses the highway to hitch a ride back to Mr. Mani's apartment. On this last occasion Hagar also (accurately) fantasizes about an historical con-

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tinuum of weary but eager travelers resting at the same spot where she now waits to reenter Jerusalem (43). Although Hagar applies the same detailed narrative style she uses to represent real experiences to describe her fantastic ones—the imaginary author or cinematic crew were sitting on a stone terrace next to some dripping-wet trees, their heads in their hands just like yours is—she distinguishes between "imaginary" events related to this crew and "real" events related to Jerusalem and Mr. Mani. Much like Sancho and Don Quixote in some of their storytelling acts, Hagar acknowledges the slippery nature of the descriptions accompanying her fantasies. She explains her sense of being followed, written about, or filmed as a self-conscious game. Once she has played out the storytelling game with her mother exactly as she wished to play it, Hagar also concedes that her interpretation of Mr. Mani's behavior may be a delusion. But even as she admits this possibility, she already retracts it, affirming the reality of what she witnessed. J knew you'd say, There goes Hagar, looking for a father again, and you're right, you're always right, Mother, what can I say, I know you are, but I also know there's something deeper than your psychology. Hagar then proceeds to hint that Ya'el herself is immersed in an illusory enshrinement of a dead husband, who is more alive to her than any potential suitor (68). Both Ya'el and Hagar frequently refer to the missing father/husband by addressing what Ya'el views as her daughter's tendency to find surrogate father figures. But if we read more closely, we notice that Hagar uses the alleged surrogate fathers to reach her mother. It is ultimately in order to get her mother's attention, and tell her all sorts of stories about ordinary and extraordinary events, that Hagar manipulates middle-aged men: Don't you remember what you've told me about myself? I could be in the nursery, or at school, and if some child fell and hurt himself, or if the drawing I was working on tore, I had to tell you so badly that I would run outside to look for you and shout the minute I found you, "Hey, Ma, listen to this!" . . . —Right. I always got away with it, because I had this knack for latching onto . . . how did you used to put it? —Yes, that's it. To some surrogate father who would do anything I asked, maybe—it's a pet theory of mine you're sure to like—because he felt guilty that it was my father and not him who was killed. And so everyone took me in tow and passed me on . . . to you, Mother, who I threw myself on and told everything... (10). Viewed from this perspective, Mr. Mani himself is a casualty of Hagar's storytelling relationship with her mother. By allowing Hagar to stay in his apartment and follow him all over Jerusalem, Mr. Mani certainly plays right into Hagar's guilt theory and Ya'el's Orphan Psychology scheme, as Hagar dubs it: "Yes, yes, why don't you say it, go right ahead. There goes

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our Hagar looking for a father figure again . . . as usual, she's latched onto some older man . . . " (24). Hagar expects this well-known reaction and alludes to it frequently, so frequently, in fact, that she cuts the sting out of Ya'el's objections and makes the psychological analysis sound like an obsessive and trivial avoidance of real communion and understanding. On the level of Hagar and Ya'el's storytelling relationship, Mr. Mani is therefore caught in the web of Hagar's fantasies, Ya'el's psychological theories, and the habitual relationship between these two women. On the global level of the novel, though, the situation is reversed: Ya'el and Hagar are pawns in a scheme to outline the lives and vicissitudes of various generations of Manis, as well as to ensure that the Mani line continues, for Hagar eventually gives birth to Gavriel's grandson. In this larger context, the truth about Gavriel Mani's alleged suicide attempt is crucial, for it exposes a tendency toward self-destruction latent in all the Manis. Hagar's potential unreliability, though, exacerbated by her tendency to mix fact with fantasy, foils our desire to be really privy to Mr. Mani's life. What is the truth about Gavriel Mani? Did he prepare a scaffold to hang himself out of despair over his mother's death? Did Hagar Shiloh prevent him from committing suicide? Hagar's story, convincing as it is in parts, contains many deliberate portrayals of her tendency to taint experiences and transform reality according to her own psychological needs. There is no omniscient narrative voice to confirm, deny, or balance Hagar's perspective. Hagar's words are the only ones available to us, and only by following her idiosyncratic story—into which Ya'el's skepticism has been incorporated—can we begin to tie together the narrative threads she offers us. Yehoshua makes sure that we will not create a coherent narrative out of Mr. Mani's subjective antichronological conversations without at least questioning the validity of our interpretations. For instance, in the biographical information that follows Hagar and Ya'el's conversation, we are seemingly offered a clarification of Gavriel Mani's contradictory behavior. But this objective information proves to be no more than a hint, one additional interpretative position dangled enticingly before us without providing absolute closure. The information provided in the biographical entry is that a few years after Hagar's strange encounter with Mr. Mani, Ya'el Shiloh became acquainted with the Jerusalemite judge, and on one occasion, Ya'el mustered the courage to ask [him] whether there had been any thought of suicide in his mind at the time of Hagar's visit to Jerusalem in December 1982. While he did not seem surprised by the question, which he in fact appeared to have anticipated, Mr. Mani answered it vaguely, almost as if it concerned someone else. (72, my italics)

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While Mr. Mani's anticipation of Ya'el's question seems to confirm that Hagar's assessment had been correct, his vague answer deflates the possibility of a categorical affirmation. Mr. Mani's tactful reply might be attributed also to a Sephardic avoidance of direct confrontation in contrast with Ya'el's Ashkenazic forwardness, though she tries to make light of her attitude. In any case, the biographical entry that contains this remark deliberately denies an authoritative explanation of Gavriel's behavior at the time of Hagar's visit. The novel's subsequent four conversations are strewn with clues that promise to solve the puzzle of Gavriel Mani's behavior. In particular, Efrayim Shapiro's tale to his father in 1899 relates how Moshe Mani, Gavriel Mani's great-grandfather, actually committed suicide in front of Efrayim and his sister Linka by throwing himself under a train in Beirut. Although the immediate catalyst of Moshe Mani's suicide is a desperate passion for Linka, according to the storyteller, the rash act stems from deeper reasons that run beyond the understanding of Efrayim, Linka, or Moshe Mani himself. This Mr. Mani is a successful and charismatic doctor who owns a birthing clinic in Jerusalem, where he lives with his wife, mother, and two children. However, when relating how his friend committed suicide, Efrayim Shapiro explains that before me no longer stood a doctor from Jerusalem but an actor forced to recite a script that he could not revise—one drummed into him immemorial ages ago—which—although he was the director and the theater owner too— he was not at liberty to leave unperformed and must stage to the bitter end. (284) Efrayim's statement suggests that if Moshe Mani was following a script when he committed suicide in 1899, then his great-grandson in 1982 might have been following the same congenital tendency to take his life at a time of emotional crisis. This, more than any other piece of information external to Hagar's story, seems to confirm her interpretation. However, the interpretation of Moshe Mani's scripted suicide forms part of Efrayim Shapiro's own stylized and idiosyncratic narrative. Efrayim feels guilty for his role in the suicide, for instead of protecting the married doctor from falling in love with Linka, he took advantage of this in order to visit Jerusalem. Furthermore, Efrayim's own relationship with his sister is suffused by a latent incestuous passion. Everything that Efrayim tells his father is therefore suspicious. Here we will not analyze Efrayim's interaction with his father; suffice it to say that Efrayim's selfish needs, games, and deficiencies play an important role in shaping his narrative. The parallel between Moshe Mani's actual suicide and Gavriel Mani's

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alleged intention to commit this act, raises a set of questions related to the global framework of the Manis' history and Yehoshua's unconventional play with the presentation of this history. If Gavriel Mani was "fated" to commit suicide, like an actor rehearsing a script or a character following the designs of an author, then Hagar's interference indeed thwarted his destiny. But is destiny an original plan, an "encoded formula," as Hagar refers to the potential Mr. Mani growing in her uterus, or is destiny whatever ends up happening at the end? Once again, no authoritative statement provides a categorical resolution to the questions woven across Mr. Mani's interlocking plots. Instead of settling some of the gaps left in parts of this (anti)historical, (anti)novelistic, (anti)family saga, new information invites us to pose deeper questions and reassess issues that seemed settled before. Mr. Mani's suggestive puzzles, parallelisms, and gaps challenge and amuse us. They engage our full attention, inviting us to test our interpretations much as Yehoshua's storytellers second-guess their experiences. Academics are not the only readers playing this game. Seven reprintings of Mr. Mani were issued the year of its publication (1990), and more than a dozen reprintings have been added since. Mr. Mani has also been widely translated, it has been adapted to the theater, and a multilingual five-part TV production was aired in Israel and abroad. PART II: THE POWER OF STORYTELLING IN LAURA ESQUIVELS LIKE WATER FOR CHOCOLATE Like Water for Chocolate: A Novel in Monthly Installments, with Recipes, Romances, and Home Remedies (Como agua para chocolate, 1989) by Mexican author Laura Esquivel was also an immediate bestseller and blockbuster film in its own country and abroad. Although intellectually it is less challenging than Mr. Mani, it equally delights its reader through selfconscious play with a variety of genres, including genres previously alien to the novel.8 Like Water for Chocolate is likewise set during a climactic national moment, the Mexican Revolution, relative to which the protagonist's personal plight functions as a metaphorical expression of Mexico's struggle to overcome deep-rooted political shackles. Tita, the protagonist, never frees herself completely from a parental form of dictatorship, but by making clever use of the different forms of expression that surround her, she manages to eke out a measure of personal satisfaction and independence. In exploring Like Water for Chocolate's interactive fictions, I will stress how Tita pursues freedom and self-expression by absorbing and adapting all the forms of storytelling to which she is exposed. Although some of the tales she hears have the power to shape her life in positive ways, a parental

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dictum imposed on her from birth irrevocably deforms her life. Ultimately, she fails to use the power of yet another story to achieve a "happily ever after" ending that, perhaps realistically, could not be reached within her lifetime. Again like Yehoshua's novel, Esquivei's is a compilation of petites histoires, none of which obtain a dominating position. Storytelling dynamics in both these postmodern novels—and especially the central relationship between their embedded storytelling situation and underlying notions of fictionality—repudiate the possibility of creating a unifying "master" script for the narration of a life. Linda Hutcheon regards such generic multiculturalism as a facet of historiographic metafiction, a self-conscious play with history that she identifies as the core of postmodern fiction: "It is not just (serious or popular) literature and history that form the discourses of postmodernism. Everything from comic books and fairy tales to almanacs and newspapers provide historiographic metafiction with culturally significant intertexts" (132-33). The most strikingly original feature of Esquivei's novel is the employment of recipes as a central narrative device. Its integration of plot with culinary events enhances the characters' fictional depth by shaping their private histories, constructing a sense of folkloric and historical depth through placement within the context of the Mexican Revolution alongside ongoing references to traditional Mexican cuisine and home remedies.9 The intimate association of recipes with Tita's experiences, memories, and thoughts provides the main chronological and causal basis for the construction of her character, while the seasonal Mexican dishes in the background establish a historical sense of national tradition and culture. Yet in addition to the obvious use of recipes as this novel's central structural device, Esquivel stages scenes of storytelling as a more subtle narrative strategy that unites plot and character. Tita grasps at and refashions all the stories that surround her. Through these alternative narratives, she seeks to rebel against the lifestyle that her mother had decreed for her: "being the youngest daughter means you have to take care of me until the day I die" (10). According to this awful family tradition, Tita is supposed to relinquish all dreams of a love life or children of her own and consecrate herself entirely to her mother. This decree is carried to such an extreme that Pedro, who is in love with Tita, is affianced to her sister Rosaura instead. In Like Water for Chocolate the ability to tell stories goes hand in hand with a propensity to give of oneself to, and care for, others. Mama Elena and Rosaura, who can bring children to the world but cannot nurture or nurse them, are conspicuously incapable of telling tales. The nanny (Nacha), the servant (Chencha), the American doctor (John Brown), his grandmother (Luz del Amanecer), and Tita in her own special way are the storytellers of this novel. Pedro is not a storyteller, and his inability to

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disregard social conventions and Mama Elena's harsh rules in order to pursue Tita constitutes the real obstacle in this novel's tragicomic love plot. Tita's second sister, Gertrudis, is situated in the middle of the storytelling versus nurturing spectrum. Although she is capable of caring about others to some extent, and is accordingly an occasional storyteller, she is much more self-centered than the other storytelling characters. She has so many things to tell Tita about her adventures in the revolution "that she could talk day and night for a month without running out of conversation" (187) and without paying attention to her sister's grave problems. John Brown and Nacha's stories, on the other hand, are geared almost entirely toward the emotional benefit of their listeners. Tita herself is not a distinguished verbal storyteller. Moreover, as we shall see later on, she often represses potential retorts and fails to express her thoughts aloud. Yet her reception and transmission of recipes can be regarded as a creative form of communication analogous to the art of telling, and in this sense, she is the novel's primary "storyteller." This connection between words and recipes is made explicit when, following a description of Tita's most prolific and enthusiastic period as a cook, we are told that she played with the ingredients and quantities of traditional recipes "just as a poet plays with words" (69). Regarded in this light, the art of storytelling acquires a wider anthropological and sociological dimension than in any other novel we have considered so far. Storytelling experiences are portrayed on a variety of levels and in several narrative dimensions in this novel. The tales told by Chencha and John Brown function as a means to characterize them as well as those to whom they tell their stories. Chencha prevaricates to elicit attention or avoid confrontations with her severe employer; John Brown uses his Native American grandmother's tales as a subtle form of psychotherapy that reaches Tita when she falls into a deep state of depression. Embedded stories also function here as a tactic that either complicates or advances the plot, occasionally tying imagery with plot, even as the magical power of Tita's recipes binds the novel internally (on a thematic and symbolical level) and externally (on a structural level). The storytellers of this novel actually represent a spectrum of cultural blends, reminding us of Sommer and Yudice's observation on the postBoom authenticity of Latin American fiction that "recognizes the heterogenous and constructed quality of Latin American identity" (197). Tita learns from a nanny and a servant who embody the blend of indigenous and Spanish traits that characterizes most Mexicans. She also learns from the North American doctor, John Brown, whose folk wisdom further derives from a Native American grandmother credited with inspiring him to learn medicine. Even Gertrudis, the occasional storyteller in this novel, represents a mixture of races, for she is the offspring of an affair between Tita's mother and a mulatto.

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From Nacha, Tita primarily learns how to cook, and the succulent tastes of prehispanic and Spanish dishes merge in these women's reenactment of a colonial mestizaje: "Tita was the last link in a chain of cooks who had been passing culinary secrets from generation to generation since ancient times" (48). In Mexican cooking, as in Mexican architecture, indigenous techniques and ingredients are adapted to Spanish needs and Spanish customs. Tita takes Nacha's mode of expression a step further, though. At first she merely follows the recipes and is as surprised as everyone else when her repressed emotions manifest themselves magically in the meals she prepares. But once she realizes that her emotions surface in her cooking, she consciously harnesses this ability as a means of communicating with Pedro. Cooking thus becomes Tita's unique form of expression and her main channel of communication. 10 The transition between routinely making food for the family and cooking as a conscious form of self-expression occurs when Pedro gives Tita a bouquet of roses, and instead of throwing them out as her mother orders, Tita employs them in the preparation of an exquisite lunch of quails in rose petals. The excitement and joy experienced by Tita when she receives the meaningful gift from her would-be-lover is transmitted through the food to Tita's unmarried sister: "Tita was the transmitter, Pedro the receiver, and poor Gertrudis the medium, the conducting body through which the singular sexual message was passed" (52). Gertrudis is affected by it to such an extent that the bathhouse burns down from the heat of her passion, and a revolutionary soldier—who from far away smells the sexual desire emanating from Gertrudis' skin—rides into the ranch and carries her off naked on his horse. Tita and Pedro witness this passionate encounter, wishing that they were in place of the couple already copulating as they ride away, but Pedro lacks the courage to defy Mama Elena. A moment later, Tita is faced with the necessity of informing her mother that Gertrudis is missing and the bathhouse is on fire. Rather than tell her mother the truth about this event, as she perceives it, Tita decides to tailor the explanation to suit her needs and taste. First of all, she cannot admit to Mama Elena that her own bottled up passion impelled Gertrudis to run away with a revolutionary soldier. Furthermore, being on the side of the rebels, she favors the revolutionary soldiers against those of the federal army and would therefore like to spare the reputation of the former. The comic dimension of Tita's dilemma links Tita and Chencha as victims of a repressive lifestyle that curbs their speech.11 Like all picaresque characters, Chencha lies to survive in a hostile world, that is, in order to avoid the wrath of her employer, but she also tells stories for the thrill of it. In this capacity, the vivacious Chencha favors horror stories. When Tita was a child, Chencha would frighten her with "stories of La Llorona, the witch who sucks little children's blood, or the boogeyman, or other scary stories." Later on, she would describe "hangings, shootings, dismember-

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ments, decapitations, and even sacrifices in which the victim's heart was cut out—in the heat of battle!" (68). Chencha's technique for concocting stories as protection against her employer is described in detail when she is forced to devise an explanation for meeting Tita against Mama Elena's orders: Nervous, she twisted her rebozo around and around, trying to squeeze out the best of her lies for this situation. It never failed. When the rebozo was turned a hundred times, a tale that fit the occasion always came to her. For her, lying was a survival skill that she had picked up as soon as she had arrived at the ranch. (127)12 In Mama Elena's household, both Tita and Chencha live as second-class subjects forced to speak a "minor" language, to borrow Deleuze and Guattari's term, since their language is shaped by a dominating ethos they can only partially change from within. In a tight spot, Tita adopts Chencha's mode of survival as she finds herself omitting her perceived role in Gertrudi's disappearance. She informs Mama Elena that federal rather than the revolutionary soldiers with whom she identifies had "swooped down on the ranch, set fire to the bathroom, and kidnapped Gertrudis" (58). That Mama Elena uncharacteristically swallows this story—a milder version of the disappearance of Garcia Marquez's Remedios in One Hundred Years of Solitude, where magic, like Tita's cooking, represents a dimension of Latin American reality—can only mean that she prefers this version to the scandalous truth. For Tita this success is a milestone. From the afternoon in which she prepares the aphrodisiac rose sauce, watches her sister run off with a daring soldier, and lies to Mama Elena for the first time, Tita begins to seek new and more effective channels of self-expression. That very night she begins to write the cookbook/diary that, in the novel's fictional world, is credited with providing the basis of Tita's story as told by her niece many years later. Her first entry, which describes the preparation of "quails in rose petals," concludes with the terse observation that "[t]oday while we were eating this dish, Gertrudis ran away" (60). From this day onward, Tita dares to transform old recipes and invent new ones specifically in order to interact passionately with Pedro. Cooking becomes a full-fledged creative outlet and her primary means of communicating with him. It takes Tita a long time to confront her mother face to face, and even when she finally does so, the cumulative years of fear and self-repression lead her to a nervous breakdown. From this state, Dr. Brown patiently nurses her back to health. To do so, he relies to a great extent on the wisdom and tales of his Kikapu grandmother, whose "match theory" (below) comes in handy when he wishes to speak obliquely about the state of Tita's psyche.

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As I have done in previous chapters when it was possible to transcribe an embedded story in its entirety, here too, I isolated the core of John Brown's tale from its dramatized context and narratorial comments in order to analyze the story's surrounding interaction in relation to the framing novel. In terms of length and beauty, this tale is the most substantial among those embedded in Like Water for Chocolate. My grandmother had a very interesting theory; she said that each of us is born with a box of matches inside us but we can't strike them all by ourselves [. . . ] we need oxygen and a candle to help. In this case, the oxygen, for example, would come from the breath of the person you love; the candle could be any kind of food, music, caress, word, or sound that engenders the explosion that lights one of the matches. For a moment we are dazzled by an intense emotion. A pleasant warmth grows within us, fading slowly as time goes by, until a new explosion comes along to revive it. Each person has to discover what will set off those explosions in order to live, since the combustion that occurs when one of them is ignited is what nourishes the soul. That fire, in short, is its food. If one doesn't find out in time what will set off these explosions, the box of matches dampens, and not a single match will ever be lighted. If that happens, the soul flees from the body and goes to wander among the deepest shades, trying in vain to find food to nourish itself, unaware that only the body it left behind, cold and defenseless, is capable of providing that food [ . . . ] There are many ways to dry out a box of damp matches [. . . ] You must of course take care to light the matches one at a time. If a powerful emotion should ignite them all at once they would produce a splendor so dazzling that it would illuminate far beyond what we can normally see; and then a brilliant tunnel would appear before our eyes, revealing the path we forgot the moment we were born, and summoning us to regain the divine origin we had lost. The soul ever longs to return to the place from which it came, leaving the body lifeless. . . . (115-17) John Brown relates this exemplary story to Tita as they sit in his laboratory, a setting that evokes John's childhood and adolescence in his grandmother's medicinal laboratory and Tita's years of apprenticeship with Nacha in the kitchen. Tita—who at the time of the telling of this story is in a state of shock caused by the death of her nephew and the ensuing quarrel with her mother—remains silent during the entire scene. She had uttered no word, in fact, since Dr. Brown brought her to his own house instead of to a lunatic asylum as Mama Elena requested.13 John Brown's story is not a one-sided narration, though, for it is inspired by Tita's predicament and innermost feelings and it is accompanied in the text by a

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description of her silent thoughts. Tita regains her mental health through contact with this caring man. Inspired by the suggestive metaphors implicit in stories such as the tale of the matches, she learns to dissociate her will and needs from those of her mother. John Brown's metaphorical tale encapsulates the novel's entire plot. Like the phosphorus that waits for oxygen and heat to kindle it, Tita waits for the consummation of her passion to free her as an individual and as a woman. Although the novel's title refers explicitly to a state of anger rather than sexual passion—"Tita was literally 'like water for chocolate,' she was on the verge of boiling over. How irritable she was!" (151)—one can also equate the image of water about to boil over with Tita's imminent sexuality. Dr. Brown expresses this idea in terms of a match ready and meant to be kindled. The match's potential radiance can be dampened, though, as Tita's life has been by Mama Elena's sadistic selfishness. Tita recognizes her own situation in Dr. Brown's tale and in his oblique explanations she finds the beginnings of a solution to her problems. Soon she is strong enough to detach herself physically and mentally from Mama Elena's stifling influence. For the first time in her life, Tita is able to make (and later change) decisions regarding her future. Eventually she gives free reign to her passion for Pedro, who is not mentioned explicitly in the initial context of John Brown's tale but is evidently the subject of Tita's inner admission that "the saddest thing was that she knew what set off her explosions, but each time she had managed to light a match, it had persistently been blown out" (116). However, right after the storytelling episode with John Brown, Tita wonders whether the gentle North American doctor could also be her destined detonator. In subsequent months she explores this possibility, but as in traditional romance, at the end she returns to her first love. After both Mama Elena and Rosaura die, Pedro and Tita are finally free to make love to each other in an unrestrained manner. But Pedro's excitement is so overwhelming that he expires in Tita's arms before she realizes that she should have warned him of the match-like properties of strong emotions. She should have told him the match story just as John Brown had once told it to her. In facts, moments prior to Pedro's death, Tita prevents her own demise thanks to a timely recollection of Dr. Brown's words. His tale comes back to her like a prophecy: 'If a strong emotion suddenly lights all the candles we carry inside ourselves, it creates a brightness that shines far beyond our normal vision and then a splendid tunnel appears that shows us the way that we forgot when we were born and calls us to recover our lost divine origin. The soul longs to return to the place it came from, leaving the body lifeless.' Tita checked her passion [. . . ] She didn't want to die. She wanted to explore these emotions many more times. This was just the beginning. (244)

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Unfortunately, Tita's foresight arrives too late to prevent the death of her lover. Tita never marries, and despite her extraordinary nurturing talents, she never gives birth to a child of her own. Because of this, it is possible to argue that a distorted version of Mama Elena's cruel script for her youngest daughter's destiny ultimately prevails. Yet although Tita is unable to fully break away from the script that her mother had imposed on her, she at least manages to spare her niece from further perpetration of this inhuman tradition. Tita herself might have eloped with Pedro if they had been more courageous and less conventional, and even after Rosaura's death they might have lived happily ever after if she had warned him in time of the dangerous properties of stifled emotions. Tita's relationship with Pedro, however, as well as her relationship with her mother, is characterized by what she does not say. Her silence comes from social correctness, to be sure, but a social correctness mixed with fear and trauma rather than the polite disapproval projected through the silence of Marlow's audience in Lord Jim, as we saw in the previous chapter. Tita never shares the match story with Pedro, and although when Gertrudis runs off she almost begs him to run away with her, she never actually suggests it. Instead, "[t]he words formed a lump in her throat and were choked one after another as they tried to escape" (57). The curbed speech imposed by her rapacious mother even suffuses snatched chances of potential verbal intercourse with the would-be-lover who time and again opts for the safe and outwardly respectable road that enables the autocrat to maintain control. 14 As we have seen, immediately after Gertrudis' disappearance and Tita's stifled cry for life, Tita is able to tell her mother a Chencha type of story about Gertrudis's disappearance. Yet she entirely ceases to speak when, after years upon years of repressing clever retorts to her mother's orders, she finally rebels by blaming Mama Elena for the death of Pedro and Rosaura's son. Although during this confrontation Mama Elena hits her daughter so violently that Tita's nose breaks, this time Tita retreats into a silence stemming from rebellion rather than submissiveness. She runs up to the pigeon house, where John Brown finds her a day later "naked, her nose broken, her whole body covered with pigeon droppings" (100). This is the lowest point in Tita's trajectory toward freedom and self-expression. Weeks later, after he has told her the match story, Dr. Brown asks his patient to write down her reasons for not speaking. Tita writes "Because I don't want to," and with this bold declaration, inscribed with phosphorus on the wall, she takes "her first step towards freedom" (117). Paradoxically, although Tita's cooking represents her most authentic channel of communication, her lack of self-expression likewise manifests itself in the magical properties of the food she prepares. Since she is denied an opinion and is furthermore compelled to live under the same roof as her would-be lover and his lawful wife, who is Tita's own sister, she is

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obliged to block her emotions in order to cope with this unnatural situation. The stifled emotions nonetheless find their way into the meals she prepares, affecting others with the feelings Tita tries to suppress. The wedding guests suffer intense nostalgia (and vomit profusely) when they taste Rosaura's wedding cake; the aphrodisiac effect of the quail in rose petals stimulates Gertrudis as we have noted; the smoked sausages, whose preparation is interrupted by the quarrel between Tita and her mother, become infested with worms. These manifestations of Tita's desires flow out of her and map her private story. Her identity and social relations subsequently develop through awareness of other forms of communication, many of which are stories or styles of storytelling she learns from those who surround her. Like Water for Chocolate is built from various interlocking communicative options, all of which Tita internalizes and transforms in a variety of ways. Recalling the match story one last time, she actually swallows a box of matches in a supreme fusion of recipe, plot, embedded storytelling, and myth. Although the recipe for matches is the only one not involving food, at the end of the novel Tita actually consumes Dr. Brown's matches to provoke a supernatural explosion that—Romeo and Juliet style—allows her to join her lover in death, if not in life. Tita's adaptation of alternative scripts and stories corresponds to the framing novel's overall structure and style. Aside from parceling plot through recipes, Like Water for Chocolate parodies romance, handbooks for correct manners, and women's magazines that were particularly popular in Mexico during the pre-Revolutionary period. Esquivel explained in an interview that the "novelas de entregas"—a women's magazine which includes serialized sentimental romances, recipes, and home remedies—originally inspired her to employ a multigeneric and serialized structure (Orgambides 2-3). Like Water for Chocolate further reconfigures itself against the influential style of magic realism, which, especially since the publication in 1967 of Garcia Marquez' One Hundred Years of Solitude, has been pervasive not only in Latin America but throughout the postcolonial world.15 A "magical supplement to realism may have flourished in Latin America not only because it suits the climate there, as Ale jo Carpentier has argued in his well-known essay on lo real maravilloso, but also because in dismantling the imported code of realism 'proper' it enabled a broader transculturation process to take place, a process within which postcolonial Latin American literature established its identity" (Faris 165). Emerging in tandem with postmodern fiction, magic realism encompasses postcolonial narratives that carry "a residuum of resistance toward the imperial center and to its totalizing systems of generic classification" (Slemon 408). The intimate connection between postmodern and postcolonial attitudes in this narrative style resides to a great extent in its ability to fuse

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simultaneous versions of life, one traditional and one official, none of which are assigned an upper hand. While Kristine Ibsen and Kathleen Glenn view Esquivei's style as a feminist subversion of magic realism, George McMurray dismisses it as a mere imitation of Garcia Marquez. I think that Esquivel does not parody magic realism as much as she adapts it to traditionally feminine areas such as the kitchen, laundry, knitting, diary, and cookbook. Once Esquivel decided to follow the pattern of women's magazines featuring recipes and romance in "monthly" installments, the possibility of integrating plot and recipes through the use of magical occurrences becomes a strategic, self-conscious, and playfully eclectic gesture.16 Like Water for Chocolate's combination of "high" and "low" genres characterizes the novel at every age, but it also reflects an end of the millennium cultural and aesthetic tendency to privilege and foreground democratic eclecticism in all areas of art, society and politics (Lillo and Sarfati-Arnaud 479). The uniform tone of voice with which magic realism yokes history and fantasy lends itself well to Esquivei's combination of romance, history, and recipes, presented jointly as if there were nothing unusual in such a mixture of genres. Although I cannot say that the other day I took for granted my search for a chilaquiles recipe among the pages of Like Water for Chocolate, it is truly possible to read this novel, write about it, and eat from it. The extra thrill of preparing a dish out of a novel rather than from a mere recipe book thus flavors the "subversive" delight of transporting this narrative to one's kitchen and palate. Each interactive fiction examined in the previous pages evokes an assessment of aesthetic and social stakes refashioned over and over again in the course of the novel's history as a genre. Cervantes offers us a hodgepodge of narrative options, which we have approached through Sancho and Don Quixote's arguments over the content, presentation, and limitations of the tales each of them invents. After much haggling, Sancho and Don Quixote learn to adjust their expectations to each other's make-believe strategies. Sterne decides to play with the novel as an object, attacking all restrictions on the reader's imagination and the writer's presentation of a fictional life. Austen's and Dickens' storytelling scenes function as metafictional commentary that redraws the relationship between romance and a consensual portrayal of a familiar world. Joseph Conrad questions this scheme, challenging its reliability by admitting an interpretative angle through which the boundaries of history and subjectivity become thinner. This boundary is eroded even further in Yehoshua's Mr. Mani, where the experiences and observations of five consecutive storytellers are deliberately riddled with inescapable gaps. Yet since Mr. Mani is after all a historical novel, the subjective composition of its parts negates the generic premises of its whole. Like Water for Chocolate tells a good old romance, parodied,

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however, in its postcolonial subtext and radicalized by means of an extreme incorporation of alternative genres. How does this account of storytelling options in the history of the novel correspond to our current political and aesthetic vision of the genre? Insofar as postmodern criticism has disregarded genre as such, this study of the novel offers a corrective approach. For it is impossible to discuss interactive fictions without referring to their represented social contexts, yet these sociopolitical properties are bundled up with generic and aesthetic expectations. Genre, which in some ways is no more than a set of conventions mediating every level of a relationship, including storytelling, must play a role in our answers to these questions.

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Notes CHAPTER 1 1. Comparing two ancient writers who claimed to have abjured fiction, J. R. Morgan notes that "Chariton masquerades as an artless historian . . . as reporter of objective fact, not as organizer of a controlled fiction. Heliodorus, on the other hand, subtracts himself from the surface of the text in the cause of immediacy directly experienced, interpreted from within, which, like the present-tense world, can often be understood only partially, provisionally or retrospectively. In both cases the fictionality of the fiction is camouflaged" (Lies and Fiction in the Ancient World 214-15). In modern times, both realist fiction and popular romance continue to downplay their fictionality. Amply documented, the interdependence between realism and romance is analyzed particularly effectively in Harry Levin's The Gates of Horn. For a bibliographical survey of this interdependence, see Michael McKeon's Origins of the English Novel (lit, 423-24, n.3). 2. Narratologists refer to this triple level of narrative embeddedness as a metametadiegetical or hypo-hypodiegetical narrative (Genette 241-45, Bal Narratology 142-49, Rimmon-Kenan 91-3). Embedded storytelling scenes can also be categorized as an extended form of mise en abyme. The most detailed classification of what Andre Gide first called mise en abyme—a concept derived from heraldry where a coat of arms is engraved with repeatedly smaller versions of its own image—can be found in Lucien Dallenbach's Le Recit speculaire. 3. In On Drama: Boundaries of Genre, Borders of Self, Michael Goldman explores generic permeability as an ideological and self-reflexive device in the theater. A model for approaching drama through embedded self-reflexive constructs is suggested by Yael Halevi in "The Potential of the Play within the Play as a Model of Fictionality."

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4. For an intriguing soul-searching decision to employ an historical approach for the study of the novel, see Jeffrey Williams 18-19. 5. Respectively in Ross Chambers, Story and Situation (1984) and Peter Brooks, Reading for the Plot (1984). 6. Brooks later articulated these differences in "The Tale vs. the Novel" (305). 7. Regarding The Canterbury Tales (1387-1400), Paul Strohm suggests that the heightened dramatization of a storytelling situation in this text resulted from Chaucer's sudden loss of a courtly environment for the public reading of his work (65). The Middle English "quitting," a competition that in The Canterbury Tales sweeps up rank, religion, sex, morals, style and diction, is found on a surprisingly self-conscious level in an earlier medieval work, Chretien de Troves' Yvain or Le Chevalier au Lion (twelfth century), where chivalrous knights interpret storytelling as a misguided challenge to action. In this romance Chretien reveals himself as "a dialectician who juxtaposes rather than harmonizes" the strict codes of behavior that were supposed to guide the literary style he created (Hunt 92). 8. See Maria Corti's An Introduction to Literary Semiotics for an insightful examination of processes of literary codification and decodification (115-143). In Kinds of Literature Alastair Fowler attempts an inventory of generic transformations, which he lists as topical invention, combination, aggregation, change of scale, change of function, counter statement, inclusion, selection, and generic mixture. 9. In a study of Tellers and Listeners, Barbara Hardy recognizes that a chronological account of represented storytelling would require an awareness of the "devices proper to certain genres and certain genres typical of certain period." However, to avoid such a generically oriented analysis, she organizes her project according to theme and author, evading a historical approach and emphasizing instead "those forms which all narratives have in common" (xi). Unfortunately, this results in an impressionistic description of every type of exchange between characters, ranging from mere snatches of dialogue to full representations of storytelling. Likewise, in Telling Stories Cohan and Shires blur generic differences between mediums as disparate as film and advertisements, novels and comics, to argue for a postmodern analysis of communication as a vast cultural network. 10. I discuss the novel's terminology and status with more detail in chapters 3 and 4. 11. In The True Story of the Novel Margaret Doody calls for a comprehensive history of the novel that incorporates Graeco-Latin romances within a definition of the genre's origins and characteristics. 12. Most of these theorists build upon Northrop Frye's combinatorial rather than reconfigurational approach to interrelated types of literature. 13. In Before Reading Peter Rabinowitz traces the horizons of expectations that condition real-life readers prior to the narrative moment itself, reminding us again of the sedimented knowledge that separates us from the original context of an aesthetic experience. He gives a wonderful example from the contemporary experience of hearing Beethoven on an early nineteenth-century fortepiano, whose authentic sounds strike us today as being "not-that-of-a-modern-piano." This aspect of our "listening experience was obviously not envisioned by Beethoven" (34). 14. Compared to Robert Alter's Partial Magic, which traces the existence of selfconscious expressions in the history of the novel, my project is in some aspects

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broader and in others more specific. My approach is broader because it deals with multifaceted dynamics of a storytelling event in relation to genre and literary theory, yet it is narrower in that interactive storytelling events represent but one type of metafictionality. 15. Studies of real communication, including storytelling experiences, such as Deborah Tannen's Spoken and Written Language or Dan Ben-Amos' Folklore: Performance and Communication, as well as analyses of narrative performance oriented toward alleged traces of orality such as Marie Maclean's Narrative as Performance, bear little relation to interactive storytelling scenes in the novel because of the extent to which these last become conditioned or "novelized" by their framing genre. (This point will be elaborated further in the next pages.) 16. Although Chambers, Brooks, and Benjamin deal mostly with pre-World War I examples, Benjamin emphasizes a postwar feeling of alienation and fragmentation in his portrayal of the modern storyteller: "With the [First] World War a process began to become apparent which has not halted since then. Was it not noticeable at the end of the war that men returned from the battlefield grown silent—not richer, but poorer in communicable experience?" (84). 17. From the point of view of postcolonial storytelling, Susanne Knaller also observes that Benjamin's "much cited concept of narration proves questionable" (106). 18. According to Milman Parry, oral storytelling exhibits a large number of formulas (groups of words regularly employed to express a specific idea), themes (repeated passages), and unperiodic enjambements, which develop due to the role played by memory and improvisation in this type of performance (summarized by Lord, Epic Singers 26). The singer's sense of his audience influences length of composition, ornamentation, and the use of stock material. Even intertextuality, so to speak, plays a role in the oral performance, for "each individual song must be understood in relation to others in its group" (Lord, The Singer of Tales 25 and 123). In novelized storytelling scenes we only encounter formulaic repetition and a sing-song rhythm when the embedded tale is explicitly rooted in folklore, as happens in Little Dorrit's fairytale and Sancho's story by the watermill. 19. Exceptions are texts offered as a product of their own represented narrative situation: Gide's Les faux monnayeurs, Stein's The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, O'Brien's At-Swim-Two-Birds, etc. 20. For a study of the novel's picaresque dimension, see Walter Reed, An Exemplary History of the Novel: The Quixotic versus the Picaresque. 21. In "The Adventure" Georg Simmel interprets storytelling as adventure, and in "Form of Time and Chronotope in the Novel" Bakhtin discusses the generic portrayal of storytelling as adventure time. 22. In The Rhetoric of Fiction (1961) Wayne Booth addressed literary theory's predilection for an artificial partitioning of fiction's multifaceted dynamics: "Criteria for works, authors, and readers are closely related—so closely that it is impossible to deal with any one of them for very long without touching on the others. Nevertheless . . . critical programs still divide easily, if roughly, according to their emphasis on work, author or reader" (39). In a more recent survey of narrative theories Wallace Martin reaffirms the persistence of this partitioning: "Modern theories of narrative fall into three groups, depending on whether they treat narrative

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as a sequence of events, a discourse produced by a narrator, or a verbal artifact that is organized and endowed with meaning by its readers" (82). 23. See Michael Hancher's "Three Kinds of Intention" for a challenge and expansion of Wimsatt and Beardsley's "intentional fallacy." 24. Gerald Prince in "On Narratology (Past, Present, Future)" gives the most powerful defense of narratology. Andrew Gibson and David Herman, who can be described as postmodern narratologists bent on reevaluating and extending narratological tools developed in the 1970s and 1980s, are currently shifting narratology away from rigid geometrical models to a more interactive theory that makes room for representation and exchange. For an incisive critique of narratological categories and limitations, see Dorrit Cohn's "Signposts of Fictionality," reprinted in The Distinction of Fiction 109-31. 25. In The Open Work Umberto Eco identifies the properties of texts that can only be interpreted by acknowledging a multiplicity of coexistent stylistic patterns and encoded meanings. Barthes' S/Z popularized the opposition of "readerly" works as opposed to "writerly" texts in which the audience must participate to create meaning. On the coexistence of "readerly" and "writerly" properties in embedded storytelling situations, see Ross Chambers 13-14, 23-28, 39-47. 26. When the boycott against intentionality was fiercest, James Phelan's Worlds from Words (1981) bravely argued for a stylistic examination of intentionality regarded as a nonlinguistic literary aspect essential to determine the success of a speech event. "Given a particular speaker with a particular subject and a particular audience on a given occasion, we can still think of numerous different intentions that speaker might try to achieve, each of which will shape his choice of language (and the response of his audience) in quite different ways" (81). Phelan analyzes this dynamic in the context of real authors, particularly James and Dreiser, and their historical situations. 27. Linda Hutcheon calls for a definition of postmodern literature that takes into account its ironic and paradoxical relationship to history. According to Hutcheon's model of "historiographic metafiction," American surfiction and the French New or New New Novel are radical forms of modernism rather than postmodern manifestations that must "problematize narrative representation, even as they invoke it" (40). 28. While Continental Europeans tend to designate Don Quixote, and even Greek or Medieval Romances as the first manifestations of the novel (see Menendez Pidal, Riley, Bakhtin, and Segre), Anglo-American literary critics usually locate the genre's genesis in eighteenth-century England with Defoe, Fielding, and Richardson. This Anglo-American position was of course endorsed most influentially by Ian Watt, although he later corrected its assumptions (see ch. 3, n.2, this book). In The True Story of the Novel, Margaret Anne Doody vehemently challenges the English claim of having invented the genre. She depicts the novel's origins in ancient romance, Boccaccio, Cervantes, and Rabelais. The cultural coordinates of the novel in its early stages are further complicated in Paul Hunter's Before Novels: The Cultural Contexts of Eighteenth-Century English Fiction. CHAPTER 2 1. Keith Whinnom offers an excellent survey of Spain's Golden Age publishing climate in the "The Problem of the 'Best-Seller' in Spanish Golden-Age Literature."

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2. Although most critics allude to the Quixote's simultaneous condemnation and enjoyment of chivalric romance, a specialized discussion of this dilemma can be found in Martin de Riquer's "Cervantes y la caballeresca," Stephen Gilman's "Los inquisidores literarios de Cervantes," and E. C. Riley's "Cervantes: Una cuestion de genero." Within Cervantes' novel Don Quixote and the Canon discuss this very problem in an extended storytelling scene that represents the core of Cervantes' genre theory (Forcione, Cervantes, Aristotle and the Persiles 91-124). 3. For a detailed explanation of the distinctions between author, implied author, and narrator, see Wayne Booth, The Rhetoric of Fiction (74-75), Seymor Chatman, Story and Discourse (147-50), and Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan, Narrative Fiction (87-88). 4. In Don Quixote: An Anatomy of Subversive Discourse, James Parr diagrams the intricate relationship among this novel's narrative frames (19, 32, 72). 5. While critics refer generally to embedded structures in Don Quixote as interpolated tales or fictions, Ruth El Saffar and E. C. Riley, who studied them in depth, developed a specialized terminology. For El Saffar, enacted situations involving Don Quijote are "dramas," while those that stand independently of him are "narrations" or "histories" (Distance and Control 26). Riley classifies the two types respectively as "internal" and "external" episodes (Suma 72-73). 6. See Anne Middleton's "Chaucer's 'New Men'. . . . " for a brilliant account of England's fourteenth-century social background and how changes in society are reflected in The Canterbury Tales. 7. For a detailed analysis of Sancho's folkloric roots, see Maurice Molho's Cervantes: Raices Folkloricas 22, 217-50. 8. Annotated editions of the Quixote define omecillo as hate, enmity, or dislike. Several editors note that in Part I, Ch. 10 Sancho confuses omecillo with homicidio, a word that had just entered the Spanish language. Henceforth, the confusion of omecillo with homicidio becomes part of Sancho's private vocabulary, his idiolect vis-a-vis the reader, and thus it is fitting that the word should appear in his creative tale. (Annotated editions consulted for the preparation of this chapter are listed in the bibliography under Cervantes, and when cited directly, also under the editors' respective names.) 9. For an analysis of Don Quixote as a historical reflection of Spanish attitudes following the Reconquest, see Americo Castro's groundbreaking studies Cervantes y los casticismos Espanoles and Espaha en su historia: Cristianos, Moros y Judios. 10. James Iffland's inspired comparison of Cervantes and Avellaneda, and Alan Trueblood's "La risa en el Quijote y la risa de Don Quijote" emphasize the ideological and formal role of laughter in this novel. 11. In La ambiguedad en el Quijote, Manuel Duran provides a thorough analysis of generic incongruities in the Montesinos episode, which he interprets as brutally antipoetic details seething in Don Quixote's unconsciousness during a dream (212). Analyses of the ambiguities of this central episode at the word and phrase level appear in Hatzfeld (363ff) and Rosenblat (347ff.). 12. Erich Auerbach, in his chapter on Cervantes in Mimesis, conducts a powerful close reading of Sancho's enchantment of Dulcinea (334-58). 13. An excellent review of conflicting critical interpretations surrounding the Montesinos episode is given by Helena Percas de Ponseti. 14. See E. C. Riley's Teoria de la Novela en Cervantes for a summary of the controversy over the value and objectives of fiction in Cervantes' day (138-45).

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15. This endeavor, championed by Ruth El Saffar, can also be observed in E. C. Riley's "Cervantes: Una cuestion de genero" and Alban Forcione's Cervantes, Aristotle and the Persiles, as well as Forcione's complementary Cervantes' Christian Romance. CHAPTER 3 1. Paul Ricoeur's monumental Temps et recit (Time and Narrative), which is not specifically narratological, offers the most thorough examination of the role of time in narrative. 2. In The Origins of the English Novel, Michael McKeon redresses and attempts to explain the conceptual reasons behind Ian Watt's failure to sufficiently consider pre-eighteenth-century and non-English origins of the novel (2-4, 2 7 3 94). Watt himself reconsidered this failure in "Serious Reflections," composed a decade after the appearance of his seminal Rise of the Novel, and in Myths of Modern Individualism: Faust, Don Quixote, Don Juan, Robinson Crusoe (1996). The second chapter of Diana de Armas Wilson's Cervantes, the Novel and the New World addresses at length Cervantes' status (or lack thereof) in Anglo-American and Continental scholarship. 3. The dashes punctuating this exchange—regulating pauses, interruptions, and intonation—exemplify Sterne's widespread use of graphological devices to reinforce the idea of his book as an object and of writing as a idiosyncratic mode of expression that must be molded into specific conventions and expectations. Although the italicization of proper names was common at the time, Sterne's exaggerated use of italics and capital letters, as well as "his carefully broken sentences with their heavy punctuation are aesthetically functional" (Monk, "A Note on the Text" xxi). 4. On the pastoral as a storytelling genre, see Paul Alpers' What is Pastoral? 5. "Then Denise began to rub the wound with her flannel, first with one finger, then with two, with three, with four, with the entire hand" (my translation). 6. An analysis of the role of gesture in this scene, as well as a further comparison of Diderot and Sterne, is given in Martin Price's "Sterne: Art and Nature." 7. For an extended discussion of the role of the reader in Tristram Shandy, see Howard Anderson's "Tristram Shandy and the Reader's Imagination" and John Preston's The Created Self: The Reader's Role in Eighteenth Century Fiction. 8. Robert Alter's Fielding and the Nature of the Novel and his sections on Fielding in Partial Magic: The Novel as a Self-Conscious Genre constitute the most influential discussion of metafictionality in the work of this author. 9. An etymological survey of the term novel appears in Edith Kern's outstanding essay "The Romance of Novel/Novella." 10. According to Watt, Fielding's contribution to the rise of the novel rests on his "realism of assessment," which differs from the "formal realism" of details and individuals achieved by Defoe and Richardson. A lucid description of the problems with this division and an account of Watt's influence on the way we read and interpret novels can be found in Daniel Schwarz's The Humanistic Heritage (99117), which analyzes a series of theories of the novel. 11. See, for example, Douglas Brooks, "The Interpolated Tales in Joseph Andrews Again"; Leon V. Driskell, "Interpolated Tales in Joseph Andrews and Don Quixote"; Paul Hunter, Before Novels (47-52); Manuel Schonhorn, "Fielding's Digressive-Parodic Artistry: Tom Jones and The Man of the Hill"; and Howard

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Weinbrot, "Chastity and Interpolation: Two Aspects of Joseph Andrews." Jeffrey Williams' perspicacious analysis subsumes various critical approaches to Fielding's interpolations (82-98). 12. Paul Hunter notes that this behavior might be a parody of the " 'Lord of the Hill' who prepared a refuge for sojourners in The Pilgrim's Progress . . . " ("Response" 141, n.8). 13. James Watt suspends the connection between The Castle of Otranto and subsequent Gothic romances commonly credited to its influence. He contends that the frivolity of Walpole's novella is intrinsic to its author's cultural vision as set forth in all his enterprises, be they political, antiquarian, or literary, and that the gothic novel derives from a romance tradition at odds with Walpole's playful defiance of Enlightened thought. 14. For more detailed connotations of the term "gothic," see Longueil, "The Word 'Gothic' in Eighteenth Century Criticism." 15. On the influence and subsequent incarnations of the Gothic, see Ian Duncan, Modern Romance and Transformations of the Novel: The Gothic, Scott, Dickens; J.M.S. Tomkins, The Work of Mrs. Radcliffe and Its Influence on Later Writers; and David Punter, The Literature of Terror: A History of Gothic Fictions from 1765 to the Present Day. 16. Mary Lascelles has traced what Austen read and how it influenced her ( 4 1 83). Frank Bradbrook in Jane Austen and her Predecessors pinpoints Austen's debt to Charlotte Lennox (90-92). In Northanger Abbey Austen refers to a number of popular gothic novels which, until re-discovered by Michael Sadleir, were erroneously assumed to have been invented by Austen. 17. Identifying gender differences within the gothic, Maggie Kilgour argues, however, that whereas the male satanic character "is so extremely alienated that he cannot be integrated into society," the female gothic, which invites us to safely indulge our imaginations, "works to eliminate conflict and radical discontinuity" (37-38). Austen's work, exhibiting gothic patterns where the heroine's imagination at first transcends a familiar environment but at the end is circumscribed by it, depicts a female development that can be traced across periods and genres. This general connection between gender and genre has been mapped out, among others, by Mary Eagleton in "Genre and Gender" and Lidia Curti in Female Stories, Female Bodies: Narrative, Identity and Representation. 18. Sir Walter Scott noted the disappointment felt by readers when Radcliffe's central mysteries are explained away through trivial details at the end of each novel (Lives of the Novelists 232-36). 19. For a comprehensive treatment of Austen's narratorial irony, see Mudrick, Jane Austen: Irony as Defense and Discontinuty. CHAPTER 4 1. Edith Kern's outstanding essay on "The Romance of Novel/Novella" traces the etymological and generic connection between the novel and romance. A nutshell comparison of realism and romance can be found in Gillian Beer's The Romance (74-76), but the best-sustained comparison of these constructs appears in Harry Levin's The Gates of Horn. F.M.J. Hemmings devotes two sections of The Age of Realism to a discussion of the residues of romance in Balzac and Flaubert, two of the most paradigmatic realists. Despite his intrusive narrator, Erich Auerbach's tel-

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ological overview of realism identifies Stendhal's novels as the crowning achievement of a realist technique. 2. A summary of Howells' attacks on romanticism appears in S. Foster's "W. D. Howells: The Rise of Silas Lapham." 3. Examining the influence of The Arabian Nights on young Dickens, Ian Duncan maps the relationship between Dickens' literary background and the progression of his fiction (16, 210 and passim). 4. For instance, a few chapters after the storytelling scene, when Amy is in the presence of Arthur's mother, for whom she does light housework, she "stood faltering. Perhaps some momentary recollection of the story of the Princess may have been in her mind" (391, my italics). 5. For an extended analysis of "Phiz's" illustrations, see Q. D. Leavis' "The Dickens Illustrations: Their Function" in Dickens the Novelist 332-71. 6. Little Dorrit's propensity to tell white lies is discussed by Janice Carlisle in "Little Dorrit: Necessary Fictions." Carlisle pays considerable attention to the delicate interchange between Amy, Arthur, and Maggy in chapter 32, as well as to Amy's Princess tale, as will be noted further on. The subject of deception in this novel is analyzed in more general terms in Charlotte Rotkin's Deception in Dickens' Little Dorrit. 7. Although the recurrent phrase and she looked at the tiny woman and the tiny woman looked at her alerts us to this focalization, it actually functions more as a refrain or formula that gives the story an air of orality. From the point of view of the fictional world, the tale is indeed an oral storytelling event, but as was explained in chapter 1, it is entirely novelized by the role it plays in the framing novel. (For an extended discussion of the technique of "focalization," see RimmonKenan 70-85.) 8. Here it is also appropriate to recall that Dickens changed the novel's original title from "Nobody's Fault" to Little Dorrit (Butt and Tillotson 223), thus placing more weight on the character and behavior of the heroine. 9. In general Dickens was prone to happy endings. Even when he originally did not write one, as in the case of Great Expectations, it was not very difficult for Bulwer Lytton to convince him to change Pip's love disappointment to a chance of reciprocation from Estella. Many of Dickens' novels end with a description of the success and happiness enjoyed by the principal (good) characters after the plot's resolution. Uncharacteristically, however, Little Dorrit concludes with no such comforting glimpse into the future. For a discussion of Dickens' endings, see John Forster (289) and Hillis Miller (Charles Dickens 278).

CHAPTER 5 1. General statements about the connection between realism and Victorian culture expressed in the following introductory paragraphs will be grounded within their appropriate scholarly context in the third section of this chapter. I remit the reader to the previous chapter for a distinction between mainstream realist novels and what is sometimes regarded as realism's fringe manifestations in England. 2. The habitual nature of Marlow's tale, pinned down to a single instance, is discussed by Ian Watt (Conrad in the Nineteenth Century 296) and Jakob Lothe (145-48).

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3. The compiled news reports of the Jeddah incident followed by an analysis of Conrad's alterations are presented comprehensively in Norman Sherry's Conrad's Eastern World (41-68, 299-311). 4. For an extended discussion of Conrad's postcolonial position, see Michael Sprinker's "Fiction and Ideology: Lord Jim and the Problem of Literary History," which undertakes an incisive comparison between the position that Ralph Rader assigns Lord Jim within the history of the English novel and Fredric Jameson's problematization of Conrad's colonial/postcolonial paradigm. 5. The members of Marlow's audience in Heart of Darkness remain likewise unnamed, yet their professional positions—director, lawyer, accountant, ship captain—identify them as the managerial forces of the British empire. Jeffrey Williams reads this professionalization as a late nineteenth-century marketing of literary and epistemological enterprises (176-83). 6. J. Hillis Miller pronounces this imitation of idiolects "somewhat suspect"— as he does the entire interpretative enterprise, though (Fiction and Repetition 29). Arno Heller analyzes the various accents and languages of Lord Jim as satire directed against Marlow (47-60). 7. Interpretations of Conrad's narration from the point of view of Benjamin's "The Storyteller" can be found in Said (The World, the Text, and the Critic lOlff.), Conroy (90), and Goetsch (179-80). See also Peter Brooks, "The Storyteller." All of these positions essentially agree with Benjamin's assessment. 8. An extended analogy between Conrad's and Coleridge's narrators has been traced by M. S. Macouski in Failed Authors: The Rhetoric of Romantic Colloquy, Coleridge to Conrad. Diss., University of California, 1983. 9. Regarding Conrad's familiarity with Nietzsche's ideas, see Edward Said's "Conrad and Nietzsche" and Daphna Erdinast-Vulcan, Joseph Conrad and the Modern Temper (16-17). 10. Observing that there is no ontologically "fixed" level in a work of fiction from which to define a "meta" level, Jeffrey Williams rejects the term metafiction as defined by Waugh and Hutcheon (8). 11. Throughout this chapter, I am indebted to Elizabeth Ermarth's view of "consensus" as an ideological concept defining the underpinnings of realism. 12. Much has been written on Conrad's attitude toward language. In particular, see Bolton, "The Role of Language in Lord Jim"; Berman, Joseph Conrad: Writing as Rescue; Conroy, Modernism and Authority; Fogel, Coercion to Speak: Conrad's Poetics of Dialogue; and Said, "Conrad: The Presentation of Narrative" in The World, the Text, and the Critic (90-110). 13. Nonetheless, Fredric Jameson and Terry Eagleton regard postmodernism as an essentially nostalgic mode, a view that Hutcheon strongly contests. For Hutcheon, postmodernism "has been rethinking modernism's purist break with history. This is not a nostalgic return; it is a critical revisiting, an ironic dialogue with the past of both art and society . . . " "[I]f nostalgia connotes evasion of the present, idealization of a (fantasy) past, or a recovery of that past as edenic, then the postmodernist ironic rethinking of history is definitely not nostalgic" (4, 39). CHAPTER 6 1. Alan Wilde considers Virginia Woolf's last novel, Between the Acts, as "the most impressive of postmodern novels" (19).

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2. Adina Abadi analyzes this aspect in "Conversational Analysis in Mr. Mani: A Genre of Dialogue which Hides One of Its Sides" [Hebrew]. 3. A brief survey of the idiosyncrasies of each of Mr. Mani's storytellers is given by Dan Meiron, 161-64. 4. Yehoshua described his relationship with his father, as well as with his father's books, in "Searching for a Lost Sephardic Time," The Wall and the Mountain [Hebrew] (Tel Aviv: Zmora Beitan, 1989), 228-40. 5. Ziva Shamir observes that Mr. Mani's paradoxical rule is that all its rules have exceptions. Yet this does not result in a loose and free structure, but rather in a novel in which all opposites have been carefully designed to fit a very tight and sophisticated structure (140). 6. Because of this feature Arnold Band speaks of an "archaeology of selfconsciousness" (186) and Gershon Shaked of a "puzzle" that the reader feels compelled to solve (47). 7. Although among the five storytellers three are Ashkenazic Jews and the fourth a Nazi soldier, all of them are focused on the Sephardic Manis and note differences in ethnic attitudes and customs that strike them as strange or picturesque. (In grossly general terms, Sephardic Jews are Middle Eastern and Mediterranean; Ashkenazic Jews come primarily from Germany, Poland and Russia.) For an analysis of Mr. Mani's Sephardic dimension, see Yael Feldman's "Return to Genesis" [Hebrew] and Alan Mintz's "Constructing and Deconstructing the Mystique of Sephardism in Yehoshua's Mr. Mani and Journey to the End of the Millennium." 8. Cecilia Lawless describes Like Water for Chocolate as an "unclassifiable work, which simultaneously breaks and brings together boundaries of genre as to concoct something new in Mexican literature. Como agua . . . is a mixture of recipe book, how-to household book, sociopolitical and historical document of the Mexican Revolution, psychological study of male/female as well as mother/daughter relations, and exploration into gothic realms, and ultimately, an extremely readable novel" (261). 9. Like Water for Chocolate's historical setting at the time of the 1910 Revolution, which was fought against Porfirio Diaz's thirty-year dictatorship, corresponds symbolically to Tita and Gertrudis's rebellions against the yoke of their mother (Ibsen 139). Another nineteenth-century system of values displaced in the course of this novel is Carreno's handbook for correct manners. On this theme, see Salvador A. Oropesa, "Como agua para chocolate de Laura Esquivel como lectura del Manual de urbanidad y buenas costumbres de Manuel Antonio Carrefio." 10. Debra Castillo's Talking Back: Toward a Latin American Feminist Literary Criticism employs culinary and housekeeping symbols as a critical discourse that expresses one dimension of autochthonous Latin American feminist theory. (See especially the opening and closing sections of this inspiring project.) 11. Although Tita constantly stifles her objections to Mama Elena's decisions, her mother punishes even the potential retorts. For instance, when forced to castrate fowls for a rare dish to grace Rosaura's wedding, Tita longs to scream that "when they had chosen something to be neutered, they'd made a mistake, they should have chosen her. At least then there would be some justification for not allowing her to marry and giving Rosaura her place beside the man she loved. Mama Elena read

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the look on her face and flew into a rage, giving Tita a tremendous slap that left her rolling in the dirt" (27). 12. As Kathleen Glenn notes in relation to this tale, "Chencha never manages to tell Mama Elena the tear-jerker of a story she has concocted about Tita because before she can do so, bandits attack the ranch, rape Chencha, and while Mama Elena is trying to defend her honor deliver such a blow to her spine that she is left paralyzed from the waist down" (43). 13. Antonio Marquet notes that Tita is a modern Cinderella complete with Nacha in the role of fairy godmother (62). Building upon Marquet's observation, Kathleen Glenn discusses Esquivei's parodic use of fairytales (44-45). 14. In one of his most famous essays, still enormously influential although it has fallen out of favor in recent years, Octavio Paz describes Mexican character as an unhealable wound resulting from the foundational union between a violating conqueror, Hernan Cortes, and a submissive collaborator, La Malinche. For a feminist response to Paz's position see Debra Castillo, 4-5. 15. Irlemar Chiampi, Graciela Ricci, and Maria-Elena Angulo interpret magic realism specifically as a Latin American phenomenon. For an international approach to the genre, see Zamora and Faris's anthology, Magic Realism: Theory, History, Community. 16. Like Water for Chocolate's status as an international bestseller and blockbuster film (directed by Manuel Arau) can be compared to what Kwame Appiah theorizes as a neotraditional style produced by a postcolonial artist with an eye for a Western market. Appiah builds here on James Baldwin's description of an African wood sculpture in which the influence of the Western world is evident in the modern clothes and bicycle sported by a traditional Yoruba merchant, who is in turn the subject of a Yoruba artifact geared toward Western consumption (885). Esquivei's adaptation of magic realism to a cast of multicultural characters and a plot symbolizing Mexico's continuing sociopolitical struggle is likewise cast with an eye "to the market." Extending this perspective to an analysis of African fiction, Appiah concludes that "what we have here is not postmodernism but postmodemization; not an aesthetics but a politics" (893).

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Bibliography Abadi, Adina. "Conversational Analysis in Mr. Mani: A Genre of Dialogue which Hides One of Its Sides." [Hebrew] In the Opposite Direction. Ed. Nitza BenDov. Tel Aviv: HaKibbutz HaMeuchad, 1995. 90-108. Abrams, M. H. The Mirror and the Lamp. New York: Norton, 1969. Achebe, Chinua. "An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad's Heart of Darkness." Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness. Ed. Robert Kimbrough. New York: Norton, 1988. 251-62. Alarcos Garcia, E. "Cervantes y Boccaccio." Estudios Cervantinos 2 (1950): 3 5 48. Aleman, Mateo. Vida y hechos del picaro Guzman de Alfarache. Paris: Baudry, 1847 (1st pub. 1599). Alpers, Paul. What is Pastoral? Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996. Alter, Robert. Motives for Fiction. Cambridge, Mass, and London: Harvard University Press, 1984. . Partial Magic: The Novel as a Self-Conscious Genre. Berkeley: University California Press, 1975. . Fielding and the Nature of the Novel. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1968. Anderson, Howard. "Tristram Shandy and the Reader's Imagination." PMLA 86 (1971): 966-73. Angulo, Maria-Elena. Magic Realism: Social Context and Discourse. New York: Garland, 1995. Appiah, Kwame Anthony. "Is the Post- in Postmodernism the Post- in Postcolonial?" Theory of the Novel: A Historical Approach. Ed. M. McKeon. Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000. 882-99. Auerbach, Erich. Mimesis. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1974. Austen, Jane. Northanger Abbey. Ed. John Davie. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990 (1st pub. 1818).

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Index Abadi, Adina, 166 n.2 Abrams, M. H., 16 Achebe, Chinua, 107 Aenead, The, 5 Aethiopica (Heliodorus), 26 Affective fallacy, 16 Alarcos, Garcia E., 25 Alpers, Paul, 162 n.4 Alter, Robert, 57, 79, 80-81, 158 n.14, 162 n.8 Amadis of Gaul (Montalvo), 5 Anderson, Howard, 62, 162 n.7 Angulo, Maria-Elena, 167 n.15 Appiah, Kwame, 167 n.16 Arabian Nights, 2-4, 6, 85, 88, 164 n.3 Aristotle, 26, 32, 70 Auerbach, Erich, 161 n.12, 164 n.l Austen, Jane, xiii, 14, 64, 70-78, 82, 154, 163 nn.16, 17, 19. See also Northanger Abbey Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, The (Stein), 124, 131 Avalle-Arce, J. B., 39, 42, 47 Avellaneda, Alonso F. de, 5, 22, 23, 24,35 Baines, Jocelyn, 107 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 7, 8, 12, 35, 64, 130, 159 n.21

Bal, Mieke, 157 n.2 Balzac, Honore de, 11, 78, 82, 104, 163 n.l Band, Arnold, 135, 136, 166 n.6 Banfield, Ann, 12 Barth, John, 131, 135 Barthes, Roland, 11, 132, 160 n.25 Barza, Steven, 118 Batchelor, John, 123 Becker, George, 83 Beer, Gillian, 82, 163 n.l Belinda (Edgeworth), 73 Beloved (Morrison), 131 Ben-Amos, Dan, 159 n.l5 Benjamin, Walter, 11-12, 115, 159 nn.16, 17, 165 n.7 Berman, Jeffrey, 165 n.l2 Bertens, Hans, 134 Between the Acts (Woolf), 130, 165 n.l Bhabha, Homi, 122, 124 Bible, The, 6, 131 Black Prince, The (Murdoch), 131 Bleak House (Dickens), 83, 100, 104 Boccaccio, Giovanni. See Decameron Bolton, W. F., 165 n.12 Booth, Wayne, 16, 18, 56, 60, 159 n.22 Bradbrook, Frank, 163 n.l6

186

Index

Bronte, Charlotte, 104 Bronte, Emily, 104 Brooks, Douglas, 162 n . l l Brooks, Peter, 5, 11, 12, 158 n.6, 165 n.7 Buchanan, Robert, 100 Butt, John, 164 n. 8 Calvino, Italo, 131 Candide (Voltaire), 69 Canterbury Tales, The (Chaucer), 6, 25, 56, 158 n.7, 161 n.5 Cdrcel De Amor (Diego de San Pedro), 34 Carlisle, Janice, 88, 95-96, 99, 164 n.6 Carpentier, Ale jo, 153 Castillo, Debra, 166 nn.10, 14 Castle of Otranto, The (Walpole), 7 1 72, 163 n.13 Castro, Americo, 161 n.9 Cervantes, Miguel de, 11, 27, 43, 48, 64, 162 n.2; influence of, xiii, 5, 15, 62, 66, 73; La Galatea, 48; Novelas ejemplares, 48; Los Trabajos de Persiles y Segismunda, 48. See also Don Quixote Chambers, Ross, 5, 9-10, 11, 81, 160 n.25 Chance (Conrad), 122-23 Chaucer, Geoffrey. See Canterbury Tales, The Chiampi, Irlemar, 167 n.l5 Chivalric romance, 4, 6, 15, 22-23, 25, 34, 40, 72 Clarissa (Richardson), 135 Clemencin, Diego, 31 Close, Anthony, 2 1 , 46, 48 Cohan, Steven, 158 n.9 Cohn, Dorritt, 160 n.24 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 117 Conrad, Joseph, xiii, 103-24, 154; and alleged racism, 107, 118; ambiguous sense of belonging, 107, 122, 124; and generic boundaries, 103, 121, 123-24; and Henry James, 122-23; and Kafka, 124; mistrust of knowledge and language, 124, 135,

165 nn.6, 12; and Woolf, 122. See also Chance; Heart of Darkness; Lord Jim; Nigger of the Narcissus, The Conroy, Mark, 165 nn.7, 12 Cortazar, C. S., 32 Corti, Maria, 158 n.8 Curie, Richard, 123 Curti, Lidia, 163 n . l 7 Cutler, Frances, 121

Daiches, David, 123 Daleski, H. M., 96-97, 107 Dallenbach, Lucien, 157 n.2 David Copperfield (Dickens), 104 Decameron, The (Boccaccio), 6, 25, 56, 63 Defoe, William, 62, 64 Deleuze, Gilles, 124, 149 de Man, Paul, 9, 10 Dickens, Charles, xiii, 2, 14, 15, 64, 81-101, 164 n.3; attitude toward fiction-making, 81, 83-84, 87-88, 101, 106, 120; and generic boundaries, 83, 100, 154. See also Hard Times; Little Dorrit; Old Curiosity Shop, The; Pickwick Papers, The Diderot, Denis, 57, 69, 162 n.6 Don Quixote (Cervantes), 21-49, 125, 130, 161 n.5; character development through embedded storytelling, xiii, 10, 21-22, 36-37, 44-47, 55, 154; dramatic potential of storytelling episode, 13, 47, 69; generic boundaries, 10, 22, 26-27, 31, 34, 37, 40, 67, 161 n . l l ; Gines de Pasamonte's "autobiography," 59-60; imaginative manipulation of reality, 15, 4 1 , 46-47, 52-53, 141, 142; influence of, 5, 15, 53, 63; need to communicate experience, 12; in relation to Avellaneda's spurious version 5, 2 2 24 passim, 35, 161 n.10; scholarship on ambivalence toward chivalric romance, 161 n.2; social and generic arguments between characters, 1, 4, 14, 32, 35-36, 93, 154, 161 n.2;

Index storytelling and social power, 13, 32, 35, 42-48 Doody, Margaret, 158 n . l l , 160 n.28 Doody, Terrence, 114, 115 Drama, 4, 7, 13, 69, 70, 157 n.3 Driskell, Leon, 162 n . l l Duff, David, xi, 4 Duncan, Ian, 163 n . l 5 , 164 n.3 Duran, Manuel, 39, 4 1 , 42, 161 n . l l Eagleton, Mary, 163 n . l 7 Eagleton, Terry, 165 n . l 3 Eco, Umberto, 160 n.25 Edel, Leon, 123 Edgeworth, Maria, 73 El beso de la mujer arana (Puig), 131 El Conde Lucanor (Don Juan Manuel), 32 El Saffar, Ruth, 23, 24, 161 n.5, 162 n.15 Embedded tales, 2, 13, 2 1 , 64, 85, 157 n.2, 160 n.25. See also Narrative embeddedness Emma (Austen), 78 Epic, 5-6, 12, 63, 70 Erdinast-Vulcan, Daphna, 165 n.9 Ermarth, Elizabeth Deeds, 78, 121, 124, 165 n . l l Esquivel, Laura, iv, 131, 135, 145-54. See also Like Water for Chocolate Family saga, 136-37 Faris, Wendy, 153, 167 n.15 Faulkner, William, 121, 137 Faux-Monnayeur's, Les (Gide), 124, 131 Feldman, Yael, 166 n.7 Female Quixote, The (Lennox), 73 Fictionality, 10, 19; in the ancient world, 157 n.l; boundaries between fact and fiction, 2, 14, 68, 79, 8 5 88, 104, 140; and Enlightenment thought in eighteenth-century England, 53, 60, 68-72 passim, 163 n.l3; modernist sense of, 121; nineteenth-century notions of, 80, 84, 86; postmodern sense of, 125-

187

28, 134-35, 137, 146; seventeenthcentury notions of, 22, 25, 48, 161 n.14. See also Neoclassicism Fielding, Henry, xiii, 63-71; boundaries for modern novel, 14, 62, 6 8 70, 71, 82; influence of, 64, 72, 73, 100; moral agenda, 63, 66-67; and novel's nomenclature, 69, 73; use of metafiction, 69, 73, 162 n.8. See also Joseph Andrews; Tom Jones Flaubert, Gustave, 78, 104, 163 n.l Flint, Christopher, 60 Fogel, John, 165 n.12 Folktales, 31-35, 93, 94, 98, 99, 146, 159 n. 18, 161 n.7. See also Gnomic literature Forcione, Alban, 23, 25, 26, 42, 161 n.2, 162 n.15 Ford, Ford Maddox, 121 Forster, E. M., 51 Forster, John, 164 n.9 Foster, S., 164 n.2 Foucault, Michel, 6, 8, 14 Fowler, Alastair, 158 n.8 Framing narrative, in relation to interactive fictions, 2, 17-18, 62, 64; of the Arabian Nights, 5; in Don Quixote compared to storytelling collections, 2 1 , 25. See also Embedded tales Franco, Jean, 131 Freud, Sigmund, 96, 130 Frye, Northrop, 77, 158 n.12 Garnett, Edward, 124 Generic boundaries. See Novel, generic reconfiguration in the Generic reconfiguration, 6, 158 nn.8, 12. See also Novel, generic reconfiguration in the Genette, Gerard, 51, 157 n.2 Genre: and identity politics, xi-xii, 163 n.17; theory of, xi, 4, 19, 81, 155, 157 n.3. See also Novel Gibson, Andrew, 160 n.24 Gibson, Frank, 85 Gide, Andre, 124, 131, 157 n.2 Glenn, Kathleen, 154, 167 nn.12, 13

188

Index

Gnomic literature, 32 Goetsch, Paul, 111, 165 n.7 Golden Ass (Apuleius), 6 Goldman, Michael, 157 n.3 Gosse, Edmund, 80 Gothic novel, 71-78, 163 n . l 3 ; etymology, 72, 163 n.14; influence of, 163 n.15; and gender, 163 n.l7. See also Radcliffe, Ann; Walpole, Horace Great Expectations (Dickens), 104 Greek romance, 6, 26 Guattari, Felix, 124, 149 Gurko, Leo, 107 Guzman de Alfarache (Aleman), 15 Halevi, Yael, 157 n.3 Hancher, Michael, 160 n.23 Hard Times (Dickens), 88-90, 100, 106 Hardy, Barbara, 81, 85, 89, 158 n.9 Hassan, Ihab, 128 Hasta no verte, Jesus mio (Poniatowska), 131 Hatzfeld, Helmut, 161 n . l l Heart of Darkness (Conrad), 107, 122, 124, 165 n.5 Heller, Arno, 165 n.6 Hemmings, F.M.J., 86, 136, 163 n.l Heptameron, The (Marguerite de Navarre), 6 Herman, David, 160 n.24 Hewitt, Douglas, 123 Historical novel. See Novel v. history Historiographic metafiction, 127, 146, 160 n.27 "Hommes-Recits" ("narrativemen"),23, 65, 85 Howells, William Dean, 82, 164 n.2 Hunt, Tony, 158 n.7 Hunter, J. Paul, 59, 62, 65, 67, 160 n.28, 162 n n . l l , 12 Hurston, Zora Neale, 131 Hutcheon, Linda, 18, 19, 127, 130, 131, 134, 146, 160 n.27, 165 nn.10, 13 Ibsen, Kristine, 154, 166 n.9 Iffland, James, 161 n.10

If On a Winter's Night a Traveller (Calvino), 131 Intentional fallacy, 16, 160 n.23 Intentionality, xiv, 16, 18, 160 n.26. See also Intentional fallacy Interactive fictions: abstraction of story's core, 28, 31, 55, 74, 92, 138, 150; audience's role, 17, 25, 64, 65, 103; definition and relevance, xi-xii, 2, 6, 8-11, 13, 19, 81-82, 128, 155; historical scope of, 4-6, 7, 11, 63, 80, 81, 154-55; method for identifying, xii-xiv, 1-4, 6, 17 Itzhaki, Yedidya, 134 Jacques le Fataliste (Diderot), 57, 125 Jakobson, Roman, 6 James, Henry, 7-8, 82; "The Turn of the Screw," 105, 123; and Conrad, 105, 122-23 Jameson, Fredric, 7, 8-9, 113, 131, 165 nn.4, 13 Jane Eyre (Charlotte Bronte), 104 Jauss, Hans Robert, 8 Joseph Andrews (Fielding), 5, 67; interpolated tales in, 64, 65-66, 162 n.ll Joyce, James, 121, 130, 135; A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, 130. See also Ulysses Kafka, Franz, 124 Kellogg, Robert, 7 Kermode, Frank, 136 Kern, Judith, 162 n.9 Kilgour, Maggie, 71, 163 n . l 7 Kinsley, James, 85 Knaller, Susanne, 159 n . l 7 Lara Zavala, Hernan, 40 Lascelles, Mary, 163 n.l6 Lawless, Cecilia, 166 n.8 Lawrence, D. H., 121 Lazarillo de Formes, 26 Leavis, F. R., 73, 99, 123 Leavis, Q. D., 164 n.5 Lennox, Charlotte, 73, 163 n.l6 Lerer, I., 32

Index Lethen, Helmut, 128, 129 Letters (Barth), 131, 135 Levin, Harry, 20, 27, 77, 79, 82, 90, 157 n.l, 163 n.l Levine, George, 73, 74, 82, 120 Like Water for Chocolate (Esquivel), iv, 131, 135, 145-54; generic boundaries in relation to social or ethnic markers, xiv, 147-48; generic reconfiguration, 14-15, 130, 145, 153, 154-55, 166 n.8; and history, 145, 146, 154, 166 n.9; imaginative manipulation of truth, 148, 149; role of recipes and cooking, 146, 147, 148, 149, 154; as romance, 153, 154, 167 n.13; storytelling as manifestation of character, 146-47; storytelling performance as structure of framing novel, 2, 146, 147, 151, 153; storytelling as therapy, 147, 149-51 Lillo, Gaston, 154 Little Dorrit (Dickens), 90-101; dramatic potential of face-to-face interaction, 13, 25, -94; generic boundaries, xiii, 14, 82, 90, 94, 98; generic molds and personal idiosyncrasies, 98; levels of fictionality, 10; need to communicate experience, 12, 90; need to pretend, 88, 90, 164 n.6; relationship between embedded tale and frame, 2, 24, 90, 94, 97, 100; role of audience, 90, 91, 93-94; storytelling performance and plot development, 15, 90, 97 Litz, Walton, 78 Lodge, David, 129 Longueil, Alfred, 163 n.14 Lord, Alfred, 159 n.18 Lord Jim (Conrad), 103-24; audience's response, 108, 116-19, 123, 152; desire to communicate experience, 12, 106, 115, 117, 120-21, 124, 135, 165 n.7; and generic boundaries, 1 4 , 1 0 3 , 1 0 7 , 1 1 3 , 1 1 9 - 2 1 , 1 2 3 24, 128; internalized audience's expectations, 13, 105, 108, 119, 132; narrative (dis)order, 121-22; narra-

189

tor's reliability, 104-5, 109, 115, 120, 123, 165 n.6; and postcolonialism, 165 n.4; and "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner," 117, 165 n.8; storyteller's appeal for altered worldview, xiii, 4, 14, 107, 111, 113-15, 119; storytelling performance as structure of framing novel, 2, 103-4, 115, 120-21, 135; storytelling and social status, 14, 106, 109, 114-15; truth and narrative, 11, 103-6, 123, 124, 135, 154; vulnerable narrator, 105, 113-15, 117, 121 Lothe, Jakob, 116, 118, 164 n.2 Lukacs, Georg, 136 Lyotard, Jean-Francois, 18, 129, 130, 134 Maclean, Marie, 159 n.15 Macouski, M. S., 165 n.8 Madariaga, Salvador de, 42 Magic realism, xiv, 11, 130, 149, 15254, 167 n.15 Manuel, Don Juan, 32 Marquet, Antonio, 167 n . l 3 Marquez, Gabriel Garcia, 131, 149, 153, 154 Martin, Wallace, 8, 159 n.22 Martinez-Bonati, Felix, 2 1 , 24, 26-27, 37 Mayoux, Jean-Jacques, 59 McHale, Brian, 125, 129 McKeon, Michael, xi, 52, 64, 157 n.l, 162 n.2 McMurray, George, 154 Meiron, Dan, 166 n.3 Meisel, Perry, 123, 124 Metafiction, 2, 9, 18, 159 n.14, 165 n.10; in Austen, 78; in Conrad, 120; in Dickens, 81, 83-84, 100; in Fielding, 63; in the nineteenth century, 7 9 84; in relation to romance and realism, 14, 73, 78, 79, 83, 100, 154; in Sterne, 60; in Woolf, 130. See also Historiographic metafiction Mexia, Pero (Silva De Varia Leccion), 38

190

Index

Middleton, Anne, 161 n.6 Midnight's Children (Rushdie), 131 Miller, J. Hillis, 97, 99, 120-21, 164 n.9, 165 n.6 Mimeticism, xii, 8-10, 18 Mintz, Alan, 166 n.7 Mise en abyme, 157 n.2. See also Narrative embeddedness; Self-reflexivity Modernism: and anxiety, 115, 119, 121, 123, 124, 126, 130; and conveyance of experience, 122; and late Victorianism, 103, 119; and narrative endings, 120; in relation to realism and postmodernism, 125-28, 129-30, 135 Molho, Maurice, 32, 35, 161 n.7 Moll Flanders (Defoe), 64 Monk, Samuel Holt, 162 n.3 Morf, Gustaf, 107 Morgan, J. R., 2, 157 n.l Morrison, Toni, 131 Mr. Mani (Yehoshua), 131, 132-45, 154; audience's resistance, 132, 135, 138, 139, 140; denial of interpretative closure, 134, 143-45, 154; fantasy as ingredient of storytelling, 140, 142; generic boundaries and interpersonal relations, xiv, 133-34, 140, 144; generic play, 130, 135; imaginative manipulation of reality, 141-42; internalized audience's expectations, 13, 132, 138, 143; need to communicate experience, 12, 137, 140, 142; reconfiguration of history, 131, 132-37, 143; storytelling and authority, 14, 15, 132, 133, 136, 141; storytelling performance as structure of framing novel, 2, 13233, 135, 143, 144, 154; subjectivity and stylization of storytelling, 14, 133, 134, 136, 140, 143, 144; variations in ethnic patterns of communication, 140, 144, 166 n.7 Mrs. Dalloway (Woolf), 130 Mudrick, Marvin, 163 n.l9 Murdoch, Iris, 131 The Mysteries of Udolpho, The (Radcliffe), 72, 74

Nabokov, Vladimir, 131 Narrative embeddedness, xiv, 16-18, 22, 24, 68, 87, 121, 123, 131, 146 Narratology, 16, 17, 51, 157 n.2, 160 n.24, 161 n.3 Naturalism, 80, 164 n.2 Neoclassicism, 26, 42-43, 48, 70, 72 Nicholas Nickleby (Dickens), 100 Niebla (Unamuno), 131 Nietzsche, Frederic, 119, 165 n.9 Nigger of the Narcissus, The (Conrad), 107, 124 Northanger Abbey (Austen), 72-78, 82, 125, 163 n.16; and generic boundaries, xiii, 2, 14, 72, 74; reassessment of genres correlated to social relations, 76, 77 Novel: death of the, xiii, 20, 131; definition, 7, 8, 2 1 , 26-27, 73, 80; etymology, 63, 69, 80, 162 n.9; origins, 20, 27, 73, 158 n . l l , 160 n.28, 162 n.2; poetics of, xiv, 7, 19-20, 64, 124-28, 155; theory of, xi-xii, 8, 2 6 27, 162 n.10; vs. biography, 10-11, 14, 81, 104; vs. drama, 4, 7, 13, 70; vs. epic, 7, 12-13, 63, 70; vs. short story, 5, 81; vs. supernatural elements, 70-72, 74, 75. See also Novel vs. history; Novel vs. romance Novel, generic reconfiguration in the, xii, 4, 6-8, 13-14, 19, 154-55; eighteenth century, 70, 71-73, 78; modern, 120-24; nineteenth century, 79, 100; postmodern, 129-31, 135, 153-54; in the Quixote, 26-27, 37, 47-48; in relation to historiography, 136; Victorian, 103, 113 Novel, history of the, xi-xii, 7-8, 1920; baroque, 2 1 , 26; comparison between realism, modernism, and postmodernism, 124-28, 129-30, 135, 165 n.l3; debates over the origin of the novel, 160 n.28, 162 n.2; eighteenth century, 52, 60, 63, 64, 69-71, 72; and interactive fictions, 2, 5, 7, 63; nineteenth century, 79, 100-101, 120; Victorian, 103, 105, 120, 164 n.l

Index Novella, 63, 80 Novel vs. history, xiii, 14, 19; Lukacs on Scott's fiction, 136; in the nineteenth century, 79, 104; in postmodern narratives, 130, 131, 132-37, 145, 165 n.13; in the Quixote, 42, 49, 69-70 Novel vs. romance, 14, 163 n.l; in early modernism, 113; in eighteenthcentury England, 63, 69-70, 74; in the nineteenth century, 79, 100; in the postmodern novel, 155; in the Quixote, 22-23, 48-49, 161 n.2 Odyssey, The 5, 6, 12 Old Curiosity Shop, The (Dickens), 8 3-84, 89-90, 100 Oliver Twist (Dickens), 100 One Hundred Years of Solitude (Garcia Marquez), 131, 149, 153 One Thousand and One Nights. See Arabian Nights Orality in storytelling, 11-13, 159 nn.15, 18, 164 n.7 Orgambides, Fernando, 153 Orlando (Woolf), 124, 130 Oropesa, Salvador, 166 n.9 Our Mutual Friend (Dickens), 100 Pale Fire (Nabokov), 131 Palmer, Richard, 136 Pamela (Richardson), 135 Parr, James, 161 n.4 Parry, Milman, 159 n.l8 Pastoral romance, 6, 26, 33, 162 n.4 Paz, Octavio, 167 n.14 Perloff, Marjory, 19 Persuasion (Austen), 78 Phelan, James, 160 n.26 Picaresque novel, 6, 15, 26, 62, 159 n.20; and Tom Jones, 64, 67 Pickwick Papers, The (Dickens), 5, 100; interpolated tales, 85-88 Play within a play, 4, 18, 69, 157 n.3 Poniatowska, Elena, 131 Ponseti, Helena Percas de, 161 n.l3 Postmodernism, xi, xiii, 5, 8, 19-20; and cultural boundaries, 122, 130,

191

131, 146; definition and scope, 12428, 129-31, 134-35; and history, 127, 131, 132-37, 134-37, 146, 160 n.27, 165 n . l 3 ; and playfulness, 124, 127, 130, 134-35, 154; and postcolonialism, 153-54, 167 n.l6; in relation to realism and modernism, 125-28, 129-30, 135, 165 n.13 Pragmatics, 16, 17 Preston, John, 162 n.7 Price, Martin, 162 n.6 Pride and Prejudice (Austen), 78 Prince, Gerald, 160 n.24 Proust, Marcel, 9, 121 Puig, Manuel, 131 Punter, David, 163 n.15 Rabinowitz, Peter, 158 n.13 Radcliffe, Ann, 72, 73, 75-76, 163 n.18 Rader, Ralph, 165 n.4 Ramsey, Roger, 123 Reader-response theory, 16, 17, 158 n.13, 162 n.7 Realism, 2, 5, 165 n . l l ; of "assessment" (Watt), 68, 162 n.10; Austen's domestic, 77-78, 163 n.l7; definitions, 80, 82-83, 120, 125-26, 129; Dickens' imbrication of realism within romance, 100-101; "formal" (Watt), 64, 162 n.10; and nineteenthcentury fictionality, 82, 120; and the novel's agenda in the eighteenth century, 70, 77; and postcolonialism, 153; in relation to romance, 90, 100, 163 n.l; in relation to romance and metafiction, 73, 78, 79-84, 130, 157 n.l; and third-person omniscience, 95, 104-5, 120. See also Naturalism Redmond, Eugene, 107 Reed, Walter, 7, 19, 70, 159 n.20 Reeve, Clara, 79-80 Reid, Ian, 5 Ricci, Graciela, 167 n.15 Richardson, Samuel, 63, 64, 72, 73, 135 Ricoeur, Paul, 162 n.l

192

Index

Riley, E. C , 23-26 passim, 39, 161 nn.5, 14, 162 n.15 "Rime of the Ancient Mariner, The" (Coleridge), 117 Rimmon-Kennan, Shlomith, 52, 53, 157 n.2, 164 n.7 Rodriguez Marin, Francisco, 35 Romance, 2, 7, 15; Cervantes' parody of, 34; definitions, 63, 69-70, 73, 80; Don Quixote's belief in, 38, 40; realism's debt to, 77, 82, 90, 100, 157 n.l, 163 n.l. See also Chivalric romance; Gothic novel; Greek romance; Novel vs. romance; Pastoral romance Rosenblat, Angel, 161 n . l l Rotkin, Charlotte, 164 n.6 Rushdie, Salman, 131 Sadleir, Michael, 163 n.l6 Said, Edward, 108, 165 nn.7, 9, 12 San Pedro, Diego de, 34 Santillana, Marquez de (Las Serranillas), 33 Santob, de Carrion (Rabbi Sem Tov), 32 Sarfati-Artaud, Monique, 154 Sarrasine (Balzac), 11 Satyricon (Petronius), 6 Saussure, Ferdinand de, 8 Schmeling, Manfred, 18 Scholes, Robert, 7 Schonhorn, Manuel, 162 n . l l Schwarz, Daniel, 162 n.10 Scott, Sir Walter, 72, 73, 136, 163 n.18 Sedgwick, Eve, 72 Seeley, Tracy, 113 Self-reflexivity, 5, 6, 8, 141, 157 nn.2, 3 Serranillas, Las (Santillana), 33 Shaked, Gershon, 136-37, 166 n.6 Shamir, Ziva, 166 n.5 Sherry, Norman, 106, 165 n.3 Shires, Linda, 118, 158 n.9 Shklovsky, Victor, 7 Showalter, Elaine, 97 Silva de Varia Leccion, 38

Simmel, Georg, 159 n.21 Slemon, Stephen, 153 Sommer, Doris, 131, 147 Sorel, Charles, 22 Spanos, William, 127, 134 Speech-Act theory, 16, 17 Spitzer, Leo, 23 Sprinker, Michael, 165 n.4 Stampfl, Barry, 108 Steele, Sir Richard, 86 Stein, Gertrude, 124, 131 Stendhal, 164 n.l Sterne, Laurence, xiii, 14, 64; Sermons of Mr. Yorick, 59. See also Tristram Shandy Stewart, Garret, 87 Storytelling as adventure, 15, 45, 135, 159 n.21 Story within a story, 3. See also Embedded tales Strohm, Paul, 158 n.7 Sullivan, Henry, 43 Tannen, Deborah, 159 n.15 Thackeray, W. M., 77, 82, 120-21 Their Eyes Were Watching God (Hurston), 131 Tillotson, Kathleen, 164 n.8 Time in narrative, 15, 43, 51-63 passim, 162 n.l Tindall, W. Y., 123 Todorov, Tzvetan, xi, 2 - 3 , 7, 65, 85 Tom Jones (Fielding), 66-70; interpolated tales in, 64, 66-70, 162-63 n . l l ; narrative demarcation of fictional life, 62-63; as a picaresque novel, 64, 67; recognition of empirical evidence, 68, 86 Tomkins, J.M.S., 163 n.15 Trilling, Lionel, 96 Tristram Shandy (Sterne), 51-63, 64, 77, 81; indebtedness to Cervantes, 5, 53; need to communicate experience, 12, 60-61; play with narrative conventions, xiii, 5, 15, 52, 59, 62, 125, 154; role of social status in storytelling exchange, 4, 14, 54, 58; storytelling at the service of/conflicting

Index with personal idiosyncrasies 14, 5 4 55, 61, 93 Trollope, Anthony, 82 Trueblood, Alan, 161 n.10 Twain, Mark, 15 Tzoren, Gabriel, 132, 135 Ulysses (Joyce), 130, 135 Unamuno, Miguel de, 131 Vanity Fair (Thackeray), 77 Verleun, Jan, 114 Voltaire, 69 Walpole, Horace, 71-72, 75; influence of, 72, 163 n.13 Watt, Ian, 21, 52, 63, 162 n.10; comparing James and Conrad, 123; on Fielding, 64, 67, 68; on Lord Jim, 108, 111, 121, 164 n.2; and preeighteenth-century origins of the novel, 27, 160 n.28, 162 n.2 Watt, James, 163 n.13 Waugh, Patricia, 83, 120, 129-30, 165 n.10

193

Weinbrot, Howard, 163 n . l l Wellek, Rene, 100 Whinnom, Keith, 160 n.l Wilde, Alan, 125, 165 n.l Williams, D. A., 82 Williams, Jeffrey, xii, 65, 113, 118, 158 n.4, 163 n . l l , 165 nn.5, 10 Wilson, Diana de Armas, 162 n.2 Wimsatt, W. K., 16, 160 n.23 Woolf, Virginia, 121-22, 124, 130; on Conrad, 122 Wright, Andrew, 59 Wuthering Heights (Emily Bronte), 104, 105 Yehoshua, A. B., xiii, 131, 132-45, 166 n.4. See also Mr. Mani Yerushalmi, Yosef, 131, 135 Yudice, George, 131, 147 Yvain (Chretien de Troyes), 5, 158 n.7 Zamora, L. P., 167 n.15 Zierler, Wendy, 132 Zola, Emile, 82

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR YAEL HALEVI-WISE is Assistant Professor of English and Jewish Studies at McGill University.