Transgression, Stylistic Variation and Narrative Discourse in the Twentieth Century Novel [1 ed.] 9781443863032, 9781443853927

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Transgression, Stylistic Variation and Narrative Discourse in the Twentieth Century Novel

Transgression, Stylistic Variation and Narrative Discourse in the Twentieth Century Novel

By

Marie-Anne Visoi

Transgression, Stylistic Variation and Narrative Discourse in the Twentieth Century Novel, by Marie-Anne Visoi This book first published 2014 Cambridge Scholars Publishing 12 Back Chapman Street, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2XX, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright © 2014 by Marie-Anne Visoi All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN (10): 1-4438-5392-5, ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-5392-7

TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction ........................................................................................ 1 Chapter One........................................................................................ 5 Theoretical Framework Chapter Two ..................................................................................... 21 Murder, Narration and Stylistic Deviation in The Outsider by Albert Camus Chapter Three ................................................................................... 37 History and Myth-Making in One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García-Márquez Chapter Four ..................................................................................... 63 Taboos and Cultural Norms in Assia Djebar’s Children of a New World Chapter Five ..................................................................................... 81 Reading Italo Calvino: Embedded Stories and Narrative Games in On the carpet of leaves illuminated by the moon Chapter Six ....................................................................................... 97 Narrating the Self: Memory and Forbidden Desire in The Lover by Marguerite Duras Chapter Seven ................................................................................. 111 The Adulterous Narrator in Margaret Atwood’s The Blind Assassin Conclusion...................................................................................... 125 Bibliography ............................................................................................ 129 Literary Terms ......................................................................................... 135 Index ........................................................................................................ 139

INTRODUCTION

Transgression, Stylistic Variation and Narrative Discourse in the Twentieth Century Novel offers scholars and students of world literature and culture opportunities to widen the scope of their knowledge of the twentieth century novel and expand their understanding of literary theory. To fully appreciate the novels’ aesthetic value, I will examine “transgression” as a central theme, a notion that currently attracts widespread interest in the humanities. By discussing the content of the text in relation to its form, readers are encouraged to establish connections with the world of the text and pay specific attention to what Wolfgang Iser called the “repertoire” of the narrative text: socio-cultural norms and allusions (Iser 1982). Thus, without losing my focus on the proposed theme of “transgression”, I will attempt to integrate knowledge about style, narrative structure and formal interpretive strategies with knowledge about specific cultural experiences as presented in the novels studied. As Jonathan Culler points out, cultural studies “can intensify the study of literature as a complex intertextual phenomenon” (Culler 2000). Key questions that will be discussed include the relationship between theme, plot and narrative technique; specific stylistic variations which affect meaning; “indeterminacies” created by self-reflexive narrative voices where the modern reader is constantly provoked to participate in the creation of meaning. In this light, deeper insights can be gained by developing an ability to distinguish among voices of the text, perspectives, and plot structure. The book presents an analysis of selected twentieth century novels and highlights distinctive rhetorical strategies and stylistic features which influence our reading. It also aims to develop aesthetic responsiveness, increase motivation to read in translation or in original challenging novels from various cultures and develop a more global understanding of literature. The interdisciplinary framework of the book is designed to improve the ability to interpret literary texts by engaging critically with literature, develop literary research skills and facilitate oral communication related to the discussion of literature and culture. By establishing connections among the novels analyzed, the study will trace a common theme and explore similarities and differences specific to the cultural and literary tradition represented in each narrative text. In his book, How to Read World Literature, David Damrosch has underlined the

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importance of enriching our reading “repertoire” by including new “frames of reference“: “Inevitably, we approach a work with expectations and reading skills shaped by the many works we have read in the past – both those of our home tradition and other foreign works we have already encountered. Rather than trying to erase this fund of prior knowledge, we need to use it productively as our springboard into the new” (Damrosch 2009). The first chapter of the book opens with the presentation of “transgression” as a central theme in the study of six representative twentieth century novels. A detailed consideration of major readerresponse theories and their importance will establish a useful context for the textual analyses in each chapter and will familiarize readers with formal interpretive strategies employed throughout the book. In this manner, readers will be encouraged to integrate knowledge about style, narrative structure and formal interpretive strategies with knowledge about specific cultural experiences as presented in the novels studied. Chapter two deliberately concentrates on the “incipit” of Camus’s novel The Outsider. Meursault’s indifference at the news of his mother’s death and his attempt to come to terms with the murder he commits will be discussed in relation to the stylistic deviation taking place during the scene of the murder. A parallel discussion of Parts 1 and II of the novel and the implications of the narrated events in Part II will throw light on the puzzling concluding lines of the novel and will lead to a deeper understanding of Meursault as an outsider in the world of the text. A close reading of the novel One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez in chapter three will attempt to underline the foreshadowing effect of the “incest motif” as recounted in Melquíades’s story of the Buendías. In this context, I propose to discuss the novel’s richness and openness to interpretation by showing how the element of suspense and implicitly, the readers’ interest, are gradually increased by frequent shifts in characters’ perspectives, narrative rhythm and repetition, heteroglossia and the association of the fantastic with the commonplace. Assia Djebar’s novel Children of a New World, examined in chapter four, introduces readers to a fictional Algerian world where transgressive acts are narrated from a female consciousness perspective. By taking into consideration the event of Touma’s murder by her own brother Tawfik, we can have a better insight into the traditional values and social norms of the fictional world portrayed in Djebar’s text. The distancing narratorial comments which frame Touma’s fragmented thoughts call attention to her distorted views of the Algerian world and her image as an outcast. As there is no obvious criticism expressed by the narrative voice, it is through

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the consistency of the other characters’ points of view that readers perceive Touma’s alienation from the Algerian society. In chapter five, the story On the carpet of leaves illuminated by the moon from Italo Calvino’s novel If On a Winter’s Night a Traveller… explores erotic acts which openly violate narrative levels. This text will be analyzed in relation to its model, Jun'ichirǀ Tanizaki’s The Key published in 1956, a story of a problematic marriage where the two main characters attempt to resolve misunderstandings during sexual acts by using their diaries to communicate with each other. My reading of this embedded story will concentrate on certain aspects related to the readers’ configuration of the text and the indeterminacies created by the fictional language which relate to the notion of “transgression”. Finally, the nature of textual self-reference in Calvino’s novel will be discussed in the context of parody, as an aspect of “transgression” on a formal level. The sixth chapter pays attention to narrative fragmentation and the role of memory in recreating the past in Duras’s The Lover. Defying genre classification, the textual digressions project the forbidden love story of the Chinese and the 15 year old in a succession of past and present images. Specifically, this chapter looks more closely at Duras’ experimentation with fictional forms and seeks to evaluate the representation of transgression through the narrative voice’s claim to explore sexual desire beyond cultural and moral taboos in 1920s Indochina. Embedded stories and post-modernist devices make it increasingly difficult for readers of Atwood’s The Blind Assassin to identify adultery as transgressive act in the novel or build a frame of reference as far as cultural traditions and social norms are concerned. Chapter seven throws into relief the subversive narrative conventions employed by Margaret Atwood in The Blind Assassin to hide the identity of the narrator until the very end. Drawing on the writer’s use of intertextuality, my analysis will focus on textual “indeterminacies” and readers’ assumptions activated by the cultural ideology of the text. The book concludes with an assessment of our experience of reading the six twentieth century novels in relation to the theme of “transgression”. Stylistic variation and narrative discourse will be evaluated as they reflect the individuality of each text. Within this context, the aesthetic pleasure derived from gaining deeper insights through significant connections and narrative patterns will be highlighted.

CHAPTER ONE THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK

Reading as Aesthetic Experience The innovative features of the twentieth century novel blur the traditional distinctions that have dominated the literary scene before 1900. The traditional novel, with its dependence on an omniscient narrator, imposed a particular interpretation on events and provided a meaningful worldview, unity and coherence of plot and recognizable characters. Before I begin to look at specific elements of narration and style and their effects in influencing our understanding of the six twentieth century literary texts, we have to consider the emergence of new modes of writing in novels such as Woolf's To The Lighthouse, Proust’s In Search of Time Past, Kafka’s The Trial that resulted in a general tendency towards a dislocation of fictional time and space, self-conscious, unreliable narration, and increased use of symbolic, metaphorical language. The narrator is thus no longer the only authoritative presence in the novel; instead, there is an emphasis on shifting points of view and lack of closure which increase readers’ participation in configuring the meaning of the literary text. In order to establish a useful context for the textual analyses in each chapter, I will start with a detailed consideration of major reader-response theories and their importance for the experience of reading. According to Roman Ingarden, a faithful reconstruction of the literary work generates an aesthetic emotion which is increased in intensity proportionally with the value of the work. In The Literary Work of Art, Ingarden develops the idea of the literary work of art as a set of four layers or strata. The first layer, “Wortlaute”, is formed by the word sounds while the second layer, “Bedeutungseinheiten”, includes meaning units such as words and sentences. The third layer, “dargestellte Gegenstände”, consists of aspects of represented objects, and finally, the fourth layer, “schematisierte Ansichten”, is made up of schematized aspects by which the represented objects appear. The four strata are organized, according to Ingarden, as a “skeleton” or “schemata” which is to be completed by the reader. Literary works present points or spots of indeterminacy,

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“Unbestimmtheitsstellen”, and, as a result, can never be fully determined. This creates an obvious dilemma as the spaces of indeterminacy represent an obstacle in interpreting the work. Ingarden’s The Cognition of the Literary Work of Art offers ways of reconstruction of the work. Varieties of cognition of the literary work of art are discussed in relation to the reader’s attitude as Ingarden focuses on two particular attitudes: “(a) the purely cognitive or ‘investigating’ attitude and (b) the ‘asthetic’ attitude” (Ingarden 1973, 172). He goes on to define the aesthetic attitude and claims that, in the perception of an object, we are first struck by a particular feature that attracts us, producing what he calls “the original emotion”: “This specific quality which attracts our attention and affects us produces in us a quite peculiar emotion, which, with a view to its role in the aesthetic experience, I shall call the ‘original emotion’ of this experience” (Ingarden 1973, 189). The next phase in the aesthetic experience described by Ingarden is represented by “a certain hunger for the possession of this quality and for intensification of the enjoyment which the intuitive possession of it promises” (Ingarden 1973, 190). At this stage, points out Ingarden, we make an effort to look for “the missing qualities” of the object that aroused our emotion in the first place. The role played by imagination is emphasized by Ingarden, who distinguishes two possibilities in the constitution of the work. First, compelled by our aroused imagination, we construct the work by overlooking some of its “deficiencies” in a desire to obtain a certain harmony. In the second case, the work of art is apprehended as not being in harmony with our first impression of it and, as a result, it is constituted as an aesthetic object of negative value. The second instance leads Ingarden to recall the attitude of the reader concerned with the formation of the aesthetic object (Ingarden 1973, 172). In discussing what happens to the reader when he returns to verify his first impression of the work, Ingarden explains that the work of art is difficult to apprehend all at once because it needs to be “viewed from different sides and also from different points of view” (Ingarden 1973, 201). In the apprehension of a literary work of art, warns Ingarden, the matters are further complicated by its temporal dimension which demands the reader’s intensified activity. In order to constitute the literary work of art, the reader is called on to remove the “places of indeterminacy” and to fill out the gaps with his own projections. He calls this activity of the reader “concretization” as its aim is to “stabilize” the work: In concretization, the peculiar co-creative activity of the reader comes into play. On his own initiative and with his own imagination he “fills out” various places of indeterminacy with elements chosen from among many

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possible permissible elements (although the elements chosen may not always be possible in terms of the work) (53).

The problem with this particular way of approaching the work is, as Ingarden admits, that readers tend to “concretize” it in various ways, depending either on the attitude of the reader, or on certain characteristics of the work itself. Consequently, “significant differences can exist among concretizations of the same work, even when the concretizations are accomplished by the same reader in different readings. This circumstance carries special dangers for the correct understanding of the literary work and for a faithful aesthetic apprehension of the literary work of art” (Ingarden 1973, 53). In Ingarden’s opinion, the reader will be able to obtain a true reconstruction of the work, first by paying careful attention to the phonetic and semantic strata and secondly, by comparing his or her reconstructions with those of other readers. One of the problems that might arise during the analytical investigation of the literary work of art, claims Ingarden, is related to the identification of “the places of indeterminacy” by the reader. The decision regarding their removal or completion needs to be performed only by paying close attention to the text. The most difficult task, concludes Ingarden, is to decide which particular completions contribute to the aesthetic value of the reader’s concretization of the work. Here, Ingarden argues against removing or replacing certain “places of indeterminacy” and shows his disapproval of concretizations of this kind: The less cultivated reader, the artistic dilettante of whom Montz Geiger speaks, who is interested only in the fortunes of the portrayed persons, does not pay attention to the prohibition against removing such places of indeterminacy and turns well-formed works of art into cheap, aesthetical gossip about the persons by garrulous expansion of what does not need to be expanded (293).

According to Ingarden, only the reader who pays attention to all the four strata and takes into consideration the limits dictated by the context of the work will be able to obtain a concretization close to the work itself.

Text-Reader Relationship Wolfgang Iser’s work has been strongly influenced by Ingarden’s aesthetic theory. Iser adopts Ingarden’s idea of the literary work of art as a schematic structure which is concretized by the reader: “As the reader passes through the various perspectives offered by the text and relates the different views and patterns to one another he sets the work in motion, and

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so he sets himself in motion, too” (Iser 1982, 21). In Iser’s opinion, the actualization of the text stems from its interaction with the reader and, in order to investigate the reading process, we need to concentrate on the text-reader relationship. He warns that “exclusive concentration on either the author’s techniques or the reader’s psychology will tell us little about the reading process itself” (Iser 1982, 21). Iser distinguishes between two main types of readers: the “real reader” and the “hypothetical reader” which is, in turn, subdivided into the “ideal reader” and the “contemporary reader”. The problem that Iser finds with the “real readers” is that their existence is based on documents which reveal a set of norms of a particular period; also, given the scarceness of documents beyond the 18th century, it becomes difficult to consider such readers. The “ideal reader” is defined by Iser as “a purely fictional being who has no basis in reality, and it is this very fact that makes him so useful: as a fictional being, he can close the gaps that constantly appear in any analysis of literary effects and responses”. Iser goes on to show that modern criticism has developed other types of readers, each corresponding to a specific area of discussion (Iser 1982, 30). In concluding that the concepts discussed impose certain restrictions, Iser proposes a reader with no predetermined character or historical situation which he calls the “implied reader”: We may call him, for want of a better term, the implied reader. He embodies all those predispositions necessary for a literary work to exercise its effect predispositions laid down, not by an empirical outside reality, but by the text itself. Consequently, the implied reader as a concept has its roots firmly planted in the structure of the text; he is a construct and in no way to be identified with any real reader (34).

His concept of “implied reader”, adapted from Booth’s “implied author” is thus a theoretical construct arising from the interaction between reader and text, and is a role that the “real reader” assumes. The two aspects of the concept defined by Iser are: “the reader’s role as a textual structure and the reader’s role as a structured act” (Iser 1982, 35). The first aspect is described as consisting of three components: the perspectives present in the text, the standpoint from which the reader joins them and the meeting place where they converge. The second aspect is revealed in the reader’s activity of filling in the blanks of the text and thus eliminating “indeterminacy” through consistency-building. Here, Iser points out, the imagination of the reader plays an important part since the convergence

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and the meeting place of the perspectives have to be imagined by the reader. In this last case, the “implied reader” appears as a “structured act”. Iser’s theory of reading represents an innovation in the sense that the meaning is revealed in the process of reading, as a result of the interaction between reader and text. Traditionally, the meaning was hidden in the text. The reader’s activity in constituting the meaning of the text is thus highlighted by Iser who opposes Ingarden’s view of “indeterminacy”. For Iser, it is the presence of “gaps” or “blanks” that stimulates the reader’s activity and induces communication. In The Act of Reading, Iser describes in detail how, in the process of reading, the images produced by the text come into contact with the reader’s own images generating a constantly shifting image. The reader’s expectations are thus modified as new expectations arise. The gaps in the text are filled by “each individual reader. . . in his own way” in order to build up the consistency of the text. Iser draws attention to the fact that the presence of a wide range of possible interpretations creates “areas of indeterminacy” and an “entanglement of the reader”. In discussing “overdetermined” texts, Iser starts from Lesser’s assumption that an “overdetermined” text may mean different things to different readers, but he claims that the different meanings arise from the increasing degrees of “indeterminacy”. In literary texts, such as Joyce’s Ulysses, predictability is reduced, and the reader is forced to relate the different levels of meaning in order to structure the meaning potential of the text. Iser affirms that the overdetermination of the text “is not merely a given textual quality, but a structure that enables the reader to break out of his accustomed framework of conventions, so allowing him to formulate that which has been unleashed by the text” (Iser 1982, 50). Iser defines the relationship between text and reader as a process of communication where there is a constant feedback of information, from text to reader, from reader to text. The process is a “self-correction” one since the reader is constantly making adjustments to modify his ideas. The reader “realizes” the situation of the text in a sequence of imagined objects taking different shapes as reading progresses: “The text can never be grasped as a whole - only as a series of changing viewpoints, each one restricted in itself and so necessitating further perspectives” (Iser 1982, 68). The “repertoire” and the “strategies” guide the reader in the process of constituting the meaning of the text. Iser defines “repertoire” as references to earlier works and cultural influences which appear modified in the text; the familiar elements of the “repertoire” create a bridge of communication between the text and a reader who is compelled to see traditional norms in a new light:

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Chapter One The reassessment of norms is what constitutes the innovative character of the repertoire but this reassessment may lead to different consequences: the participant will see what he will not have seen in the course of his everyday life; the observer will grasp something which has hitherto never been real for him. In other words, the literary text enables its readers to transcend the limitations of their own real life situation; it is not a reflection of any given reality, but it is an extension of broadening of their own reality (79).

Iser considers social norms and literary allusions two basic elements of the “repertoire” and illustrates what happens when the “repertoire” is made up of different systems. In this case, the reader becomes disoriented because it is difficult to connect the diverse elements of the “repertoire”. The “strategies” have the task, in Iser’s opinion, of structuring the communication between reader and text through a background-foreground relation in which the cultural norms and literary allusions constitute the background whereas the new meanings created form the foreground. The relationship between reader and text, as Iser sees it, is based on a “process of anticipation and retrospection, the consequent unfolding of the text as a living event, and the resultant impression of life-likeness”. It is the structure of theme and horizon that plays an important part in the reader’s constant reassessment of the perspectives in the text. Iser postulates that the theme is constituted by the view of the perspective at one moment while the horizon is made up of all the other perspectives at different stages of reading. Thus, the readers’ attitudes are broadened as the structure of theme and horizon offers them a “transcendental vantage point”. In Iser’s view, the perspectives of the narrative text are arranged in four distinct manners: “counterbalance”, “opposition”, “echelon”, and “serial”. “Counterbalance”, the first type of arrangement, situates the hero’s perspective as central. The “oppositional” arrangement advances opposing norms where the reader becomes aware of their conflict. The “echelon” arrangement lacks the referential element present in the former two types and consequently, the reader is faced with an “echelon of references and perspectives, none of which is predominant” (Iser 1982, 102). The last type, the “serial arrangement”, illustrated by Joyce’s Ulysses, is characterized by a constant alternation of theme and horizon where the perspectives are continually changed. In discussing the perspectives of the text, Iser emphasizes the fact that in the interplay between text and reader the transfer of the text is initiated by the text itself, but it is the reader’s task to use the textual “repertoire” and “strategies” in order to construct the aesthetic object. Iser further adds that during the process of reading the

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reader encounters two major problems: first, the whole text cannot be perceived at any one time and secondly, the reader has to construct objects described in the text. In order to build consistency and thus grasp the text, the reader performs a “synthetizing” activity, a “wandering viewpoint” moving along the different stages of reading. This means, in Iser’s terms, that the text is perceived as an event by the reader who formulates “gestalten” and creates the world of the text. At the same time, the readers react to their own “gestalten” when the process of consistency building is interrupted by the strategies of the text. Iser maintains that in modern literature the “entanglement” of the reader is increased by various literary devices present in the text, such as “divergent” textual perspectives. In the chapter entitled “Interaction between Text and Reader”, Iser draws attention to the fact that with reading (as opposed to other communicatory activity) there is no face-to-face situation (166). As the textual strategies provoke a re-adjustment of the reader’s projections, an asymmetry between text and reader is created. In Iser’s theory of reading, the concept of “gaps” differs widely from Ingarden’s “places of indeterminacy”. Iser finds limitations with Ingarden’s concept and argues that “places of indeterminacy” occupy a less important role in the production of the aesthetic object: For him, concretization was just the actualization of the potential elements of the work, - it was not an interaction between text and reader; this is why his “places of indeterminacy” lead only to an undynamic completion, as opposed to a dynamic process in which the reader is made to switch from one textual perspective to another, himself establishing the connections between “schematized aspects”, and in doing so transforming them into a sign sequence (178).

According to Iser, there are two basic structures of “indeterminacy” in the text: “blanks” and “negation”. The “blank” is seen by Iser as a “vacancy in the overall system of the text”. By filling in the “blanks”, textual patterns interact and the reader is thus able to form images. The difference between Ingarden’s “places of indeterminacy” and Iser’s “blanks” consists mainly in the latter’s potential of “connectability”: the “blanks” indicate the need for combining schemata in the text and help the reader reformulate the world of the text. Therefore, the reader’s participation in the text is stimulated by the “blanks” as they provoke the apparition of “first” and “second degree images”. By reacting to the first images produced, the readers are able to watch themselves producing images and become aware of their transformation. Iser’s observations with regard to the evolution of the interaction between reader and text shed further light on the role of the “blanks”. Chronologically, with the apparition of the fictitious reader and

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“unreliable narrator, the readers’ interaction with the text changes as they have “to produce new criteria for judging the events and their significance” (205). As a result, the readers are forced to detach themselves from familiar norms and have to travel through different positions in the text. Iser further explains how, in the modern novel, the readers’ expectations become frustrated as they cannot orient themselves among the increasing number of perspectives. The familiarity with fiction-making techniques becomes thus a prerequisite, and without it, the reader is not able to understand the communicative structure of the text. In the process of reading, stresses Iser, familiarity with norms and literary competence will guide the response of the reader. As Iser justly acknowledged in The Act of Reading, a major concern of reader-response theorists surrounds the concept of reader. Who is the reader? Are the critics referring to an actual reader? Or are they considering the reader a theoretical construct, whose response is based on a system of literary conventions? Most critics seem to agree that the actual reader cannot constitute an object of study because of the variability of response. The actual reader appears as a type of reader whose expectations, experience and knowledge vary widely; in the process of reading, the mental images originating in the text come in contact with the reader’s own images producing an image constantly shifting. The relationship between the actual reader and the text is a dynamic relationship where the reader incorporates own ideas in the text without letting them superimpose upon the text. For a successful relationship, the reader has to change projections and expectations. In Iser’s view, the real reader recuperates the intention of the text by assuming a certain role, that of the “implied reader”.

Literary Competence It becomes obvious that the interpretation of a modern literary requires the ability to identify literary norms. Jonathan Culler clearly indicates the importance of the reader’s awareness of conventions when approaching unfamiliar texts: “. . . a willingness to think of literature as an institution composed of a variety of interpretive operations makes one more open to the most challenging and innovatory texts, which are precisely those that are difficult to process according to received modes of understanding” (Culler 1975, 129). Since the narrator is “the most central concept in the analysis of narrative texts” (Bal 1997, 19), the reader’s competence is an essential attribute in the reading process. The reason why we need to acquire such competence as readers becomes clear when we consider

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modern novels. As we know, “literary competence” is necessary when dealing with fictional worlds in a literary work. One can read a text in many ways, but to read a literary text and to be able to understand it one needs to read it according to pre-established conventions. Even when the conventions seem to be transgressed and the text presents difficulty, the understanding of the fictional text is still possible if the reader resorts to a system of literary conventions. “Broken” narratives, “unreliable narrators”, and “self-referentiality” are only some distinguishable features which compel the modern reader to take on an active role in constructing the meaning of literary texts. Several critical reviews have recognized the influence of Russian Formalism and Anglo-American New Criticism in the shaping of a number of theories commonly known under the name reader-response criticism. Jane P. Tompkins sees this approach as a revision of formalism, even though meaning is to be realized in the reader. She argues that “although New Critics and reader-oriented critics do not locate meaning in the same place, both schools assume that to specify meaning is criticism’s ultimate goal” (Tompkins 1980, 201). Both Robert C. Holub and Elizabeth Freund have described the readerresponse approach in connection with other influences. Holub, for instance, devotes a substantial part of his book Reception Theory: A Critical Introduction to Russian Formalism and Prague Structuralism before tackling the issues concerning readers and reading. According to him, Iser wants a “way to account for the reader’s presence without having to deal with real or empirical readers. . . he seeks a ‘transcendental model’ what might also be called a ‘phenomenological reader’ one that embodies all those predispositions necessary for a literary work to exercise its effect while precluding empirical interference” (Holub 1984, 84-85). Likewise, Elizabeth Freund investigates reader-response criticism by taking as point of departure “a dissatisfaction with formalist principles” and considers Richards and Anglo-American New Critics as its “precursors”. I believe, however, that the explanation offered by Wallace Martin with regard to the type of reader used by Iser is more suitable: “. . . for Iser, ‘the reader’ is not the fictitious figure addressed by the implied author, the real person reading, or some combination of the two; rather, the reader is a transcendental possibility, not yet realized, that exists and changes only in the process of reading” (Martin 1986, 162). Also, the reason why Iser or other critics do not include the response of the real reader in their works is because they start their analyses of the “act of reading” from an advanced stage in the evolution of the reader, which we might call the “active stage” (active in the sense given by Ingarden when

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he describes the actualization of the third and the fourth strata). The type of audience they address needs also to be taken into consideration. The analyses are scholarly in their content and are not directed to a lay audience. In presenting their views, the critics are fully aware that the audience must be familiar with the concepts discussed. That the reader cannot be a real reader becomes thus a commonly accepted fact. Therefore, the reader discussed is supposedly a reader who is able to actualize a literary text, a reader who progresses with every fictional text towards an acquisition of certain linguistic and literary skills. The “literary competence” is aptly defined by Jonathan Culler in Structuralist Poetics: . . . it is clear that the study of one poem or novel facilitates the study of the next: one gains not only points of comparison but a sense of how to read. One develops a set of questions which experience shows to be appropriate and productive and criteria for determining whether they are, in a given case productive; one acquires a sense of the possibilities of literature and how these possibilities may be distinguished. (Culler 1975, 21)

If any advance is to be made in reader-response criticism, then we have to agree with the idea that “critical commentary be freed from the notion that its function is to explain that what is not clear about the text to ordinary readers” (Valdés 1987, 57). This is the reason why some critics have completely abandoned the idea of identifying the reader or defining reading because of the inevitable one-sidedness of such theories and instead, have adopted a different approach. By confessing that the analyses of the fictional texts are presented from their own point of view, their work has centered on the elements in the text that provoke the activity of the reader. In the “Introduction” of her book Poetics of Reading, Inge Crosman Wimmers speaks of her discussion of reading as a shift in focus: . . . I decided to give up theorizing about readers and texts in general to see what happens when actual readers (my students, myself) read novels. . . . In choosing the texts, I purposely selected a variety of novels - ranging from seventeenth to twentieth century works and from the historical to the experimental - to get a better idea of what kind of texts novels are and to see if different novels make for different kinds of reading. (XlV)

Crosman Wimmers recognizes the difficulty “to pin down the reader in the various narratives” she proposes to analyze: “A chameleon-like, complex figure, the reader takes on various guises, including different critical and theoretical perspectives as well as different identities - for instance, a male as opposed to a female reader, a seventeenth- as opposed to a twentieth-

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century reader, or a particular as opposed to a more general reader” (XVlXV). In my readings, this view of the reader is modified in order to encompass the individuality of each literary text discussed. It is in relation to the literary text that the “various guises” of the reader are perceived. The “shifting images” described by Iser occur when certain elements in the text become indeterminate and are difficult to grasp. I believe that by identifying the “determinate” features of the text we become aware of how the “indeterminacies” appear and affect our response. During reading, we constantly try to “stabilize” images formed and our success in doing it is dependent on our experience and competence as readers. How do we grasp the meaning of the text? Being an “active” reader is certainly a prerequisite, as Ingarden repeatedly stressed in his works : “During active reading”, we think with a peculiar originality and activity the meaning of the sentences we have read; we project ourselves in a co-creative attitude into the realm of the objects determined by the sentence meanings” (Ingarden 1973, 40). Umberto Eco, a reader-response theorist of international fame, has been also preoccupied with the active role of the reader. In The Open Work, published in 1962, Eco lays the foundation of his poetics. Repeatedly revised, his theory of the “open work” will appear, taking a different focus, in The Role of the Reader and The Limits of Interpretation. Eco’s concern with meaning, readers, and interpretation remains, however, constant over the years. He clearly states that the author has to “foresee a model of the possible reader”. Eco’s reader is a textual strategy, being able to “deal interpretatively with the expressions in the same way as the author deals generatively with them” (Eco 1976, 9). According to Eco, some texts clearly appeal to certain readers when they address them directly or by means of “typographical signals”. The “Model Reader” is a reader who interprets a text by making use of a “specific encyclopedic competence”. Eco believes that the competence of the “Model Reader” is “created” by the text itself; by making use of this competence, the reader recognizes literary conventions and makes inferences resorting to “common” and “intertextual frames”. The “Model Reader” makes “forecasts” which the text “confirms” or “contradicts”. It is in the volume edited by Stefan Collini, Interpretation and Overinterpretation, where Eco clarifies his position as a theoretician who claims that there is a difference between interpreting and using a text. In his opinion, there are limits to the interpretations one can give to fictional works: “I accept the statement that a text can have many senses. I refuse the statement that a text can have every sense.” (Eco 1992, 141)

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To return to Iser’s view of readers in The Act of Reading, it is important to note that, in his opinion, the role of the reader is to recognize the set of conventions present in the text. By understanding what motivated the selection of certain “strategies”, the reader is thus able to discover the individuality of the literary text and its unique arrangement of formal and fictional elements: As far as the reader is concerned, he finds himself obliged to work out why certain conventions should have been selected for his attention. This process of discovery is in the nature of a performative action, for it brings out the motivation governing the selection. In this process the reader is guided by a variety of narrative techniques, which might be called the strategies of the text. (61)

The term “motivation” invoked by Iser was originally employed by Viktor Shklovskii in his writings on the aspects of narratives. For Shklovskii, “motivation” was the underlying factor of the techniques used by the writer. In other words, the writer had to “motivate” his/her devices. For instance, the “journey” was seen as such a device which “motivated” the gathering of a number of people who told stories or to take another example, the incorporation of memoirs and letters were employed to represent social reality. From a reader-response perspective, Iser’s remark on “motivation” is made in connection with the reader’s interaction with the literary text. If the formalists concentrated upon discovering devices in the text without paying close attention to either the author or the reader, a reader-response approach starts with the reader’s activity which is provoked by the presence of certain “areas of indeterminacy”. By questioning accepted norms and their “motivation” the reader progresses to a new understanding of the text and its world. Since the authorial intention is no longer separated from the text, the readers are led to discover the relevance of the conventions used to shape the fictional world, and by producing their own images in the act of reading learn to orient themselves in the text. This is done, as Iser points out, by identifying the “strategies” of the text. In Iser’s view, the “strategies” or “accepted procedures” are the techniques which organize the selected references in the text. In discussing the reader’s relationship with the text, Iser draws attention to the four perspectives to be perceived as narrative structure: “Generally speaking, there are four perspectives through which the pattern of the ‘repertoire’ first emerges: that of the narrator, that of the characters, that of the plot, and that marked out for the reader” (Iser 1982, 96).

Theoretical Framework

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In my analyses of the six novels, I will concentrate on what Iser calls the perspective of the narrator; by exploring the reader’s relationship with the narrative voice or voices, I attempt to show that the meaning of the text is disclosed when readers learn to distinguish among various textual metamorphoses. A distinctive feature of the narrative text, the narrator has been traditionally considered as having a mimetic function. The narrator’s relationship to the narrated material and to the reader was a central issue in the discussion of point of view. The importance of distinguishing between narrative perspective and narrative voice was pointed up by Gérard Genette in Figures lll. In his chapter on “Mode”, he discusses narrative focalizations, and argues that the narrator’s focalization had to be separated from the characters’ perspectives. According to Genette, the category of mood (“mode”) has been traditionally confused with the category of voice (“voix”). In the last chapter of “Discours du récit”, Genette concentrates on the category of voice; he discusses the relation between the act of narrating, time of narration and person. For Genette “person” represents the relationships between the narrator, the narratee, and the story. Here, Genette argues against the use of “first-person” and “third person” narration and develops a distinction based on the narrator’s relationship to the story: the “heterodiegetic” narrator who is absent from the story it recounts and the “homodiegetic” narrator, who is at the same time, a character in the story it retells. Another major literary critic who devoted a substantial discussion to “focalization” was Boris Uspenski. The Russian critic developed the concept of “focalization” in Poetics of Composition; he postulated that point of view is manifested on several textual planes such as “the phraseological plane”, “the spatial/temporal plane”, “the psychological plane”. On “the psychological plane”, for instance, point of view may be expressed by a particular person’s consciousness, in a subjective manner or, objectively, by events known to the author. A focalizer, according to Uspensky, could be a perceiver, a self-perceiver and self-reflecter, and is capable of openly acknowledging or concealing its viewpoint. In some narratives, Uspensky argues, we perceive a single perspective which dominates all the other viewpoints; in others, various perspectives intermingle in a “polyphonic” structure. It is this “polyphonic” characteristic of some novels that attracted Mikhail Bakhtin. In his theory of dialogism, developed in Problems of Dostoievski’s Poetics and also, in The Dialogic Imagination, Bakhtin postulated that within the narrative text one can distinguish several voices engaged in dialogue, in a sort of play of discourse. For Bakhtin,

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“polyphony” implies that the multiple perspectives expressed by the voices in the text are free from authorial control, in the sense that they become “subjects of their own directly signifying discourse” (Bakhtin 1993, 7). In Bakhtin’s view, Dostoievski was the creator of the “polyphonic novel” and his characters were not “voiceless slaves”, but were capable of bringing in own views, alongside the author: “A plurality of independent and unmerged voices and consciousnesses, a genuine polyphony of fully valid voices is in fact the chief characteristic of Dostoievski’s novels” (Bakhtin 1993, 6). From this perspective, the concept of “polyphony” becomes a useful tool for a reader-response approach. If we recall Iser’s assumption in his chapter on “Strategies”, the “repertoire” is perceived through the four perspectives; Iser also maintains that the meaning of the text comes from the interaction of the shifting textual perspectives. By taking into account the polyphonic aspect of the novel, the reader is able to assemble various points of view in relation to a “controlling” voice, without ignoring the individuality of each perspective. As a result, the “shapes” of the text formed during the activity of reading appear with more clarity, making it easier for the reader to remember them. If we take into account the distinctions between first-person and third-person narrators pointed out by critics, we notice that the concept of “reliability” plays an important part. This is the condition of discourse, in which, as we know, the possibility of speaking the truth creates the possibility of misunderstanding, misperceiving, and lying (Martin 1986, 142). As it becomes obvious from this theoretical overview, the readers’ relationship with the narrator is of prime importance in their attempt to understand the text: “In the specialized case of fiction, the reader’s control of the text is usually mitigated by the narrator. Thus it follows that control in fiction is to a large extent dependent on the reader’s ability to cope with the narrative voice or voices” (Valdés 1987, 22). Examples from three major twentieth century novels will serve to illustrate the complexity of the problem. For instance, the omniscient narrator of Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being presumes access to the minds of characters: While she marched around the pool naked with a large group of other naked women, Tomas stood over them in a basket hanging from the pool’s arched roof, shouting at them, making them sing and do kneebends. The moment one of them did a faulty kneebend, he would shoot her. Let me return to this dream. Its horror did not begin with Tomas’s first pistol shot; it was horrifying from the outset. (57)

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What poses a problem for the reader here is the sudden change from third person to first person narration. There are slight chances that this abrupt digression might escape an attentive reader. Now, if the narrator qualifies the preceding events as “dream” and, at the same time, intervenes in the story, the reader is made to understand that the narrator’s intervention must be important for the meaning of the text. Robbe-Grillet’s The Voyeur offers another example of how the change of focalization could mislead the reader. Some passages in the novel are repeated obsessively, as with the scene of Mathias’s entrance into the house of a prospective customer. The sentences describing the actions of Mathias mention in passing the kitchen and the oval table. Mathias sees the actions being performed and the objects in detail, but there is a certain distance from which everything is visualized. Often, objects are brought into existence by his glance and in this sense, he becomes the “voyeur”, having the power to create visually images that become entities. When Mathias becomes involved with the fictional objects or characters which correspond more or less to his imagination, then his capacity of “voyeurism” is passed to someone else in the novel. As it has been noted by Robbe-Grillet’s critics, objects do not appear incidentally in his novels. Indeed, objects in The Voyeur are always highlighted and they change their characteristics according to each new perception: the same series are repeated throughout the text of the novel with variations imposed by the changing point of view. The readers are thus faced with an increasing number of “indeterminacies” which force them to constantly return to the text in order to reconstruct its meaning. One last example will further illustrate the “entanglement” of the reader in a modern narrative text. The reader of Cortazar’s Hopscotch is challenged to approach the novel in one of two ways: in a linear fashion, from chapters 1 to 56, or starting with chapter 73 and following a clearly established sequence. The sly remark in this direct form of address intrigues the reader from the very beginning. As there is no omniscient narrator in the traditional sense, readers are urged to become actively involved in putting everything together. By learning to connect the various perspectives of the text in the absence of a traditional narrator, the readers will provide a key to the meaning of such an overdetermined text. Against the theoretical background presented, the six subsequent chapters will be approached thematically. As the notion of “transgression” will be examined in the various cultural traditions represented in the six narrative texts, further considerations of the relationship between reader and text will be explored.

CHAPTER TWO MURDER, NARRATION AND STYLISTIC DEVIATION IN THE OUTSIDER BY ALBERT CAMUS

The Outsider by Albert Camus has been an inexhaustible source of inspiration for literary critics who attempted to explain its appeal by paying close attention to its narrative structure. Drawing from the readerresponse theories exposed in chapter one, I will argue that our understanding of The Outsider relies on a critical assessment of the narrator’s manipulation of the reader’s expectations. As we will see from the examples provided, our ability to distinguish the actual story and the events before and after the murder from the manner in which they are narrated will determine our interpretation of Camus’s novel. According to Valdes, the readers’ relationship with the narrator is of prime importance in their attempt to understand the text: “In the specialized case of fiction, the reader’s control of the text is usually mitigated by the narrator. Thus, it follows that control in fiction is to a large extent dependent on the reader’s ability to cope with the narrative voice or voices” (Valdés 1987, 22). First, I will look into Meursault’s narration in Part I and how it affects our reading. Here, Jauss’s notion “horizon of expectations” and Iser’s idea of interactive reading will provide us with new perspectives on Camus’s novel. Secondly, as a means of grasping the text of The Outsider and the murder committed by Meursault, my discussion will focus on the evolution of the main character expressed stylistically by metaphorical language and a change in the tone of narration. Finally, I will attempt to show that the stylistic deviation in The Outsider is an innovative form employed by Camus to give narrative tension to Meursault’s story and to transform his readers’ “horizon of expectations”.

The Telegram To begin, I will deliberately concentrate on the “incipit” of The Outsider and thus examine the various implications of its ambiguity. Meursault’s

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indifference at the news of his mother’s death and his attempt to come to terms with the murder he commits will be discussed in relation to the stylistic deviation taking place during the scene of the murder. A parallel discussion of Parts 1 and 2 of the novel and the implications of the narrated events in Part 2 will throw light on the puzzling concluding lines of the novel and will lead to a deeper understanding of Meursault as an outsider in the world of the text. In The Outsider, it is the arresting manner in which social norms and cultural values are interpreted by the protagonist, Meursault, that will influence our expectations and ultimately, our reader response. From Jauss’s point of view, the reader’s “horizon of expectations” greatly influences the way a literary work can be interpreted. Indeed, with the opening of the novel, we are immediately made aware of the presence of a narrative voice which takes control of the events. Following Genette’s classification of narrators, Meursault can be considered an “autodiegetic narrator” (Genette, 1980) whose cold and detached presentation of the events in Part I will disorient the reader. Through my proposed interpretation, I will examine the degree of the character-narrator’s participation in the events of the story and how the type of narration in The Outsider determines our reaction towards Meursault. The basic point in this argument is that by understanding our response to Camus’s protagonist, we can understand the function of the detailed descriptions in Part I. Indeed, Meursault’s perception of events and people is evoked through a limited point of view which centers on unusual, unique characteristics. Thus we can say that Meursault’s discourse concentrates on apparently insignificant details and reveals the “strangeness” of his perceptions. Perhaps the most striking aspect of the first pages of the novel is Meursault’s behavior when he reports the receipt of the telegram. The fact that he does not show any emotion defies social norms and expectations and transforms the reader’s sense of reality by foregrounding human characteristics that cannot be easily identifiable. In my view, it is the opening paragraph that will provide the key to our understanding of Meursault’s attempt to come to terms with the murder he commits. Also, several distinctive effects created by the changing rhythm of the narrative, repetition of words and phrases and the grotesque humour of certain scenes will displace our reality and thus gradually change our expectations as we read. In The Act of Reading, Iser maintains that in the process of reading, the images produced by the text come into contact with the reader’s own images generating a constantly shifting image. This idea helps account for the change in the readers’ expectations with regards to

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the protagonist’s attitude in The Outsider before and during the scene of the murder. As a result, Meursault’s “confessional story” will provide to us clues about the protagonist’s character and personality before the murder. Let us return to Meursault’s cold narrative stance at the beginning of the novel: “Mother died today. Or maybe yesterday, I don’t know. I had a telegram from the home: ‘Mother passed away. Funeral tomorrow. Yours sincerely.’ That doesn’t mean anything. It may have been yesterday.” (9) Statements such as “I don’t know”, “It may have been yesterday” are key elements in suggesting to the reader that the attitude of the narrator towards the events presented in the text of the novel is unusual. If we consider Meursault the focalizer in the narrative, the events recounted are then related to his perception. In this case, the complexity of the narrative, characterized by many ellipses, creates “a subtle tension” between Meursault and the readers of The Outsider as David Sprinzer observed: “Between the complete unassuming naturalness of his actions and observations, on the one hand, and his insensitivity to normal feelings and expectations, on the other, a gulf emerges that makes it quite difficult for us to coordinate our emotional response to him”. (Bloom, 2012) The tension created by Meursault’s lack of sensitivity in this passage is further intensified by the generic instability of Camus’s novel. On a formal level, The Outsider represents a deviation from the norms, situating itself between confessional novel and diary, where Meursault’s point of view is questionable. With the opening paragraph, readers become acutely aware of the temporal limitations of the narrative voice. The fact that Meursault does not remember clearly when he received the telegram calls into question his reliability as a narrator. Also, as far as his participation in the events recounted in Part I is concerned, we can easily grasp his lack of emotion and his inability to communicate with others. There is also the perceived sense that the bus ride to Marengo is almost an obligation. The “strangeness” of this type of behaviour appears morally offensive and will make it difficult for some readers to identify with the protagonist. Take, for instance, the incriminating passage where Meursault justifies his rare visits to his mother during the year preceding her death: She cried a lot the first few days at the old people’s home. But that was only because she wasn’t used to it. After a month or two she’d have cried if she’d been taken out of the home. Because by then she was used to it. That’s partly why during this last year I hardly ever went to see her any more. And also because it meant giving up my Sunday-let alone making

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Chapter Two the effort of going to the bus stop, buying tickets and spending two hours travelling. (11)

There are two ways of reading this passage: on the one hand, we can easily detect Meursault’s insensitivity towards his mother, but, on the other hand, his regard for “truth” becomes obvious when he records the events (Bloom 78). In re-evaluating his actions before the funeral, Meursault does not lie about his feelings and actions. In this case, the reader’s ability to gain more knowledge about Meursault’s actions before and after the murder is challenged by the “truthful” quality of his narrative. Is it then because of his “truthful nature” that he recounts all the events before the murder, or is it rather a “confession” in which he attempts to get to the bottom of things, to understand the truth about himself and about the society that will condemn him to die? This idea will throw a different light on our perception of Meursault as his story will faithfully mirror his character and personality. The result is that the reader will be able to identify elements in the text of Part I of The Outsider that will facilitate a detached, objective view of the scene of the murder instead of being grounded in a particular “horizon of expectations”. In this context, it is important to note that description plays an important role in Meursault’s story. Camus’s descriptions are often pervaded by a grotesque sense of humor that has a referential function and helps create an “absurd” type of fictional world populated by people Meursault does not understand. The emphasis on details and sometimes imperceptible movements create a humorous effect. Suffice it to recall the portraits of people from the asylum where his descriptions bring out striking elements in the physical or mechanical description of gestures and movements: It was at that point that mother’s friends came in. There were about ten of them in all and they came gliding silently into the blinding light. They sat down without even a chair creaking. I saw them more clearly than I’ve ever seen anyone and not a single detail of either their faces or their clothes escaped me. And yet, I couldn’t hear them and I found it hard to believe that they really existed. Almost all the women were wearing aprons tied tightly round their waists, which made their swollen bellies stick out even more. I’ve never noticed before what huge paunches old women can have. The men were almost very thin and carrying walkingsticks. (15)

Meursault’s truthful comments from the preceding example might surprise us but, at the same time, they can lead us to a more intimate revelation of his perceptions. According to the story told in Part I, the portraits

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symbolize the distance between Meursault and others. Camus, with his art of cartoonist, ridicules the secondary characters to highlight the essence of his hero. Awkward gestures and replies bring a certain image of Meursault as an outsider in the world he portrays. As we read, we are struck by the cold recording of facts and the grotesquely humorous presentation of the old people at his mother’s wake framed by the many side comments representing Meursault’s reflections on people and events. At the same time, we learn about Meursault’s benevolent character and his desire to please the people around him. His whole discourse explicitly calls attention to his moral integrity and his effort to ingratiate himself with the people he meets at the funeral, his boss or his friends. It is interesting to note that he does not seem to address an audience when he retells his version of the story. This is why we could argue that Meursault’s discourse represents perhaps the text of his diary or even his monologue as it can be inferred from Part II of the The Outsider. But even when all these allowances are made for the informal quality of most of Meursault’s narrative discourse, there is no denying the role that the ethical appeal plays in persuading us, as readers, to have a good impression of his character. Aside from descriptions, we can detect Meursault’s uneasy feeling that there is something wrong in the way he provides us with minute details which seem unimportant and also, in the way he relates to other people around him. As noted by Girard, the details in The Outsider definitely provoke our interest as we read: “As I read the novel, my attention is focused upon details which are insignificant in themselves but which come to be regarded as portents of doom just because the writer has seen fit to record them. I sense that Meursault is moving towards a tragedy, and this impression, which has nothing to do with the hero's actions, seems to arise from them”. (Girard, 1964)

We can gain a clearer notion of the sense of guilt and the tension in the narrative if we look at certain repetitive phrases in Part I of the novel. When Meursault asked, for instance, to take two days off to go to his mother’s funeral, he recalled that his boss “didn’t seem pleased”. He remembered that he “even said, ‘It’s not my fault’” (9). At the old people’s home in Marengo, he felt that the warden “was reproaching him for something” (10) and when he refused the offer of the caretaker who wanted to unscrew the coffin in order to let him see his mother, he was “embarrassed” because he felt that he “shouldn’t have said that” (12). We have just seen three examples of how Meursault’s comments on the events betray his hesitation with regard to his relationship with the other people

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and perpetuate the sense of guilt. In her Introduction to the Theory of Narrative, Bal stresses the importance of taking into account the difference “between spoken and unspoken words of the characters”. In her opinion, our reading can be influenced by the “unspoken words” to such an extent that we “do not often realize how much less the other character knows than they do” (Bal, 154). In this respect, the way in which Meursault presents the warden, the caretaker, the old men and women at the home gives us not only information about these characters but also, about Meursault himself. As a result, our reading is manipulated by Meursault’s unspoken words and thoughts that shape whole scenes for us. Here is a good example of how Meursault’s perception of people appeals to our imagination through the use of sensory, specific detail: Now it was all these people sitting in silence that was getting on my nerves. Except that every now and then I heard a strange noise and I couldn’t understand what it was. In the end I realized that some of the old people were sucking at the insides of their mouth and letting out these peculiar clicking noises. (15)

The vivid reporting of the scene and the self-revealing comments further create a clearer image of Meursault as a spectator in the world unfolding before him. Once again, the idea that the death of his mother did not seem to disturb his passive existence, increases the emotional impact of the description. Therefore, we must assume that Meursault lacks certain human characteristics due not only to his personality, but also, to his unique sense of perception. When we are told that he does not understand what the others mean, or when that he does not listen to other people: “The warden spoke to me again. But I wasn’t really listening any more” (11) we assume that his “strangeness” is due to his vision of the world as a limited, enclosed space. Given the flat, monotonous tone of narration in Part 1, readers are led to accept the fact that Meursault sees the world as a restrictive space where nothing happens and nothing is of great significance. His reaction at his boss’s offer to work in Paris is thus typical of his outlook on life: “He then asked me if I wasn’t interested in changing my life. I replied that you could never change your life, that in any case one life was as good as another and that I wasn’t at all dissatisfied with mine here. He looked upset and told me that I always evaded the question and that I had no ambition, which was disastrous in the business world” (44). In similar manner, Meursault’s response to his lover’s questions about marriage, reveals once again his strange but truthful nature: “That evening, Marie came around for me and asked me if I wanted to marry her. I said I didn’t mind and we could do if she wanted to. She then wanted to know if

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I loved her. I replied as I had done once already, that it didn’t mean anything but that I probably didn’t.” (44) We can see now how readers are constantly being asked to focus on Meursault’s words and side comments in relation to others as a way of understanding him. In this context, we can easily assume that unusual events such as the funeral can be perceived differently by Camus’s protagonist. It seems then appropriate to claim that the reader who recognizes Meursault’s unusual experience during the funeral will gain increased awareness about his actions in the murder scene or during the trial. As suggested by Larry W. Riggs and Paula Willoquet-Maricondi, the social code in the novel is reinforced by ceremonies in which Meursault refuses to take part: Meursault’s “deviant” behaviour at the funeral and throughout the story in terms of its relationship with the code of social norms makes us aware of the powerful presence of ceremonies in the novel. From the funeral to the trial, and punctuated by the initiation at Raymond’s home and the processing by the judicial system, Meursault is converted gradually into grist for ceremonial mill. (Bloom, 2011)

Of course, there are many other ways that convince Camus’s readers of Meursault’s detachedness from the other characters in the novel. It is my contention, however, that Camus’s prose highlights characteristics of Meursault’s personality by creating particular effects which challenge our reading. The rhythm of the narrative, the repetition of words and phrases, and the grotesque humour, where the process of exaggeration and distortion of the other characters dominate certain scenes, are unique features of Camus’s work that will displace our reality and thus gradually change our expectations as we read. As far as our image of the protagonist is concerned, his ability to tell the truth about others and about himself will influence our initial expectations and will lead us to a perceptual appropriation of Meursault’s world filtered by his focalization. This view will enable us to understand his own vision of a society distorted by conventional norms and values. If in Part I of the novel Meursault tells us much about others by noticing the smallest details of their physical appearance, he also expands our reading experience by allowing us to witness his own transformation as he understands the implications of his behaviour. At this point, I should like to concentrate on the changing rhythm of narration and how this change is reflected in a certain inconsistency of language. Barrier remarked about The Outsider that there is a “serious disturbance” in style. Jean Paul Sartre rather spoke of “inconsistency on

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the part of the author” and Brian T. Fitch explained this stylistic deviation from “poverty of vocabulary and lack of expressiveness by education level and temperament of the narrator.” Let us now approach these claims from the point of view of Meursault’s evolution as a character. In my opinion, the language inconsistency and the rhythm variations in the text of the novel reflect Meursault’s personality transformation. We have seen that the pattern which holds through Part I is the obvious disparity between the hero’s actions and words and those of the other people around him. The sense of guilt related to the appropriateness of certain gestures and phrases seem now to be taken out of context and re-evaluated. As the narrative voice steps aside and reflects on what was said in various circumstances, readers learn to rely not only on the chronological sequence of the events but also, on the embedded references framing several scenes. Bal, who recognized the lack of synchrony in The Outsider, identified the presence of “pseudo-scenes”: This novel, in which chronological sequence is maintained, consists almost entirely of scenes. Naturally, these scenes cannot possibly coincide completely with the time of the fabula. After all, the latter covers quite a few days. In fact, they are pseudo-scenes, scenes which are presented in a strongly accelerated manner, and in which a myriad of invisible ellipses must be present. (Bal, 106)

Let us take the example where the entire scene of the funeral is rapidly summarized by Meursault’s restrictive point of view. The lack of synchrony of this particular scene with Meursault’s story is clearly reflected in the paragraph and sentence structure. The long sentence, where the deliberate omission of conjunctions creates the hurried rhythm in the narrative, contains references to Perez and ends, provocatively, with Meursault’s reported “joy” who returns home after the funeral: Then there was the church and the villagers in the street, the red geraniums of the tombs in the cemetery, Perez fainting (like a dislocated dummy), the blood-red earth tumbling onto mother’s coffin, the white flesh of the roots mixed in with it, more people, voices, the village, the wait outside a café, the incessant drone of the engine, and my joy when the bus entered the nest of lights which was Algiers and I knew I was going to go to bed and sleep for a whole twelve hours. (22)

The slow pace of narration is suddenly interrupted by this final scene where the reader has the impression of Meursault trying to free himself from his mother’s funeral. Besides the rhythm in narration, the scene provokes our interest: it alerts us to the use of word “joy” and what it means for Meursault. As we will see in Part II, the fact that he rejoices at

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his return from the funeral and he returns to his ordinary life instead of showing his emotion at his mother’s recent death will play an important part in the accusations against him. Further events in the story will have two consequences for our reading: the first consequence is that they will strengthen our perception of Meursault’s behaviour as unusual: if he goes to the beach, makes love to Maria Cardona and goes to see a Fernandel movie, he appears insensitive because he seems to be drawn to these events without any regret for his dead mother. The second consequence is that Meursault’s actions from Chapter two to five can also be understood as situations seeking to establish the credible image of a young ordinary man who is affected by his instinctual nature. An important consideration for understanding Meursault’s behaviour immediately after his mother’s funeral is that there is nothing necessarily reprehensible about being moved to action through emotions. If Meursault cannot control his “natural feelings” and he continues his daily activities as before, it is because he does not understand how others perceive him. Taking into account the second consequence of our reading about the events before the murder, we will be inclined to accept the fact that Meursault’s character is governed by his physical needs. From this perspective, our projection of the protagonist is slightly changed. The possibility that Meursault reacts differently under certain circumstances needs to be taken into account. At this point, a certain degree of sympathy based on common human experience, will gradually reduce the distance between Meursault as narrator and the readers of The Outsider. It is clear that our expectations of Meursault during the murder scene will be different than the ones we had when we started to read the first lines of the novel. The simplicity of Meursault’s life interrupted by sudden moments of happiness has an emotional appeal for readers of all times: Yesterday was Saturday and Marie came over as we’d arranged. I really fancied her because she was wearing a pretty red and white striped dress and leather sandals. You could see the shape of her firm breasts and her suntanned face was like a flower. We caught a bus and went a few miles out of Algiers, to a little beach surrounded by rocks and bordered inland by reeds. The four o’clock sun wasn’t too hot, but the water was warm and rippled with long, lazy waves. Marie taught me a game. You had to drink from the crest of the waves as you swam along, gathering all the foam inn your mouth, and then turn on your back in a warm shower onto my face. (37)

What is revealed by this example is that Camus’s major strategy is to rely on sensorial descriptions of events which can persuade us that Meursault is

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a normal human being, with emotions and feelings: the even tone of narration indicates that there is nothing surprising about Meursault’s emotional attachment to nature, his desire for Marie or his willingness to help his friend Raymond when he needs him.

The Murder Beginning with Chapter Six, when we notice again a change in the rhythm of narration, Camus sets the murder scene into motion and creates powerful, sensorial images intensified by the metaphorical language. The sun and the heat, reminiscent of the day of the funeral, take mythical proportions and have a paralyzing effect on Meursault: There was still the same dazzling red glare. The little waves were lapping restlessly at the sand as the stifled sea gasped for breath. I was walking slowly towards the rocks and I could feel my forehead swelling up under the sun. The sun was pushing full against me as I tried to walk. And every time I felt the blast of its hot breath on my face, I set my teeth, closed my fists in my trouser pockets and tensed my whole body in defiance of the sun and of the drunken haze it was pouring onto me. With every blade of light that leapt off the sand, from a white shell or a piece of broken glass, my jaws tightened. (58)

As the scene suggests, nature itself seems to conspire against Meursault. The rhythmic sound of the waves and the tantalizing sun bring into focus the protagonist’s heightened perceptions of nature before the murder. If in the previous chapters of Part I, Meursault is the focalizer, he now becomes the focus of attention. There is no doubt that stylistically, the passage does not match the rest of the text. The tension created by the “strangeness” of the hero’s actions and words and those of the other people around him and the sense of “guilt” we noticed during our reading of Part I will influence our understanding of Meursault’s behaviour before the murder. We become now aware that Meursault’s perception of the sun and the heat is “distorted” by his physical needs. At a symbolic level, one can correlate this scene with similar descriptions of nature during the scene of the funeral and reflect on how Meursault is affected by the evocation of the sun. Thus the description of the beach during the murder scene can explain the shift in language as it will emphasize Meursault’s tragic flaw: he does not know how to control his emotions and feelings. If he brings about his downfall and commits a murder it is because his perceptions of the world are governed by his instincts. The reason why he ignores conventional norms is not because he is a bad person, it is because he does not know how to govern his instincts. So when in Part II, in his defense, Meursault

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explains to the examining magistrate that “by nature my physical needs often distorted my feelings. On the day of mother’s funeral I was very tired and sleepy. So I wasn’t fully aware of what was going on.” (65) we know that this is the truth. From this perspective, Camus’s stylistic deviation and use of sensorial language to express the exaggerated proportions of the heat and the dazzling effect of the sun on Meursault can be understood as a strategy to show Meursault’s truthful nature. In considering this view of Meursault’s motive for the murder, Camus’s characterization of his hero reveals an understanding for his vulnerability: “So for me Meursault is not a reject, but a poor and naked man, in love with a sun which leaves no shadows.” (119). The descriptive qualities of Camus’s narration and the continued use of metaphorical language during the murder scene can thus be linked to the emotional appeal to the reader. By describing the scene through a deviation from the ordinary tone employed in the rest of the novel, Camus is able to draw the reader’s attention to Meursault’s change in behavior and aggression. Our imagination is seized by the use of sensory, specific detail in the final passage of Chapter Six. Indeed, Camus makes generous use of vivid words to increase its impact and to convince us of Meursault’s vulnerability, as we can see from the following passage: My eyes were blinded by this veil of salty tears. All I could feel were the cymbals of sun was clashing against my forehead and, indistinctly, the dazzling spear still leaping up off the knife in front of me. It was like a red-hot blade gnawing at my eyelashes and gouging out my stinging eyes. That was when everything shook. The sea swept ashore a great breath of fire. The sky seemed to be splitting from end to end and raining down sheets of flame. My whole being went tense and I tightened my grip on the gun. The trigger gave, I felt the underside of the polished butt and it was there, in that sharp but deafening noise, that it all started. I shook off the sweat and the sun. I realized that I’d destroyed the balance of the day and the perfect silence of this beach where I’d been happy. And I fired four more times at a lifeless body and the bullets sank in without leaving a mark. And it was like giving four sharp knocks at the door of unhappiness. (60)

It is precisely in Meursault’s vulnerability during the murder scene where we can identify a change in our own interpretation of the novel. If in the previous chapters of Part I, we had difficulty situating ourselves in the protagonist’s perspective, in Part II, we will see Meursault in a different light, as portrayed by conventional views. In this case, as readers, we can either accept Meursault’s version of the events and believe that he did not

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intentionally kill the Arab or side with his prosecutors who consider him guilty of murder.

The Trial We can argue that Part II becomes a reflection of Meursault himself and his actions in Part One. As we start reading Chapter One of Part II, we realize that the events presented in Part I of the novel are now “defamiliarized” by Meursault as he recounts the first days of his arrest. The complexity of the plot is evident from the protagonist’s change of circumstances and reversal of fortune. His lack of knowledge about the legal system and his remark to the examining magistrate about his case “. . . I thought my case was very simple” (63) clearly demonstrate that Meursault does not yet understand the consequences of his criminal act. As he gradually admits his self-deception with regard to the social and moral values of the society and how the legal system works, the ironic distance becomes evident. For instance, the portrait of the examining magistrate is framed by the protagonist’s thoughts to such an extent that it opens up a series of relevant aspects concerning the ludic nature of the trial: At first I didn’t take him seriously. I was shown into a curtained room, there was just one lamp on his desk which was shining on his chair where he made me sit while he himself remained in the shadow. I’d read similar descriptions in books before and it all seemed like a game. After our conversation through, I looked at him and saw a tall, fine-featured man with deep-set blue eyes, a long grey moustache and a mass of almost white hair. I found him very reasonable and on the whole quite pleasant, in spite of a few twitches he had about his mouth. (63-4)

The passage deliberately provokes our interest and tends to reduce the description of the examining magistrate to a mere caricature. Meursault’s manner of recounting of the events in the second part of the novel and the “absurd” details of the examination bring the reader closer to Meursault’s perspective by creating a bridge of communication between the text and a reader who is compelled to see traditional norms in a new light. The mirroring effects in Part II place both the protagonist and the reader in similar situations. What becomes relevant is the readers’ realization that their reaction to the events presented by Meursault in Part I was very similar to that of the examining magistrate. From this point of view, the readers of The Outsider find themselves re-assessing their expectations of the protagonist. As Meursault begins to understand the consequences of

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his murder, he appears to Camus’s readers as a “tragic hero” because of his self-destructive actions. What has been noted about the murder scene will become now quite clear: blinded by the sun, Meursault committed a murder on a beach where he has been happy and thus reversed his fate. In Aristotelian terms, Meursault’s “mistake” or “tragic flaw” (hamartia) will lead him from ignorance to knowledge (anagnorisis) (Aristotle 1975). Camus’s distinctly emphasizes Meursault’s ignorance of the legal system in order to draw the readers’ attention to the social and cultural norms of the textual world described in his novel. If we recall the repetitive phrases which perpetuated a sense of guilt in the narrative from Part I, we now realize that his apprehension about communicating with the warden or the caretaker is justified. Meursault’s impression that the warden “was reproaching him for something” at the old people’s home in Marengo, and his feeling of embarrassment because he refused the offer of the caretaker who wanted to unscrew the coffin in order to let him see his mother were, in fact, correct. By superimposing his accusers’ vision of the events on his protagonist’s, Camus alters our previously formed opinions. Indeed, what we end up perceiving is the hero’s realization that he is considered guilty not because he killed the Arab but because he did not show emotion at his mother death and thus did not understand social conventions. If in Part I of the novel, Meursault’s emotional distance from the events is evident, in Part II, he becomes aware of the significance of certain details which seemed to be unimportant to him. The confessional tone of the narrative thus compels us to adjust our opinion of Meursault. This reassessment of norms changes the readers’ expectations from an accusatory stance to an understanding of Meursault and the roots of his self-deception. Telling the truth and being honest about his feelings at the funeral, represented for Meursault a way of life. Because he admits his ignorance of the society norms and confesses his self-deception, Meursault becomes “human” and gains our sympathy for being an “outsider”. Moreover, he appears as a victim of the legal system because he is not able to give his opinion: “Things were happening without me even intervening. My fate was being decided without anyone asking my opinion” (95). The circus atmosphere of the courthouse and the satirical view of the lawmakers shift our attention from the murder itself to Meursault’s perception of it. Therefore, by insisting on the faithful transcription of Meursault’s thoughts and actions instead of focusing on his criminal act, Camus challenges the readers’ horizon of expectations. Reading the second part of the novel will therefore decrease the distance between Meursault as narrator and his readers. The images created by the story of Meursault will challenge our perception of the fictional world described in

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The Outsider as we begin to see the events and characters from his perspective. Such an interpretation casts a different light on the events recounted after the murder scene. In Chapter Four, Part II, Camus excels in presenting two contrasting views of Meursault’s character: on the one hand, we have the prosecutor’s speech who believes that Meursault’s crime was premeditated; on the other hand, we are given free access to the protagonist’s thoughts and his version of the of the event: “I stood up and since I felt like talking, I said, rather haphazardly in fact, that I hadn’t intended to kill the Arab”. (99) Given Meursault’s answer regarding the motives of his crime: “Mixing up my words a bit and realizing that I sounded ridiculous, I said quickly that it was because of the sun.” (99) we realize that Meursault’s inability to defend himself stands out as a proof of his innocence. Recognizing the truthful nature of his words, we are forced to recall our own past viewpoints on the events, with particular attention to the presentation of the murder scene. The degree to which we understand Meursault’s “guilt” or “innocence” depends, in this case, on our perception of Camus’s stylistic deviation during the murder scene. As readers, we are asked to solve an impasse regarding the responsibility of Meursault in a crime he committed. The internalization of Meursault’s view of the murder and his naive thoughts project us in the same position as him and we can understand his revolt against the absurdity of life and customs of a society that condemns him to death. According to Iser, “The reassessment of norms . . . may lead to different consequences: the participant will see what he will not have seen in the course of his everyday life; the observer will grasp something which has hitherto never been real for him. In other words, the literary texts enable its readers to transcend the limitations of their own real life situation; it is not a reflection of any given reality, but it is an extension of broadening of their own reality” (79). In this light, the concluding lines of The Outsider are reminiscent of Camus’s words in The Myth of Sisyphus (1942). Meursault’s sudden realization of his happiness in understanding his “passion for life” brings us closer to Camus’s hero: “...I looked up at the mass of stars and signs in the night sky and laid myself open for the first time to the benign indifference of the world. And finding it so much like myself, in fact so fraternal, I realized that I’d been happy, and that I was still happy.”(117) Because of Meursault’s refusal to lie and his non-conformity in the world described in the novel, the horizon of expectation against which we now interpret the text fusions with that of Meursault’s. The ironic distance of the narrative voice that succeeds in presenting a view of the society and the absurdity of life through Meursault’s eyes strikes a chord with readers

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of all times. By drawing us away from the murder committed and its motive, the narrator challenges our expectations and makes us reassess our own norms and values.

CHAPTER THREE HISTORY AND MYTH-MAKING IN ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF SOLITUDE BY GABRIEL GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ

Gabriel García Márquez’s novel One Hundred Years of Solitude has been described as “a novel of a strange reality, for the most part readily accessible to read, but elusive to describe or analyze satisfactorily” (Williams 1984). Its richness and openness to interpretation have constantly attracted critics who pondered upon its “magical realism”, the function of time in the story, or its metafictional chapters (Warnes 2009). The starting point of my analysis will be the incest motif, an act of transgression which introduces the story of the Buendías. According to Joyce Wexler, “The family's genealogy begins with incest, a curse, and murder-the usual components of myths of origin. Conveying empirical and non-empirical meanings, incest expresses the historical condition of social isolation as well as a mythic personal solitude” (Wexler 2003). Úrsula Iguaran and José Arcadio Buendía married against the wishes of their relatives ignoring the “horrible precedent” in their family: the birth of a child with a pig tail. Úrsula’s fear to consume the marriage because of the “sinister predictions about their offspring” will lead to the murder of Prudencio Aguilar and shortly after, to the Buendías’ departure from their home town and the founding of Maccondo. In tracing the development of the plot, the incest motif will be discussed in relationship with the novel’s narrative complexity resulting from the stylistic variations which characterize García Márquez’s “magical realism” and postmodernism. Alternative viewpoints, narrative rhythm, as well as the incorporation of a variety of languages and genres, will be viewed here in relation to spatial and temporal dislocation, characters’ portrayal and readers’ expectations. Foreshadowing as narrative technique that intensifies the reader’s activity becomes evident in One Hundred Years of Solitude when the birth of a child with a pig tail is first mentioned. It appears as a premonition feared by Úrsula who, in marrying her cousin, breaks the moral taboos of her family. As our reading progresses, we become anxious to know if the

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premonition will ever come true. The fact that the narrator tells of this transgressive act in Úrsula’s family leads the reader to believe in the possibility of such birth: There had already been a horrible precedent. An aunt of Úrsula’s married to an uncle of José Arcadio Buendía, had a son who went through life wearing loose, baggy trousers and who bled to death after having lived forty-two years in the purest state of virginity, for he had been born and had grown up with a cartilaginous tail in the shape of a corkscrew and with a small tuft of hair on the tip (20).

García Márquez’s critics have repeatedly affirmed that the novel anticipates the fulfillment of this premonition (McMurray 1987). The last Aureliano is indeed born with a pig tail, an event which closes the circular structure of the novel and reminds the reader of Úrsula’s fear. For Bergenholtz, Macondo’s disappearance from the face of the earth in the final chapter signifies “the terrible wrath of the gods” (Bergenholtz 1993). Instead of focusing on the religious and moral implications of incest, I choose to examine first the element of suspense as it is gradually increased by the association of the fantastic with the commonplace. In One Hundred Years of Solitude, common objects are presented by the narrative voice as being out of the ordinary and possessing magical qualities whereas unusual things are stripped of their mystery. Ricardo Gullón, among other critics, observed that the narrative voice wins the reader’s confidence by the familiarity of its tone (Gullón 1970). Indeed, after only a few pages, the reader becomes engulfed in the fictional world of the novel, where names of people are introduced as if they are already known. The reader of García Márquez’s text is lured from the first lines of the novel to enter its fictional world. The first chapter of One Hundred Years of Solitude continues to be open to multiple interpretations. One common view shared by critics is that the narrative voice builds up a fictional world through constant narrative movement. By evoking the event of the firing squad situated in the future simultaneously with the event of the discovery of ice that occurred in the past, the narrative voice creates a fictional time which will be manipulated according to the limits of the fictional universe of the novel. As it has been stressed by Carmen Arnau, the manipulation of time and space in the novel results in a cinematographic effect of narration (Arnau 1971). In One Hundred Years of Solitude, readers find themselves involved in a fictional world where the act of transgression is recounted through recurrent flashbacks. If we take a closer look at the first passage of the novel, we find that a privileged, omniscient narrator has access to the characters’ thoughts and

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feelings since the memory of the ice episode belongs to Colonel Aureliano Buendía. Viewed from a historical perspective, the passage calls attention to a different image, that of Macondo at its beginnings, a town untouched by modern science, transcending the limits of time and space. What we have here is not only a temporal and spatial dislocation but also, a sudden change of perspectives. Colonel Aureliano Buendía’s memory of ice is immediately followed by the perspective of the chronicler introducing the image of a fictional town, Macondo, which cannot be placed geographically on the map of Colombia. Determinate and indeterminate elements are skillfully combined in the narration of events which cover one hundred years in the story of the Buendías. Names of people and places, the language spoken, family life, local customs or political events resemble a Latin American reality more or less known by the reader; nevertheless, the fictional world of Macondo surpasses the limits of any known reality and the reader is forced to participate actively in “filling in the blanks” of the text (Iser 1982). In this respect, the reader’s relationship with the narrative voice becomes of major importance.

Macondo: History and Myth-making The analepsis (Genette 1972) employed by García Márquez brings in the image of Macondo and with it, a whole network is formed. In a similar way, Proust recreated Combray: Marcel’s past emerged from his cup of tea when he dipped his “madeleine” and then tasted it. In One Hundred Years of Solitude, the technique of flash-back brings together the members of the Buendía family. The anticipation of the events to come forms the expectations of the readers who gradually realize that the story of the child with a pig tail mentioned in the beginning is pushed aside by other stories, as fantastic as the one they are expecting. The first image we have of Macondo is that of a happy village: “Macondo was a village that was more orderly and hard-working than any known until then by its three hundred inhabitants. It was a truly happy village where no one was over thirty years of age and where no one had died”(9). We already know that José Arcadio and Úrsula come to Macondo to forget the violence committed against Prudencio Aguilar and to start a new life. The repetitive evocation of Prudencio enables us to link the underlying theme - incest - with our understanding of the newly founded world of Macondo where José Arcadio represents the figure of the patriarch and Úrsula, the mother figure. The Buendía family is described in its hierarchy, as a clan, rather than as a small group. The narrative voice presents a family chronicle where the Buendías appear as a

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synergetic family. Most of them live in the same house, a house that will turn into ruins after Úrsula’s death. The history of the family lives in the memory of the characters who invoke it insistently. Each Buendía has his or her particular traits which are often inherited by the next generations of José Arcadios and Aurelianos, as it is noticed by Úrsula. Solitude is a trait common to all the Buendías, but it is more obvious in men. The relationships the Buendía men and women have with others usually fail. Úrsula’s fear of incest is ignored by her children and grandchildren who seem to find happiness only within their own family: Aureliano loves his aunt Amaranta; Amaranta Úrsula and Aureliano Babilonia are not able to overcome their passion. For the Buendías, particularly the men, sexual love appears as an escape from the world they live in. José Arcadio is unable to fight its urge and lets himself drawn “to that exasperated silence and that fearful solitude” (28). Petra Cotes and Aureliano’s affair is seen as a symbol of fertility: when it starts raining in Macondo and continues to rain for four years, eleven months and two days, Aureliano leaves the house of his mistress to go back to his wife Fernanda, and then, the animals in Petra’s courtyard start dying. It seems that the Buendías long for a kind of love where an intense feeling of friendship predominates, but they are overwhelmed by their sexual urge, reminiscent of Jose Arcadio Buendia’s forbidden attraction for his cousin and wife, Úrsula. In the end, it is again through incest that the “two solitary lovers”, Amaranta Úrsula and the last Aureliano, experience the infinite pleasure of their passion which only later becomes a communion of souls. In the fictional world of Macondo described with omniscience by the narrative voice, early changes appear. The first one occurs with the gypsies’ arrival during the month of March. Melquíades, the magician gypsy, puts José Arcadio in contact with the great inventions: “Every year during the month of March a family of ragged gypsies would set up their tents near the village, and with a great uproar of pipes and kettledrums they would display new inventions” (1).

The excitement brought about by magnets and astronomical calculations takes a strong hold of José Arcadio Buendía. He loses his sense of reality and, constantly preoccupied by his thirst for knowledge, gradually enters the domain of another world, the world of the imaginary, where everything is possible. Melquíades initiates him in the secrets of alchemy and José Arcadio is thus the first Buendía to embark on the epistemic quest. The events in the world surrounding him, the world of Macondo, will be slowly overlapped by fantastic events. Natural disasters occur in Macondo such as the plague of insomnia which brought with it the loss of memory;

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it is at this time when José Arcadio attempts to construct the memory machine in order to save reality. A series of new arrivals put Macondo in contact with other worlds. With the arrival of Apolinar Moscote and his ordonance that all houses must be painted in blue, the colour of the Conservative Party, Macondo undergoes further changes. Pietro Crespi, the Italian musician and dance master introduces with his pianola European culture. Father Nicanor Reya, who is brought by Apolinar Moscote, is the representative of the Catholic Church in Macondo. Another important event in the narrative is the final return of Melquíades. In his room, built next to Aureliano’s workshop, Melquíades will find the secret of immortality. Shortly after Melquíades’s apparent death, José Arcadio Buendía, terrified at the immobility of time, exclaims: “The time machine has broken…” (80). Unable to distinguish any longer between the world of Macondo and the other world, where time has been suspended, he will spend the rest of his life tied to a chestnut tree, conversing with the dead. The history of the Buendías is thus gradually presented through another history, that of political events. Politics operates a major change in the fictional world of Macondo as it leads the Buendía men to even more isolation and solitude as they fail in their designs. Aureliano becomes Colonel Aureliano Buendía, a Liberal who tries to exterminate the Conservatives, among whom is his father in law. He organizes thirty-two armed uprisings and loses them all; Arcadio Buendía fights against the Conservatives and is shot. José Arcadio Segundo, who breaks with family traditions and works for the Americans at the banana plantation, witnesses the massacre of the striking workers. The fictional event recounted in García Márquez’s novel parallels a historical event that took place in Cienaga, a town not far from García Márquez’s birthplace, Aracataca, in Colombia, as attested by historians. The scene of the massacre deserves quotation as it is an illustrative example of García Márquez’s “magical realism”. The narrative voice starts by reporting objectively the event: The captain gave the order to fire and fourteen machine guns answered at once. But it all seemed like a farce. It was as if the machine guns had been loaded with caps, because their panting rattle could be heard and their incandescent spitting could be seen, but not the slightest reaction was perceived, not a cry, not even a sigh among the compact crowd that seemed petrified by an instantaneous vulnerability (311).

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As several critics remarked, there is a sudden shift from the personal point of view of the historian to the personal point of view of José Arcadio Segundo, who will be one of the few survivors of the massacre. On his return from the place of massacre, nobody believes him. The officials deny everything and the massacre becomes thus a mental construct of José Arcadio Segundo, a myth: José Arcadio Segundo did not speak until he had finished drinking his coffee. ‘There must have been three thousand of them,’ he murmured. ‘What?’ ‘The dead,’ he clarified. ‘It must have been all of the people who were at the station.’ The woman measured him with a pitying look. ‘There haven’t been any dead here,’ she said. ‘Since the time of your uncle, the colonel, nothing has happened in Macondo’. (313-14)

This is how the major events coming into opposition with Macondo’s world have contributed to its change. From the patriarchal, peaceful settlement of happy people, Macondo declines into an unrecognizable site (Williams 1988). Solitude, which becomes inevitable for José Arcadio Buendía in his quest for knowledge, will be constantly sought by successive generations of Buendías. It is through solitude that the Buendías have access to the other world, the supernatural world governed by Melquíades’s spirit. As reading progresses, elements of the supernatural gradually infiltrate the world of Macondo until, in the end, the reader witnesses Aureliano Babilonia’s destruction just as the cyclonic wind sweeps everything away. The narrative voice constructs a fictional world starting from the discovery of ice recalled by Colonel Aureliano Buendía and destroys it when a child with a pig tail is born, at the exact instant when the last Aureliano discovers his identity. The detachment of the omniscient narrator becomes thus a strategy to involve the reader in the fictional world. By apparent relinquishment of authority and constant use of alternating perspectives in the novel, the narrator remains unknown until the very end. As Valdés noted in Hermeneutics: A Phenomenological Approach, the authority of the narrative voice dictates what is to be told: “The storyteller’s will as manifested in what and how the narrator chooses to tell the story is the dominant feature of this text, and nothing in the natural realm of cause and effect alters this central fact and obliges or constrains the narrator” (Valdés and Valdés 1990).

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The Discovery of Ice: Stylistic Variation and Narrative Discourse The narrative complexity in One Hundred Years of Solitude stems from the unique characteristics of García Márquez’s style. Frequent deviations from linear narration draw the reader’s attention to specific images, words, symbols and stylistic devices and intensify our reading activity. For instance, what is the purpose of choosing to start with the discovery of ice? Michael Wood comments on the use of “ice” as a simple device in the narrative, with no real repercussion in the story told: “the ice has no story; leads to no story” (Wood 1990). However, it can be argued that the discovery of “ice” becomes a symbol for the Buendías’ quest which will be fulfilled by Aureliano Babilonia. José Arcadio’s astonishment in front of the huge, transparent block of ice and his mistaking it for the “largest diamond in the world” is narrated in a tone reminiscent of Don Quixote and will be repeated throughout the novel. The reported dialogue between José Arcadio Buendía and the gypsy who allows him to touch the block of ice for the price of “five reales” reveals a contradiction that the reader is forced to acknowledge. What José Arcadio Buendía believes to be a diamond is, in reality, ice: Disconcerted, knowing that the children were waiting for an immediate explanation, José Arcadio Buendia ventured a murmur: ‘It’s the largest diamond in the world.’ ‘No,’ the gypsy countered. ‘It’s ice.’ José Arcadio Buendia, without understanding, stretched out his hand toward the cake, but the giant moved it away. ‘Five reales more to touch it,’ he said. (18)

Even before this incident, the reader is made aware of José Arcadio’s rich imagination and his readiness to believe in miracles. Paradoxically, it is Melquíades, the sage gypsy, who tries to check his credulity and confronts him with reality. When Melquíades brings the two metal ingots to Macondo, José Arcadio is seized with the desire to possess them, in the hope that he will find a heap of gold. Melquíades checks his enthusiasm and warns him that it won’t work for that purpose. Again, a year later, when the gypsies bring a telescope and a magnifying glass, José Arcadio’s imagination runs wild and he plans to use the magnifying glass as a weapon of war. Melquíades intervenes and tries, without success, to make him change his mind. José Arcadio is not the only one who believes in magic. Úrsula Iguarán, unwilling at first to accept Melquíades in her house, is certain that the gypsy has diabolical designs because one day, on entering the room where he was, a strange smell lingered. What Úrsula took to be “the smell

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of the devil” was, in reality, the smell of bichloride of mercury. Examples such as the ones discussed above are numerous in García Márquez’s novel. The narrative voice is clearly confronting the readers (as Melquíades does with José Arcadio and Úrsula) and leads them to distinguish between the two fictional worlds: the world of Macondo and the world of the characters’ imagination, made up of old beliefs and mythological beings, a supernatural universe. The fictional beings of Macondo step in and out of this supernatural universe and the reader has to learn to follow them. This is also where One Hundred Years of Solitude parts with Don Quixote. If in Don Quixote the narrative voice is always quick to point out that Don Quixote is mad, in García Márquez’s novel, the tone of narration bewilders the reader from the very beginning. There is no obvious denial of what the Buendías and other people in Macondo believe. The narrative voice even goes as far as bringing in the historical figure of “the pirate Sir Francis Drake” who attacked Riohacha in the sixteenth century to give more credibility to the story of the Buendías. Further analysis would disclose a narrative strategy frequently employed: each time when the narrative voice comes upon a fantastic event, there is, all of a sudden, a change in perspective. To return to the scene mentioned earlier, where Úrsula enters the room with the strange smell, there is no overt comment made by the narrator as to the origin of the smell attributed by Úrsula to the devil. We are simply told that Melquíades broke “a flask of bichloride of mercury”. Melquíades’ response to Úrsula’s accusation is interesting because it throws light on the sudden change of perspectives. Úrsula, on the other hand, held a bad memory of that visit, for she had entered the room just as Melquíades had carelessly broken a flask of bichloride of mercury. ‘It’s the smell of the devil,’ she said. ‘Not at all,’ Melquíades corrected her. ’It has been proven that the devil has sulphuric properties and this is just a little corrosive sublimate. (7)

We are dealing here with three perspectives: the narrator’s, Úrsula’s and Melquíades’s. The narrator points out that Úrsula has a bad memory of Melquíades’ visit because of the smell of bichloride of mercury and instead of making any further comments, the reader comes across the dialogue between Úrsula and Melquíades. Melquíades’ “corrective function” (Ortega 1988) is thus highlighted from the very beginning and the passage illustrates, at the same time, an apparent non-involvement of the narrator. I say apparent because, in the end, the reader understands that Melquíades is the narrator. The detachment of the narrator becomes then a strategy to involve the reader since by refusing overt comments, it creates suspense.

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As a result, the reader is trapped by an external narrative voice and constantly tempted to believe in the magical reality of the novel in spite of Melquíades’s attempts to divert the focus of narration. It is this very contradiction that creates suspense, almost unnoticeably at first. If the first chapter mentions the discovery of ice and not that of “the biggest diamond in the world” the reader is led to believe that ice is a significant element in the story. Or, if Úrsula dreads the birth of a child with a pig tail, the reader’s curiosity is aroused each time her fear is mentioned at every birth in the family. The “foreshadowing and premonition technique” has been often noted by García Márquez’s critics in relation to the circular structure of the novel which can be better understood in the context of the change of perspectives discussed above. Carmen Arnau stressed in her book “El mundo mítico de Gabriel García Márquez” the effect of the “anticipation technique” on the reader (Arnau 1971). The significance of foreshadowing for our understanding of the novel is thus not only reflected in the story of the child with a pig tail but also, in the first sentence of the novel, when we are told that Colonel Aureliano Buendía will face the firing squad. The reader anticipates Aureliano’s death which, instead, occurs not in front of the firing squad but when he commits suicide. “Facing the firing squad” appears more than once in the novel as it will be also recalled with regard to Arcadio’s death. Only that, this time, the prediction will come true as Arcadio will be shot at the order of Roque Carnicero. The reader’s capacity of remembering characters and events is thus constantly challenged as the narrative voice indulges itself in narrative games of the kind mentioned here. One other instance where premonition plays a part in the story is closely related to the figure of Aureliano Buendía. He is the “seer” in the family, and Úrsula is the one who discovers his gift. Aureliano was born “with his eyes open” and the intensity of his look warns of impending disasters. When facing the firing squad, his lack of premonition convinces the reader of his power of seeing things happen. The soldiers do not shoot and that is why Aureliano could not see his death approaching. Trying to grasp the non-traditional character portrayal in the novel, one notices that in most cases, the main characters in the novel appear first as projections of their memories, thoughts and beliefs before being formally introduced by the narrator. Colonel Aureliano Buendía’s memory of ice, José Arcadio Buendía’s exalted thoughts or Úrsula’s strong disapproval of the gypsies and their ideas assume a familiarity with the world described by the narrative voice. In this fictional world, even when incredible things happen, the tone of the narrator remains unchanged. For instance, the

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manner in which the narrative voice describes the spread of the insomnia plague brings to mind the disease which infiltrates another fictional world, that of Camus’s The Plague. The insomnia plague starts insiduously, with José Arcadio Buendía and other members of the family finding themselves one day unable to sleep. Instead of panicking, they simply accept their fate and treat the plague as any other common disease. Úrsula uses medicinal plants against the loss of sleep while the people of Macondo seem happy with their constant wakefulness as it enables them to finish all their chores in the newly founded city of mirrors. The methods they try to use in order to exhaust themselves, such as the never-ending retelling of the story of the capon, or José Arcadio’s spinning dictionary designed to review basic knowledge in order to fight against the loss of memory caused by the disease are only ways of adapting to this new state which the reader is led to believe that to be quite natural. At a stylistic level, the rain of “tiny yellow flowers” falling on Macondo the night of José Arcadio’s death invests the narrative with a dream-like intensity which is rendered credible by the matter-of-fact description of the funeral. The carpenter who is taking measurements for the coffin and the people who clear away the flowers which are in the way of the funeral procession do not show any surprise at the unusual floral “storm” or rather, no surprise is reported by the narrator. A short time later, when the carpenter was taking measurements for the coffin, through the window they saw a light rain of tiny yellow flowers falling. They fell on the town all through the night in a silent storm, and they covered the roofs and blocked the doors and smothered the animals who slept outdoors. So many flowers fell from the sky that in the morning the streets were carpeted with a compact cushion and they had to clear them away with shovels and rakes so that the funeral procession could pass by. (144)

As our reading progresses, the fantastic is so skillfully weaved in the narrative that it becomes increasingly difficult to distinguish between the two worlds, the world of Macondo and the supernatural universe. The reported thoughts and beliefs of the characters gain verisimilitude and the reader is compelled to believe and even expect extraordinary events. Remedios the Beauty, for instance, is described as a magnificent creature, but her daily preoccupations do not seem to have anything out of the ordinary. Her prolonged baths, her disordered habits and her decision to shave her hair because she didn’t want to make it into rolls and braids are as strange as her natural odor, so easily detected by strangers. Remedios’s actions appear, however, natural and easy to believe since the narrative voice provides a common sense explanation of her behaviour. For

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example, the simplicity of her dress, “a coarse hassock” that she wears all the time, is understandable when the narrator reports that “she did not understand why women complicate their lives with corsets and petticoats”. Again, the narrator does not make any claim for exposing a certain view on things, but presents instead Remedios’s perspective. Also, when the other characters’ opinions about Remedios start changing and are overtaken by Colonel Aureliano Buendía’s idea that she is “the most lucid being that he had ever known”, the reader has to accept that Remedios is an extrardinary human being. Her ascent to heaven is then viewed as something inevitable since heaven is the place for beings endowed with such purity of spirit. The details of the ascent startle and amuse at the same time. Amaranta, Fernanda and Úrsula are witnessing this miraculous event and the reader is confronted all of a sudden with three different perspectives - not to mention, of course, Remedios’s own way of experiencing it : She had just finished saying it when Fernanda felt a delicate wind of light pull the sheets out of her hands and open them up wide. Amaranta felt a mysterious trembling in the lace on her petticoats and she tried to grasp the sheet so that she would not fall down at the instant in which Remedios the Beauty began to rise. Úrsula, almost blind at the time, was the only person who was sufficiently calm to identify the nature of that determined wind and she left the sheets to the mercy of the light as she watched Remedios the Beauty waving good-bye in the midst of the flapping sheets that rose up with her, abandoning with her the environment of beetles and dahlias and passing through the air with her as four o’clock in the afternoon came to an end, and they were lost forever with her in the upper atmosphere where not even the highest-flying birds of memory could reach her. (24243)

The reader’s role is determined here by all these perspectives on the event: the fact that Amaranta is concerned about falling down when Remedios starts rising, and that Fernarda worries so much about her sheets, reifies the ascent to heaven. Úrsula, the narrator tells us, is the only one who understands the meaning of Remedios’s ascent because she “was sufficiently calm to identify the nature of that determined wind”. The narrator’s language appears to reflect the characters’ reactions to the event, a fact which explains the uniformity of tone. The narrator’s tone is thus borrowed from that of the characters; for the fictional beings populating the world of Macondo nothing is extraordinary and this is the reason why the narrative voice describes incredible events in a cool manner (Llosa 1971). The passage represents another illustration of the narrator’s art of storytelling at work. It becomes obvious that the exaggeration and the

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distortion of reality in One Hundred Years of Solitude are accepted by the reader because they are perceived as being an integral part of the novel’s fictional world. For instance, José Arcadio’s sexual prowess ceases to startle the reader after the narrative voice presents two different perspectives: Úrsula’s, who worries that her son’s disproportionate size is similar to a deformity similar to the birth of a child with a pig tail and Pilar Ternera’s, who sees the positive side of such an unusual physical endowment. As a result, all José Arcadio’s later accomplishments appear quite normal. If “his monumental size provoked a panic of curiosity among the women” the reader is to conclude that making a living by raffling himself at ten pesos suits José Arcadio’s masculinity. In the same manner, Rebecca and José Arcadio’s honeymoon is described detachedly as being “scandalous” from the neighbours’ points of view who “prayed that such wild passion would not disturb the peace of the dead.” José Arcadio’s death episode, which I have mentioned previously in my analysis, is as exaggerated as this character’s out of the ordinary attributes. When the narrator records the funeral, the strangeness of the smell of powder is made credible by the amount of factual detail presented. José Arcadio’s body was scrubbed, seasoned and boiled over fire, then sealed hermetically but, in spite of all the drastic measures, it continued to smell: They sealed him hermetically in a special coffin seven and a half feet long and four feet wide, reinforced inside with iron plates and fastened together with steel bolts, and even then the smell could be perceived on the streets through which the funeral procession passed. . . Although in the months that followed they reinforced the grave with walls about it, between which they threw compressed ash, sawdust and quicklime, the cemetery still smelled of powder for many years after, until the engineers from the banana company covered the grave over with a shell of concrete. (136)

As we have seen from the above examples, the reader’s involvement is consistently maintained not only by the familiar tone of the narration and the unusual description of characters but also, by the change in focalization which ultimately creates an entanglement in the story recounted. The power of focalization has been delegated to characters and this is another reason why the fictional entities appear exaggerated: they take the perceptual characteristics of the focalizers. As a result, an interesting phenomenon occurs: instead of being given the impression that the narrator has control of the narrative, the reader perceives the fictional world of Macondo through the characters’ imagination. As the narrator’s tone adapts to the world described, the readers are also drawn by what they see as unmediated reactions of the characters to events. In spite of the

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omniscient tone of narration, the narrative voice is gradually perceived as being part of the fictional world, a fact which will be confirmed in the last pages of the novel. All this being said, the narrator in One Hundred Years of Solitude has, nevertheless, full control of the narrative. Vargas Llosa demonstrated in his monumental study how certain rhetorical strategies contribute to the dynamism and rhythmical quality of the narrator’s language (Llosa 1971). The reader is not given a chance to escape the fictional world of the novel as the accumulation of events takes elusive shapes. Starting with the image of the child with a pig tail and the desire to avoid incest, the events are told at an incredible speed, and the reader is vividly aware of the frenetic rhythm of narration (Williams 1988). The use of enumeration, for instance, creates a constant alternation of images which draws the reader’s attention to the character, object or event described, intensifying certain characteristics. Let us recall Aureliano Segundo who, losing patience over Fernanda’s monologue, “set about smashing the Bohemian crystal ware against the walls, the hand-painted vases, the pictures of maidens in flower-laden boats, the mirrors in their gilded frames, everything that was breakable, from parlor to pantry. . .”(332-33). Aureliano Segundo’s repressed fury is accentuated in this passage by the rhythmical descriptions of his actions and the enumeration of the objects destroyed creates a vivid image of the event. Repetition as stylistic variation is employed by the narrative voice in One Hundred Years of Solitude to create special effects. Rhetoricians of all times have stressed the strong emotional effect repetition produces on the audience as it establishes a marked rhythm in the sequence of clauses. In García Márquez’s novel, repetitions have an “incantational” force which takes the reader back to the mythical time of Macondo’s foundation (Llosa 1971). From the reader’s point of view, the repetition of certain words or phrases at regular intervals in the narrative creates an intimacy with the events retold. The readers’ awareness of the fictional world is thus heightened, causing them to participate more actively in the producing of meaning. For example, the phrase “many years later”, which appears in the first sentence, will be repeated in different contexts throughout the novel and it becomes a textual marker for the reader. By attempting to grasp the meaning of the phrase in a certain context, the reader is forced to recall the other contexts when the phrase was used. A series of already formed images confront the readers; in this manner, they have the impression of a more or less definite recollection of other characters and events causing, as I have noted above, a familiarity with the fictional world. Also, the constant repetition of names in the novel requires a great degree of

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intimacy with the characters and challenges the reader to follow the plot lines with increased attention. Each time a name is repeated with slight variations (Aureliano, Aureliano Segundo, Aureliano Babilonia) the reader has to sort out the names in order to understand the story. However, the reader’s task is simplified by Úrsula who notices the differences among the Buendía descendants, and the narrative voice which introduces the family members in chronological manner. Another stylistic device is the climactic arrangement of events. The procedure commonly used is to introduce a few elements, which pass almost unnoticed at first, followed by a gradual accumulation of facts which lead to the paroxysm of the event described. The destruction or dissolution occuring a short time after the climax is as slow as the beginning. The examples abound in One Hundred Years of Solitude. In Macondo, the world is “so recent that many things lacked names, and in order to indicate them it was necessary to point”. (1) The narrative voice continues to build up the fictional world which is threatened by external events such as the arrival of the gypsies, the armed uprisings, the banana company. With the biblical rain and Úrsula’s death, the destruction of Macondo is clearly anticipated. The last image of Macondo is of a place “forgotten even by the birds, where the dust and the heat had become so strong that it was difficult to breathe. . .” (409). To take another example, the presentation of the relationship between Aureliano Segundo and his mistress, Petra Cotes, follows the same order. A woman whose love is shared by the twins, Petra Cotes’ figure appears at first without much importance for the story. The strength of the relationship is, in time, confirmed by the “supernatural proliferation of the animals” which gives Aureliano an excuse to leave his wife for his mistress. The appeasement of their sexual drive comes with the rain and the death of the animals in Petra Cotes’ courtyard. The episode of Aureliano Babilonia and Amaranta Úrsula’s tempestuous love affair is worth mentioning here for it marks the final destruction of Macondo’s world. Their love emerges from an adulterous relationship which takes place in the rare moments of Gaston’s absence and develops into the mad passion reminiscent of José Arcadio and Rebecca’s. The striking aspect in the following paragraph is the capacity to evoke the destructive force of their passionate love which will be matched by the cyclonic wind that wipes out Macondo: They lost their sense of reality, the notion of time, the rhythm of daily habits. They closed the doors and windows again, so as not to waste time getting undressed and they walked about the house as Remedios the Beauty had wanted to do and they would roll around naked in the mud of

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the courtyard, and one afternoon they almost drowned as they made love in the cistern. In a short time they did more damage than the red ants: they destroyed the furniture in the parlor, in their madness they tore to shreds the hammock that had resisted the sad bivouac loves of Colonel Aureliano Buendía, and they disemboweled the mattresses and emptied them on the floor as they suffocated in storms of cotton. (410-11)

This is the climax of Aureliano and Amaranta Úrsula’s love story. In their case, total destruction follows as the cycle of one hundred years is completed by the birth of a child with a pig tail. As we can see from the examples analyzed, the climactic arrangement of the events is one of the factors that contribute to the element of suspense created by the narrative voice. The readers’ involvement is increased as they are drawn by a gradual unfolding of the events described. As mentioned previously, in García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, the readers’ perception of the characters and their perspectives is mediated by the narrative voice. The absence of the dialogue provokes the reader to construct an imaginary dialogue starting from isolated phrases scattered throughout the novel or from narratorial comments. As one critic justly observed: “We learn what people believe and know and do, but we don’t hear them speak. . . Speech in this novel tends to be repartee or wisecrack or memorable phrase, a means of framing or focussing a story but not of telling one” (Wood 1990). As they are given access to the characters’ thoughts and beliefs, the readers of One Hundred Years of Solitude are called upon to share their experience and become thus involved in the fictional world of the novel. The difficulty arises, however, when they attempt to reconstruct the images of the fictional beings. Since the world of Macondo is so “recent”, readers seem to have no referent and are compelled to rely on the information provided by the narrative voice. The fictional beings do not gain an existence of their own but are instead subordinate to the fictional language of the narrator. They are however, easily recognizable as they are singled out for their participation in the events described. Having recognized the role played by the narrative voice in the presentation of characters in One Hundred Years of Solitude, the strategy commonly used is to start with the report of a belief, a thought or a memory, and then, proceed to introduce the fictional being. To take one example, the first thing we know about Colonel Aureliano Buendía is his memory of the ice discovery. In subsequent chapters, his image will become clearer as the narrative advances. Likewise, José Arcadio Buendía is first introduced to the reader as the narrator reports his thoughts at the meeting with Melquíades and his

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inventions: “José Arcadio Buendía, whose unbridled imagination always went beyond the genius of nature and even beyond miracles and magic, thought that it would be possible to make use of that useless invention to extract gold from the bowels of the earth” (2). The image of the founder of Macondo undergoes several changes as it is perceived by the reader. If at first he appears as representing the figure of the patriarch, later, under Melquíades’s spell, he will change habits and ultimately will die tied to the trunk of a chestnut tree. Although Melquíades is the first character introduced by the narrative voice, the reader’s attempt in projecting an image of this elusive character is constantly hindered. Who is Melquíades? We know that his wisdom is immense and that he has magical powers. He is a gypsy who comes to Macondo following the song of the birds and leaves it at intervals, only to bring new inventions to its people. The first image of Melquíades is that of “a heavy gypsy with an untamed beard and sparrow hands” (71). The portrait drawn by the narrator further in the novel points out his ambivalent nature of a prophet and ordinary human being: That prodigious creature, said to possess the keys of Nostradamus, was a gloomy man, enveloped in a sad aura, with an Asiatic look that seemed to know what there was on the other side of things. He wore a large black hat that looked like a raven with widespread wings, and a velvet vest across which the patina of the centuries had skated. But in spite of his immense wisdom and his mysterious breadth, he had a human burden, an earthly condition that kept him involved in the small problems of daily life. He would complain of the ailments of old age, he suffered from the most insignificant economic difficulties, and he had stopped laughing a long time back because scurvy had made his teeth drop out. (6)

As with other characters in the novel, Melquíades is presented through various perspectives. One afternoon, when Aureliano is only five years old, he sees the gypsy sitting by the window with the grease on his temples melted by the heat, and talking about the wonders of another world. José Arcadio Buendía, his father, is convinced that he and the magician are at the beginning of a great friendship whereas his elder son, José Arcadio, will pass on the memory of that afternoon to his descendants. Úrsula, on the other hand, will not have a good memory of Melquíades’s visit as she comes in the room at the moment when the gypsy breaks the bottle of bichloride of mercury. As we can see, in the passage describing Melquíades’ visit, the readers come upon four different perspectives that allow them to construct an image of the magician gypsy, and at the same time, to realize the importance of his presence for the rest of the story. The afternoon when Melquíades visits the Buendías will remain as an

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unforgettable instance not only for the family but also, for the reader, who cannot miss the significance of the event. The example above serves also to illustrate the fact that the reader knows what the other characters think of Melquíades but the gypsy’s own thoughts are never disclosed by the narrative voice. There is always mystery surrounding him as he comes and goes. His magical powers allow him to cross the boundaries between the world of Macondo and the other world, where imagination reigns supreme. The people in Macondo learn to trust him because he is, as the narrator points out, an honest gypsy. His view on things is expressed in assertions that startle the modern reader by their common sense: “science has eliminated distance” (3) or “In a short time, man will be able to see what is happening in any place in the world without leaving his own home” (3). The declarations have the effect of installing the readers side by side with Melquíades as they share the magician’s wisdom. The prophecies of Melquíades break, for an instant, the fictional world and return readers to a familiar frame of reference. A similar strategy will be used again in the last pages of the novel, when readers find themselves reading at the same time with Aureliano “the last page of the parchments”. The contrast between Melquíades’s and José Arcadio’s points of view has been previously mentioned when I have discussed José Arcadio’s readiness to believe in miracles. If Melquíades’s statements have a prophetic ring, those uttered by José Arcadio do not instil credibility. When he exclaims: “The earth is round, like an orange” (5) Úrsula scolds him and people in the village think that he has gone mad. Only with the return of Melquíades, José Arcadio’s discovery is given due praise. For the reader, the contradiction between the two characters’ perspectives emphasizes Melquíades’s strong sense of “reality”. In Macondo’s fictional world, José Arcadio’s destiny resembles that of Don Quixote who went mad because of too much reading. Likewise, José Arcadio goes mad when he is “dragged off by his imagination into a state of perpetual delirium. . .” (79). The gypsy, instead, maintains his lucidity until “His skin became covered with a thin moss, similar to that which flourished on the antique vest that he never took off. . .” (74). Melquíades’s influence on the future of Macondo, repeatedly mentioned by the narrative voice, will be fully understood in the last pages of the novel. His manuscripts, written in Sanskrit and discovered by Aureliano Babilonia are the chronicle of the family that he left in a room untouched by the passing of time. His repeated deaths add to the supernatural aura surrounding him and lead the reader to believe in his immortality. Generations of Buendías, who never met him, recognize him instantly as his ghostly appearance stops by in his old room. Melquíades

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keeps on coming back until he is assured that Aureliano Buendía is capable to decipher the parchments and learn his own destiny. Melquíades’ ultimate death - on the sands of Singapore - appears as fantastic as the other ones. The reader will later realize that in fact, Melquíades never dies. He returns again just before Macondo is wiped out by the whirlwind, to reveal himself as the chronicler of the Buendías’ history. As I have already pointed out earlier, Melquíades is the only character whose thoughts the reader does not know. The reason why this happens is understood in the end, when the magician shows himself as the narrator. Only then, we realize that the omniscient voice that accompanied us is that of Melquíades who “used the errors of his characters as a way of teaching us how to read the novel” (Bell 1993). Suddenly, we find ourselves in José Arcadio’s shoes, at the beginning of the novel, who takes ice for the biggest diamond in the world. Melquíades, with his deceiving art of a magician, has told us a story about some parchments in Sanskrit which were nothing but the novel we have been reading. As far as the other characters are concerned, they appear as projections of their own thoughts. From this point of view, each character’s presence is dependent on the omniscient narrator’s retelling of events. Often, the reader is only allowed to catch a glimpse of the fictional being before actually understanding its place in the fictional world. An example may help clarify this point. With José Arcadio, the first born, the narrative voice starts from Úrsula’s relief at seeing his human features, and it is only on the following page that it provides the reader with the full story of his disproportionate size. After his disappearance, flatly reported by the narrator: “On Saturday night José Arcadio wrapped a red cloth around his head and left with the gypsies. “(34). José Arcadio will be absent from the story until one day, when he returns to surprise everybody with his monumental size and pantagruelian appetite. José Arcadio’s return is staged in theatrical manner: the scarcity of words spoken and the meticulous description of his sudden entrance set in contradiction to the immobility of the other members of the family transmit a vivid image to the reader. His repeated “hello”, uttered in a tired voice as he passes through the rooms of the house, intrigues the reader who is not told about the identity of the man until he arrives in the kitchen. Úrsula’s reaction at this unexpected visit forces the reader to see José Arcadio through her eyes and to experience his return as a surprise. The news of José Arcadio’s death, as sudden as his flight with the gypsies, finds Úrsula in the kitchen again, this time “getting ready to crack thirty six eggs to make bread” (135). The trickle of blood that comes out in

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Úrsula’s kitchen is invested with human attributes as it travels without being seen through the Buendías’ house to inform Úrsula of her son’s death. José Arcadio’s presence in the narrative is thus conditioned by Úrsula’s perspective. Each time the reader tries to construct the image of José Arcadio, the other image, that of Úrsula, comes into focus. From his birth to his death, José Arcadio’s fictional existence appears to the reader closely related to Úrsula’s. In this sense, his image is a projection of the events seen through Úrsula’s eyes. In the case of José Arcadio, the reader is not given direct access to his thoughts, as it happens with other fictional beings, such as Úrsula or Fernanda. We have seen how Úrsula represents the unifying thread in the novel, her changing image corresponding to the transformations Macondo and its fictional beings undergo. The little we know about Úrsula in the first pages of Gárcia Márquez’s novel consists of her reaction to José Arcadio’s obsession with inventions which contribute to her portrayal her as a strong-willed, hard-working woman. Later on, the narrator’s direct description of Úrsula confirms the image that the reader has already formed of her: Úrsula’s severity, her starched petticoats match the cleanliness of her house and the serenity reigning in the newly-founded Macondo. Her presence in the novel orients the readers as they attempt to build the consistency of the text. Even if Úrsula’s “voice” is always mitigated by the narrator, the reader comes to realize that she occupies a privileged position in the narrative. The distance between her and the reader is gradually reduced as the narrative voice reveals her intense feelings and emotions. The manner in which Úrsula experiences events in the novel leads to the reader’s familiarity with her. She weeps in consternation when José Arcadio exchanges two magnets and three colonial coins for Melquíades’ magnifying glass and she loses her patience as her husband tries to put gypsy ideas into their children’s heads. When José Arcadio runs away with the gypsies, she does not hesitate to start a search and when he returns, she shouts and weeps with joy. Each time Úrsula is brought into focus, the reader expects her reactions and the revelation of her thoughts. As readers learn to listen to Úrsula’s judgments on people and events, they understand her place in the novel. In the fictional world of Macondo, she becomes the referent for the image-building process in which the reader is involved. Úrsula is the only one who notices the air of solitude in the eyes of all Aurelianos and does not show any surprise at the ascent of Remedios the Beauty; she follows José Arcadio’s trickle of blood to a house unknown to her where the body of her son lies, and weeps bitterly when Pietro Crespi commits suicide. In time, the changes in the world of Macondo will affect

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Úrsula who resists growing old. She becomes blind but refuses to let anybody in the family know and learns to guide herself by the sound of voices and by odors. Her blindness to the world in which she lives opens for her the imaginary world where she wanders to meet the dead. During the third year of the rain she weeps for three days for her dead greatgrandmother as she loses the sense of reality. Her matriarchal instinct wins, however, in the end, and she returns from her state of confusion when it stops raining in Macondo in order to be once again with her family. Úrsula cried in lamentation when she discovered that for more than three years she had been a plaything for the children. She washed her painted face, took off the strips of brightly colored cloth, the dried lizards and frogs, and the rosaries and old Arab necklaces that they had hung all over her body, and for the first time since the death of Amaranta she got up out of bed without anybody’s help to join in the family life once more. The spirit of her invincible heart guided her through the shadows. (339-40)

Úrsula’s self-consciousness at the time when the “arid wind” begins to blow is the signal anticipating the destruction of Macondo. Before her death, she becomes keenly aware that time “was turning in a circle” and at her funeral, “it was so hot …that the birds in their confusion were running into walls like clay pigeons and breaking through screens to die in the bedrooms” (369). What has been noted concerning the narrative complexity and stylistic variation throughout the novel can be applied, to a certain extent, to the incorporation of other languages, speech types or genres. It could be argued that readers learn about events in the story through characters’ thoughts or imagination and their competing languages and voices (Bakhtin 1984). How is this accomplished? If we recall the assumption made previously that the narrator’s language appears to reflect the characters’ reactions to events, we could say that the narrator’s merges its voice with the characters’. This results in a phenomenon of “heteroglossia” which becomes obvious if we take a closer look at certain passages in the novel. For instance, Fernanda’s presence in the fictional world of Macondo deserves particular attention since she represents the only exception as far as the distinctness of her “voice” is concerned. The reader’s image of Fernanda prior to her monologue is that of a pretentious being with unfulfilled desires and memories of a sheltered life as they are presented by the narrator and other characters’ perspectives. Her arrival in Macondo creates turbulence; she is the most beautiful woman who ever existed, but her self-imposed discipline and airs of a queen displease everybody, not to mention her husband Aureliano, who hides his disappointment in the arms

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of his concubine, Petra Cotes. During the time of the rain, exasperated by her husband disinterest in domestic affairs, Fernanda starts outpouring her accumulated despair in a lengthy monologue which takes the reader by surprise. It is the only instance in the novel where a “voice” of a character is clearly heard. In a fragment of unmatched humour and irony, Fernanda’s diatribe isolates her from the other fictional beings and allows the reader to form a more determinate image of her. Aureliano Segundo’s reaction to her “singsong” adds to the humour of this passage whereas narratorial comments undermine Fernanda’s accusations. The narrator explicitly signals the effect of Fernanda’s complaints by employing a series of qualifiers: her laments are heard as “an uncontained, unchained torrent”, “the monotonous drone of a guitar”, “singsong” or “buzzing” reflected in the text by the uninterrupted flow of written words. And while the urgencies of the pantry grew greater, Fernanda’s indignation also grew, until her eventual protests, her infrequent outbursts came forth in an uncontained, unchained torrent that began one morning like the monotonous drone of a guitar and as the day advanced rose in pitch, richer and more splendid. (328)

Aureliano Segundo has the patience to listen to her for almost three days, tells us the narrator, until exasperated by what has become “the echo of the bass drum that was tormenting his head”, breaks into pieces all chinaware, glass and crystal existent in the house. The passage reproducing Fernanda’s complaints outlines not only Fernanda’s point of view but also the narrator’s and the other characters’ perspectives as Fernanda’s language appears strikingly different from the others’; her comments are meant to identify her as a superior being, raised to be a queen and mistreated by her husband and her husband’s family. What we have here in a condensed form is an illustrative example of “skaz” (Eichenbaum 1975). Fernanda’s monologue is foregroundred and her mimicry of others as well as her gesturing produce a comical effect. Her frequent invocation of God (“the Holy Father”, “Lord”) is employed to frame her emotional appeal which nevertheless misses its point. The strong element of ethos (“they had raised her to be a queen”, “the godchild of the Duke of Alba”, “a noble dame of fine blood like her”) side by side with the others’ view of her provoke laughter instead of arousing pity. Fernanda’s “voice” enables the reader to form an image of her by comparing the various perspectives. The narratorial comments are aimed in the end at subverting Fernanda’s intentions in arousing her husband’s compassion and placing the reader in a position to see the ridicule of her pretentiousness. It becomes clear that Fernanda’s “voice” is not employed for the purpose of rehabilitating her

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but to enforce the reader’s perception of her as a “stuck-up highlander”, in total contrast to the Buendías. To take another example which illustrates the variety of languages and speech types in the novel, the event of the “insomnia plague”, when the people of Macondo tried different methods to exhaust themselves, is worth mentioning. The retelling of the previously noted “story about the capon”, an oral game in which the narrator played tricks on his audience for entire nights, is an example of oral literature which is reproduced in the novel as part of the narrator’s speech. It is, however, easily recognizable by the scarcity of punctuation marks which reflects the story itself in its endless form. Another example of oral language incorporated in the story is represented by Francisco the Man’s songs. Francisco is a minstrel who earns his living by including in his songs news from the people he meets on his way. For a fee, he adds the news of births, deaths or other major events to his repertory and people flock to listen to him; in that patriarchal world, Francisco the Man’s songs become the only means of communication with people in distant places. . . . Francisco the Man told in great detail the things that had happened in the towns told in great detail the things that had happened in the towns along his route, from Manaure to the edge of the swamp, so that if anyone had a message to send or an event to make public, he would pay him two cents to include it in his repertory. That was how Úrsula learned of the death of her mother, as a simple consequence of listening to the songs in the hope that they would say something about her son José Arcadio. (52)

In visible contrast with these types of voices and languages in the novel, the language of the chronicler can be easily distinguished by its truthclaims and specific details of historical value: “When the pirate Sir Francis Drake attacked Riohacha in the sixteenth century. . .”(19) or as it mentions the transgressive act committed by Ursula’s aunt. In fact, each chapter begins with statements which give the impression of an outside observer. Only after the introductive statements, the reader is confronted with the views of the other characters. Another instance where the chronicler’s speech becomes obvious is the passage retelling the strike of the banana workers. The tone is cold and detached as it registers the unexpected order: “The captain gave the order to fire and fourteen machine guns answered at once” (311). The question arises of how this invisible narrator relates to Melquíades. If Melquíades does not reveal himself as the chronicler until the very end, one notices that, from a stylistic point of view, Melquíades’ language is definitely unique in the novel. The elevated register and the vocabulary used clearly illustrate his wide knowledge and preoccupations, reminiscent of the language used by the chronicler. His

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utterings have “little to do with reality” (that is, with the reality of Macondo) as Aureliano discovers one day, when he tries to understand “his groping monologues”; instead, he is only able to grasp the repetition of the word “equinox” and “ the name of Alexander von Humboldt”. His Spanish is marked by a strong accent which adds to the esoteric quality of his language. “I have found immortality.”, or “We come from the water.” (74) are prophetic statements meant to startle the reader. Melquíades’s speech appears thus as a channel of communication with the supernatural world where he seems to have unlimited access. The difference between the gypsy’s language and that of José Arcadio Buendía, the founder of Macondo, consists in the latter’s inability to surpass the reality of Macondo. When José Arcadio goes mad, his language becomes “highsounding and fluent but completely incomprehensible” for the others, until Father Nicanor discovers that the language is, in fact, Latin. Given the similarities between the language of the chronicler and that of Melquíades, one is led to speculate that the narrative strategy used by García Márquez in this case strongly conveys his experimentation with metafiction and postmodernism. While it claims to give a historical explanation to the degeneration of the Buendías and the decline of Macondo, the novelist makes it impossible to distinguish the “real” version from the fictional one. The merging of these two narrative voices can only be understood in terms of García Márquez’s crossing of genres and self-reflexive writing. In this light, the fusion of the chronicle of the Buendias with the mythical tale of the child with a pig tail erases the boundaries between history and myth and exposes the fictional illusion by situating readers, narrators and characters outside “man’s conventional time”. By identifying only a few of the discursive strata present in One Hundred Years of Solitude we can say that “heteroglossia” contributes largely to its emotional appeal. Close attention paid to the variety of languages and genres incorporated in García Márquez’s novel makes the reader aware of the narrator’s relation to the characters and to their reaction to events. Looking back on the issues discussed in my analysis of One Hundred Years of Solitude, the authority of the narrative voice appears now with more clarity. In the last pages of the novel, the reader comes to understand that the external omniscient narrator is none other but Melquíades himself who has been busy telling the story of the Buendias. We have seen how the sudden change of perspectives, as well as the temporal and spatial dislocation, have drawn the reader unawares into the fictional world of Macondo. Melquíades’s identity as narrator remains unknown until the end but his constant presence is occasionally revealed as if the sage gypsy

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wanted to test readers’ ability to distinguish between their own reality and that of Macondo. The narrative voice in One Hundred Years of Solitude regulates the readers’ expectations as it leads them to anticipate the events by the use of foreshadowing and premonition. I have also noted that the reported thoughts and beliefs of the characters, as well as the fantastic events recounted, gain verisimilitude as the tone of the narrative voice associates the fantastic with the commonplace forcing the reader to perceive the fictional world of Macondo through the characters’ imagination. The cinematographic effect of narration in One Hundred Years of Solitude stems from the constant use of enumeration and repetition which provoke the reader’s activity. By intensifying certain characteristics of fictional entities and also, by creating a familiarity with the fictional world, the narrative voice challenges the reader to become involved in it. As far as the reader’s relationship with the characters is concerned, it becomes clear that the reader’s images of the characters are founded on projections of their thoughts and beliefs; in Fernanda’s case, we have seen how the use of “reproducing skaz” enables the reader to hear her “voice” distinctly. “Heteroglossia” in García Márquez’s novel is characterized by an exposure of the characters’ internal speech which is another major factor that contributes to increase the reader’s intimacy with the characters. Aside from the peculiar stylistic features highlighted above, the incest motif appears as a crucial factor in understanding the circular nature of One Hundred Years of Solitude. If the birth of a child with a pig tail does not alarm Aureliano and Amaranta Úrsula in the last chapter of the novel this is because they “were not aware of the family precedent” mentioned in the beginning of the novel. It is this particular event that forces us to reconsider all expectations formed in the beginning and makes us aware of the reading act in progress which ends at the same time with Aureliano Babilonia’s reading. The identification of the reader of One Hundred Years of Solitude with Aureliano Babilonia gives a new dimension to reading; as Melquíades is installed in the function of the narrator, so is the reader given a privileged position as the one who knows before Aureliano Babilonia the history of the Buendías through myth making. Readers are, however, taken by surprise by this discovery because it is only in the last pages of the novel when they become aware of their knowledge. Melquíades’s parchments written in Sanskrit, which represent in the novel the philosopher’s stone coveted by generations of Buendías, became accesible to the reader from the very first line. The ignorance of the reader who learns the truth in the last pages of the novel is thus paralleled by the ignorance of Aureliano Babilonia who comes to know his destiny at the

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exact moment when Macondo is “wiped out by the wind and exiled from the memory of men”: Only then did he discover that Amaranta Úrsula was not his sister but his aunt, and that Sir Francis Drake had attacked Riochacha only so that they could seek each other through the most intricate labyrinths of blood until they would engender the mythological animal that was to bring the line to an end. (447)

The act of reading appears in this case a discovery, very similar to José Arcadio’s discovery of ice or Aureliano Babilonia’s discovery of his identity, initiated by the first sentence of the novel as readers gradually make the discovery that Melquíades’s manuscripts are in fact the novel they are reading. The metafictionality of the novel can be better understood in the parallel reading unveiled in the end by Melquíades. This time, readers become the focus of attention as they realize that they have been all along absorbed in the story of the Buendías, ignoring that they were the only ones gaining access to Melquíades’s hermetic writings, even before Aureliano Babilonia. The postmodernist twist of the novel pushes readers out of the traditional position of spectators as they ultimately find themselves reflecting on their own expectations and their fulfillment during the process of reading. This is the reason why suspense is intensified when reading the last two pages of the novel. The desire to know, belonging to Aureliano, overwhelms the reader as the narrative progresses. The surprise comes when readers discover, at the same time with Aureliano Babilonia, what they already knew. The multiplicity of meaning is a constant feature of García Márquez’s style. As we come to understand Melquiades’s chronicle by gaining insights into the importance of “incest” in the history of the Buendias, we realize that Aureliano Babilonia is the ideal reader in the novel. It is worth recalling that he meets the requirements set out by the author of the parchments: he does not know anything about his own time but he studies Sanskrit and has the basic knowledge of a medieval man. If Aureliano is thus able to decipher Melquíades’ manuscripts and discovers his identity, readers, in turn, are forced to reflect on their own reading of the novel, their familiarity with the content described and the truthfulness of the narrative voice. With every reading, García Marquez, the magician in disguise, reverses the fate and once again, challenges us to understand the story of Latin America through a fictional universe made up of history and myth.

CHAPTER FOUR TABOOS AND CULTURAL NORMS IN ASSIA DJEBAR’S CHILDREN OF A NEW WORLD

Assia Djebar’s novel, Children of a New World, introduces readers to a fictional Algerian world where transgressive acts are narrated from a female consciousness perspective. If in One Hundred Years of Solitude I discussed the incest motif in relationship with the novel’s narrative complexity, in my analysis of Djebar’s novel, I plan to show that Touma’s death is presented as a deserved fate for her transgression of social taboos. The distancing narratorial comments which frame Touma’s fragmented thoughts in the novel call attention to her distorted views of the Algerian world and her image as an outcast. As there is no obvious criticism expressed by the narrative voice, it is through the characters’ points of view that readers perceive Touma’s alienation from the Algerian society. Perception of space in Children of a New World is also important when discussing transgressive acts. It can be argued that the fictional space represented here, an Algerian town during the national evolution, is “thematized”. According to Bal, space can become “an ‘acting place’ rather than the place of action. It influences the fabula, and the fabula becomes subordinate to the presentation of space” (136). Since the narration relies to a large extent on retrospective techniques, we have to consider the two aspects of the fictional space represented in the novel. On the one hand, we have the space perceived as it is narrated in the present tense, and, on the other hand, there is a memorized space. Both aspects become visible from the start, when the narrator’s surveying of the old Algerian town in the first chapter places us in a fictional space transfigured by political events. A further noteworthy aspect regarding the construction of the fictional space in Djebar’s novel is the clear establishment of the narrator’s authority (Valdes 1982, 25). As it becomes obvious from the first image of the town, the narrative voice uses explicit, historical references to describe the scene. Since an appreciation of the Arab norms within the space

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described in the novel is essential for the plot, it follows that the factors that influence Touma’s murder in “Place d’armes” can be understood only if the reader gains imaginative insight into this particular setting. In her essay, “Trespasser across Perilous Ways: Assia Djebar, Woman Writer”, Clarisse Zimra informs us that Djebar stresses the crucial importance of constructing (and thus reading) her work “architecturally”, her thinking through the preliminary spatial conceptualizing of a single novel as an affect that will, eventually, fuse both writer and reader in a shared imaginaire – an architectonics”. (Zimra, 2001) As far as the internal organization of the novel is concerned, one should note how the main act of transgression - Touma’s murder - is connected to other transgressive acts or sub-themes: Cherifa’s rebellion against her first husband, her walk through the city center, Lila’s rebellion against traditional values. Thus the framework I propose has two levels of inquiry: a narrative level, where the presentation of characters’ views is deeply affected by the revolution as perceived through Lila’s inner monologues, and a stylistic level, where analysis focuses on the multivoiced, polyvocal discourse with its distinct versions of feminine consciousness that mediate our views of events and characters in the novel. Through the proposed interpretation, I shall demonstrate that the female consciousness perspective will result in an expansion of awareness for us as readers of Djebar’s novel (Valdes 1982, 174). For the purpose of my analysis, I will look first at how the narrative is organized. There are nine chapters, each being named after nine characters in the story. An unusual narrative strategy, the placing of the characters before the first chapter orients the readers in the fictional world of the text.

Cherifa In Children of a New World the focal point becomes the door with its lifted curtains which allow the women to watch the mountain lit by the fire of the revolution. Along with the present image of the town, the narratorial voice evokes its past - a preferred place where, before the revolution, wellto-do families came to find repose. The two images are thus contrasted, as the memorized space becomes an idealized world. In the old Arab quarter at the foot of the mountain the whitewashed houses all look alike. Before the city grew larger, this was the only place where affluent families would come to find a bit of cool air, near the brooks and orchards at the end of the spring. Each home is at the end of a cul de sac, where, after wandering through a maze of silent little alleyways, one must stop.

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All that can be heard is some vague whispering suddenly interrupted by the shrill cries of children, whom the mothers are trying to keep at home, but to no avail. The military guard can show up at any moment. Then there is barely enough time to gather the children and muffle their voices behind closed doors. Once the soldiers have gone, the mothers, each with her own brood, settle down again at the back of their room, on the tile floor or on a mattress. There they stay for hours on end, and through the door, with its raised curtains opening wide onto the courtyard and fountains, they quietly watch the spectacle the guard had announced is about to begin: the mountain under fire. (1)

Against this background, female characters have an important role to play in Djebar’s novel. Wadi Bouzar provides a diagram designed to show the similarities and differences among female characters in Children of a New World. Cherifa’s and Lila’s destinies are, perhaps, the ones that mostly symbolize the changing world described in the novel. It is mainly through their perceptions of events and people that we come to understand the new world. Throughout the novel, their memories and thoughts disrupt the narrator’s discourse, revealing intimate aspects of their social relationships. Djebar’s detailed description of Cherifa in chapter one facilitates our reconstruction. A strikingly beautiful woman, Cherifa is portrayed as having a certain appeal that cannot be missed by young or old: It is true. At twenty-nine, she holds on to her reputation as the town’s most beautiful woman. Her complexion is flawless; her hair, a black river, falls down to her waist; her wide eyes, with their somewhat unhurried look that does not waver, settle on other people, forget them, dream, wander off-her eyes could enrapture-and above all, her figure, with a bearing that would provoke comments from the old women at celebrations when they watched her come in, traditional Arab metaphors, improvised in a murmur that would get lost in the din (“A gazelle running across the sand,” “ A heavenly angel disguised as a thoroughbred horse,” “A quail quivering with modesty on a branch,” and so on). (9)

The implied author’s emphasis at the beginning of the passage, as well as the interspersed remarks of other people about Cherifa’s beauty, add credibility to the description. Character portrayal is an important factor in helping us, as readers, construct the fictional world represented in the novel; Cherifa’s portrait is an illustration of how Djebar succeeds in presenting unfamiliar social norms that stimulate our participation in the production of meaning. Let us take, for instance, Cherifa’s internal monologue where we find out about her aversion for her first husband, as shown in the following passage:

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Given this intimate view of Cherifa’s relationship with her first husband, we are able to fill in certain missing elements from her life and thus facilitate our image-building process when we read. By following closely her internal monologue, we understand that during her first marriage Cherifa felt the desire to take control of her life and to escape from a relationship in which she felt trapped. The problem was that in her world women never questioned their submissiveness to their husbands; this is why her rejection of her first husband appears to us out of the ordinary. As it will become obvious, Cherifa is different because she has the courage to oppose traditional views of marriage. In bringing to the fore her memories, the narrator thus directs our attention to her particular point of view on marriage and the woman’s condition in the represented Algerian world. It is, however, through the narrator’s omniscient discourse that we are informed of Cherifa’s reaction to the unexpected turn of events: her repudiation by her first husband after refusing to have a child with him. She then had to suffer her husband’s cries of rage and fury; he beat her and, in a final sign of cowardice, pretended to be resigned, a turnaround he refused to translate as an admission of helplessness. After an interval of several days-even at night she stayed in her room at the back of the house, thereby enjoying the small pleasures of defiance-he came in one night, his face inscrutable and his voice hard, to announce that he was repudiating her, since she hadn’t been able to bear him any children. His businesslike expression was a mask that allowed him to save face. (15)

What we have here is a tacit approval of Cherifa’s decision to act, as if the narrator is voicing the character’s most intimate thoughts. The intervention of the narrator is not at all surprising as we come to understand that Cherifa remains a traditional woman in the sense that she does not openly express her opinions. By the end of the first chapter, the readers witness the unfolding of her consciousness as the unobtrusive implied author presents her story in the form of a reflection on past life.

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Another example where Cherifa’s inner voice becomes known to us through narratorial framing is her sudden desire to show Youssef, her present husband, her devotion and love. After her conversation with Amna, she decides to go to Youssef’s store and warn him of Hakim’s suspecting of him. Her internal struggle might appear incomprehensible to the readers who, perhaps, ignore the reason why a woman should consider her walk across the town an act of transgression. The excerpt describing Cherifa in front of her mirror, carefully choosing one of her oldest silk veils, is the prelude to a more detailed narratorial commentary. It is in another passage where the implied author explains Cherifa’s fears: here, the readers are told that in the Algerian town represented in Children of a New World, a woman can never walk unaccompanied. This is why Cherifa’s action is qualified as an act of transgression. Her awareness of defying old customs by being seen in public is transmitted to us through the narrator’s minute recording of her gestures and feelings as she crosses the core area of the town. Walking through the main street becomes an ordeal for Cherifa, as it is stressed by the narrator’s commentary in the following passage: Cherifa walks the long street for the first time. her slow, lightly balanced tread is going to attract the gaze of the men on the terraces, who are playing, talking, or drinking tea or coffee. Cherifa’s heart beats in haste and shame and she stares at the end of the street as if it were her salvation. She wishes she could walk serely and indifferently, as she used to on holidays, but her veil is no protection for her. She walks straight, her step is regular; already eyes are are looking up at her, imagining her as a languid figure, wandering around in the sun. (86)

While observing Cherifa’s movements, readers become aware of her own perception of the external world and it seems that her inner feelings surge, unmediated, from the narrative. The brevity of sentences in this passage reflects Cherifa’s internal monologue as the narrator’s intervention becomes minimal. As she becomes more conscious of the gravity of her action, we are vividly made aware that she moves in a world where women’s presence is forbidden. The episode of Cherifa’s walk across the main area of the town represents for us an important factor in the process of consistency-building of the text. Her experience gives us a glimpse of the restrictions imposed to women in the fictional world described in Djebar’s novel. Also, since she is one of the main characters in the novel, it is clear that her actions become significant for the story. If Cherifa appears here as a spectator, her perception of the town centre is transmitted to the readers, who become thus, in turn, spectators of the unfamiliar world of the text. Ultimately, the readers are given the

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impression that Cherifa’s vision is superimposed on their own vision of the Algerian town. We can see now how the revolution and the physical space described in the novel increase our awareness of the fictional world represented in Children of a New World.

Lila In discussing Lila, the other major character, we find that her intended isolation sets her apart from all the other feminine characters in Djebar’s novel. The story of her love for Ali represents a focal point in the text, and the readers are constantly stimulated to gather the fragments of memories, bits of conversation, in order to understand their relationship. As I have suggested in the beginning, Lila’s perspective becomes predominant, and gradually, the events narrated are seen as part of the story she tells. Lila’s loneliness urges her to turn back to her past which she analyzes with lucidity. Her rhetorical questioning is a recurrent pattern throughout her inner monologues in the novel, and suggests her intense soul-searching. The absence of her husband, whom she still loves, provokes a chain of successive images to emerge from her past. With every interior monologue narrated, it seems that we penetrate deeper into Lila’s consciousness. If her solitude brings immediately the thought of the most recent episodes from her life with Ali - their interminable fights, and her perverse pleasure in them - free associations produce a proliferation of other past memories dating back to her childhood. Lila’s consciousness is thus revealed at different stages in the narrative. The omniscience of the narrator becomes obvious as we are consistently provided with ample commentaries on events and people in her life. In her case, as with the other characters, the narrator exposes most intimate thoughts. An appropriate term for this type of narration is, perhaps, Dorrit Cohn’s “psycho-narration” (Cohn, 1978). In Djebar’s text, we have a combination of narration types which we may call a “hybrid” form of as it passes from the authorial omniscience to the almost total intermingling with the characters’ voices. As mentioned previously in this chapter, Lila’s rebellion against traditional values emerges as an important act of transgression. Lila is thus not only a problematic feminine figure, but also, a character whose views come in sharp contrast with those of other characters in the novel. It is from this contradiction of ideas and opinions, I believe, that readers will be led to understand that the revolution acts as a catalyst in Children of a New World. The constant intermingling of the political with the social in the novel familiarizes the reader with an Algerian world where traditions and

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customs are threatened by the colonists. Human relationships are influenced by the political events. Lila, who, at first, does not understand her husband’s political commitment, feels estranged and sees the revolution as a threat to their love. The relationship between Amna and her husband, Hakim, changes as she lies for the first time to him; she does it in order to protect her friends’s husband, Youssef, who is suspected of political involvement. The lie that she tells her husband shatters Amna’s self-confidence. Unlike the other women in the novel who resign themselves to wait for their husbands, Lila is the only woman who rebels, even if it is through silence. The decision taken after Ali’s departure - to live on her own - is thus the beginning of her self-discovery process. Suzannes’s visit, as well as other encounters with other people she knows in town, will deepen even more of her self-questioning. As she searches to find the cause of her present unhappiness, Lila’s wandering mind returns to childhood memories where her father, Rachid, occupies a distinct place. In Lila’s narrated memories, the traditional family appears in conflict with her own father’s family. Rachid defies ancient customs and refuses to live his life according to his father’s precepts. It is the influence of his defiant personality that ultimately leads Lila to question the traditional values of the world she lives in. The fragment concerned with Lila’s childhood is thus an illustrative example of the narrator’s authority; we recognize instantly the voice that offered us, in the beginning of the novel, the bird’s eye view of the Algerian town, or commented extensively on the interdiction of women to walk unaccompanied in the streets. This time, the readers are duly informed of traditional marriage customs and the unexpected turn of events in Lila’s family. Her father, Rachid, falls in love with the young woman chosen to be his wife. The passage describing a traditional family becomes revelatory when, against this image, Lila’s memories reconstruct another type of family, based on love. It is clear that the marriage of Lila’s parents represents, in their world, an unacceptable break with tradition, as it is indicated in the following passage: How she loved this man, who discovered his true self in his happiness, who was able to forget the others to such an extent that his love for his wife appeared scandalous and shameful. ‘How improper!’ they used to say. ‘How indecent!’ they whispered when, night after night, he was seen preferring the company of his wife, in the privacy of their room, to the male gathering on the family patio. (127)

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The story of Lila’s relationship with her father is therefore brought to fore. Her admiration of his rebelliousness pervades her memories of him and is definitely important in trying to define Lila’s character. At this stage in the narrative, the readers are able to better understand Lila’s complex personality if they take into account her reported memories. By paying close attention to her search into her past, the readers have not only a clear picture of the traditional Algerian society but also, succeed in reconstructing Lila as a character in the novel. The fusion between the present in which Lila, alone, evaluates her relationship with Ali, and the past can be grasped more easily by the readers who are able now to project Lila’s self-analysis against her narrated background. Her soul-searching has, therefore, its source in a questioning of the world she lives in; her refusal of a traditional role as a submissive wife has to be understood in the context of her modernity. She is an educated woman - we recall that Rachid insisted that Lila should be educated - whose perceptions of the Algerian world differ from those of Amna, for instance. The memory of her parents’ happy marriage opens up for Lila another world. It is the new world, where a woman is allowed to voice her opinions or to remain silent, if she so desires. As a result, Lila’s imprisonment in the last chapter can be perceived as a “passage” to this new world, where she can see herself with Ali in a non-traditional type of relationship. Looking back at how Lila’s portrait emerges from the examples discussed here, we can say that our activity of reconstructing the world of Djebar’s text is closely connected with the narrator’s presentation of characters. The shifting in the narration, from the obvious ideological commentary of the omniscient narrator to the points of view of individual characters, allows us to perceive the social and cultural background of the text not only as detached observers, but also, as active participants in the configuration of meaning. Since the text of Djebar’s novel is made up of unfamiliar norms, it is the readers who have to assemble the various perspectives in the text, perspectives that often contradict each other.

“A family affair” To turn now to another perspective in the text, the figure of Touma represents a challenge to the values of the Algerian world depicted in Children of a new World. Earlier in my analysis, I have made the assumption that the readers gain insight into the fictional world of the novel through a collective feminine consciousness. In Touma’s case, we become suddenly aware of the distancing comments of the implied author that indicate that this character’s views come in contradiction with those of

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other women in the novel. If in describing Cherifa and Lila the narrator’s distance appears greatly reduced by a constant change in focalization that creates an impression of intimacy with these two characters, with Touma we have another type of narration. It is only after we have identified this type of narration that we can better understand the role of the character in the narrative. Touma’s first image emerges from a detached narrative stance: An ice cream stand could be seen between two cafes, at the other end, straight ahead. Touma, who is sitting alone, is having a pêche melba. Her visit at the police station exhausted her. She loves this place, where she comes now almost every day. She likes being noticed by her customers in the neighbouring cafes, and imagines the desire of those men who seize her up, stare at this provocative, “emancipated Arab” (‘Yes, she is wearing flat shoes, a short skirt, she has a perm, she looks exactly like our women and she even has a nice figure. . . such an attractive brunette; she could be from Marseille, or from Arles. . . ’. (91)

The incorporation of Touma’s thoughts in the narration, as well as the bracketed views of the Europeans draw attention to the change in the narrator’s tone. As the following paragraphs show, there is an excess of information which allows the readers to see that Touma is a pariah, not only because she expresses openly her hate of the Algerians (although she is an Algerian herself), but also, because she shows her desire to please the Europeans. Genette called this narrative technique “alteration inverse” or “paralepse” (Genette 1972, 213). The narrator’s incursion into Touma’s conscience is framed by comments pointing up the disparity between the narrator’s and the character’s views. What the readers are urged here to retain is Touma’s alienation, made visible in the cold manner of narrating the scene. For Touma, the others are the Algerians, as it is stressed by the narratorial intervention. As it is perceived by the narrator, Touma’s whole attitude reflects her conflicting views of the Algerian world. The image that she embodies comes in sharp contradiction with the values intermittently exposed by the implied author. We recall, how, at the beginning of the chapter entitled “Touma”, we come across narratorial comments regarding interdictions imposed to women. In the same excerpt, Cherifa’s walk across town becomes an event which transmits to us her sense of guilt as she is forced to break with tradition. Now, to return to Touma, she is first represented as a woman who sits alone at a table, dressed in European clothes, and who takes pleasure in being noticed by men. The narrator’s accusatory voice becomes more audible as our attention is directed to Touma’s movements. The apparently insignificant detail mentioned by the omniscient narrator -

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her silver lighter is a present from Martinez - aims, in fact, to draw the readers’ attention to another event, where Touma appears in passing. In the chapter entitled “Salima”, Hakim returns to the police station. On the stairs, he meets Touma, who is just going out and who teases him behind his back. Hakim’s thoughts reveal his mistrust of her and confirm other allusions in the text about Touma, specifically that she is an informer and Martinez’s mistress. In this manner, the readers of Djebar’s text are definitely manipulated by the implied author to perceive Touma in the light of previous comments which will serve to condemn her attitude toward her own people. The allusion to the origin of the lighter in the passage discussed previously confirms, once again, the suspicion that she is Martinez’s mistress. By simply stating a fact, the narrator provokes the readers’ activity, whose curiosity is aroused by the disclosure of information, and resorts to an “intertextual frame” in order to fill in the missing information (Eco 1976, 214). There are other instances in the narrative where Touma appears as an outcast in the fictional world depicted. It would suffice to recall Cherifa’s reaction when she hears Touma laughing. Or, to take another example, there is the waiter’s diatribe which angers Touma and explains the reason of her disdain of Algerians. The encounters between Touma and her brother, Tawfiq, are narrated with the same consistency of views. Tawfiq’s presence is registered as a fugitive appearance whose role is to threaten Touma for what he considers a shameful behaviour. Shortly before shooting his sister, Tawfiq asks her to leave town, a warning anticipating the events to follow. The events of Touma’s murder will be introduced by the narrator before the readers have the opportunity to find out more about Tawfiq. Touma’s death interupts Lila’s thoughts just as she is crossing the centre of the town. Ironically, Touma is lying under the palm tree and it is Lila who finds her. The next chapter takes us back to the hopelessly romantic episode before Touma’s death. A young European, Bob, apparently in love with Touma, is ready to disregard any gossip about Touma and Martivez (another allusion to Touma’s involvement with Martinez) and plans to see her after his military service starts. The placement of this episode after Touma’s death stresses even more Touma’s alienation from the Algerian world. The murder scene, as narrated by the waiter, will be re-played in Tawfiq’s mind as he wanders aimlessly after killing his sister. He realizes that Touma provoked him by addressing him in Arabic and that his desire to kill her was prompted by the story he remembered from his childhood: a man killed his daughter because she had dated a foreigner. Seen in this

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light, Touma’s death becomes a re-affirmation of the values in the Algerian world described in the novel since Touma’s position is totally different from other women’s in Children of a New World. If Lila challenges old values, it is because she is an educated woman and also, as we have seen, because she has been influenced by her father’s freedom of spirit. Nevertheless, she is not viewed as someone whose presence is dangerous for the Algerian society. Her role appears to be that of a woman who struggles to become more assertive in a world where the silence of women is the predominant feature. Touma, by contrast, does not have any respect for tradition and, for this reason, her attitude is to be perceived as blasphemous. In what is one of the most touching episodes in the novel, the monologue of Touma’s mother stresses even more Touma’s repudiation from the society in which she was born. Left alone with her dead daughter, the old woman is the only one who forgives her. There are no tears, no lamentations since Touma’s mother understands that her outcast daughter cannot have proper funeral; in her decision to hire mourners, there is a recognition of the traditions and customs of the Algerian world: “ ‘Ever since your childhood, this gold was intended for your wedding trousseau. If nobody wants to come and weep over you out of the goodness of her heart, I’ll pay for professional mourners for you. I’ll pay for the mourners.’ ” (192) Clearly consonant with the old woman’s utterance, the implied author’s sympathy for this character is evident from the heightened emotional note pervading the old woman’s discourse, painfully reminiscent of the rigidity of norms in the fictional world of the novel. It becomes clear that, by taking into consideration the place of Touma in the narrative, we can have a better insight into the fictional world of the text. The implied author presents Touma in a manner that betrays a disapproval of her alienation. The distancing narratorial comments which frame Touma’s fragmented thoughts call attention to her distorted views of the Algerian world. As there is no obvious criticism expressed by the narrative voice, it is through the consistency of the other characters’ points of view that the readers of Djebar’s novel perceive this character as a pariah. It becomes evident that the variety of types portrayed in Children of a New World makes up the collective feminine consciousness perceived by the readers. The narrative voice which seems, at first, in control of the story, is gradually incorporated in a collective discourse. With every chapter, the languages of women add new perspectives on the fictional world of the novel and its fictional beings. Thus, we can affirm that characteristic feature of the novel is the incorporation of “heteroglossia“ in

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the form of the languages used by charactersin the form of the languages used by characters (Bakhtin 1981, 315). A distinction needs to be made, however, between the languages of the female and male characters. As I have said in the beginning, what we have in Djebar’s novel is a hybrid form of narration shifting from authorial omniscience to an almost total intermingling with the characters’ voices. Indeed, there is a noticeable difference between this shift in narration when we deal with female characters. The voices of the women appear to take over the narration act and what we hear is a multi-voiced discourse where voices complement each other. In the case of the male characters, we have instead the accompanying voice of the narrator which takes control of the narrative. This explains why, when we perceive the fictional world of the novel through the women’s perspective, their multi-voiced discourse provides us with an intimate knowledge of the fictional entities. We have the impression that the feminine consciousness, which becomes privileged, mediates our view of the fictional world. Let us take now a closer look at the voices in the text. The implied author’s speech serves to familiarize the readers with a less known fictional world. The bird’s eye views of the town and of the streets, as well as detailed comments regarding the socio-cultural structure of this world are scattered throughout the novel. The readers’ unfamiliarity with the Algerian world portrayed in the novel seems to be taken for granted by the narrative voice. For instance, when describing “Palais d’Orient” the narrator introduces the two Chicou brothers, habitual customers who start their day by having a drink at the “bistrot de l’Espagnol”. The cafés in the central area of the town are thus rapidly sketched, enabling us to grasp a new reality. Cherifa approaches “Palais d’Orient”, the largest of all the Moorish cafes; here, in front of the nearest table, one could see the two Chicou brothers who start their usual game of checkers. Every morning, they stop at the “bistrot de l’Espagnol” before coming to the “Palais d’Orient” , where no alcoholic drinks are served. The “bistrot” is well-known, one of the rare bars where one can see workers of every trade. This first glassful is enough to transport them to a state of blissful serenity, slightly congestioned, at the first stage in, which will end in the uninhabited drunkenness that overcomes them at night, under the eyes of their habitual audience: puritan bourgeois who come to sit here after work, or sleepy jobless men who are loooking for some entertainment. This is where the whole scene will take place. (86)

One thing that needs to be emphasized in this narratorial presentation is that the language of the narrator is intentional. The inviting tone aims at

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creating the necessary framework for a certain event. Thus, in the example I have just quoted, the narrator’s intention is to underscore an important event mentioned at the beginning of my analysis: Cherifa’s walk across the town. By drawing our attention to the fictional space, the narrator not only guides us to an unfamiliar world, but facilitates our understanding of Cherifa’s attitude and feelings. The information provided by the narrative voice is significant for it serves a double purpose: to place the readers in the fictional space and also, to allow them to see this fictional space from Cherifa’s perspective. As noted previously, there are many instances in the novel when the narrator’s speech incorporates the anonymous voices of the townspeople. When discussing the scene of Touma’s death, I have remarked that the presence of the anonymous male voices inserted in the narration is meant to signify a tacit approval of Tawfiq’s crime. In another excerpt, the implied author employs the anonymous speech in order to stress the surprise provoked by the event narrated. The customers gathered in front of café Bagdad one morning voice their curiosity regarding the owner’s absence. After reporting their surprise at the unusual event, the narrative voice incorporates fragments of conversation and thus renders the scene more vividly: One morning, the “Bagdad” remained closed: the first customers, who had their old routines, could not recover from their surprise; at ten o’clock, they had started to form a silent circle around the lowered metal blinds. In ten years, this cafe has never been closed. . . no actually, in twenty. ’Pardon me, says another, he closed one day, it was on May 8, 1945. . . but it was not a day like. ’ Saidi’s younger brother, barely a teenager, was in front of the cafe, with a fearful expression on his face, unsure if he should tell the curious people to go away. To their questions (‘Where is Saidi? Did he go to the capital? Is he sick?’) he was shaking his head, and seemed terrified. (99)

The speech of the implied author changes drastically when, for instance, Martinez, the police officer, is introduced. The brevity of sentences alerts the readers to consider this male character from an external, detached perspective. The narration takes here the form of a biographical note, and the first part of the passage given below reads as some information commonly recorded on an official document: “Martinez. Assistant chief officer at thirty-eight. A heavy physique with the shoulders of an athlete, but a remarkably agile and feline gait; his eyes, adumbrated by thick lids, have a piercing look. The confidence of a parvenu.” (95) These introductory sentences point out clearly the narrator’s perspective. What the ironical tone betrays here is an obvious dislike for Martinez, who is perceived as an outsider in the world described in the novel. His

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successful career as a police officer, pointed up by the acknowledgement of his own confidence, is another indicator of the distancing position of the narrator: “All that he needs is one or two political contacts, and then, he will have all chances to become chief inspector before he reaches forty. A success.” According to Bal, an examination of the “non-narrative comments” in a novel, such as the ones presented here, will help us “measure the difference between the text’s overt ideology, as stated in such comments, and its more hidden or naturalized ideology, as embodied in the narrative representations” (Bal, 30) There is a precise reason for this stylistic variation in Djebar’s novel. As we learned earlier, the implied author’s speech privileges a certain female consciousness perspective and rarely presents male characters as fully drawn individuals. Their sketchiness is due, to a great extent, to the function of the male authority in the novel, which provokes in the women a need for a re-evaluation of the Algerian world and its values. Therefore, the male voices in Djebar’s novel are preponderently authoritative. For instance, Hakim, a traditional man in every sense of the word, goes as far as submitting his wife, Amna, to a cross-examination in order to find out information about Youssef whom he suspects of involvement with the revolutionary group. In addressing his wife, Hakim employs the threatening tone of a police officer talking to a suspect. His voice is harsh and his words betray his aggressive behaviour. “Woman, tell me what you know! I order you to do so.” (51) The commanding note in the voices in the male characters appears to be a common characteristic in the novel. We are gradually led to believe that it is an accepted pattern for men to address women in such manner in the fictional world of Children of a New World. To take another example, Youssef’s assistant who has never met Cherifa, and consequently, refuses to let her in her husband’s store and wait for him. When he does so he is fully aware of social conventions: a decent woman could never walk unaccompanied and, in conclusion, Cherifa cannot be Youssef’s wife. In the fictional world of the novel, Tawfiq’s speech clearly illustrates male authority in the relationship of men with women as presented by the implied author. His disappointment in not being selected as member of the revolutionary group causes him to blame his sister Touma and later murder her. His bitterness manifests itself in the rude remarks made to his mother: “ ‘Your daughter’s a whore,’ he grumbled as a greeting. The old woman lowered her head. She was used to it” (170). The relationship between son and mother seems to be limited in their case to a total rejection and disrespect from Tawfiq’s part, and silent acceptance from

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her. Ironically enough, it is the old woman who tries to console herself for her son’s behaviour. There is clearly a sense that Tawfiq’s destiny is closely related to that of his sister; it is from their relationship as brother and sister that we become able to reconstruct his image. His constant harassing of his sister stems from his perception of Touma as “a stain” affecting his male honour. He strongly believes that it is because of her bad reputation that he is not accepted by the revolutionary group. His decision to kill Touma has much to do with the position of authority as the male head of the family, that he feels obligated to fill in. Being the brother of a pariah he realizes that his whole destiny becomes overshadowed by Touma’s condemnable behaviour. In their world, Tawfiq’s crime appears as a “family affair”. The scene of Touma’s death is narrated from two main perspectives. First, it is the implied author who reports the crime detachedly, and secondly, there are the anonymous male voices intercalated in the narration: Touma’s body is still on the ground, half leaning on one side; the men surrounding her had the time (“her brother!-yes, it’s her brother- he avenged his honour!- God help him!”) to contemplate her at leisure. Shortly after, they started to spread; many were already gone. ‘-This is not our business.’ ‘A family affair.’ ‘-Let’s go, it’s safer.’ ‘I didn’t see anything.’ ‘So many dead people, so many crimes, every day! How strange the times are!’ ‘-No, it is because, finally, the time has come, let justice speak!’(281)

The last sentence summarizes the second view that I have mentioned. What the readers are led to understand is that Tawfiq is absolved by his crime simply because he saved his honour by killing his sister. In this light, Tawfiq’s crime becomes a neccesity imposed by the moral rules and norms. As he remembers his fatal gestures, we come across the tacit approval of his crime. Tawfiq realizes that the crowd covered his flight and that his own people will never betray him. As we can see, Tawfiq plays an important role in our understanding of transgression in the textual world of the novel. His crime, narrated in fragments which the readers have to put together, appears as a symbolic re-instatement of traditional moral values, and therefore, could be perceived as an attempt to restore the old order in a world threatened by the others, the colonists. The examples discussed here have showed how the implied author’s voice ostensibly presents the male characters in the novel from a detached perspective. As I have maintained previously, the presentation of women is perceived differently, because their languages are heard as a multivoiced discourse. We can distinguish two main narrative devices

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employed to create this impression. First, there is the “psycho-narration”, where the implied author exposes the inner lives of the female characters and calls attention to their perspectives; secondly, we have the fusion of the implied author’s voice with the voices of the women in the novel. It is this particular type of narration that familiarizes the readers with the Algerian world as it is viewed by a collective feminine consciousness. Let us take now a few examples to illustrate this affirmation. When discussing Cherifa’s presence in the text, I have showed how the narrator directs our attention to her perspective on the woman’s condition in the Algerian world by framing her discourse with ideological comments. At other times, as we can see from the example below, the implied author’s voice becomes inaudible and Cherifa’s intimate thoughts seem to envelop the narrative. Her capacity of self-analysis enables her to re-evaluate her first marriage and make the decision to leave her first husband. Cherifa’s voiced intention: “I have to leave” stands out in her memories as the expression of an awakening consciousness which is vividly transmitted to us: It occurred to her (as she opened the shutters, put away the fabrics, the thread, the thimble, the scissors, and, while the door was half open, she undressed, and put on another dress) that this house was not the place for her. ‘I have to leave’, and she was convinced that it would be a lie to continue living there. Carried away by this sudden realization, she felt as if she was coming awake; yes, all her previous life had been nothing but a lengthy somnolence, not devoid of sensuality. A voluptuousness that gave her, in the patios, when she was invited to parties, a vague, absent air, which, in the eyes of those who were taken aback by her apparent coldness, appeared to the old as a sign of modesty, and to the young, as a mystery. (34-35)

In this passage, the abundant use of verbs and nouns of consciousness allows us to understand Cherifa’s inner struggle. Her words, inserted in the implied author’s discourse, mirror her decision to act in accordance with her own desires. Instead of being perceived as a transgression, Cherifa’s divorce becomes a recurrent motif in the narrative and symbolizes instead the Algerian woman’s need to assert herself. By refusing to conform herself to traditional conventions, Cherifa inaugurates a whole new perspective of her world. It is in this light that we have to perceive her subsequent action of crossing the town unaccompanied and her desire to join Youssef. Afraid that he might refuse her, Cherifa feels that she is not ready yet for that step - to express herself openly in front of her husbandalthough she is able to formulate her wish in her conversation with Lila.

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With Amna, a new type of discourse infiltrates the narrative. Her silent prayer, meant to absolve her of her lie to Hakim and put in evidence by her sudden disturbance, gives us an idea about the traditional role of women in the Algerian world. Terrorized by the fact that she was forced to lie to her husband, Amna is not able to recover herself. She feels crushed by the realization that she has opposed by her husband’s will, by not disclosing the truth about Youssef’s comings and goings. Here, we have a clear shift from the narrator’s discourse to Amna’s represented consciousness, visible in the foregrounding of her interior monologue. Amna’s fragmented speech thus outlines her image of a traditional woman who cannot surpass the limits of her world. Another important female character is Salima. She belongs to the group of educated women who, forced by circumstances, perceives her world from a totally different perspective than other women in the novel. After her father’s death, she becomes the head of the family at an age when, as it is common in the Algerian world, young women are “cloistered”. Her rhetorical questions, which enter the narrative with no formal markers, draw our attention to a different stage of the feminine consciousness. Now, a brief comment on the speech introduced by Lila in the novel will add a new dimension to this character, which has been already discussed at length in my analysis. Lila’s voice emerges distinctly from the narrative as we are gradually led to look at the Algerian world partly through her discourse. As I have showed previously, Lila’s retrospection and her intense soul searching return with each new chapter. On the last page of the novel, with the presence of Ali, we are given the impression that we have listened to a long story told by Lila. The language of the narrator coincides to such an extent with Lila’s that the readers are led to believe that they have become her privileged listeners. The intervention of the implied author is, in Lila’s case almost imperceptible, as she takes centerstage. Her discourse in the novel is, in many ways, a re-playing of her long dialogues with Ali. Having considered the presence of a multi-voiced discourse in Djebar’s novel, the examples offered here have showed that our awareness of this discourse is accomplished through the fusion between the voice of the implied author and the voices of female characters. The collective feminine consciousness resulting from this fusion of voices offers the readers a new perspective on the fictional world of Assia Djebar’s novel. As set out in the beginning, my examination of the narrative presentation in Djebar’s novel demonstrates that characters’ views are

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deeply affected by the revolution as perceived through Lila’s inner monologues. At a stylistic level, analysis focused on the multi-voiced feminine discourse that mediated our views of events and characters in the novel. Looking back at the narrative strategies and the unique stylistic features employed in Children of a New World, we can see how transgressive acts appear mediated by the feminine collective consciousness. The glaring differences between the portrayals of men and women are reflected, as I have shown, in the languages incorporated in the novel. Clearly, there is a symbiosis between the languages of the female characters and the language of the implied author whereas, in the case of the male characters, the narrative voice constantly frames their speech. To sum up, in Djebar’s novel, the readers are introduced to the fictional world by a narrator, the implied author, who has an ideological function. The explicit comments on various aspects of the world portrayed gain in Assia Djebar’s novel a psychological quality, as they do not impose a monopolizing view on transgression, but become incorporated in the multi-voiced discourse of the female characters. Thus, the readers are led to perceive the fictional world of the novel through a discourse imbued with a collective feminine consciousness which creates a new vision of the Algerian world.

CHAPTER FIVE READING ITALO CALVINO: EMBEDDED STORIES AND NARRATIVE GAMES IN ON THE CARPET OF LEAVES ILLUMINATED BY THE MOON

Italo Calvino’s novel If On a Winter’s night a Traveller… challenges, in post-modernist fashion, the reader’s ability to control the act of reading. The self-conscious use of language and the playful tone of the narrative voice in the frame story require a “sophisticated reader” who understands not only narrative conventions but also, how these become distorted under the sign of parody (Hutcheon 1985). My reading of the story in chapter eight, On the carpet of leaves illuminated by the moon from Calvino’s If On a Winter’s night a Traveller… will concentrate on certain aspects related to the notion of transgression. While essentially working with Calvino’s frame story and its ludic implications for plot structure, character description and language variation, I will start by examining the reader’s relationship with the narrative voice in the entire novel. It is important to note that given the demystification of the conventions of the genre and the complexity of its embedded story incipits, If On a Winter’s night a Traveller…has often been described as “unreadable” (Cannon 1981, 97). I will argue instead that, by paying close attention to the work’s narrative structure, as well as to the relationships between its textual elements, we can engage in an effective dialogue of interpretation with Calvino’s novel. After having recognized certain aspects related to the readers’ configuration of the text and the indeterminacies created by Calvino’s fictional language, I will discuss the story in chapter eight, On the carpet of leaves illuminated by the moon in relation to its model, Jun'ichirǀ Tanizaki’s The Key. Published in 1956, the parodied novel presents the story of a problematic marriage where the husband attempts to attain sexual intimacy by using his diary to communicate with his wife. Through a comparative approach, I propose to explore the role of narrative voice in

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presenting sexual transgression in the two texts. For this reason, I will attempt to show how the indeterminacies created by the combination of a literary language and a porn subtext in On the carpet of leaves illuminated by the moon influence our reading activity. As to The Key, I will look at the alternation of narrative levels that builds suspense and ultimately creates suspicion regarding narrative reliability. Finally, the nature of textual self-reference will be discussed in the context of parody, as an aspect of “transgression” on a formal level.

Embedded Stories and the Role of the Reader To determine how the narrative voice in Calvino’s If On a Winter’s night a Traveller…influences our reading, I will take as a starting point the first pages of the novel. Rather than presenting his book as “fiction”, Calvino surprises us with his attempt to make the story seem real. The initial impression, confirmed by the ordinary language employed, is that we have a text where the author does not want us to take his story at face value. The traditional distinctions between fiction and reality as well as the linearity of reading are overtly explored in detail throughout the novel. Indeed, the novel seems to require a well-versed reader who is able to distinguish the frame story from the ten novel incipits. Calvino takes pleasure in teasing his reader, by pointing out how the fictional world is created. Nine of the ten stories are written in the first person and they vary in style from thrillers to detective stories to pornography. Their narration breaks off, unfailingly, at the climax. Moreover, with the exception of the story entitled On the carpet of leaves illuminated by the moon the characters and plots of the novel incipits are only partially developed. The self-consciousness of the first person narrators is obvious, as it draws attention not only to their intricate mental states but also, to the exotic settings. If in One Hundred Years of Solitude the enunciating voice breaks the illusion of fiction at the end, in Calvino’s novel, the reader is addressed, from the very first sentence, by a narrative voice closely resembling that of the author himself, in a tone rendered familiar by the use of the second person singular verb forms : You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino’s new novel, If on a winter’s night a traveler. Relax. Concentrate. Dispel every other thought. Let the world around you fade. Best to close the door; the TV is always on in the next room. Tell the others right away, ‘No I don’t want to watch TV!’ Raise your voice - they won’t hear you otherwise - ‘I’m reading! I don’t want to be disturbed!’ (3)

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The narrative voice’s self-reference and repeated invitations to start reading invoke a Reader who supposedly likes Calvino’s books. Close attention is paid to the imagined actions of this Reader as the narrative voice suggests that reading is pleasurable; it is obvious that the type of Reader called into question here is the empirical reader (Eco, 1992). It could be someone who reads at home or in the bus or at the office during business hours. The place of employment does not really matter but it is better, the unnamed narrator playfully suggests, to read a book at home. The constant prodding in the first chapter reveals the controlling function of the narrative voice in the unusual dialogue in which the Reader appears to be a theoretical construct at the whims of its creator. In the second chapter, by contrast, things have changed. The unidentifiable narrator disappears and another narrative presence is felt in the first story, disconcertingly entitled If on a winter’s night a traveler: The novel begins in a railway station, a locomotive huffs, steam from a piston covers the opening of the chapter, a cloud of smoke hides part of the first paragraph. In the odor of the station there is a passing whiff of station café odor. There is someone looking through the befogged glass, he opens the glass door of the bar, everything is misty, inside, too, as if seen by nearsighted eyes, or eyes irritated by coal dust. The pages of the book are clouded like the windows of an old train, the cloud of smoke rests on the sentences. (10)

As we can see from the above passage, the tone changes considerably. The passages I have italicized point to the narrator’s attempt to show how we read. The voice from the first chapter is less audible as it is interspersed with the “incipit” of a story, which seems to write itself. This time, a first person traditional narrator who refuses to identify himself (we know from the first narrative voice that it is a “he”), takes control of the narrative and continues the dialogue with the Reader. The occasional confessions of the narrator are overtly aimed to confuse the Reader just as he becomes more involved in the fictional world of the story. Suddenly, the Reader discovers, as we are told by the main narrative voice, that the book is defective. In a fit of anger, the Reader throws the book away, only to dust it off later, impatient to return it in exchange for a good copy. The next day, when he arrives at the bookstore, he is told that instead of reading Calvino’s book he read the beginning of a Polish novel. Unsure yet if he should get the new novel, the Reader notices a young lady. This is how the two Readers meet and start to communicate about the book they have been reading. The book or rather, the defective book, becomes thus the channel of communication between the two Readers. Within a frame built up by the interrupted “dialogue” between the narrator and the Reader - which

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constitutes the main story, there are ten stories or to use Genette’s terminology, “récits métadiégétiques” (1972, 241-43) At first, the skilfully crafted story incipits do not appear to have any explicit relation to the main story other than to provoke the Reader’s irritation. It is, nevertheless, through these stories that the main story advances. This is one of the reasons why Calvino’s critics have emphasized the text’s resemblance to both The Decameron and One Thousand and One Nights. The interventions of the narrative voice from the frame story disrupt each incipit; as each fragment is left off at the climax, and the narrative voice records the reactions of the reader calling attention to the techniques used. The change in the tone of narration becomes then a reflection of the concealed irony at the expense of the reading activity itself. Popular novels of fantasy, science fiction and pornography which focus, with variations, around a “love triangle” or the theme of “female as prey” become the parodied texts in Calvino’s novel. To take several examples, the woman desired by the two men Ponko and Gritzvi in Outside of the Town of Malbork is Brigd-Zwida, whereas in another story, Without fear of wind and vertigo, Irina holds in her power two men, Valerian and Alex. The triangle changes in In a network of lines that intersect where a businessman fond of mirror-multiplied images is abducted by his wife and left to contemplate her reflection absurdly intersected with his tied-up mistress. This last story is a perfect illustration of the multiplying structure of the novel itself. Thus, Calvino’s fragments can be viewed as an integral part of the Reader’s activity of reading in the frame story. As he starts reading, he becomes a character in the novel. Regarded from this perspective, the constant return to the initial format of narration - a speaker, the narrator addressing a listener, the Reader - is aimed to deny the fictionality of the discourse. The impression created is that of an ordinary discourse where the speaker and the listener are situated in the real world, in contrast to the fictional world of the “incipits”. What the narrator tries to allude to is, as many of Calvino’s critics remarked, the “loss of faith in literary communication” (Cannon 1981, 100). From this point of view, the interruptions reflect the Reader’s frustrations at the inability of fiction to express the materiality of the world. We soon realize that the narrative voice refuses to pretend that it is creating a fictional world and offers us instead a theory of reading. In chapter three, there is an illustrative example of how the narratorial comments reveal the elusiveness of the fictional world: The novel you are reading wants to present to you a corporeal world, thick, detailed. Immersed in your reading, you move the paper knife mechanically in the depth of the volume: your reading has not yet reached

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the end of the first chapter, but your cutting has already gone far ahead. And there, at the moment when your attention is gripped by the suspense, in the middle of a decisive sentence, you turn the page and find yourself facing two blank sheets. (42)

The Reader’s search for the lost book is reminiscent of the traditional quest of fictional heroes. In contrast to the traditional narrative techniques though, where the narrator employs a variety of truth-claims in order to construct the fictional world, in Calvino’s novel, the fictional world beginning to take shape is constantly threatened to be destroyed by the enunciating voice. We can find a perfect example of this narratorial whimsicality in the tenth story What Story Down There Awaits Its End? where the narrator-hero mentally erases the world surrounding him in order to increase his chances to meet his old friend Franziska. The story becomes thus a symbol of narratorial power which constructs the world starting from the indeterminacies in the text. Regarded from this perspective, the novel “incipits” are not interruptions in the narrative but bridges that help the Reader advance in his reading. While Calvino invites his readers to attempt a close reading of his novel by playfully pointing out his transgressions of literary conventions, he never fails to suggest that the structures and conventions of the traditional love story in the frame story will continue to be acknowledged. As with Shahrazad's storytelling power, where the king becomes so enthralled by her stories that in the end he marries her instead of sentencing her to death, Calvino’s postmodernist text brings into focus the pleasure of telling stories and implicitly, of reading. This is clearly illustrated when the sixth reader-character accidentally puts the titles of the incipits together and forms the beginning of another story. The images projected by the context of the sentences read in this manner: If on a winter’s night a traveller outside the town of Malbork leaning from the steep slope without fear of wind or vertigo looks down in the gathering shadow in a network of lines that enlace in a network of lines that intersect on the carpet of leaves illuminated be the moon, around an empty grave what story down there awaits its end? Following my brief introduction to If on a winter’s night a traveller. . . it is clear that our understanding of the story in chapter eight, On the carpet of leaves illuminated by the moon, will be based on our own awareness of Calvino’s manipulation of his readers. Linda Hutcheon justly remarked that “Calvino’s overt manipulation of the readers . . . allegorically demonstrates the presence and power of the authorial position, though its very obviousness and our realization of the different

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readers involved work to undercut that power and to call it into question” (1985, 89).

Narrative Games in On the carpet of leaves illuminated by the moon As mentioned previously, the story between the two Readers is the background of all the other stories. Once we have considered the narrative challenges imposed by Calvino’s metafictional text we can now begin to examine the theme of trangression as it is presented in chapter eight, On the carpet of leaves illuminated by the moon. My discussion of point of view and the attitude of the narrative selves will bring into focus Calvino’s ironic distance from Tanizaki’s The Key. If we examine the “incipit” of Calvino’s On the carpet of leaves illuminated by the moon, we come across descriptive scenes where sensory and visual details create an exotic setting: “The ginko leaves fell like fine rain from the boughs and dotted the lawn with yellow. I was walking with Mr Okeda on the path of smooth stones”(199). The expansion of reality in the above scene establishes an imaginative model which will be constantly contrasted to the “reality” of the events recounted (Valdes 176). A reader can scarcely miss the elevated language used by Calvino in this passage. The aesthetic turn of the conversation changes abruptly as it is interrupted by trivial comments about Makiko’s “bare nape”. Using the pretext of his lesson about the possibility of distinguishing the “sensation of each single gingko leaf from the sensation of all the others. . .” (199), the narrator “practices his ability to isolate sensations” by openly focusing his attention on Mr. Okeda’s daughter, Makiko, under his mentor’s “motionless eye”: Makiko, the youngest Okeda daughter, came to serve the tea, with her selfpossessed movements and her still slightly childish grace. As she bent over, I saw on her bare nape, below her gathered hair, a fine black down which seemed to continue along the line of her back. I was concentrated on looking at it when I felt on me Mr Okeda’s motionless eye, examining me. Certainly he realized I was practicing on his daughter’s neck my ability to isolate sensations. (199)

The change in the tone of narration becomes thus a reflection of the duality present throughout Calvino’s novel: if the first passage overtly exposes the theories on which the novel is based, the traditional novel techniques employed in the above scene are meant to reflect those used by popular books such as The Key. The parodied text becomes then the

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background for Calvino’s story. According to Linda Hutcheon “. . . the pointing to the literariness of the text may be achieved by using parody: in the background will stand another text against which the new creation is implicitly to be both measured and understood” (Hutcheon, 31). As mentioned earlier, the structure of the frame story: a woman desired by two men is repeated in both On the carpet of leaves illuminated by the moon and The Key. The moral ambiguity of the erotic scenes in both texts reflects the narrative voice’s preoccupation with readers as audience. In seeking to grasp the story line, the reader is forced to re-evaluate certain expectations and values in light of the credibility of the narrative voice. The first person narrator in On the carpet of leaves illuminated by the moon gives every indication of being consciously aware of the reader’s presence as he breaks social taboos by engaging in sexual acts with his mentor’s wife and daughter. If we examine the metanarrative passages in Calvino’s story, we realize that they establish textual authority by reflecting the activity of reading itself. (Hutcheon, 1996). Take for instance the narrator’s reflections with respect to the reader’s receptivity, in the following passage: To shift the conversation to different ground, I tried to make the comparison with the reading of a novel in which a very clam narrative pace, all the same subdued note, serves to enforce some subtle and precise sensations to which the writer wishes to call the reader’s attention; but in the case of the novel you must consider that in the succession of sentences only one sensation can pass at a time, whether it be individual or general, whereas the breadth of the visual field and the auditory field allows the simultaneous recording of a much richer and more complex whole. (203)

In a similar manner, the appeal to the reader made by the middle-aged husband in The Key from the very first page of his diary, is intended to provoke the reader’s participation. The first narrative voice will gradually involve us as privileged observers of his thoughts and voyeuristic acts through visual effects as he resorts to the help of his assistant, Kimura, to incite his own jealousy and to ultimately arouse his wife’s sexuality. To complicate things even further, the first person narrator’s discourse in this novel is interrupted by a second narrative voice, that of his wife, Ikuko. As in Calvino’s text, the credibility of the narrative voice (or rather, voices) in The Key becomes questionable. We can see now more clearly how irony creates a multiplicity of meanings in Calvino’s novel. Thematically, transgression will appear distorted under the sign of parody as it “belittles” or “ridicules” certain aspects of the background text (Hutcheon 1985, 32). We can argue that Calvino’s style variation in On the carpet of leaves illuminated by the

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moon corresponds to the two different languages present in Tanizaki’s diaries. The different perspectives on transgression are given in Tanizaki’s novel by the gender differentiation of two first-person narrative voices. When the husband starts writing his diary and hopes that his wife, in spite of her “rigid upbringing” will secretly read it, he deliberately challenges us to look at “her antiquated morality” from a new perspective. The ambiguity of his statements in the following passage open up a series of relevant aspects concerning his wife’s unreliable character: .

This year I intend to begin writing freely about a topic which, in the past, I have hesitated even to mention here. I have always avoided commenting on my sexual relations with Ikuko, for fear that she might surreptitiously read my diary and be offended. I dare say she knows exactly where to find it. But I have decided not to worry about that any more. Of courses, her old-fashioned Kyoto upbringing has left her with a good deal of antiquated morality; indeed, she rather prides herself on it. It seems unlikely that she would dip into her husband’s private writings. However, that is not altogether out of the question. If now, for the first time, my diary becomes chiefly concerned with our sexual life, will she be able to resist the temptation? By nature, she is furtive, fond of secrets, constantly holding back and pretending ignorance; worst of all, she regards that as feminine modesty. Even though I have several hiding places for the key to the locked drawer where I keep this book, such a woman may well have searched out all of them. For that matter, you could easily buy a duplicate of the key. (3-4)

What initially might appear a questioning of his wife’s ability to “resist the temptation” to read the secret diary, it will become, during the course of our reading, a questioning of her reliability in expressing her own feelings about sexual relations with her husband or about her involvement in certain forbidden acts or events. Her comments in her own diary will gradually take over the narration act by distorting the information her husband presents in his diary. This is to say that our understanding of the story in The Key is constantly challenged by the presence of the two conflicting narrative voices. In her article Another Key to Tanizaki’s Eroticism, Tzvetana Kristeva suggests that the “temporal succession” of the two diaries “conveys the idea of the flow of time, but it can also be perceived as the flow of writing, which in turn exemplifies the flow of sensuousness and passion.” The awakening of his wife’s desire, which seems to be the reason why the husband starts writing his diary, is closely related to the “key” as “a symbol of the breach of a taboo”. Kristeva stresses the ‘voyeuristic’ effect of Tanizaki’s narration on our own reading:

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Tanizaki amplifies this effect in his novel by introducing the device of the key. The diaries are hidden in drawers, the drawers are locked, and the key to each is kept in a “secret” place. Thus the key is a symbol of the breach of a taboo not only by the husband and his wife, who read each other’s “private” diaries, but also by readers of the novel, who are made witnesses of this game of hide-and-seek. By doubling the diary form, he doubles its effect: he reveals the falseness of the pretext of “writing for oneself” and explicates its real purport via a diary-dialogue form. The result, however, is that since the intended reader of each of the two diaries is also a character in the novel itself, readers of The Key are forced into the somewhat embarrassing position of being voyeurs . (Boscaro 2009, 74)

Similarly, when the self-conscious narrator in Calvino’s On the carpet of leaves illuminated by the moon plays with the possibility of being watched simultaneously by his mentor, Mr. Okeda, and his daughter Makiko, while he is “overcome by voluptuousness” in Madame Miyagi’s arms, he implicates us as readers in the voyeuristic act: “I have no idea how long Mr. Okeda had been there. He was staring hard, not at his wife and me but at his daughter watching us. In his cold pupil, in the firm twist of his lips, was reflected Madame Miyagi’s orgasm reflected in her daughter’s gaze” (208).

Reading as Transgression and Textual self-reference Viewed from this perspective, Calvino’s metafiction transforms our own activity of reading in a forbidden, transgressive act. The constant textual self-reference and the open structure of If on a winter’s night a traveller. . . might disorient us at first but ultimately this modern text offers us a new way of looking at stories, characters and events. Some critics even believe that Calvino’s novel “stands with the best folktale collections anywhere...since its plot, themes, and even characterization exemplify its similarities to a tale” (Guton 91). We have seen how Calvino’s novel juxtaposes the conventions of a popular novel and a postmodernist novel about reading and readers. On a formal level, If on a winter’s night a traveller. . . deviates from established norms by avoiding an identifiable narrator or a linear plot, well drawn characters and settings. Instead, from the very first pages of the novel, our attempt to start the process of consistency-building is delayed by the enunciating voice which breaks the illusion of fiction. It is clear that the empirical data present in the text do not contribute to form empirical truthclaims. The Reader is not named and we do not have any clear indication of his physical appearance or social status. He exists only through his function of reading. As far as characters are concerned, Ludmilla, the

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Other Reader, is portrayed with more attention to physicality and her role in the story is dictated by her love of reading. Time and space in the frame story direct us towards our own world, with no pretense of fictionality. The narrator’s refusal to provide specific setting indications is obvious. The Reader spends a restless night after discovering that his reading is interrupted and the next day he runs to the bookshop. In other words, it could be any night and any next day. The same goes for the places appearing in the story: the bookshop, the university, the café where the Reader waits for Ludmilla are not precisely defined. Ludmilla’s house is the only place described in detail but again, we do not know its exact location. The evasiveness of the narrator becomes understandable in chapter seven. It is in this chapter where the narrative voice explains the rules of traditional fiction-making (in a novel, characters and events need to resemble reality) and points out the deliberate omission of fictional devices in the frame tale: What are you like, Other Reader? It is time for this book in the second person to address itself no longer to a general male you, perhaps brother and double of a hypocrite I, but directly to you who appeared already in the second chapter as the Third Person necessary for the novel to be a novel, for something to happen between that male Second Person and the female Third, for something to take form, develop, or deteriorate according to the phases of human events. Or rather, to follow the mental models through which we attribute to human events the meanings that allow them to be lived. (141)

Another way of pointing to the change of literary conventions is the parallel between reading and love-making in Calvino’s novel. If the two readers, the Reader and Ludmilla, have definite roles as characters in a love story, their love-making scene becomes a pretext for the omniscient narrator to focus on the differences and similarities of the two acts: reading a book and making love (or, as the narrator puts it by extending the acceptions of the word, “reading bodies”). Reading and love-making appear thus as experiences that cannot be measured in time and space. The analogy between love-making and reading is also important for another reason. It sheds light on the subordination of time and space to the immediacy of reading and explains the lack of temporal and spatial indicators in the frame tale. Since reading is an experience that cannot be measured in time and space, then it follows that preciseness in this regard is redundant. In the absence of empirical truth-claims, the narrator’s discourse creates a fictional world by constantly attempting to subvert the traditional sense of order commonly present in narratives. What the narrative voice has suggested all along was that the Reader failed to

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recreate the fictional world because he constantly returned to the author, determined to recuperate the author’s intention. By sharing his views with other reader-characters in the library (chapter eleven) he becomes aware that a text may be read in many ways. When the sixth reader-character accidentally puts the titles together, they form the “incipit” of a new story, to the Reader’s surprise who realizes that new images are projected by the context of the sentences read in this manner. He learns thus that telling or not telling a story is a question of life and death, as in One Thousand and One Nights, where to stop telling a story means to die. His reaction upon reflecting on the words of the seventh reader-character is sudden: the male Reader’s attempt in gaining the wholeness of the text and its unity of meaning is thus reflected in his decision to marry Ludmilla, the Other Reader. In the final scene, a true happy-ending of the frame story, the two Readers are in bed, reading. The Reader’s answer to Ludmilla, who wants him to turn off the light, neatly concludes their story and challenges, at the same time, the idea that the author can control the Reader’s configuration of the text. If the frame story becomes incorporated in the novel, the reader’s interpretation, however, will always escape the author. What we have here is a truth-claim of the self. By drawing our attention to the narrator’s unsuccessful attempt to control the Reader, the text forces us, as modern readers, to reflect on the experience that we now share with him. Gradually, we are led to suspect that the unidentifiable voice is that of the author himself who exposes his own views on readers and reading. As we have seen, the didactic tone pervades the narration of the frame story creating a critical distance between the narrative voice and the Reader. The perspective of the unidentifiable narrator was brought into focus each time the Reader encountered a new reader-character or read another story. By sharing his views with other reader-characters in the library (chapter eleven) he becomes aware that a text may be read in many ways. The observations made so far about Calvino’s text and us, its readers, have been relevant in the context of the fictional structure of the text. Since the formal transgression of the text is my focus, I will concentrate now on the important aspects of the relationship reader-narrator, particularly those that definitely provoke the reader’s active collaboration: self-reflexivity and parody. We have shown how the narrative voice constructs and deconstructs the fictional world, urging the Reader to continue reading but, at the same time, never allowing him to finish the stories he starts. The identification of the reader with this fictional Reader is sought at every step by the very structure of the novel that becomes at times frustrating.

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In order to arrive at our relation with the text, let us consider first our own projections in Calvino’s novel. We can say that the images of the reader-characters presented to us contribute to add to the multi-faceted figure of the Reader. As we shall see in chapter seven, the Reader is purposely left unnamed so that his identification with us (if we are male readers) becomes facilitated: This book so far has been careful to leave open to the Reader who is reading the possibility of identifying himself with the Reader who is read: this is why he was not given a name, which would automatically have made him the equivalent of a Third Person, of a character (whereas you, as Third Person, a name had to be given, Ludmilla), and so he has been kept a pronoun, in the abstract condition of pronouns, suitable for any attribute and any action (141).

This Reader’s desire for wholeness is present throughout the novel. The type of book that he likes to read is one guided by the authorial voice, a linear book, with no interruptions. When the first interruption occurs, while reading If on a winter’s night a traveller. . . he goes into a fit and runs to the bookstore. His chance meeting with Ludmilla and other readers will make him see, in the end, that reading does not have to be a linear activity. The search for the unfinished book (and his pursuing of Ludmilla) brings him to interact with other people and gives a social dimension to reading. There is, undoubtedly, a privileging of Ludmilla over the other readers in the novel. She seems to be the ideal reader as her pleasure of reading is constantly evoked. Her desires of books are precise and well-defined; as soon as she describes the book she would like to read her wish is fulfilled (Hume 1992, 123) in the following chapter. At the University, when the Reader meets the non-reader, Irnerio, he is compelled to reflect on the absence of reading. Irnerio’s rejection of reading and, implicitly, of writing is reminiscent of Socrates’ Egyptian tale in which Thamus, the king, mistrusts Theuth’s new invention of letters because it creates forgetfulness. Likewise, Irnerio revolts against reading which, he claims, makes us slaves of the written words. It is not an easy job to learn how not to read, confesses Irnerio. Professor Uzzi-Tuzii from the Department of Bothno-Ugaric Languages and Literatures, recommended by Ludmilla, induces the Reader to reflect on the difference between other possible ways of reading: reading silently and reading aloud, or reading in the original and reading in translation. He realizes that when the utterer’s voice takes control of the text being read, he refuses the listener a privilege commonly allowed: the actual presence

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of the object of reading, the text. The issue becomes even more complicated when the text read aloud is a translation: Listening to someone read aloud is very different from reading in silence. When you read, you can stop or skip sentences: you are the one who sets the pace. When someone else is reading, it is difficult to make your attention coincide with the tempo of his reading: the voice goes either too fast or too slow. And then, listening to someone who is translating from another language involves a fluctuation, a hesitation over the words, a margin of indecision, something vague, tentative. The text, when you are the reader, is something that is there, against which you are forced to clash; when someone translates it aloud to you, it is something that is and is not there, that you cannot manage to touch. (68)

Lotaria is another reader-character in the novel. It is clear that her view of reading is based on those new trends in literature and critical theory which appear to be so much in contradiction with the traditional reading for pleasure. The scene where Lotaria invites Professor Galligani from the Cimbric Literature Department at the seminar of feminist criticism to introduce the novel is satirical. Academic criticism - the incessant need of literary scholars to lecture, classify and interpret - comes under scrutiny. The simple desire to read and to continue reading is here, again, emphasized in opposition to the more sophisticated ways of reading: You are impatient, you and Ludmilla, to see this lost book rise from its ashes, but you must wait until the girls and the young men of the study group have been handed out their assignments: during the reading there must be some who underline the reflections of production methods, others the processes of reification, others the sublimation of repression, others the sexual semantic codes, others the metalanguages of the body, others the transgression of roles, in politics and in private life. (75)

It is in the eleventh chapter where the Reader learns from the other readercharacters in the library that a story must not necessarily have a beginning and an end. Furthermore, he is told that the activity of reading itself is a “fragmented process” and in order to arrive at the hidden meaning of the story the Reader has to pay constant attention to the text. Ultimately, the Reader comes to understand that the most important thing is to continue reading. As we can see, Calvino’s text is dedicated to readers and reading. If we consider the narrator’s discourse in If on a winter’s night a traveller. . . from a rhetorical point of view, we can easily identify its emotional appeal. Let us recall the familiar form of address that is used throughout

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the novel and the attention paid to the comfort and well-being of the Reader and the generous use of sensory detail in the descriptions of the Reader’s activities during reading. These are descriptions employed to arouse the imagination and to invite the Reader to a more serious reflection of reading itself. It becomes obvious that this emotional appeal is an important part of the persuasiveness exerted by the narrative voice in the text. To turn to the characters in the frame story, they are mostly readers. It seems that the Reader’s views and opinions undergo constant change with every new encounter. Thus, we often hear the voice of the narrative voice being interrupted by the voice of the other reader-characters which force the narrator to rephrase and explain. The stylistic differences of the languages used by the voices in Calvino’s novel underscore the differences in the types of readercharacters. At times, the character’s voice is heard distinctly, all by itself. At other times, the speech of a character is incorporated in the narrator’s speech. Let us take, for instance, Professor Uzzi-Tuzzi’s voice in the novel: We are confined in this sort of closet. . . The university expands and we contract. . . We are the poor stepchild of living languages. . . . If Cimmerian can still be considered a living language. . . “But this is precisely its value!” he exclaims with an affirmative outburst that immediately fades.” “The fact that it is a modern language and a dead language at the same time. . . A privileged position, even if nobody realizes. . .” (51)

The image of the old professor emerges more forcefully through the presence of his voice in the novel. In other cases, the voices of the anonymous characters enter the text in a polemical manner, through utterances revealing a whole different language. The language of the narrative voice distances itself considerably from this other language as could be seen from a scene in Chapter five. Here, after Lotaria finishes reading the novel, the narratorial commentary frames the language of literary criticism which appears to take over in a chorus of undistinguishable voices: At this point they throw open the discussion. Events, characters, settings, impressions are thrust aside, to make room for the general concepts. “The polymorphic-perverse sexuality. . .” “The laws of a market economy. . .” “The homologies of the signifying structures. . .” “Deviation and institutions. . .”

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“Castration. . .”. (91)

It should be clear from our discussion that Calvino’s readers are continually stimulated by these voices to question their perception of reading. Their diverse languages correspond to diverse points of views on reading. The transgression of novel conventions makes Calvino’s text unique: in its multiple mirroring of readers and ways of reading, we are ultimately constrained to identify with one particular position. Reading for pleasure would put us in the same group with the Reader and Ludmilla whereas reading for the pleasure of critical analysis would condemn us to Lotaria’s view of reading. It seems (with the exception, perhaps, of Ludmilla’s) that no particular position is privileged. Once we become conscious of our own way of reading, we have to accept that there are, perhaps, other possibilities which we have disregarded so far. It becomes now evident that Calvino uses parody on different levels as the playfulness of the narrative voice annihilates authorial power. If the extensive use of the first person narrators and the element of dramatic immediacy emphasize narratorial power in creating dense fictional world, the constant theorizing exposes the fragility of its own existence. In other words, we are told that there is no use pretending in order to create fiction, for narrative conventions more or less fail at translating reality. By forcing readers to reflect on their own expectations when reading his novel and the truthfulness of the narrative voice, Calvino provokes them into participating in the creation of the fictional world and gives unity to his work.

CHAPTER SIX NARRATING THE SELF: MEMORY AND FORBIDDEN DESIRE IN THE LOVER BY MARGUERITE DURAS

Chapter six will focus first on the role of memory in recreating the past in The Lover and its implications for the type of narration used by Marguerite Duras. In my view, the unconventionality of Duras’ narrative technique and style characteristics help convey a modern, feminine vision of the self. Marguerite Duras once said that “Women have been in darkness for centuries. They don’t know themselves. Or only poorly. And when women write, they translate this darkness” (Duras 1975). In the presence of such statements, one understands why Duras stresses the importance of “talking about the hidden stretches” of her youth in The Lover. The fact that she deliberately blurs authentic experience and fiction by presenting her story in a fragmented narrative discourse raises interesting questions about the autobiographical details in the novel. As we shall see, a more comprehensive approach to Duras’ experimentation with fictional forms in The Lover, would have to take into consideration the representation of transgression as perceived by an older narrator. The emotional tone created by the striking descriptions of the human body and the reflections of the narrative voice invite the reader to contextualize a set of mere narrative digressions and explore sexual desire beyond cultural and moral taboos in 1920s Indochina. Since it is my belief that the novel projects a significant event through alternating perspectives and a self-reflective style, I will explore the relationship between reader and text by taking into consideration the nonlinearity of The Lover. As will be demonstrated, textual digressions prove to be the links between past and present images that will provoke the readers’ participation in the creation of meaning. In addition, I will examine a set of textual qualities and stylistic variations which have a symbolic function in the novel. The main point I will be trying to make is that the text of The Lover provokes us to appropriate features of the writer’s world-making process

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by allowing us to witness an unfolding confession from her past. When Duras declares: “I started to write in surroundings that drove me to reticence. Writing, for those people, was still something moral” (Duras 1975) we understand that The Lover was written with the intention to lay bare feelings and events that were “buried”. Genova has already pointed out the confessional quality of The Lover and its effect on our reading: The silence of Duras invites us, even obliges us, to speak, to converse with and to confront her own voice, in a kind of aesthetically grounded personal encounter. Perhaps that which really allows Duras to move beyond the Nouveau Roman, beyond her peers and beyond her time, is this invitation to confess, in a deliberate blending of autobiography with a kind of polyphonic open- ended dialogue. (Genova 2003)

As the novel opens, the self-description of the narrator subtly engages the reader in participating in the world-making of the text. What has been noted concerning the “new novel” strategies can be observed from this very first encounter: defying genre classification, the narrative voice transforms readers in “voyeurs” and creators of meaning through a display of succession of past and present images of herself and her family that transcend our reality. According to Carol Hoffman, Duras’ use of repetition “seems to emphasize the changing, unstable aspect of memory and language and move the reader to question his or her own memory and examine the dynamics of forgetting. . . . memory is seen as volatile and impossible” (Hoffman, 1991). Faced with the complexity of Duras’ text one cannot help but be reminded of Barthes’s notion of a writerly text that was meant to reveal certain elements that the readerly text attempts to conceal” (Barthes, 1974). The “writerly” nature of The Lover opens the text to multiple interpretations and as we read, we can see how the segments of narrative shape the novel and, in a post-modernist twist, draw our attention to the process of writing. To illustrate the mirroring effect of Duras’ writing, I have chosen a passage that clearly points to the nonlinearity of the text: The story of my life doesn’t exist. Does not exist. There’s never any center to it. No path, no line. There are great spaces where you pretend there used to be someone, but it’s not true, there was no one. The story of one small part of my youth I’ve already written, more or less- I mean, enough to give a glimpse of it. Of this part, I mean, the part about the crossing of the river. What I’m doing now is both different and the same. Before, I spoke of clear periods, those on which the light fell. Now I’m talking about the hidden stretches of that same youth, of certain facts, feelings, events that I buried. I started to write in surroundings that drove me to reticence. “ (8)

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From the preceding example, it is clear that with The Lover, the writer’s world-making process is defamiliarized and thus the readers find themselves in a position of partnership with the narrative voice. What Barthes describes as “ourselves writing” is evident from this passage where the readers are invited to take an active role in the construction of meaning.

The missing image of the girl on the ferry As we approach the text of The Lover, we become self-conscious of our power of interpretation through the appeal of a narrative voice that destabilizes our expectations of conventional reading. Indeed, Duras succeeds in mirroring the fluidity of her narrative discourse in the very text we read. A “self-conscious” novel, The Lover is a perfect illustration of how Duras’ own literary discourse gains consistence by incorporating selfcommentary and description in a non-linear fashion. The device of the image that “does not exist” becomes thus an opportunity for Duras to re-create the past by drawing our attention to an image of the young girl: “It’s the only image of myself I like, the only one in which I recognize myself, in which I delight”(4). As the writer attempts to defy the time by making an effort to revive a significant event from her adolescence, she analyzes her feelings and reflects on the act of writing through a duality of perception. If the focal point in The Lover is the meeting on the ferry between a fifteen and a half year old French girl and a wealthy Chinese man who later becomes her lover, the image of the fateful encounter is told through repetitive narrations. What make the narrative technique interesting are the spatial and temporal dislocations created by the alternation of narrative voices. The sober, confessional tone of the older narrator’s discourse is abruptly interrupted by her naive 15 year old self. With the accumulation of lyrical descriptions and details that seem to grow with each scene, the recurring image of the girl on the ferry crossing the Mekong River will be constantly brought in the foreground through a play of imaginative expansion. The present of Duras’ narration parallels the past and carries with it a complexity of feelings and sensations. Born in Indochina, we can assume that Duras recreates for us intimate memories of her youth in a metaphorical design. What might appear at first a “broken” narrative, becomes gradually a first-person haunting love story about the loss of innocence and the thrilling, unknown power of sexual desire. The text of The Lover does not attempt to describe the event in its entirety. Instead, the image of the girl on the ferry becomes a visual metaphor for her desire around which the story is built. From this point of

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view, the image recreates the self-consciousness of the older narrator. Taking as raw material the author's past life, memories are recounted as fragmented moments and impressions which contribute to the appearance of a motionless plot. What many critics have recognized as the author’s tendency to use veiled autobiographical elements in her work is also present in The Lover. The subtle irony we notice at the beginning of the novel when the narrative voice introduces the image of the 15 year old will gradually give way to a sense of loss and nostalgia. A series of flashbacks place us in the foreign landscape where Duras grew up, bringing it closer through panoramic views of the Mekong river, the house in Sadec, and Cholon. In fact, the reader is solicited to look at the landscape through the eyes of the young girl. In this case, the descriptions gain fluidity and dynamism by the narrative strategy of presenting a recurring image of the ferry, each time in a new context.

The “Child Prostitute” As we read, the narrated memories shift our attention to the girl’s feelings and thoughts of being different. “It’s not the shoes, though, that make the girl look so strangely, so weirdly dressed. No, it’s the fact that she’s wearing a man’s flat-brimmed hat, a brownish-pink fedora with a broad black ribbon. The crucial ambiguity of the image lies in the hat”(12). Through the process of “psycho-narration”, the readers can thus become aware of the girl’s wish “to be seen” even if her clothes and bearing transgress certain norms. As a French young woman and daughter of colonists, she would be expected to keep a certain distance from mingling with the natives. Curiously, the image we see unfolding through a series of descriptions is, however, that of a young prostitute who wants to draw the attention of a wealthy Chinese man. In a narrative manner that borrows from cinematography, the narrator is trying to unravel the forbidden desire of the 15 year old through “close-ups” of her physical appearance and her clothes. It is as if the narrator is presenting us with different versions of the same image whereby we are required to question our previous reading. One of the first striking aspects in noticing the girl’s clothes is our reflection of the sentence previously quoted: “The crucial ambiguity of the image lies in the hat. “ (12) One may consider the girl’s “passive attitude” and the hat as objects of desire that identify her as “laying herself open to be desired”. If we consider George Bataille’s affirmation that “Not every woman is a potential prostitute, but prostitution is the logical consequence of the feminine attitude, we can

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assume that the 15 year old on the ferry “offers herself as object” to the Chinese: In so far as she is attractive, a woman is prey to men’s desire. Unless she refuses completely because she is determined to remain chaste, the question is at what price and under what circumstances will she yield. But if the conditions are fulfilled she always offers herself as an object. Prostitution proper only brings in a commercial element. By the care she lavishes on her toilet, by the concern she has for her beauty set off by her adornment, a woman regards herself as an object always trying to attract men’s attention.“ (Bataille, 1957)

From this perspective, the generic ambiguity, cutting scenes, and ellipses in The Lover not only contribute to the creation of an innovative narrative that reveals the identity of the writer, but also, to a hidden, transgressive vision of desire. In Bataille’s terms, the girl’s hat becomes an “adornment” that will excite the Chinese man’s desire. The precocious French girl who goes out “dressed like a child prostitute” already knows something about desire: “You didn’t have to attract desire. Either it was in the woman who aroused it or it didn’t exist. Either it was there at first glance or else it had never been. It was instant knowledge of sexual relationship or it was nothing. That too I knew before I experienced it. (19)

It is clear that the confession of the older narrator has the intention of shaping our expectations of the young girl. By creating a cinematographic effect, the narration in The Lover moves along by conveying the complexity of the character we see being sketched as we read. If she points out the fact that the 15 year old is “dressed like a child prostitute” we expect her behavior on the ferry to reflect this idea. As with RobbeGrillet’s descriptions, in The Lover, objects become the focus of narration and play a major role in the events presented. As we try to contextualize the objects described, the voice of the narrator guides us with additional comments that frame our perceptions. The shift to the consciousness of the 15 year old determines then a change of perspective as the tone of seduction provokes curiosity. The intimate, familiar form of address is emphasized by the use of the imperative form that emphasizes the desire to be noticed: “On the ferry, look, I’ve still got my hair. Fifteen and a half. I’m using make-up already. I use Creme Tokalon, and try to camouflage the freckles on my cheeks, under the eyes” (16). By evoking visual images, Duras uses filmmaking techniques in her narration in addition to close-ups. Instead of describing the girl in sequential images, she employs

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a series of jump-cuts in order to create rhythm and visual interest. For this reason, the reader is solicited to constantly bring back aspects of the girl’s image on the ferry as the context changes. According to Iser, this type of narration where the view point changes “ . . . adds the dimension of space to that of time, for the accumulation of views and combinations gives us the illusion of depth and breadth, so that we have the impression that we are actually present in a real world” (Iser, 1982). Viewed against this idea, the two perspectives, one of the older narrator and the other representing her younger self, influence and modify each other. It should also be noted that, aside from the switch in perspectives through the use of film techniques, the length of sentences in The Lover seem to mirror the alternating voices. There is a point to be made here about the rhetoric of the sentence in The Lover that has a dynamic effect on our reading. Duras varies the rhythm of her prose by alternating the kinds of sentences from balanced and rhetorical to simple ones, to exclamations and ellipses. If we consider the variety of sentence types in Duras’ novel, we shall see that certain scenes, where the perception of the 15 year old is foregrounded, are narrated in a simplified form, as if the younger self of the older narrator presents the events with her own view of the world. The meeting between the fifteen year old and the Chinese man, for instance, is retold from the point of view of the young girl: Inside the limousine there’s a very elegant man looking at me. He’s not a white man. He’s wearing European clothes-the light tussore suit of the Saigon bankers. He’s looking at me. I’m used to people looking at me. People do look at white women in the colonies; at twelve-year old white girls too. For the past three years white men too, have been looking at me in the streets, and my mother’s men friends have been kindly asking me to tea with them while their wives are out playing tennis at the Sporting Club. (17)

Even if the commentary about the white men who have paid attention to the young girl for “the past three years” is made in a naive, almost childish tone, it is meant to raise questions about her innocence. Is the girl’s preoccupation with her own appearance a normal attitude for someone who becomes aware of her beauty or is it perhaps, driven by her erotic desire? From this perspective, the girl’s “passive attitude” on the ferry and her clothes make obvious her social degradation and can appear transgressive. We can now understand why the narrative voice is reluctant in providing details about this particular episode in her life. Reasons can be found in “that common family history of ruin and death” (25) or in her mother’s “smile” when “the child already knows how to divert the interest people take in her to the interest she takes in money” (24). The girl’s

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poverty explains why she goes out “dressed like a child prostitute”(24): “The link with poverty is there in the man’s hat too, for money has got to be brought in, got to be brought in somehow” (24). As suggested by the comments of the enunciating voice in The Lover, desire was already present in the girl’s reflections, even before she knew it: “It was instant knowledge of sexual relationship or it was nothing”(19). Bataille’s remarks about sexual activity as transgression, would lead us to believe that the girl’s clandestine affair with the older Chinese breaks “general taboos”: The remarkable thing about the sex taboo is that it is fully seen in transgression. It is inculcated partly through education but never resolutely formulated. Education proceeds as much by silence as by muffled warnings. The taboo is discovered directly by a furtive and at first partial exploration of the forbidden territory. At first nothing could be more mysterious. We are admitted to the knowledge of a pleasure in which the notion of pleasure is mingled with mystery, suggestive of the taboo that fashions the pleasure at the same time as it condemns it. . . . everywhere – and doubtless from the earliest times – our sexual activity is sworn to secrecy, and everywhere, through a variable degree, it appears contrary to our dignity so that the essence of eroticism is to be found in the inextricable confusion of sexual pleasure and taboo. (Bataille, 1957)

According to the narrator’s discourse in The Lover, it is not just the desire for sexual pleasure or the curiosity for the “forbidden territory” that makes the girl respond to the advances of the Chinese. Driven by her poverty and motivated by the commercial aspect of a sexual affair with a wealthy, older Chinese man, the fifteen year old girl relies on her seductive appeal and convinces herself that she has the power to break taboos by offering her body in exchange for meals or money. Apparently, she is indifferent to the taboos of her white race and her status as a colonist with regards to the selection of her sexual partner. In this respect, the surprising role reversal in the worldview of The Lover transforms our expectations. If the young girl’s perspective and actions no longer coincide with the prevalent norms of her society, she will be perceived in a new light. Suddenly, the narrative interruptions that framed the series of images projected in the text gain meaning. Thus the girl’s fear and isolation in a foreign country, her mother’s madness and her family’s poverty influence our reading in the sense that we begin to establish connections with her way of seeing the world. Therefore, her act of transgression opens for us a network of possibilities for a modern interpretation of the novel. Within the narrative sections that frame the love story between the girl and the Chinese, we often encounter “pauses” which have “a slow-down effect”. In The Lover,

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the “pauses” are narrative devices that explain the social norms embedded in the novel by bringing different perspectives on the same event. To take one example, we are told that the girl’s family members ignore “the elementary rules of society” when they accompany the couple to expensive restaurants. By refusing to speak to her Chinese lover who pays for their dinner, they show their silent opposition to him. The following passage will illustrate the fact that the “pause” in the story aims to inform us about their racist behaviour and hypocrisy and also, to engage us in observing the perspective of the enunciating voice who clearly disapproves of their attitude. These evenings are all the same. My brothers gorge themselves without saying a word to him. They don’t look at him either. They can’t. They’re incapable of it. If they could, if they could make the effort to see him, they’d be capable of studying, of observing the elementary rules of society. During these meals my mother’s the only one who speaks, she doesn’t say much, especially the first few times, just a few comments about the dishes as they arrive, the exorbitant price, then silence. He, the first couple of times, plunges in and tries to tell the story of his adventures in Paris, but in vain. It’s as if he hadn’t spoken, as if nobody had heard. His attempt founders in silence. My brothers go on gorging. They gorge as I’ve never seen anyone else gorge, anywhere. (50)

By seeking to comment on various aspects of transgression as viewed from the point of view of white colonists in former Indochina, the enunciating voice enriches the reader’s cognitive experience and cultural involvement in the world of the text. Moreover, the girl’s transgression appears now questionable since it is linked to her family’s poverty and their biased view of her lover. The intersection of racism and discrimination on the basis of gender and sexuality raises serious questions with respect to viewing the fifteen year old as a prostitute. Instead, she appears as a victim who, in retrospective, exposes her own shameful behaviour dictated by the norms of a patriarchal society. This aspect is clearly brought into focus in the next example: My brothers never will say a word to him, it’s as if he were invisible to them, as if for them he weren’t solid enough to be perceived, seen or heard. This is because he adores me, but it’s taken for granted I don’t love him, that I’m with him for the money, that I can’t love him, it’s impossible, that he could take any sort of treatment from me and still go on loving me. This because he’s a Chinese, because he’s not a white man. The way my elder brother treats my lover, not speaking to him, ignoring him, stems from such absolute conviction it acts as a model. We all treat my lover as he does. I myself never speak to him in their presence. When

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my family’s there I’m never supposed to address a single word to him. (51)

To understand the girl’s family background will definitely move us closer to the understanding of her relationship with the Chinese man. The process has been aptly described by Iser in the chapter eight of his book The Act of Reading, A Theory of Esthetic Response: “The apparently negative aspects of human nature fight back, as it were, against the principle itself and cast doubt upon it in proportion to its limitations” (Iser, 1982). It is precisely the non-linear type of narration chosen by Duras that will gradually foreground the self-conscious discourse of the young girl and ultimately reveal the flux of emotions surrounding The Lover. In this light, a new, more intimate image of the girl on the ferry emerges “in the muddy light of the river”. It seems that the fragments of the “missing photo” are finally put together to form an image of exquisite beauty as it becomes immortalized against the dream-like background of the river that “seems to reach the horizon”: The girl in the felt hat is in the muddy light of the river, alone on the dock of the ferry, leaning on the rails. The hat makes the whole scene pink. It’s the only color. In the misty sun of the river, the sun of the hot season, the banks have faded away, the river seems to reach the horizon. It flows quietly without a sound, like the blood in the body. No wind but that in the water. The engine of the ferry is the only sound, a rickety old engine with burned-out rods. From time to time, in faint bursts, the sound of voices. And the barking of dogs, coming from all directions, from beyond the mist, from all the villages. (21)

Cholon, the “City of Pleasure” The climactic arrangements of narrative segments in The Lover definitely point to the love-making scene from Cholon. What is of interest here is the anticipation of pleasure driven by erotic desire. The flash-back constantly shifts the reader’s attention from the scene that takes place in Cholon, the Chinese part of the city, to the reflections of the narrative voice that amplify the event. The accelerated rhythm of narration is visible from the short sentences used to recreate the scene: “It happened very quickly that day, a Thursday. . . It’s in Cholon. . .It’s early in the afternoon” (36). Once again, the capacity to evoke the girl’s feelings and emotions draws the reader into the visualization of the clandestine space through the cinematographic effects of the narration. The presence of the foreign city is communicated through a sensorial vocabulary that succeeds in overlapping the darkness of the studio and “the noise of the city in which

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the room is immersed” (36). The change to the third person creates a sense of detachment as if the narrative voice wants to distance herself from the event. Thus, while the description of the scene gains a dramatic effect through its emotional elements, the girl’s “tinge of fear” and his “trembling”, there is a clear sense of suspension that disorients our reading. One explanation could be the presence of the flash-forward that makes the reader understand the girl’s desire: “She doesn’t feel anything in particular, no hate, no repugnance either, so probably it’s already desire. But she doesn’t know it” (36). The allusions to her “perverseness” because she follows the wealthy Chinese to his studio are confirmed in his reported dialogue: “You’ve come here with me as you might have gone anywhere with anyone.” and brings back the image of the “child prostitute” on the ferry. Here, the distancing comments of the narrative voice seem to suggest that the girl is still unaware of her desire. What she believes, we are told, is that her breaking of the norms is intentional; it happens because of her poverty and also because of her defiance of the racial and social expectations of the colonists: he is Chinese and wealthy. The previously mentioned commentary about her “perverseness” is then brought to bear on her inability to understand her desire, and, in a broader perspective, on her emotional involvement in her love affair with the Chinese man. In what appears to be a role reversal game - a white young woman who wants to be seduced by a native man - is, in fact, erotic desire: “She says, I’d rather you didn’t love me. But if you do, I’d like you to do as you usually do with women. He looks at her in horror, asks, Is that what you want? She says it is” (37). The tension of the sexual scenes is heightened by tactile, forbidden images that bring the Chinese man’s body in focus. This time, his body is objectified as the young girl expresses her delight at having him in her power. What makes the image so unique is the open view of the girl’s desire through her insistent gaze of her lover’s body as an erotic object. References to his “sumptuously soft” skin and the assumption of her lover’s weakness bring a new perspective into play. In this case, the young girl becomes the spectator who explores his male “otherness” without reticence. Being able to liberate herself from the colonized, patriarchal view of a sexual relationship, the girl comes closer to understanding her own erotic desire. According to Simone de Beauvoir, the erotic experience that ceases to rely on the patriarchal roles of man and woman and instead, aims at making them “aware of themselves as flesh and as spirit, as the other and as the subject” achieves greater intimacy and is liberating for a woman (Beauvoir, 1961). We can see from the following examples how the “spectatorship” quality of the scene builds up the new vision of a

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female desire that overcomes the threat of linguistic taboos by evoking, through self-reference, the body of her lover. The lyric tone of the descriptive discourse heightens the surprising perceptions of the girl who experiences sexual love for the first time and captivates us through the articulation of a feminist aesthetics: He’s torn off the dress, he throws it down. He’s torn off her little white cotton panties and carries her over like that, naked, to the bed. And there he turns away and weeps. And she, slow, patient, draws him to her and starts to undress him. With her eyes shut. Slowly. he makes as if to help her. She tells him to keep still. Let me do it. She says she wants to do it. And she does. Undress him. When she tells him to, he moves his body in the bed, but carefully, gently, as if not to wake her.” The skin is sumptuously soft. The body. The body is thin, lacking in strength, in muscle, he may have been ill, may be convalescent, he’s hairless, nothing masculine about him but his sex, he’s weak, probably a helpless prey to insult, vulnerable. She doesn’t look him in the face. Doesn’t look at him at all. She touches him. Touches the softness of his sex, his skin, caresses his goldenness, the strange novelty. He moans, weeps. In dreadful love. And, weeping, he makes love. At first, pain. And then the pain is possessed in its turn, changes, slowly drawn away, borne toward pleasure, clasped to it. The sea, formless, simply beyond compare.” (38)

As I proposed to show at the beginning of my analysis of The Lover, the affective tone foregrounding Duras’ corporeal descriptions and the reflective nature of the narrative segments invite the reader to contextualize the memorized events and explore sexual desire beyond cultural and moral taboos in the fictional world of the novel. From the examples presented so far, it becomes now clear that the stylistic effect created by this type of narration emphasizes the importance of the room in Cholon for the understanding of the girl’s desire. As the narrator points out the “otherness” of the place through the self-conscious discourse of the girl, we realize that it is here, in Cholon, where she discovers her desire for the Chinese man. Initially presented as a modern place, “hastily furnished from the look of it, with furniture supposed to be ultra-modern” (36), the room will gradually capture the vivid images and the flux of emotions of her first erotic experience. We suddenly notice the darkness of the room and see the bed “separated from the city by those slatted shutters, that cotton blind. There’s nothing solid separating us from other people” (41). We hear “the din of the city”: The noise of the city is very loud, in recollection it’s like the sound track of a film turned up too high, deafening.” (40) and “The clatter of wooden clogs” and foreign sounds of

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the Chinese language: . . . the voices strident, Chinese is a language that’s shouted the way I always imagine desert languages are, it’s a language that’s incredibly foreign” (41). It appears that by emphasizing the sensorial nature of her recollections, the older narrator relives every detail of the scene in Cholon: “Whiffs of burnt sugar drift into the room, the smell of roasted peanuts, Chinese soups, roast meat, herbs, jasmine, dust, incense, charcoal fires, they carry fire about in baskets here, it’s sold in the street, the smell of the city is the smell of the villages upcountry, of the forest” (41). Duras’ narrative expression of female desire includes here not only an exploration of her lover’s body and of the erotic act but also, the exploration of a new culture with its own different norms. The “otherness” of the place and the foreign sound of the language will gradually transform the identity of the young girl. The desire for the Chinese man will enhance her intimacy with the foreign landscape: “The city of pleasure that reaches its peak at night. And night is beginning now, with the setting sun”.

Narrating the Self: Memory and Forbidden Desire The act of writing as a process that has the capacity to engage readers in an open discourse with the text of The Lover has been my central focus in chapter six. By examining Duras’ non-linearity and the effect of her style on our reading, I have sought to illustrate that the theme of transgression in The Lover is closely linked to our appropriation of the writer’s worldmaking process. By discussing the contrast between the patriarchal norms embedded in the text through narrative “pauses” and the textual selfconsciousness represented by the image of the girl on the ferry, I have established connections between the world of the text and a new vision of desire expressed from a feminine point of view. As I have said before, the narrative distance noticed at the beginning provokes us to question our own perception of her “forbidden desire”. The key words: “The story of my life doesn’t exist.” can thus be seen as an open invitation to resolve the conflicting interpretations of the girl’s transgression and to recreate, using the power of our imagination, the world of the text in light of the value judgments expressed in the narrative “pauses”. As a female author, Duras tells her story in a way that transcends the world of the novel and focuses on the textual interdependence between the enunciating voice and the image representing the fifteen year old. From this perspective, the words: “the story has no path” can be interpreted as a revelation that the author who recalls memorized events from her past is in the process of writing the story. Consequently, memory will play an

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important role in recreating the events. In this light, the alternating perspectives and the change from the first to the third person mirror the effort to remember and the quest for self-expression. Obviously, the passage of time has influenced beliefs and values, hence, the distancing effect in the narrative I have touched upon. As in many modern novels, in The Lover there is a constant re-evaluation of the represented world of the text and with it, an expansion of our reality as participating audience. Thus, for example, the girl’s “passive attitude” on the ferry at the beginning of the novel will be re-evaluated through a projection to the future, as perceived by the mature narrator. Therefore, instead of presenting a linear narrative and a story where “the reader has a simple choice between acceptance and rejection” Duras gives us glimpses of the scenes she remembers, allowing the sensorial images to enhance our historical and cultural understanding of the relationship between the fifteen year old and her world. The sensual quality of the narrative creates, as a result, an intimacy with the individual feminine expression of the author. It is not by chance that the final pages of the novel return to a new understanding of the “forbidden desire”. Telling a story becomes then a form of confession that reflects the vulnerability of the girl who discovers herself in her love for the Chinese man from Cholon: Among all the other nights upon nights, the girl had spent that one on the boat, of that she was sure, and she’d been there when it happened, the burst of Chopin under a sky lit up with brilliances. There wasn’t a breath of wind and the same music spread all over the dark boat, like a heavenly injunction whose import was unknown, like an order from God whose meaning was inscrutable. And the girl started up as if to go and kill herself in her turn, throw herself in her turn into the sea, and afterwards she wept because she thought of the man from Cholon and suddenly she wasn’t sure she hadn’t loved him with a love she hadn’t seen because it had lost itself in the affair like water in sand and she rediscovered it only now, through this moment of music flung across the sea. (113-114)

CHAPTER SEVEN THE ADULTEROUS NARRATOR IN MARGARET ATWOOD’S THE BLIND ASSASSIN

In The Blind Assassin, Margaret Atwood deliberately hides the identity of the author until the very end. Drawing on the writer’s use of intertextuality, my analysis will bring into focus the readers’ assumptions activated by the cultural ideology of the text. In this chapter, I will show how the embedded stories and the post-modernist devices employed by Atwood make it increasingly difficult for readers to identify adultery as transgressive act in the novel or build a frame of reference as far as cultural traditions and social norms are concerned. As we shall see, the duality of order/disorder in The Blind Assassin challenges the modern reader to find the significance of textual “indeterminacies” and recreate the story told by an unreliable narrator. Recognizable details about the Canadian landscape and the Canadian societal norms are abruptly brought into focus through the reported deaths in Chapter I as we try to sift through newspaper articles and unstable narrative reports to find out what really happened. Even if it seems obvious that the search for identity has a position of central importance in The Blind Assassin, the game structure of the novel involves us in potential ramifications of the story as we are manipulated to distinguish fact from fiction. One of the most fascinating narrative strategies in Atwood’s novel is her portrayal of the evolving narrator-character, Iris Chase Griffen. My primary focus will be then to show the connections between her status as narrator and character in the story with the purpose of clarifying her role as the “adulteress” in the world of the text. In view of the dialogic nature of the narrative discourse and the postmodernist preoccupation with intertextuality employed by Atwood, I will discuss conflicting interpretations of the notion of transgression in the novel as they relate to the narrator’s imaginative power and her own search for truth. As Linda Hutcheon observed, the notion of “moral responsibility” becomes a political one for Atwood and “themes of violation (physical, psychological, and ideological) provide the focus for Atwood’s particular challenge to the male-‘universal’. . . “ In her opinion, “All of Atwood’s heroines are highly imaginative; their creative

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processes, however extreme or comic, also in a sense mirror that of the novelist herself, which in turn mirrors our own as readers” (Hutcheon, 1988). It is this aspect of ideological implications that will be of interest in my analysis of the relationship between the reader and the text of the novel. Social and gender differences, prevailing norms of early twentieth century Canadian society, values and value judgments expressed in the text of the novel will influence our image-building process. Through subversive narrative techniques aiming to convince readers of a linear story, Atwood creates instead an unstable text, which combines literary and non-literary elements. In this case, our consideration of the objectivity of the narrator becomes a fundamental question when we attempt to construct an image of the characters and the events presented in the novel. In reference to our analysis of characters in the novel, Bal insists on taking into consideration “the connections existing between the various characteristics”; for her, ideological positions of characters and their connections with their situation and environment are important elements: A character exhibits not only similarities to and differences from other characters. Often, there is a connection or a discrepancy between the character, its situation, and its environment. Finally, the description which has been obtained of a character can be contrasted with an analysis of the functions it performs in a series of events. . . What kinds of actions does a character perform, and what role does it play in the fabula? This confrontation can yield information about the construction of the story with respect to the fabula. Because of a certain event, alterations may take place in the build-up of a character, and internal relations between the various characters change. Conversely, alterations in the make-up of a character may influence events and determine the outcome of the fabula. (Bal, 1997)

The Notebooks To start, I will attempt to define the role of the narrative voice in creating the world of the text, with particular attention to characterization and setting. As the novel opens provocatively with the report of an accident, the authority of the narrative voice is established from the very first lines: Ten days after the war ended, my sister Laura drove a car off a bridge. The bridge was being repaired: she went right through the Danger sign. The car fell a hundred feet into the ravine, smashing through the treetops feathery with new leaves, then burst into flames and rolled down into the shallow

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creek at the bottom. Chinks of the bridge fell on top of it. Nothing much was left of her but charred smithereens. (1)

Bearing the title “The bridge” the first lines of the subchapter appear to be written in a cold, detached manner. The initial lack of emotion is gradually replaced by visible signs of pain and a an image of the victim, Laura: “I could picture the smooth oval of Laura’s face, her neatly pinned chignon, the dress she would have been wearing: a shirtwaist with a small rounded collar, in a sober colour-navy blue or steel grey or hospital-corridor green”. The words “hospital-green” and the “penitential colours” of her clothes attract our attention since the report of the accident by the policeman suggested that Laura “had turned the car sharply and deliberately, and had plunged off the bridge with no more fuss than stepping off a curb”. We can assume that Laura committed suicide and also, given her sister’s description, that she had been previously hospitalized or institutionalized. However, as we attempt to build up a frame of reference, our assumptions are altered because of the following sentence: “It wasn’t the brakes, I thought. She had her reasons. She was completely ruthless in that way”. The sentence can disorient us because it changes the information we learnt in the beginning. The fact that the one who tells us this revealing detail is Laura’s sister establishes her authority in the textual world influences our opinion. Therefore, starting with the first chapter of the book, we are tempted to find out the implications of her statement; more precisely, we want to find out why Laura committed suicide and what were her reasons. These preliminary questions will move us progressively along a set of expectations that find their source in the text. To return to the same chapter, let us examine closely a passage that will have a crucial effect on our reading: “I opened the drawer, I saw the notebooks. I undid the crisscross of kitchen string that tied them together. I noticed that my teeth were chattering, and that I was cold all over. I must be in shock, I decided” (2). The noticeable emotion of Mrs. Griffen at the sight of the notebooks alerts us to the importance of their content and leads us to believe that, perhaps, their content will reveal the “reasons” of Laura’s suicide. From the examples provided we can clearly see now how contextual meaning relies to a large extent on the established authority of the narrator. From the first chapter of the novel, Mrs. Griffen’s point of view on the events will be privileged as we will be often called upon to rely on her authority in assembling the story. The article dated May 26, 1945 from “The Toronto Star” follows Mrs. Griffin’s report of Laura’s accident:

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Chapter Seven “The Toronto Star, May 26, 1945 QUESTIONS RAISED IN CITY DEATH SPECIAL TO THE STAR” A coroner’s inquest has returned a verdict of accidental death in last week’s St. Clair Ave. fatality. Miss Laura Chase, 25, was travelling west on the afternoon of May 18 when her car swerved through the barriers protecting a repair site on the bridge and crashed into the ravine below, catching fire. Miss Chase was killed instantly. Her sister, Mrs. Richard E. Griffin, wife of the prominent manufacturer, gave evidence that Miss Chase suffered from severe headaches affecting her vision. In reply to questioning, she denied any possibility of intoxication as Miss Chase did not drink. (3)

In a language and style characteristic of media reports, the article confirms the death and gives additional details about the accident. The textual function of the truth-claims here is obvious: by providing recognizable elements about the date and the place of the accident, as well as about the social status of Laura’s family, the text of the newspaper article points to the authenticity of the event. Ironically, certain details of the event are altered, expanded or presented it in a different light. For instance, there is no evidence of the policeman’s disclosure about the two people (“a retired lawyer and a bank teller, dependable people”) that witnessed Laura’s deliberate turn. Furthermore, because “It was the police view that a tire caught in an exposed streetcar track was a contributing factor” in Laura’s death, a good portion of the newspaper article is devoted to the “safety precautions taken by the city” and “renewed protests over the state of the streetcar tracks on this stretch of roadway.” The details call for a reevaluation of our reading in the first chapter and definitely contrasts this public view of the accident with the one suggested by Laura’s sister, Mrs. Griffen. We have thus two perspectives of the event, in conflict with each other as they originate from different sources, representing diverse social speech types. Bakhtin’s definition of the novel as “a diversity of social speech types (sometimes even diversity of languages) and a diversity of individual voices, artistically organized” (Bakhtin, 1984) aptly describes how the “multiplicity of social voices” can become in The Blind Assassin a distinct feature of the narrative. The dialogic nature of Atwood’s novel is further confirmed in the final pages of the first chapter when the presence of the authorial voice is felt. Since we were already informed of Mrs. Griffen’s discovery of Laura’s notebooks, we can thus assume that The Blind Assassin (the very novel we are reading!) is written by Laura Chase. To support this claim, several details are skillfully inserted in the narrative:

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the title and the author, the name of publishing house, the date of publication as well as the “The Prologue” of the book.

Frames of Reference: Avilion and the Button Factory Picnic As we will see from the remaining fourteen chapters, the alternation of narrative voices will pose serious problems to our reading. Atwood creates several frames of reference and invites the reader to discover the “author” of The Blind Assassin while she purposefully changes the focus of narration. Because the temporal sequence is not followed, we have a series of flash-backs and flash-forwards that have an effect of retardation on our reading. For instance, the novel starts with the event of Laura’s death which took place in 1945, followed, two years later by the publication of Laura’s book. Chapter II, mostly based on the fantastic tale recounted by Alex Thomas and events taking place before Laura’s death, jumps forward to May 1998 when Mrs. Iris Griffen is invited to present the Laura Chase Memorial Prize. The anachronism in the narration of events points to the unreliability of the narrative voice and urges the reader to examine the text more closely. After careful consideration of several chapters, the portrait of Iris Chase Griffen emerges clearly from the narrative. We learn to recognize her voice from the constant retroversions and anticipations which gradually retell her childhood memories in Port Ticonderoga. Her story provides significant details about her sister Laura and their family life, changing perspectives according to the time of narration. The descriptions of Canadian landscape abound in realistic details employed to intensify the idea that the narration is based on true, historical facts. For instance, the image of Avilion, the family home in Chapter III, is perceived through the perspective of an older narrator who can recall its former elegance: Avilion is not the standard-issue limestone. Its planners wanted something more unusual, and so it is constructed of rounded river cobblestones all cemented together. Froma distance the effect is warty, like the skin of a dinosaur or the wishing wells in picture books. Ambition’s mausoleum, I think of it now. It isn’t a particularly elegant house, but it was once thought imposing in its way – a merchant’s palace, with a curved driveway leading to it, a stumpy Gothic turret, and a wide semi-circular spooled verandah overlooking the two rivers, where tea was served to ladies in flowered hats during the languid summer afternoons at the century’s turn. String quartets were once stationed there for garden parties; my grandmother and her

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Chapter Seven friends used it as a stage, for amteur theatricals, at dusk, with torches set around; Laura and I used to hide under it. It’s begun to sag, that verandah; it needs a paint job. (58)

The tone of the narrator reveals intimate details about the family history and within the landscape described, the development of characters unfolds as we read. We understand now that this is in fact the frame story where events and characters intersect with the other secondary stories in the textual world of the novel. The growing awareness that we are now listening to the narrative voice of Iris Chase Griffen who establishes a sequential order in the history of the Chase family helps us build connections with the other narratives. If we do not question her reliability as a narrator at this stage it is for the simple reason that we have already assumed that her story is “true” given all the information provided through authentic, non-literary documents: newspaper articles, letters, and invitations. The revelation of intimate incidents and events, names of family members and their realistic portrayals gives us a sense of intimacy with the members of the Chase family as it gives us an inside view of their history. The major effect is that we become attentive listeners and our curiosity is intensified, given the confessional tone of the narrator. As the rich descriptive passages are often accompanied by her anticipatory comments on the events, we are led to identify the narrator’s value judgments on the patriarchal values of the Canadian society. In this case, the historical documentation provided by the narrator’s discourse is revised from the point of view of an older person who can point certain attitudes and behaviours unknown previously. We can already see from the previous example how the focus of narration on Avilion expands our understanding of the past. The narrator’s perception brings with it three parallel images of the same object: the family home as it used to be during the time of her grandparents, the transformations during the time of her childhood and finally, the image she describes to us in the temporal segment of her discourse. By bringing the past to the present of narration, the narrative voice succeeds to make connections with events in the story by creating new frames of reference. Consequently, our vision of the events and characters are enriched, enabling us to understand and evaluate what is narrated. If, for instance, the Button factory appears often in the story, the image presented by the narrative voice is significant. As we shall see from the nest example, the Button factory shows a reflection of the reader’s transformation as she recalls the past:

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The Button Factory is on the east bank of the Louveteau, a quarter of a mile upriver from the Gorge. For several decades it stood derelict, its windows broken, its roof leaking, an abode of rats and drunks; then it was rescued from demolition by an energetic citizens’ committee, and converted to boutiques. The flower beds have been reconstituted, the exterior sandblasted, the ravages of time and vandalism repaired, though dark wings of soot are still visible around the lower windows, from the fire over sixty years ago. (50)

The more one reads the novel, the more significant the image of Button factory becomes. As the inside view of the history of the Chase family clearly informs us that Benjamin Chase, the grandfather of the two sisters made his fortune with the money from the Button factory, we understand that it was also because of “the crude money, button money” that he was able to marry Adelia Montfort, from an established family, as the following passage illustrates: Adelia’s maiden name was Montfort. She was from an established family, or what passed for it in Canada-second generation Montreal English crossed with Huguenot French. These Monforts had been prosperous oncethey made a bundle on railroads-but through risky speculations and inertia they were already halfway down the slippery slope. So when time had begun to run out on Adelia with no really acceptable husband in sight, she’d married money-crude money, button money. She was expected to refine this money, like oil. (She wasn’t married, she was married off, said Reenie, rolling out the gingersnaps. The family arranged it. That’s what was done in such families, and who’s to say it was any worse or better than choosing for yourself ? In any case, Adelia Montfort did her duty, and lucky to have the chance, as she was getting long in the tooth by then-she must have been-twenty three, which was counted over the hill in those days). (59)

We can see how these narrative comments, fitfully framed by Rennie, the former family maid, bring to light values and judgement values that will form the ideological background of the novel. Moreover, the Button factory is also important for the re-creation of memories surrounding the first meeting with two characters who will play major roles in the story: Alex Thomas and Richard Griffen. We recall that the photograph mentioned in the Prologue in Chapter I has the word “picnic” on the back. As assumed by the title and name of the novel, we believe that the young man is Laura’s lover and that she kept “the single photograph because it’s almost all she has left of him” (4). It is, however, in Chapter V that we have a clearer idea about the significance of the Button factory picnic since in subchapter entitled “The button factory picnic” we are given

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missing details not only about Alex Thomas but also, about Richard Griffen who will be chosen as Iris’s future husband. Subversively, Atwood presents the two characters in the same setting and changes the focus of narration from the man Iris sees with her father, a “sleek” Richard Griffen, “of Royal Classic Knitwear in Toronto” to the man she finds talking to her sister Laura. Her visible disapproval of Alex is expressed in the cold way of judging people with the arrogance instilled by her family history. The man’s “style was indeterminate – not a factory worker, but not anything else either, or nothing definite. No tie, but then it was a picnic. A blue shirt, a little frayed around the edges. An impromptu, a proletarian mode” (176). It becomes obvious that Iris sees the man’s connection to Laura inappropriate. She is unpleasantly surprised by the familiar tone her fourteen year old sister uses with him and talks to him in that “sneering way people have” (177). The duplicity of Atwood’s postmodernist technique is evident from her technique of inducing the readers to believe that Alex Thomas will be associated with Laura in the future since Iris Chase Griffen seemed to dislike him at the Button factory picnic. This is a trap for the reader who does not question the identity of the narrator at this time. As I will point out later, Alex Thomas will become Iris’s lover, not Laura’s. The change in focalization involves thus the readers in making assumptions about the rest of the story based on the idea that Laura and Alex will have an intimate relationship because Laura has already expressed an interest in him whereas Iris seemed more interested in meeting Richard Griffen. The unreliability of the narrative voice could be interpreted, from this point of view, as a desire to hide a personal involvement. I will recall here Rimmon-Kenan identification of its main sources of unreliability: the narrator’s limited knowledge; his personal involvement; and his problematic value-scheme. By this statement I mean that Iris Chase Griffen, in retrospective, refuses to comment on her personal relationship with Alex Thomas, a relationship that will start during her marriage to Griffen. Being an adulteress, the implications could prove disastruous given the rigid moral values of the Canadian society she lived in.

The Adulteress Narrator The evidence that certain narrative segments of the frame story, that is the story told by Iris Chase, do not follow a strict chronological sequence, can be noticed from the presentation of events. We have seen how from the very beginning of the novel, a multitude of narrative voices enter the text creating the impression of a conflicting “dialogue” making it challenging

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for us to understand the evolution of characters or the progress of events in the story. With respect to the frame story, we can assume that the reason why there are many ellipses and hidden facts is because the temporal segments belong to different life stages in the life of Iris Chase Griffen. The event of her sister’s death and the discovery of the notebooks represent, in my opinion, the motivation for her telling her own story. From this perspective, we can see her narrative as a reflection of her selfquest journey, triggered by Laura’s death. The point I am trying to make is that the frame story told by Iris Chase mirrors her internal transformation and as a result, the events are often mitigated by her own re-evaluation of her human nature. Her relationships with the other characters in the novel come also under her scrutiny as she learns details about Laura’s life. Let us examine the passage where she accepts Richard Griffen’s marriage proposal: Richard proposed to me in the Imperial Room of the Royal York Hotel. He’d invited me to lunch, along with Father; but then at the last, as we were walking through the hotel corridors on our way to the lift, Father said he couldn’t attend. I’d have to go by myself, he said. Of course, it was a put-up job between the two of them. (225-226)

The central idea of the passage reflects Iris’s submission to the expectations imposed by her class. We recall the previous comment made about her grandmother Adelia Montfort and the circumstances of her marriage. In the example provided here, the image of the young woman who accepts Richard Griffen as her husband is reminiscent of her grandmother’s. As in earlier times, the fortune of her future husband has more weight and consequently her decision in the matter is not important. The ironic tone revealed in the final sentence clearly supports the idea that marriages are “put-up jobs” between the father of the bride and the future husband. Given this understanding of the social norms of the text, we can better assess other reflections made by the narrative voice. Her silent acceptance of norms and the reasons for it are brought into focus as she narrates the conversation with her father before Richard’s proposal. Her submission to her father’s appeal to think of “Laura’s future” can be perceived as “empowering” when in fact it strongly illustrates his adherence to the values of a male-driven society where women do not really have a choice. To take another example, when Laura runs away from the Toronto house where she lived with Iris and Richard and is found working in a waffle booth at the Sunnyside Amusement Park, the event is reported as it was viewed by Winifred, Richard’s sister. The characteristic

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irony we learn to identity in Iris’s discourse is present here in the final comment: But the most important thing, said Winnifred, was that not a word of all this must leak out. A fifteen-year-old running away from home like that-it would reflect badly on the family. People might think she’d been mistreated, and this could become a serious impediment. To Richard and his future political prospects, was what she meant. (324)

The explicit comment serves as a clarification of the basic social norms in the textual world of the text. Indeed, in line with the historical truth-claims we have identified previously in the novel, the example becomes credible through the presentation of the inside view of family relationships and physical details of the place where Laura was found. At the same time, it foregrounds the idea that well-established Canadian families, aware of the political implications of their actions, hid unpleasant family events from the media. By bringing forth these aspects of her society, Iris subtly invites the reader to reflect on her silent acceptance of societal norms: I thought I could cope with Richard, with Winnifred. I thought I could live like a mouse in the castle of the tigers, by creeping around out of sight inside the walls; by staying quiet, by keeping my head down. No: I give myself too much credit. I didn’t see the danger. I didn’t even know they were tigers. Worse: I didn’t know I might become a tiger myself. I didn’t know Laura might become one, given the proper circumstances. (328)

At this point, it is important to comment on the process of character transformation I have mentioned in the introduction of this chapter. By invoking certain events from the past, Iris Chase connects us with the norms of her society and helps us build an image of the world of the text. If we consider Bal’s statement regarding “Construction of contents”, we can see how the portrait of Iris as narrator-character evolves from the text of Atwood’s novel: When a character appears for the first time, we do not yet know very much about it. The qualities that are implied in that first presentation are not all ‘grasped’ by the reader. In the course of the narrative the relevant characteristics are repeated so often – in a different form, however – that they emerge more and more clearly. Repetition is thus an important principle of the construction of the image of a character. (Bal 1997)

We recall how in Chapter I, the character’s image was based on her actions related to the death of her sister; since the previous chapters presented the story through various narrative interruptions, a sense of

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“disorder” was noticed due to the contrasting viewpoints on the same event. Repeated presentation of the same event provided to us with clues regarding the frames of reference used to describe the world of the text and suggested that the key to finding out more about Laura’s death might be in the narrative discourse of Laura Chase. After all, it was this particular event that seemed to urge Iris to tell the story. Taking into consideration all the information provided in the novel, including her narrative discourse, we can establish some coherence and order regarding the novel we read by attempting to answer the following questions: What is the relationship between Laura’s death and Iris’s discovery of the notebooks? What happened to Laura after Iris’s marriage? What was her relationship to Alex Thomas? The extent of the information that can be found in the novel regarding these questions depends, of course, of the types of readers and their familiarity with postmodernist techniques. For instance, we notice that the fantastic tale about the city of Sakiel-Norn mirrors to a certain extent the story of the two sisters who were “sacrificed”. Comments made from the narrative level of the fantastic tale by Alex Thomas are confronted by the unnamed lover in the other story that we assume to be written by Laura: “Nowadays you might say she looked like a pampered society bride. She sits up. That’s really uncalled for, she says. You want to get at me. You just love the idea of killing those poor girls in their bridal veils. I bet they were blondes”(29). If we take a closer look at this passage, we will see one of the several clues about the identity of the narrator. Since Laura was never married, the similarity about “the pampered society bride” in the fantastic story and the society marriage of Iris Chase to Richard Griffen seems to be more appropriate. Also, the ambiguity about Iris’s reservation regarding Alex Thomas is dispelled when we find out in Chapter VII that she met him on Queen Street, in Toronto. This event throws into question her credibility as narrator and all her references to Laura and Alex Thomas. The manner in which she presents her meeting with Alex modifies our expectations of the relationships in the novel. As we learn about her strong feelings, we recall the episode in Chapter V when Iris remembers his kiss on the mouth in the attic where he was hidden by the two sisters. Once again, Atwood skillfully blurs the details of the incident by making it appear insignificant or questionable because of the role played by memory: “Nothing I can recall, but is what I remember the same thing as what actually happened?” (217). Thus the accidental meeting with Alex in Toronto becomes an important event because the intimacy the two once shared.

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Chapter Seven Then one day – it was a Thursday – I saw Alex Thomas. He was on the other side of the street, waiting for the light to change. It was Queen Street, at Yonge. He was the worse for wear – he had on a bklue shirt, like a worker, and a battered hat – but it was him all right. He looked illuminated, as if a shaft of light were falling on him from some invisible source, rendering him frighteningly visible. ... He turned then, and at first I was not sure he could see me. I stretched out my hand, like a drowning person beseeching rescue. In that moment I had already committed treachery in my heart. (321)

The passage is significant because it facilitates our ability to reconstruct the temporal sequence of events in Iris’s story, in spite of the constant interference of the other narrative levels in the novel. When the narrative voice in the frame story declares: “I look back over what I’ve written and I know it’s wrong, not because of what I’ve set down, but because of what I’ve omitted.” she addresses the readers directly in what can be seen an open invitation to find out the truth from her story. Indeed, it is in Chapter XIII that the story we have been waiting for is finally revealed. Since we already knew about Laura’s being committed to an institution, Bella Vista, and about Reenie’s ability to help her obtain her freedom and a part of her father’s fortune, her meeting with Iris will have tragic consequences. Against the background of untold stories and family secrets, Iris’s adulterous affair with Alex Thomas will be the cause of Laura’s suicide. As more missing links to the story become now visible, we realize that Laura’s love for Alex was innocent. The evoked revelation of truth completes the story and helps us reconstruct the whole story. Bringing together the various narrative levels and re-establishing the missing elements will guide us to better understanding of how transgression is perceived in The Blind Assassin. The full significance of the social norms and social differences incorporated in Iris’s frame story is clear now because there are no longer social pretenses and family secrets. Iris’s silent acceptance of the society norms is suggested by her “blindness”: she fails to “see” when Richard seduces Laura who becomes pregnant and is then committed to an institution after her abortion. She is unable to raise her own daughter or help her granddaughter as her own wishes violently conflict with the appearance of social order that the Griffens wanted to maintain. Shaped by the views of the narrative voice in the frame story, the readers’ expectations will be modified by these revelations and in this new light, Iris’s adultery becomes commonplace, being part of the bigger picture of a corrupt society. Freed from the constraints of her former preoccupation with the moral order and the expectations of her class, Iris

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tells us the truth about the real author of the book published under the name Laura Chase: As for the book, Laura didn’t write a word of it. But you must have known that for some time. I wrote it myself, during my long evenings alone, when I was waiting for Alex to come back, and then afterwards, once I knew he wouldn’t. I didn’t think of what I was doing as writing-just writing down. What I remembered, and also what I imagined, which is also the truth. I thought of myself as recording. A bodiless hand, scrawling across a wall. I wanted a memorial. That was how it began. For Alex, but also for myself. (512)

We can see now that the information in the final pages of the novel seeks to re-establish the authority of the narrative voice and thus allows us to fill in the missing elements. Since the notebooks found by Iris and mentioned in the first chapter were not Laura’s book, as we were led to assume, we learn that it was because of “simple prudence” that Iris named her sister as an author. More importantly, we find out that the book is addressed to Iris’s granddaughter, Sabrina. The functions of the book are thus twofold: first, to present the family history from a truthful, feminine perspective that rejects patriarchal values and norms, and second, to fulfil a moral responsibility by disclosing the name of Sabrina’s real grandfather, Alex Thomas. The appeal to creative imagination: “Your legacy from him is the realm of infinite speculation. You’re free to reinvent yourself at will” is significant here because it illustrates the narrative quest for identity by the narrator character in the frame story. It should not be surprising then to find that the imaginative power and more precisely, writing, is seen as a liberating force in Atwood’s novel. We have seen how the ambiguity of her novel is mirrored in the interpolated stories and how often the variety of languages and voices seems to contradict all conventions of narration. Nevertheless, looking at the subtle but clear indications that the author is not the only source of meaning, we understand that, ultimately, Atwood’s text challenges the readers’ capacity to make sense of the world of the text by reflecting on their own reading. The theme of transgression as it is built up in The Blind Assassin encompasses all aspects of the narrative as it becomes a question of social order. By bringing forth accepted patterns of perception in a recognizable Canadian society, Margaret Atwood establishes an on-going dialogue with her readers by engaging them to actively create their own frames of reference.

CONCLUSION

In Transgression, Stylistic Variation and Narrative Discourse in the Twentieth Century Novel I have attempted to show that complex narratives that push us out of our traditional roles as spectators and disrupt our way of seeing the world enhance the pleasurable activity of reading and thus broaden the scope of literature and aesthetics. The writers of the six novels analyzed in this book challenge traditional storytelling and conventional narrative techniques by bringing into focus self-conscious narrators who confront the world of the text with a new perception of the social order. In this context, transgressive acts are perceived in a new light as they come into existence through the writer’s ability to break away from moral and social constraints and focus instead on new ways of novelistic expression. In explaining why twentieth century novels will always remain open to interpretation, I have chosen to focus on frames of reference that radically change our cultural and interpretive expectations in the process of reading. Furthermore, given the shift from traditional world-making techniques where the omniscient narrator provided the readers with an accepted set of human values to that of subversive forms of narration that engage the readers in re-shaping the world of the text, my aim was to present the stylistic implications of the generic instability and cultural and social differences in the novels discussed. The importance of understanding how the various points of view in the twentieth century novel create new frames of reference and defy the readers’ expectations has been the starting point in my discussion of the theme of transgression acts in each of the six novels. In The Outsider, we have seen how the ironic distance of the narrative voice succeeds in presenting a view of the society and the absurdity of life through Meursault’s eyes by drawing us away from the murder committed and its motive. Albert Camus’s grotesque humor casts a different light on the events in the story and challenges our expectations by making us reassess our own norms and values, as we gradually change our opinion of Meursault. Having understood the protagonist’s refusal to lie and his nonconformity, we become able to internalize his own view of the murder. The degree to which we understand Meursault’s “guilt” or “innocence” depends, in this case, on our perception of Camus’s stylistic deviation when presenting the murder scene.

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Conclusion

García Márquez’s metafictionality in One Hundred Years of Solitude is constantly brought into focus in the parallel reading unveiled in the end. Only by becoming fully conscious of the postmodernist twist of the novel that pushes us out of our conventional way of reading we can understand why we are suddenly caught in the same wind noticed by Aureliano Babilonia as he discovers his identity. The writer’s closure device is part of his masterful storytelling: he starts with Ursula’s fear of incest and shifts our attention to such an extent that we become absorbed in the story of the Buendías, ignoring that we were in fact reading Melquíades’s hermetic writings. The importance of distance in presenting ideologically explicit comments on various aspects of the fictional Algerian world portrayed in Assia Djebar’s novel Children of a New World has been emphasized in discussing the portrait of Touma, murdered by her brother Tawfiq. The view on transgresssion in Djebar’s novel is mediated by the multi-voiced discourse of the female characters that strongly determines our reactions as readers from a particular culture or social group. Confronted with the glaring differences between the portrayals of men and women in the Algerian textual world described through “psycho-narration”, Touma’s death appears as a deserved punishment. Our ideas of justice, historical and social change are constantly questioned as we become able to see changes of social patterns through many levels of narrative time. In Calvino’s novel If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller. . . . transgression appears distorted under the sign of parody as it “ridicules” certain aspects of the background text. Calvino’s style variation in the interpolated story On the carpet of leaves illuminated by the moon corresponds to the two different languages present in Tanizaki’s diaries. The tension between the two different perspectives is created by the gender differentiation of two first-person narrative voices who explicitly control the readers’ expectations. This is simply one example of the subversive techniques used by Calvino to question our perception of reading. The self-reflexivity of the If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller. . . . is enhanced by the multiple mirroring of readers and ways of reading as we are ultimately constrained to identify with one particular position. By forcing the readers to reflect on their own expectations and the truthfulness of the narrative voice, Calvino provokes them into participating in the creation of the fictional world. If we look at Duras’ non-linearity and the frequent repetitions that highlight the conflicting interpretations of the girl’s transgression in The Lover, we find that they are closely linked to our appropriation of the writer’s world-making process. Because memory plays a major role in

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recreating the events of the story, the alternating perspectives and the change from the first to the third person mirror the narrator’s effort to remember and the quest for self-expression. The distancing effect observed at the beginning of our reading will be replaced by a growing intimacy with the individual feminine expression of the author as we are manipulated to re-evaluate the represented world of the text with its norms, beliefs and values through sensorial images and narrative “pauses”. In Atwood’s The Blind Assassin, the obvious disruption of the story though constant back and forth movement between narrative levels and insertion of genres in clearly shows how reading and interpretation can become blurred. The readers’ view of adultery as transgression in textual world of The Lover is modified by the narrator who suppresses certain evidence and instead allows several layers of her story to unfold in the end. The self-consciousness of the narrator encompasses all aspects of the narrative as it brings forth conflicting views of accepted norms and values. Through her masterfully designed narrative games, Margaret Atwood establishes an on-going dialogue with her readers by engaging them to actively create their own frames of reference in order to discover the identity of the narrator. Different as they are, the six novels change the borders of own reading perceptions and stimulate us to understand a new way of defining “great literature”. By looking closely at the narrative and stylistic effects created by major twentieth century writers, we bring literature alive and make their craft visible, as Northrop Frye pointed out in The Educated Imagination: We have to look at the figures of speech a writer uses, his images and symbols, to realize that underneath all the complexity of human life that uneasy stare at an alien nature is still haunting us, and the problem of surmounting it still with us. Above all, we have to look at the total design of a writer's work, the title he gives to it, and the his main theme, which means his point in writing it, to understand that literature is still doing the same job that mythology did earlier, but filling in its huge cloudy shapes with sharper lights and deeper shadows. (32)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Primary Sources Atwood, Margaret. The Blind Assassin. Toronto, Ont: McClelland & Stewart, 2000. Calvino, Italo. If on a winter's night a traveller. Trans. William Weaver. Toronto: Lester & Orpen Dennys Ltd. 1986. Camus, Albert. The Outsider. Trans. J. Laredo. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1983. Djebar, Assia. Children of the New World: A Novel of the Algerian War. Trans. M. De Jager. New York: Feminist Press at the City University of New York, 2005. Duras, Marguerite. The Lover. Trans. B. Bray. Random House, 1985. Márquez, Gabriel García. One Hundred Years of Solitude. Trans. G. Rabassa. NY: Harper Perennial, 1998.

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Frasson-Marin, Aurore. ltalo Calvino et l'imaginaire. Geneve: Slatkine, 1986. Freund, Elizabeth. The Return of the Reader. New York: Methuen, 1987. Frye, Northrop. The Educated Imagination. Toronto: Anansi, 1993. Genette, Gérard. Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method. Ithaca, N. Y. : Cornell University Press. 1980 —. Narrative Discourse Revisited. Ithaca, N. Y. : Cornell University Press, 1988. Gullon, Ricardo. Garcia Marquez; o, El olvidado arte de contar. Madrid: Taurus,1970. —. Figures III. Paris: Seuil, 1972. Girard, Rene. “Camus's Stranger Retried. “ PMLA 79 (Dec. 1964): 51933. Guton, Sharon and Sline, Jean. Contemporary Literary Criticism. Volume 22. Detroit: Gale Research Company, 1982. Hoffman, Carole. Forgetting and Marguerite Duras. University of Colorado Press, 1991. Holub, Robert C. Reception Theory: A Critical Introduction. New York: Methuen, 1984. Hume, Kathryn. Calvino's fictions: cogito and cosmos. New York: Oxford UP, 1992. Hutcheon, Linda. A Theory of Parody. New York and London: Methuen, 1985. —. A Poetics of Postmodernism. London and New York: Routledge, 1988. —. The Canadian Postmodern: A Study of Contemporary English-Canadian Fiction. Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1988. Ingarden, Roman. The cognition of the literay work of art. Trans. Ruth Ann Crowley Kenneth R. Olson. Evanston: Northwestern UP, 1973. —. The Literary Work of Art. A n Investigation on the Borderlines of Ontology,Logic and the Theory of Literature. Trans. George G. Grabowicz. Evanston:Nortwestern UP, 1973. Iser, Wolfgang. The lmplied Reader. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1974. —. The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1982. —. “Feigning in Fiction” in Identity of the Literary Text. Eds. Mario J. Valdes and Owen Miller, Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1985, 204-228. Jauss, Hans Robert. Toward an Aesthetic of Reception. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. 1982. Kundera, Milan. The Unbearable Lightness of Being. Trans. Michael Henry Heim. New York : HarperCollins, 2004. Mailhot, L. Albert Camus ou l’imagination du désert, Les presses de l’Univ. de Montréal, 1973.

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Martin, Wallace. Recent Theories of Narrative. Cornell UP, 1986. Olken, I. T.. With Pleated Eye and Garnet Wing. Ann Arbor: Univeristy of Michigan Press, 1984. Petersen, Gwenn B. The Moon in the Water: Understanding Tanizaki, Kawabata, and Mishima. Honolulu: University Press of Hawaii, 1979. Proust, Marcel. Du côté de chez Swann. Paris : Éditions Gallimard, 1954. Ricci, Franco. Ed. Calvino Revisited. Ottawa: Dovehouse Editions, 1988. Rimmon-Kenan, Shlomith Narrative Fiction. Contemporary Poetics. London: Routledge, 1983. Robbe-Grillet, Alain. Le Voyeur. Paris : Éditions de Minuit, 1963. Spitzer, Leo. Etudes de style. Gallimard, 1970. Todorov, Tzvetan. Poitique de la prose. Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1978. Tompkins, Jane P., Ed. Reader-Response Criticism: from Formalism to Poststructuralism. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1980. Valdés, Mario J. Shadows in the Cave: A Phenomenological Approach to Literary Criticism Based on Hispanic Texts. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1982. —. World-Making: The Literary Truth-Claim and the Interpretation of Texts. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1992. Valdés, María E, and Mario J. Valdés. Approaches to Teaching García Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude. New York: Modern Language Association of America, 1990. Vargas Llosa, Mario. García Márquez: Historia de un deicidio. Barcelona: Barral Editores, 1971. Warnes, Christopher. Magical Realism and the Postcolonial Novel: Between Faith and Irreverence. Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire England: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. Weiss, Beno. Understanding Italo Calvino. Columbia: U of South Carolina P, 1993. Wexler, Yoyce. “Beyond the Body in The Rainbow and One Hundred Years of Solitude” In D. H. Lawrence Review. Austin: 2003. Vol. 31, Iss. 2. Williams, Edwin. “Magical Realism and the Theme of Incest in One Hundred Years of Solitude.” In Bernard McGuirk and Richard Cardwell, eds., Gabriel García Màrquez: New Readings. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988: 45-64. Williams, Raymond L. Gabriel García Márquez. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1984. Wimmers Crosman, Inge. Poetics of Reading. Approaches to the Novel. Princeton UP, 1988.

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Wood, Michael. Gabriel García Márquez: One Hundred Years of Solitude. Cambridge University Press, 1990. Woodhouse, J. R. ltalo Calvino: A Reappraisal and an Appreciation of the Trilogy. Hull, Yorkshire: U of Hull, 1968. Zimra, Clarisse. “Woman's Memory Spans Centuries: An Interview with Assia Djebar.” 06 April 2001.

Other Sources Kristeva, Tzvetana. “Another Key to Tanizaki’s Eroticism.” in “Japanese Lyrical Diaries and the European Autobiographical Tradition,” in Gordon Daniels, ed., Europe Interprets Japan Tenterden, Kent: Paul Norbury Publications, 1984. An Interview with Marguerite Duras Author(s): Susan Husserl-Kapit and Marguerite Duras Source: Signs, Vol. 1, No. 2 (Winter, 1975), pp. 423434. Published by: The University of Chicago PressStable URL: http://www. jstor. org/stable/3173055 Studies Marguerite Duras and the Contingencies of Modern Autobiography: “L'Amant”Author(s): Pamela A. GenovaSource: Modern Language Studies, Vol. 33, No. 1/2 (Spring - Autumn, 2003), pp. 44-59 Published by: Modern Language Studies Stable URL: http://www. jstor. org/stable/3195307 Encyclopedia of contemporary literary theory: approaches, scholars, terms: Irena R. Makaryk, general editor and compiler. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, c1993.

LITERARY TERMS

aesthetic distance: the distance that ought to exist between the reader and the text in order to view the literary text objectively allusion: a reference in a literary work to a person, place, or thing in history or another work of literature climax: arrangement of words, phrases, or clauses in an order of increasing importance defamiliarization: coined by Viktor Shklovsky, the term refers to a writer’s ability to present familiar objects in an unusual way or perspective dialogism: in Bakhtin’s view, the “language” of the novel is embedded in the cultural expression of other genres and art works, repetitions and quotations figurative language: language that varies from the norms of literal language and engages the imagination through figures of speech: simile, metaphor, etc. flashback: a narrative technique that is used to describe an event that happened at an earlier time; it is used to help understand the current events or helps portray characters by providing insight into their past life. foreshadowing: a narrative technique that suggests what is about to happen and sets the stage for a story to unfold; is commonly used to suggest an upcoming outcome to the story framework story: a narrative that contains another narrative genre: a type of literature: poem, novel, autobiographical novel, story, short story, diary hyperbole: the use of exaggerated terms for the purpose of emphasis or heightened effect

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Literary Terms

horizon of expectations: a term employed by Jauss to show that a particular generation in a cultural community understands, interprets and evaluates a literary text according to a shared framework emotional appeal: a mode of persuasion that appeals to the emotions of the audience imagery: figurative language used to convey images and evoke an emotional response irony: use of a word in such a way as to convey a meaning opposite to the literal meaning of the word metaphor: an implied comparison between two things of unlike nature that yet have something in common mood: a literary device that refers to the disposition of the author towards the subject of the literary work; it lends a particular character or atmosphere to the work and it influences the reader’s response to the literary work. narrative: a collection of events placed in a particular order that tell a story parody: a literary work in which the style of an author or work is imitated for comic effect, ridiculized or criticized point of view: the “vantage point” from which the narrative is told polyphony: according to Bakhtin, it consists of narrative voices in the novel which may present perspectives that do not coincide with the ideological position of the author readerly/writerly text: a distinction made by Barthes between a traditional literary text (readerly) and a non-linear, modern one (writerly) that forces the reader to become “a producer of the text” tone: the attitude that the author adopts with regards to a specific character, place or development; tone can portray a variety of emotions: sad, humorous, witty, etc.

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unreliable narrator: a narrator who is inconsistent or who lies deliberately in order to influence the reader’s response voice or narrative voice: refers to the “authorial voice”; it can also be described as the “implied author”

INDEX A aesthetic experience, 6 aesthetic value, 1, 7 alternative viewpoints, 37 Aristotle, 33, 129

Holub, Robert C., 13 horizon of expectations, 21, 22, 24, 33, 136 Hutcheon, Linda, 81, 85, 87, 111, 112, 131

B Bal, Mieke, 12, 26, 28, 63, 76, 112, 120, 129 Barthes, Roland, 98, 99, 129, 136 Beauvoir, Simone de, 106, 129, 130 Booth, Wayne C., 8, 130

I ideal reader, 8, 92 image-building process, 66, 112 implied reader, 8, 12 indeterminacies, 1, 3, 15, 19, 81, 85, 111 Ingarden, Roman, 5, 6, 7, 9, 11, 13, 15, 131 intertextual, 1, 15, 72 intertextuality, 3, 111 Iser, Wolfgang, 1, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 15, 16, 17, 18, 21, 22, 34, 102, 105, 130, 131

C Cannon, Joan, 81, 84, 130 collective feminine consciousness, 70, 73, 78, 79, 80 Crosman Wimmers, Inge, 14 Culler, Jonathan, 1, 12, 14, 130 cultural ideology, 3, 111 D Damrosch, David, 1 E Eco, Umberto, 15, 72, 83, 130 Embedded stories, 3 F flashback, 38, 135 frames of reference, 2, 115, 116, 121, 123, 125, 127 Freund, Elizabeth, 13 G generic instability, 23, 125 Genette, Gérard, 17 H heteroglossia, 2, 73

K Kundera, Milan, 18 M magical realism, 37 Martin, Wallace, 13 memorized space, 63, 64 metafiction, 89 Model Reader, 15 moral taboos, 3, 97, 107 multi-voiced discourse, 74, 77, 79, 80, 126 myth, 37 N narrative fragmentation, 3 narrative rhythm, 2, 37 narrative tension, 21 non-linear type of narration, 105

140 O overdetermined texts, 9 P polyphony, 18, 136 postmodernism, 37 Proust, Marcel, 5, 132 psycho-narration, 68, 78, 100, 126 R reader’s competence, 12 Robbe-Grillet, Alain, 19, 101 S self-conscious discourse, 105, 107 self-reflexive narrative voices, 1 shifting image, 9, 22

Index shifting points of view, 5 Shklovskii, Viktor, 16 socio-cultural norms, 1 spatial and temporal dislocation, 37 subversive narrative techniques, 112 T textual self-reference, 89 Tompkins, Jane P., 13 U unreliable narrator, 12, 111, 137 Uspenski, Boris, 17 V Valdés, 14, 18, 21 Valdés, Mario, 14