The Three Senses of an Ending

The Three Senses of an Ending

A. For to make sense of our lives from where we are, as it were,

stranded in the middle, we need fictions of beginnings

and fictions of ends, fictions which unite beginning and end

and endow the interval between them with meaning.

–Frank Kermode, The Sense of an Ending, 190

B. The irremediable character of what has no present,

of what is not even there as having once been there, says:

it never happened, never for a first time, and yet it starts over,

again, again, infinitely. It is without end, without beginning.

–Maurice Blanchot, The Space of Literature, 29

     How can one ever say, like in Margaret Atwood’s “Happy Endings”: “Eventually they die. This is the end of the story,” and say it in a language, in a text, in writing?¹ How can a story end when, in fact, once written, it reverberates like an endless spectral haunting, engraved in cultural memory as long as it can be reiterated, reproduced, reread? How can any character “die” if these characters have never “lived” at all? This resounds like an extravagant claim, a fiction greater than fiction. Here, indeed, we can echo the text—which is already an echo of itself—and return its claim against itself that we should not be “deluded by any other endings [since] they're all fake, either deliberately fake, with malicious intent to deceive, or just motivated by excessive optimism if not by downright sentimentality.” By a self-differentiating epanorthosis, the text attempts to set apart a distinct category of the end, an “authenticity” opposed to the fiction of a “happy ending,” but thereby risks drawing itself nearer the Cretan paradoxical edge by the simple affirmative statement of an irreplaceable singularity: “The only authentic ending is the one provided here: John and Mary die. John and Mary die. John and Mary die.” It seems, then, that we are being proposed “fictional” ends and “authentic” ends; the first one belongs to the fairy tale closure of popular narratives where everyone (apart from the villain) “lives happily ever after,” and where the second “authentic” ending, death, is a terminal “event” that is ideally—optimistically—always downplayed, elided, suppressed; that is, suspended.

     However, as if a certain critical linguistic or rhetorical logic or exigency demanded it, this only (singular, exclusive) authentic ending is underlined, italicized, recited tricolonially. Are these the same Johns and Marys dying thrice? Why does death need to happen thrice? A death that repeats itself, that appears thrice (well, at least thrice, for how many times should death die to finally die?), that has to happen thrice without itself succumbing to falsity or impossibility or self-parody? Thus, we sense here an extravagance of “truthful deaths” in the text, the “same” deaths that, by some popular (obsessional) narrative logic, must be skipped by a “forced” return to the utopian “master narrative” in the very beginning (death excluded, yes, but silently included). This is the “deliberately fake” ending of fiction, which is nothing but a certain “popular” narrative “optimistic” desire reflecting fairytale utopia where the “authentic” end is suspended in an Ever After. Why do we need one more, especially a more “authentic” one above the fake “deceitful” ones? Why do we need an “authentic” death in the narrative and not just a simple but “fake” happy ending where nothing is actually “truly” ended? Is this authentic ending, then, of the “unhappy” sort, the kind of ending that the fake ending seems to try often to evade or omit from openly telling, a certain denial or repression of the Death principle and the affirmation of a Life principle? Why is this other end of narrative possibility—that of death—posited as the only “authentic” end? End of what, exactly?

     To begin a sketch for a possible reply, some general argumentative provisions are in order. Let us say, then, that the “absence” of Life is the structural condition of the possibility of the “presence” of Life. Death as the absolute End: this threat or concept of “nothingness” is what allows “somethingness” to shine forth as a perceptible semantic horizon. It is my projected absence or disappearance which allows me to be conscious of my presence. It is my (imagined) unconsciousness that defines my (also imagined) consciousness. Death and the End are enfolded within Life and the Beginning, as necessarily included counterpoints in the very meaning of my Life as what I live through in the middle of the middle after the Beginning and before the End.  I am structured by this potential or projected gap, by this emptiness or self-absence. Death is not what happens to Life; it is that non-event which always happens so that Life can be Life, as that which Life lives for and against which Life pretends to struggle through the ruse of substitute “fake” ends that suspend ends. The purposes or ends of Life, those for which (“bourgeois”) Life is directed and from which it derives its teleological sense and economy of meaning, is only secondary in relation to the primordial notion of the other end called Death, the ultimate end of Life, its perceived or postulated “absolute” opposite, and yet, somehow, also the real culmination of Life, the very proof of a Life that has been and that has passed away.

     But the question again arises: is Death really possible in language, in fiction, in writing? Can death take place in a space without time and presence (Blanchot: “Ecrire, c'est se livrer à la fascination de l'absence de temps” ²)? Is not the claim that it can happen also as fictional and as deceiving as the fairytale endings that govern the logic of the popular narrative (whose formal limits have now been wholly identified as a simple transformative loop from A to not-A and back to A)?  Won’t this loop merely revive or resurrect everyone and everything else for another judgement day and reiterate its more “authentic” logic as part of nothing more or nothing less than a self-referential chain of signifiers? What has always happened—this perpetually iterated absence of presence and time—cannot happen anymore as a singular and irreplaceable event apart from the rest. For in language, Death is the same in all directions, and it happens all the time as a completed event, and hence cannot happen once and once only once again. One death looks the same as another, and cannot stand out as itself, and therefore cannot be recognized as such, cannot be pointed out or singled out, and cannot be spoken of. The same thing can also be said of Life: that it, too, cannot be spoken of once and only once as such and as itself in a writing space already full of death.

     It is “here,” in a utopian realm that is actually atopic, that ‘characters” (as both the personnages that people narratives and the alphabetical scripts that compose them) are in a sense really “immortal.” They have always existed in an “Afterlife.” This Afterlife—if “this” can be deprived of its deictic or indexical function and can be read as “somewhere” without becoming a new positive presence at a distance—is the space of writing and the ontological mode of the sign. It neither speaks of Life nor of Death but of what has always been dead and alive, and hence cannot be fully dead or alive. The characters have always been in an Afterlife, for the sign is neither alive nor dead. How can absence be embodied? How do you unname an absence? Or, conversely, how can you unname a presence? Since both cannot be unnamed, it would be then necessary to name them both at the same time so that one can become the unnaming of the other. Here, the “unnameable” is not that which resists naming, the realm of a putatively impossible Real or Sublime. What is really unnameable is that which cannot be unnamed, that whose status of Being-Named cannot be undone and whose destitution, by an imposition of an absolute poverty of signifiers, would allow us finally the (fictive) opportunity to “experience” the unveiling of its essence.

     We will, therefore, be able to speak here of three senses (meaning/direction) for an “ending.”

1) “Inauthentic”: or the suspension of the singular end via the utopia of a perennially reiterable Happy Ending in the Ever After;

2) “Authentic”: or the singularity of the end as the punctuality of an absolute and terminal event called Death; and

3) “Interminable”: or the simulation of both “inauthentic” and “authentic” ends in or as an Afterlife where both Life and Death are impossible as singular, unnameable, unique events.

     As a recapitulative structure containing “what Dante calls the point where all times are present, il punto a cui tutti li tempi son presenti,^{” 3} the narrative as a species of writing is like the Borgesian “Aleph” (the Hebraic equivalent of the Greek letter A/α). It contains both the lives and deaths of its characters in a synchronic loop that a reader can traverse back and forth, characters like John and Mary whose diachronic or “temporalized” presences and absences are merely a function of textual “spatialization” and are never singular non-iterable events. In fact, we can imagine the continuously present and iterable “death” of a character as a sort of rhetorical figure. For example, we can look at it as an “Apostrophe” since the text addresses or names the now “dead” or “eliminated” character; or, a certain kind of “Apophasis,” a denial of x by mentioning its “disappearance” from the field of action; or maybe as “Prosopopoeia,” where the absent item is still made to speak through a certain “pronominalisation” (a group of words replaces the character which would indicate that “it/he/she is gone”). The important idea is to consider the rest of the text starting from a character’s point of disappearance as a “mass” that is as constitutive of the character’s lingering presence in which the same character can still be seen “alive” and acting or speaking. It is because the text continues to speak much further on as a semiotic “gesture” of Life that a Death space or moment could be marked off from it.

     The context of Dante’s journey can serve as a useful illustrative point. As a narrative journey set essentially in the Afterlife, the temporal horizon of Dante’s progress is no longer inscribed within a human history as “presently lived.” All the characters and personnages he meets no longer possess that presence that characterizes living beings and are “alive” only as literary artefacts of the Cantos. As poetic or literary artefacts, the souls that populate the Afterlife, both fictional and historical, are neither dead nor alive. Also, some of their destinies are not yet all complete. The Commedia still reserves for the souls in Purgatory a secondary teleology: they either gain eternal life or eternal death after some purgation. This dynamic possibility where a soul is in transition is no longer possible for those in Inferno or Paradiso: they already have attained the opposite extremes of eternal Life and Death, states that would not make sense without the contrasting mediatory and transitory midterm logic of Purgatorio. The interesting part here is that, again, however absolute eternal damnation may be, the dead souls never really disappear. They can no longer die since they are already dead. The non-space and the non-time of the Afterlife of writing invalidate any distinction between authentic and inauthentic deaths and suspend the possibility of any absolute death as a singular punctual event. The fictionality of the present life as the historical midstream of Divine arch-history that we read in Dante’s conversation with Farinata in Canto X of the Inferno doubly inscribes all eventualities in the Afterlife. In the impossible space where the “historical present” is invoked, we can see how, by being already part of the narrative of death, it is also an artefact of the Afterlife where the singularity of Life as self-present actuality assumes the same lifeless as well as deathless reiterability of the atopic topology of the Commedia.

     The space of writing, therefore, is the interminable and incessant atopic realm where death and life never end, but also (with equal importance) where they never begin. It is not the space of the singular, irreplaceable, punctual, and unique event. In many places in The Space of Literature, Maurice Blanchot incessantly speaks of the interminable as the paradoxical operational mode of writing (“To write is now the interminable, the incessant”⁴). It is also what characterizes the nature of the word or of language: “Everything is word, yet the word is itself no longer anything but the appearance of what has disappeared -- the imaginary, the incessant, and the interminable.”⁵ As a mode of disappearance that has never taken place, writing is the lifeless and deathless operation of the interminable “where nothing reveals itself” as itself and where “nobody speaks.” The Afterlife of writing is this “empty, dead time [which] is a real time in which death is present -- in which death happens but doesn't stop happening.”⁶  Because of this, “death admits of no "being for death"; it does not have the solidity which would sustain such a relation. It is that which happens to no one, the uncertainty and the indecision of what never happens. I cannot think about it seriously, for it is not serious. It is its own imposter; it is disintegration, vacant debilitation -- not the term, but the interminable, not proper but featureless death, and not true death.”⁷

     An “untrue” death loop that keeps happening and functioning as the double of life. In other words, the interminable is the suspension of both life and death, the non-event that keeps happening not as a singular or punctual event, but the repetition of what has never been present. The myth of the event, structured with beginnings and endings, is the “sense” created by fiction to give meaning to our lives which are “stranded in the middle” (Kermode). That is, the “middle,” this midstream state of lives flowing in medias res, is always already an Afterlife viewed sub specie aeternitatis. The structure of our daily lives, read as they are under days and months named after mythical figures and counted following a historically contingent calendrical system, or even located following a still theoretical cosmic event (the Big Bang), represents the pre-inscription of our “present lives” within the Afterlife of the narrative. Hence, the being of our being is not lived as a series of singular events where any punctual beginning or end can be fixed, but as the interminable iteration of undead middle states already written in the Book (Edmond Jabès). Time travel narratives exemplify this excellently and rather amusingly by their “calibration” of spatio-temporal coordinates using the artificiality of arbitrary human historical time-keeping, as if there were an absolutely and punctually known point of reference for the beginning of universal history, a transcendental or hyper-clock with absolute coordinates, and not the Julian or Gregorian system, or the navigational maps that have been drawn without reference to any other dynamic coordinate system greater than (politically) written history or the (geopolitical) maps themselves.

     As Kermode has demonstrated, the explanatory power of “apocalyptic” myths or fictions of the end ⁸ lies in their capacity to endow the midstream with a structural “concordance” that links its “transitional” nature to a beginning and an end. Like in the Afterlife of Dante’s Commedia, the arch-narrative of the Alpha and Omega supplies human history with what we can call a theological and teleological systematicity or “langue.”⁹ This fictive System whose modelling has always been theological connects the “stranded” unassembled series of what in an ensemble of the One and the Whole, in a logic of reading that requires the corollary logic of Parts and Wholes, Beginnings and Ends. What remains stranded must enter into a dialogue simulating a Beginning and an End, even if this stranded What is nothing but the postulation of the System itself (in both the active and passive modes of this syntax). If la langue doesn’t exist theologically, it must still be posited fictionally so that the dialogue can begin (and end). For the logos is never alone fictionally (it is theologically, but as fictionally theological): it is always a dia-logos, always a binary, always a double. For example, “Happy Endings”—although in the plural, as if there were that many endings—assumes its readability only because of its singular form somewhere and its negative “Unhappy Endings” variety. From the very beginning, we jump headlong into the middle of things, or into the heart of the “story,” even if it only appears to be a beginning, a simulation of the Alpha (“try A”). Right here, we are already torn between the dialogical demands of the Tragic and the Comic, or between Necessity and Arbitrariness, ancient complementary dialogical pairs whose interior dynamic informs the very conceptuality of both langue and parole as inseparable, symbiotically and mutually-constitutive co-signs; that is, as conceptual limits that allow us to imagine “systematicity” itself and its “other.”

     My significance derives from being part of a chain of beings. I am not determined by my self-regard, by the self-emergent autonomy of an identity, but a non-isolable component of a history, that of a species, even if the origin and the end of this chain is indeterminable. As infinities that stretch on both extreme sides of the chain, the Past and the Future must then be divined and postulated so that the middle part of the chain, that which can be perceived as existing, can be rescued from its arbitrariness and solitude. Hence, the middle where I am, the short known history of humanity, will no longer be an island disconnected from an Order, but a manifestation of this Order. Despite my desire for autonomy and its notion of self-determining identity (like in Romanticism where the significance of the self derives wholly from an independent self-definition, as a mode of solitude and existence apart from this chain of history), I recognize the necessity for this Order, for absolute autonomy. And yet, this extension of the chain from opposite ends, an extension that posits a limit called Origin and End, is as mythic as the idea of autonomy. In short, both Heteronomy and Autonomy, as being named by the Other and being named by the Self, despite an appearance of being in opposition, are not originary or genetic, and are both mythic principles of the Afterlife where the Ever After resembles more strongly the interminable space of writing than the singular Death of any “authentic” ending.

     The simulation of both the suspension of the singular and of the singularity of suspension, where what takes place is suspension itself, is the interminable waiting for the End, this suspension which is simulation itself. Hence, the authentic end is simply what is more inauthentic than the inauthentic, a fiction greater than fiction itself. It is a punctuality or singularity that denies its iterated and interminable status, but denies it so that it can allow the iterable to be iterable, for the sign to be interminable. As a simulation of a singular point of termination, death—or the sign of death, allows the interminable to be possible, but structured as impossible, as the iteration of the impossible signs of Life.

Notes

1. “Writing” here is used both in the narrow sense and in the general Derridean sense of différance as “arche-writing,” the historical opening of differences that set up languages. Like the “trace,” arche-writing can no longer be worked out within the metaphysical notions of time centered on a present. “The concepts of present, past, and future, everything in the concepts of time and history which implies evidence of them-the metaphysical concept of time in general-cannot adequately describe the structure of the trace.” In Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, tr. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), 67.

2. Maurice Blanchot, L’espace littéraire (Paris: Gallimard, 1955), 25. It is not the simple positive absence of time, but “le temps de l’absence de temps” (26).

3. Frank Kermode, The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction (NY: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 6.

4. Blanchot, op. cit., 20, my translation.

5. The translated passage here is from Maurice Blanchot, The Space of Literature, tr. Ann Smock (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1989), p. 44.

6. Op. cit., 31.

7. Op. cit., 155. My emphases.

8. Just to cite a few passages again from Kermode:

Virgil and Genesis belong to our end-determined fictions; their stories are placed at what Dante calls the point where all times are present, il punto a cui tutti li tempi son presenti.... The Bible is a familiar model of history. It begins at the beginning ('In the beginning...') and ends with a vision of the end ('Even so, come, Lord Jesus'); the first book is Genesis, the last Apocalypse. Ideally, it is a wholly concordant structure, the end is in harmony with the beginning, the middle with beginning and end. The end, Apocalypse, is traditionally held to resume the whole structure (6).

But there is one important element in this apocalyptic pattern which I have as yet hardly mentioned. This is the myth, if we can call it that, of Transition. Before the End there is a period which does not properly belong either to the End or to the saeculum preceding it (12).

Men in the middest make considerable imaginative investments in coherent patterns which, by the provision of an end, make possible a satisfying consonance with the origins and with the middle. That is why the image of the end can never be permanently falsified.... This has relevance to literary plots, images of the grand temporal consonance (17).

In so far as we claim to live now in a period of perpetual transition we have merely elevated the interstitial period into an 'age' or saeculum in its own right, and the age of perpetual transition in technological and artistic matters is understandably an age of perpetual crisis in morals and politics. And so, changed by our special pressures, subdued by our scepticism, the paradigms of apocalypse continue to lie under our ways of making sense of the world (28).

9. Derrida, in Demeure: Maurice Blanchot (1998): “car la langue n’existe pas, personne ne l’a jamais rencontrée” [For the langue does not exist, nobody has ever seen it]. This is the essential inexistence of a theological/teleological Whole, something we should differentiate from its ad hoc inessential existence as myth. Without the application of a mythic whole, the middle becomes a different kind of interminable interval, which would be that of the Fragment where a different logic occurs: the Non Sequitur.

Narrative Inviolables in Hemingway and Marquez

Narrative Inviolables in Hemingway and Marquez

I.

    If I am going to speak of the concept of narrative inviolables in Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s short story “Death Constant Beyond Love,”¹ I may need to do so by sitting it beside Ernest Hemingway’s “Hills Like White Elephants.” This is not because there is any thematic connection between two writers whose milieu and stylistic priorities could not be more in contrast, despite their similar experiences as professional journalists. The comparison will give the benefit of sharpening what an “inviolable” element might be like, beyond its preliminary description as the ground on which signs are no longer exchangeable or reversible, a domain beyond structural play and that allows the generation and maintenance of the formal integrity of the narrative as Narrative, as the inertial frame of reference without which the narrativity of the Narrative (or any signification for that matter, like in the case of Marquez) cannot be perceived as performable or actualisable.

    From the very first paragraph, and even from the title itself, Marquez’s story of the last days of Senator Onesimo Sanchez already lays down the line that cannot be reversed, or the direction by which Senator Sanchez’s fate had been pre-scribed. If Thanatos and Eros were the archetypal narrative inviolables in Marquez, I will argue that the inviolable in Hemingway is the absent fabula, the absence of which nullifies at once also the logical place of a syuzhet as a possible nomenclature for the text which is “Hills Like White Elephants.” This absent fabula, however, is the very condition of the textual narratological possibility (or impossibility) of “Hills Like White Elephants.” Allow me to explain as quickly as possible.

    We would think that the dominance of discourse or dramatic dialogue in “Hills Like White Elephants” would be the candidate for the inviolable in Hemingway, limiting as it does the mediating nature of traditional narrative markers like psycho-narration and inquit formulae. We would think that the simulation of immediacy by recourse to the dramatic form (as direct quotation) is the main stylistic goal of the text (a reinscription of a “Realism” whose vogue has since passed in their previous formats in 3^rd-person omniscient narratives of the 19^th century and through the arrival of modernist techniques like “stream of consciousness” or the use of plain language versus “purple prose” by Camus or Prévert, or the major development in the novel with the Nouveau Roman from Nathalie Sarraute onwards), accomplished by a change in its linguistic codification now as a purely “objective” reporting of heard or overheard dialogues. However, the artificiality of the dialogues as theater script is quite evident in the almost musical progression of the tonal tensions between the interlocutors, and in the absence of typical non-linear conversational flow or the presence of “fillers,” for example. Furthermore, the fact that this is the batch of dialogues that were overheard and not the simultaneous dialogues of other people in the vicinity already betrays the presence of the narratorial function as an editorial agent of selective discourse reporting.

     Although the dramatic mode that dominates the “short story” (which is practically a “plotless plot”) gives us a hint of a possible fabula, it nevertheless deploys the fabula deliberately in the figure of an ellipsis. For example, we don’t have the luxury of a summary flashback even from the “players.” Thus, it is left for us to reconstruct an over-arching narrative frame that will contextualize the dialogical exchanges. The quasi-refusal of a narratorial presence that supplies the fabula as a dispersed set of inferable data from among the series of periphrases that a syuzhet normally deploys transfers the burden of narration to the reader who, in reconstructing the fabula, must do so as an extraneous element of the narratorial field, as the un-signified referent that can only be alluded to but not narrated explicitly on the textual surface and that merely evokes it as part of its implicitly larger structure extending beyond the textual surface itself. Hence, the text navigates itself precariously between the extremes of immediacy without narration and a narratorial mediation without objectivity or plausibility.

     As a Referent kept outside the play of signification, the absent fabula grounds the reality of the dialogues, their logic, meaning, tension, agon, substance, etc. That is, the dialogues will lose all their significance, their status as signifying speech, if the absent fabula were really absolutely absent as their origin and end. This linguistic ground is all the more convincing by being implied as present somewhere but kept away from us, for to make it textually explicit is to reinsert it into the realm of signs and to cast doubt on its “objectivity” as the ground before both narrative and discursive signs. As the version of the classical tension of “Art or Truth,” the predominantly mimetic mode² (as dramatic discourse) of the “short story” necessitated the minimalism of narratorial presence (diegesis) and the promotion of discourse as the figural presentationality of a language without mediation or narration, complemented by the figural presentationality of an absent fabula held inviolably away from the mediation of narratorial signs and their infinite capacity for Art and Illusion.

    The question, then, arises concerning the import of this formal and stylistic manoeuvre in the economy and history of the Narrative as a mode and generic marker of the literary. The most that can be said at the moment is that, as a style at the limit of both the Narrative and the Dramatic, the text structurally explores the very possibility of Narrative in the Discursive, if by “discursive” we mean not the total absence of Narrative, but the situation of “everyday” discourse in which an over-arching narrative frame as either fabula or syuzhet is not always accessible or formulated. At the same time, however, this formal experiment cuts both ways because it also raises the question of the possibility of the “discursive” as the category of the everyday, tainted as it is already by traces of the Narrative (and Art).

    This is a (meta-) literary and (meta-) structural question that, as we know, has always lingered in the history of Literature. Since both the Narrative and the Discursive, like the Sign itself, don’t grow on trees, they cannot exist without themselves being signified; that is, without being denotated by the strategic deployment of a meta-signifying manoeuvre. In the case of Hemingway, what we see then is less the absence of Narrative or Discourse than the meta-indication of their mutual inter-possibility, interdependence and inter-definition, but as near-absent modes of narrativity (or discursivity) existing as elliptical horizons, away from the signs— supposedly—of “vulgar” or overt narration and, by extension, discourse.

II.

“You have the power to strip away many superfluous troubles located wholly in your judgement, and to possess a large room for yourself embracing in thought the whole cosmos, to consider everlasting time, to think of the rapid change in the parts of each thing, of how short it is from birth until dissolution, and how the void before birth and that after dissolution are equally infinite.” (Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, 9.32. Italics added.)

    We can say that the death of Senator Onesimo Sanchez coincides exactly with the structural end of the narrative as told in Marquez’s short story, “Death Constant Beyond Love.” Nothing, as it were, happens by chance; even the encounter between the Senator and the object of his newly-awakened desire, Laura Farina, seemed only another minor delay in the arrival of the inevitable. For what we have, in fact, are the two archetypal forces vying for domination in the narratives of our lives or—which is the same thing—in the lives of our narratives; and where Marquez’s short story title (serving simply as another moment in the cyclical inversions or reversions of Thanatos and Eros, or Thanatos in Eros, or vice versa) is as much an unavoidable symptom in the similar reversible logic of the Sign as it is in the inverted nominal quotation of Francisco de Quevedo’s (1580-1645) famous poem “Amor Constante Mas Allá de la Muerte.”³

   

     However, as we all know, reversibility must have a limit, the play of signs must have a bar it cannot cross, or the narrativity of the Narrative will not hold together, cannot take any shape or structure. If Marquez’s story begins with the predestined date of Senator Sanchez’s death, it is only to signal to us the over-arching narrative frame against which the last days of the Senator will be measured or will take value and meaning. This “cosmic” frame which we can call Destiny or Fate or Nature is the adopted stoic vision that the Senator (a reader of the Latin classics, specifically of Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations ⁴) understands very well. In this, he is the inheritor of an ancient semantic structure where Time is divided between the Irreversible and the Reversible, between the Tragic and the Comic, or the Sacred and the Profane (to use Mircea Eliade’s terms). In the case of the Homeric universe in which the hero’s tragic condition results from his/her ambiguous status as half-human, half-divine (Bruno Snell),⁵ it is the Sacred order that allows the human world to be delineated in the shadow of the divine. Without the Infinite or the irreversible order of the gods, the destiny of human beings called “time” cannot emerge as a perceptible tragic or comic horizon.

    The crucial moment of contrast or juxtaposition happens at the point of the campaign where Senator Onesimo Sanchez (meaning “useful saint’s child,” a name quite opposite of the public image he represents) delivers his speech. In it, he maintains his illusion of control and exercises his hubris by declaring “"We are here for the purpose of defeating nature," he began, against all his convictions,”” an assertion that is “the opposite of a fatalistic pronouncement by Marcus Aurelius in the fourth book of his Meditations.” Right before this, he felt that “the erosion of death was much more pernicious than he had supposed” even if at the start of the speech he “felt in full control of his will.” Here, Destiny expresses itself primarily through the figuration of Nature as an entropic principle that follows a transcendental order, an order which already overlaid the whole narrative from the very outset as the fixed and irreversible sentence of death hanging on a finite being (hence, a proleptic⁶ summary). Nature, for the Senator, is the expression of the irreversible order that he pretends to defeat, but always reasserts itself as the overpowering “gust of fire” of the climate that eats away at his circus props or that reduces him to sweat. Against the background of the Zodiacs (he was born an Aries), the Lord God (in his exclamation), Marcus Aurelius’ “fatalism” (whose stoic world view he resists but actually acknowledges), and the cancer or disease that Nature had inflicted on him, he wages his futile war. However, the coup de grâce was struck by Nature herself in the animal form of the beauteous Laura Farinas. Eros, as the hidden order of Destiny, is the double of Thanatos, and appears immediately after the mention of the Senator’s death, as if the opening syntax (which in Greek meant “moving together”) saw them as necessarily bound, in the same way that the final phrase in Quevedo (polvo enamorado, or “dust in love” in all its polysemic ambiguities) binds the two archetypal forces together.

    Nothing about all of this is new, literary- or narrative-wise. If the proleptic summary at the beginning (a death foretold, a species of fortune-telling) casts the narrative flow as an irreversible cosmic or natural trajectory, this frame of Destiny itself will not have any meaning without supplementing it with elements belonging to what we can call the category of “Non-Destiny.” The elements of this category will be an obligatory technical necessity (ironically) to reinforce the irreversibility of Destiny without which the whole narrative tension collapses into a mere secular form of Realism or worse, of Soap Opera. Furthermore, by avoiding the other extreme of including supernatural beings to concretize the presence of a transcendental order, Marquez also indicates the literary space he wants to navigate as no longer that of the epic, Christian, or fairytale type. The irreversibility of Death, however, remains a sacred ground that cannot be subject to reversibility. In short, Marquez avoids the extremes of Soap and the Fantastic where the sufferings and love affairs are driven by social or psycho-personal inviolables for the former and moralistic or ethical inviolables for the latter (Shame or Guilt cultures, curse and justice tales, transgression and redemption stories). The best proof, I believe, that Thanatos and Eros are inviolables in Marquez is that he also avoids the Gothic and the Science Fiction genre where Death is reversible in the forms of vampires, Frankenstein monsters, ghosts, zombies, clones, cybernetic brain transfers, time travel reunions, and other means of resurrection where “real” death can often only happen through “special” methods. (We should also note the overt or covert eroticism that usually accompanies them.)

    If Thanatos and Eros belong to the irreversible order of Destiny (and “solitude” is not exactly the reverse of Eros inasmuch as it is simply the metonymy of death), we can then pose the question of how this transcendental order is kept possible semiotically. If we imagine Destiny as a straight entropic unidirectional arrow (which we can consider as the fabula) and Non-Destiny as a double-headed arrow that meets itself back and forth (the syuzhet), this bi-directionality or reversibility forms the contrastive field that reinforces the irreversibility of Destiny. Hence, it is just a matter of identifying the elements in the syuzhet with reversible traits (a feature that recovers the proleptic-analeptic logic in another form or level, a reversion or inversion that the unidirectionality of the fabula precisely denies) for us to get an idea of a mutual interdependence that, in a bidirectional mode, generates Destiny and Non-Destiny as actually the result of the reversibility of the Sign itself.

    The first domain where we notice the reversibility of signs at work is the polis, the zone where the Senator practices his Realpolitik. Not only is the village portrayed as “illusory” at the very start, but that it is also the stage wherein Senator Sanchez conducts his campaign with all the props of fake trees, houses, and ocean liner. This is “his fictional world” in the fictional world of Rosal del Virrey, the utopian city that he promises his potential voters, the reverse image of the barren and desolate geography of the village. The Senator is himself called the Blacaman of politics by Nestor Farina, a circus animal hypnotist, a magical act supported by all his “hidden illusionists who were pushing” the show along. In other words, what the Senator is offering is a double illusion that has a literal and figurative level in his narrative world. First, the props of his circus are recognizable illusions on the literal level as seen by the people, but figurative of the utopian dream the Senator is selling. Second, the real agenda he discusses in secret with the “important people of Rosal del Virrey [to] sing for them the truths he had left out of his speeches” disposes of this first level illusion and proposes a different profitable policy, thereby imputing the same category of a literal illusion as the substance of his campaign and nothing more, whose sole purpose is to hide the real agenda (that we are able to distinguish heterodiegetically,⁷ of course).

    If Marquez stopped here, he would be reinstituting a Reality principle that only the privileged vision of the narrator can identify and separate from the proliferating illusions of politics, a Master Subject capable of revealing to us the Truth in the manner of the narrative mode called Social Realism. The abandonment of such a privileged vision will, of course, entail a mise en abyme of illusions within illusions, the endless reversal of signs within signs, a theater within a theater (the central motif of the Baroque) where we lose all points of reference that separate the “real world” from the circus of images and farce. As with the question of Thanatos, Marquez must once more navigate between extremes of narrative modes. The first one will revive an old literary style marked by Leftist or Humanist undertones, a reprisal of the role of the writer as social critic with a presumed access to a higher morality or utopian methodology. The second option, on the other hand, would be to surrender to a total state of relativism where no judgement of Truth or Falsity is possible. Thus truth judgement will only replicate the very illusion the writer wanted to expose in the first place. Singling out the inauthentic from the authentic or fiction from reality becomes impossible because all the signs look the same in all directions. Art and Truth become indistinguishable because the sign of the real is the same as the sign of the unreal. In short, these two signs—and here we already note the paradox—should be separable by some way and should not be reversible.

Narrative “ontological” levels in “Death Constant Beyond Love”

    To settle the question of ontological levels in the narrative, there will be a need for a specific function that we can, for now, call the “semiotic verifier.”⁸ The semiotic verifier is basically an indexical function that displays an awareness of ontological level distinctions. To see how this works, we can imagine the levels as a series of embedded contexts. The innermost we can call Circus, the next one City, then Realpolitik, and the outermost one the Syuzhet. (To skip the use of varying narratological terminologies that inform the debates in this area, I am opting for the use of letters a, b, c, and d, to designate these “levels.”⁹) In a necessary way, the semiotic verifier presumes a theory of Truth since it can distinguish signs from one another in terms of varying coefficients of the Real. The semiotic verifier can be deployed via at least two avenues. The most obvious, of course is the Narratorial function which, as the primary mediatory voice, has the authority to execute what I will call the privilege of performing a “transcendental attribution” (TA). Next, we have the Actorial function which can either also be the narrator or just plainly be any “participant” in the fictional world(s). However, as a semiotic agent endowed with speech, the actor can also generate a secondary narrative, or simply deploy a “corroborative commentary” (CC) on the nature of the events in which he, she, or it is involved.

    1. The illusory nature of the Circus is identified via both TA and CC. The words “circus,” “artificial creatures,” “prop,” “cardboard facade,” “make‐believe houses,” and “his fictional world” are overt ontological designations. When Nelson Farina blurted out after the final applause of the crowd, "C'est le Blacamen de la politique," he executes a CC that not only designates the circus show but also extends beyond it.

    2. The village of Rosal del Virrey is designated by TA as “an illusory village.” It is illusory at least in a triple sense: in its present actual state; in the future “utopian” state as dramatized by the Senator’s circus program; and as the fictional setting for Marquez’s story. From this alone, we are already on very unstable geographical grounds. The referred City is semiotic through and through, although not necessarily unreal. In fact, this is the very boundary that keeps getting blurred. It’s as if the very material substance of their world was as insubstantial as the signs that they deploy to speak of it.    

    3. Nelson Farina represents the more politically aware fraction of the populace familiar with the Senator’s Realpolitik as a disjunction between overt campaign platform and covert under-the-table agenda. Hence, he is a major semiotic verifier via CC, reinforcing all the ontological attributions in the narrative. His status as a fugitive of the law (“He had escaped from Devil's Island”) and his request for a false identity card can be seen as a muted extension of the Senator’s own image (operating above the law, presenting a facade). Like the Senator, he knows how to play the political game, and this is proven by how he later manipulates the Senator’s weakness to his advantage.

    4. As actorial participants, Nelson Farina and Senator Sanchez, however clever they may be, do not have access to the higher ontological level of the Syuzhet. They are aware, of course, of the fictitious nature of the political worlds they inhabit or that inhabit them. This unbreakable wall is what prevents the short story from becoming “metanarrational” from our point of view, that is, extradiegetically (which does not preclude it having a “metafictive” import¹⁰). However, the question arises concerning the ontological place of Destiny in the narrative. It can be considered as existing outside or above all the constructed lives they know they are living in, at least from the point of view of Senator Sanchez, a level that the reversibility of the signs of reality with the reality of signs cannot touch. Should we then add it as a fifth ontological level called Destiny that even the Senator’s capacity as a spin doctor cannot manipulate, the final and transcendental order beyond reversibility?

     Before I answer this question, I must emphasize the mutual interdependence of ontological levels: they are inter-constitutive and define themselves solely through difference from other levels. The level of Realpolitik is what it is only because it is not Circus. This is why, to stop the infinite regress, the narrative needs an inviolable element of an irreversible type, an “absolute” semiotic verifier. If not, the ontological series will not have one strict hierarchical order, but will look equally the same in any reversible direction—and they actually do extradiegetically, since a, b, c, and d are all part of the fictive dimension made of signs, and one is higher than the other only as a function of the (contra-) indexical act of the semiotic verifier. This endless reversion is then halted only temporarily (and we must add: a procedure by which “temporality” itself also emerges as the possibility of plot movement) by a chain of semiotic verifiers, whose own ground must be higher in relation to a lower ontological order, but not absolute since, like Nestor Farina, the semiotic verifier is still part of the fiction whose illusions it identifies. If this sounds like it is going to burst outward as Metafiction, implicating as it does the role of the extradiegetic reader as itself another ontological semiotic verifier, it seems it nearly does, but covertly.¹¹

    This is where the second domain of reversibility becomes crucial in Marquez’s metafictive play where he “flattens” the ontological coefficient for all the levels, but without neglecting to provide a reversible loop (like a yoyo effect) that becomes the semiotic thread which activates, deactivates, and reactivates the fictional possibility of the different levels themselves. This is the domain of the physis where the animate and the inanimate exchange places via the transformative or metaleptic¹² violation of physical dimensions carried out by the paper birds, the butterfly, and the paper bills. As the “clusters of paper birds [flew] into the air [,] the artificial creatures took on life” but afterwards “went out to sea.” When “the senator had torn a sheet off the calendar and fashioned a paper butterfly out of it with his hands. He tossed it with no particular aim into the air current coming from the fan and the butterfly flew about the room and then went out through the half‐open door.” Later on, after Laura sees it, “the large lithographed butterfly unfolded completely, flattened against the wall, and remained stuck there.” The same goes for the money bills, thereby also effectuating a reversion of the classic Marxist binary of use-value vs. exchange value. The metamorphosis of a two-dimensional inanimate object into a four-dimensional animate being and back again is the very process whereby fiction and life exchange ontological places in the act of reading. (Through this device of the inter-dimensional loop, we can begin interrogating the ontological constitution of the Sign itself beyond its conceptualizations and reifications before and after différance.) This is the part where Marquez avoids falling into the Fantastic or the Realistic completely by de-animating what he has reanimated, but at the same time evades the full affirmation of the total illusory nature of Art and the World (the Baroque mode). This defines the nature of perception and knowledge (and political economy) as essentially structured by a metaleptic process, as a necessary violation of levels expressing itself in and as the reversibility of signs.

    To conclude, let us answer the question in the previous paragraph: Should we then add a fifth ontological level called Destiny that even the Senator’s capacity as a spin doctor cannot manipulate, the final and transcendental order beyond reversibility? Destiny, which is the irreversible arrow of Thanatos and Eros, is the final ground that Marquez seems to place in that fifth level, an inviolable ontological level that contains (in all senses) all the reversible levels and allows them to be exchangeable amongst themselves, but not with Destiny. However, we must also note that this doctrine of Destiny is something that our dear fictional Senator Sanchez inherited from a “real” historical figure, Marcus Aurelius, from having read Meditations, a philosophical memoire written between the years 161 to 180 AD. This is a “real” historical figure and a “real” historical text that are in Marquez’s text, a fact which allows us to say that, as opposed to being an absolute ontological dimension that escapes reversibility, the inviolable level of Marquez’s text actually turns out to be just another text, that the absolute level is not Destiny, but a text about Destiny.

    And what can we say about the stubborn and enigmatic presence of the rose all throughout the text? In the name of the rose, I will propose the other term of a “categorical singularity.”

Notes

1.  The citations for Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s “Muerte constante más allá del amor” are from “Death Constant Beyond Love,” translated by Gregory Rabassa and J.S. Bernstein.

2. The ancient distinction between mimesis and diegesis comes from Plato and Aristotle, a distinction which roughly corresponds to “direct” presentation like in drama and mediated presentation where there is an overt narrator present. The problematic status of the realism of dialogues as an “unmediated” presentation and closer to “reality” is criticized in Brian McHale as follows:

An unexamined assumption throughout much of the discussion of speech representation has been that mimesis in the sense of speaking for the character should correlate with mimesis in the sense of faithfulness of reproduction―that the more direct the representation was, the more realistic or life-like it would be (Sternberg 1982). Thus, DD should be the most faithful to reality, and ID the least, with FID somewhere in between. Nothing could be further from the truth; in fact, speech representation is a classic illustration of what Sternberg (1982) decries as the fallacy of “package deals” in poetics whereby forms and functions are bundled together in one-to-one relationships. Actually, the forms of speech representation stand in a many-to-many relationship to their reproductive functions: some instances of DD are highly imitative of “real” speech, while others are deliberately stylized and un-mimetic; some instances of ID or FID are more imitative of “real” speech than DD often is, while other instances are less so.

Quoting Monica Fludernik, McHale adds: “In short, the mimesis of speech in fiction is a “linguistic hallucination.””

See Brian McHale, “Speech Representation,” in Handbook of Narratology, eds. Peter Hühn, John Pier Wolf Schmid, Jörg Schönert ( Berlin: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co. KG, 2009),  p. 438-9.

3.  The poem by Francisco de Quevedo is reproduced below from A.Z. Foreman, poems found in translation (blog), March 2016, http://poemsintranslation.blogspot.com/2012/10/quevedo-love-constant-beyond-death-from.html.

Love Constant Beyond Death Translated by A.Z. Foreman     That terminal shadow may with darkness seal          my eyes shut when it steals white day from me, and in an instant, flattering the zeal of this my eager soul, let it go free.     But on this hither shore where once it burned it shall not leave behind love’s memory. My flame can swim chill waters. It has learned to lose respect for laws’ severity.      This soul that was a god's hot prison cell, veins that with liquid humors fueled such fire, marrows that flamed in glory as I strove     shall quit the flesh, but never their desire. They shall be ash. That ash will feel as well. Dust they shall be. That dust will be in love.

Amor Constante Mas Allá de la Muerte Francisco de Quevedo     Cerrar podrá mis ojos la postrera sombra que me llevare el blanco día, y podrá desatar esta alma mía hora a su afán ansioso lisonjera;     mas no de essotra parte, en la riuera, dexará la memoria, en donde ardía: nadar sabe mi llama l'agua fría, y perder el respeto a lei severa.     Alma qu'a todo un dios prissión ha sido, venas qu'umor a tanto fuego an dado, medulas qu'an gloriosamente ardido,     su cuerpo dexarán, no su cuydado; serán ceniça, mas tendrá sentido; polvo serán, mas polvo enamorado.

4. “Meditations is a series of personal writings by Marcus Aurelius, Roman Emperor from 161 to 180 AD, recording his private notes to himself and ideas on Stoic philosophy.” Wikipedia, s.v. “Meditations,” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meditations. Last edited 22 August 2017.

“Marcus' reputation as a philosopher rests upon one work, the Meditations. The Meditations take the form of a personal notebook and were probably written while Marcus was on campaign in central Europe, c. AD 171-175.... “Of all the philosophical exercises in the Meditations the most prominent centers around what might be called 'the point of view of the cosmos.' In a number of passages Marcus exhorts himself to overcome the limited perspective of the individual and experience the world from a cosmic perspective.” John Sellars, “Marcus Aurelius (121—180 C.E.),” in Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, http://www.iep.utm.edu/marcus/, 05 September 2017.

5.  See Bruno Snell, The Discovery of the Mind: The Greek Origins of European Thought (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1960).

6.  Prolepsis and analepsis correspond to the popular figures for “flashforward” and “flashback” in the plot. They represent the “predictive function” and the “explanatory function” of the narrative. I find these figures interesting not only because they call attention to the artificiality of the plot but also to the temporal horizon simulated by narrative whose “events” can only exist as coordinates on the time axis they draw. I think time travel plots can be read as the bi-play of these figures.

7.  “Heterodiegetic,” “homodiegetic,” “extradiegetic” correspond roughly to 1) a narrator who is not part of the action; 2) a narrator who is also a character, figure, actor, or participant in the narrative world; 3) the level outside the narrative where real readers can also reside. However, these terms from Gérard Genette have been the subject of reinterpretation. See Didier Coste & John Pier “Narrative Levels,” in Handbook of Narratology, eds. Peter Hühn, John Pier Wolf Schmid, Jörg Schönert ( Berlin: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co. KG, 2009),  pp. 295-308.

8. As far as I can tell, this term has not been used in narratology, but it will definitely fall under any metadiegetic indicator whose main function is to alert us of differing ontological levels. The main emphasis of the term has the advantage of underlining the veridical or non-veridical determination of a level.

9. The succinct discussion by Coste and Pier (op. cit.) gives us an idea of how the notion of narrative levels has been formulated in varying and sometimes confusing terminology:

By reformulating narrative embedding in terms of the enunciative threshold in the transitions between levels, Genette opened up a debate with far-reaching implications as to the nature of the relations between levels, a debate centered, at least initially, on the prefix meta-. If understood analogously to metalanguage, metanarrative (métarécit or récit métadiégétique) would correspond to the embedding narrative—a primary narrative on or about the second-level narrative. But in fact metanarrative (or better: metadiegetic narrative) corresponds to the events related within diegetic narrative. Genette insisted that just as the narrating instance of the primary narrative is extradiegetic, so that of a metadiegetic (second-level) narrative is diegetic. In order to resolve the potential terminological ambiguity, Bal points to three usages of meta-: (a) a quoted discourse is metalinguistic in the sense of being fictional in relation to the quoting discourse (a sense close to Genette’s); (b) from a functionalist perspective, the quoted discourse is a metanarrative commentary on the quoting discourse (metalinguistic textual devices, etc.); (c) an abusive extension of meta- to cover commentary of any kind.

10. “Metanarration” and “metafiction” are distinguished Birgit Neumann and Ansgar Nünning in the article “Metanarration and Metafiction,” in Handbook of Narratology, eds. Peter Hühn, John Pier Wolf Schmid, Jörg Schönert (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co. KG, 2009), pp. 204-211.

11. Hutcheon distinguishes between “overt and covert forms of metafiction. While overtly metafictional texts disclose their self-awareness in “explicit thematizations […] of their diegetic or linguistic identity within the texts themselves,” covert forms “internalize” this process: They are “self-reflective but not necessarily self-conscious.”

Birgit Neumann & Ansgar Nünning, “Metanarration and Metafiction,” in Handbook of Narratology, eds. Peter Hühn, John Pier Wolf Schmid, Jörg Schönert ( Berlin: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co. KG, 2009), p. 206.

12.  A brief definition of metalepsis is given below:

In its narratological sense, metalepsis, first identified by Genette, is a paradoxical contamination between the world of the telling and the world of the told: “any intrusion by the extradiegetic narrator or narrate into the diegetic universe (or by diegetic characters into a metadiegetic universe, etc.), or the inverse. Described as “taking hold of (telling) by changing level” and thus combining the principle of → narrative levels with the rhetorical figure of metalepsis originating in ancient legal discourse, narrative metalepsis is a “deliberate transgression of the threshold of embedding” resulting in “intrusions [that] disturb, to say the least, the distinction between levels....” Genette (2004) also argues that not only is metalepsis a violation of the separation between syntactically defined levels, but also a deviant referential operation, a violation of semantic thresholds of representation that involves the beholder in an ontological transgression of universes and points toward a theory of fiction.

There is also a basic distinction between two types proposed by Ryan: rhetorical and ontological:

Following a proposal by Ryan, it is now widely acknowledged that metalepsis breaks down into a rhetorical (Genette) and an ontological variety (McHale), parallel to the distinction between illocutionary boundary at discourse level and ontological boundary at story level. “Rhetorical metalepsis,” Ryan claims, “opens a small window that allows a quick glance across levels, but the window closes after a few sentences, and the operation ends up reasserting the existence of the boundaries.”

John Pier, “Metalepsis,” in Handbook of Narratology, eds. Peter Hühn, John Pier Wolf Schmid, Jörg Schönert ( Berlin: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co. KG, 2009), pp.190-192.

The Utopia of Everyday Life

What if each day had a unique name. Everyday a new language, maybe that's how it should be, or imagined it should be.

To wake up with a new tongue, as if the day just got reinvented. The forever newly invented, the unsettled turning of days. Language invents the day that reinvents language. Yet, all words are old, and we, in time.

The utopia of everyday life, the utopia of our fantasies, the ideal we employ in faith.

1. The utopia of Communication, above all, for we must have confidence or faith in the ability of language to create understanding.

2. The utopia of Self comes next, or the play of Self, a belief in oneself, an identity who speaks.

3. The utopia of the Other, someone who accompanies the self, a partner, the fiction of an interlocutor.

4. The utopia of Society or Community, a fiction of resemblance above all, that serves as the space of intersection in the sea of infinity without ground, the crossroad of language where language could mean.

5. The utopia of Meaning then, of the sign and its dynamics, its capacity to produce meaning and sense, information, beyond or below Noise; a petite linearity of signifying chains in the midst of the ocean of simultaneous noise.

6. Finally, the utopia of System, within which objects circulate in a network of relationships, with its discourse laws following the order  which we impose on them, a utopia of Law and Order.

Calvino and the Narrative of Reading (c. 2000)

“There are thus two interpretations of interpretation; of structure, of sign, of play. The one seeks to decipher, dreams of deciphering a truth or an origin which escapes play and the order of the sign, and which lives the necessity of interpretation as an exile. The other, which is no longer turned toward the origin affirms play and tries to pass beyond man and humanism, the name of man being the name of that being who, throughout the history of metaphysics or  of ontotheology… has dreamed of full presence, the reassuring foundation, the origin and the end of play.”

                                                                                   --J. Derrida, “Structure, Sign and Play…”

 

   Probably it would not be too much to say that Calvino’s text can be seen as the literary summa of 20^th century ideas about interpretation in the same way people consider the Commedia of Dante Alighieri (another Italian) as the literary summa of the Medieval Ages. (Some eminent predecessors: Ovid, Arabian Nights, Boccaccio, Margueritte de Navarre, Corneille, Chaucer. As for narrative embedding itself prior to self-reflexivity, we can go as far back as Homer.) And we must hear Nietzsche’s name here, too, as that text that opened the world up to interpretation (as Derrida himself indicates in the sentence after the one quoted above). For what Calvino’s text enacts is that semiotic play that repositions the origin and the end of interpretation as both textual simulacra and readerly anxiety. In this textual allegory of Reading (if allegory is not exactly that instance where the Other speaks), the major protagonist or figure/focalizer is a Reader (or the Reader, if that would make his identity more definite).

   By making its own functional presence obvious at the incipit by addressing the Reader in the second person, the (intrusive) narrator provides a space for the intersection of the fictive Reader with all potential actual readers, implicating the act of reading the Calvino text with the allegoric narrative of reading of the Calvino text. The act of reading coincides with the narrative of reading. Hence, here we could see an additional complication of the game: the narrative of reading mirrors the “real time” act of reading, or vice versa. And this is not enough. Within—and we should put quote marks around these words—the fictive world of the text, we, the readers, discover that, apart from the spiraling multiplication of non-climaxing counterfeited novels, this double situation is replicated in Silas Flannery’s projection of a novel where a Reader searches for the complete text of what he was reading, only to get caught in the spiraling multiplication of non-climaxing counterfeited novels. Diagrammatically, we could envision the situation as follows:

Actual Reader

↓

Calvino Text m

↓

(Reader-Protagonist

↓

Calvino Text n

↓

    {Ermes-Flannery>>>Calvino Text p

↓

  [Calvino Text m,n]})

   This dictates at least two points de départ for discussion:

1) The allegoric narrative of reading: a Reader reads the text, finds it incomplete, searches for completion, materially and aesthetically, discovers multiple forgeries, meets Ermes and Silas as perpetrators of the design to make a novel about a Reader who, finding the text incomplete, searches for completion materially and aesthetically…. The Calvino text transforms into non-Calvino texts, the Reader hunts down the rest, demands for climax, but a series of incomplete texts suspends the climax: anticlimactic.  Two types of readers: one who wants climax, another who wants perpetual suspense. Deferral of the end, which is the deferral of the origin. The Reader is literally in suspense. His mode of existence, as the allegorical desire for the Other, is suspension. The title itself of Calvino’s novel leaves us hanging. It is a fragment. This entails a relation of non-possession of the Other (text or the other Reader), or a mode of possession that is always anticlimactic, plural, incomplete, counterfeit, forged. The denouement is a return to an origin that is constituted as a forgery or translation: at any rate, a fake text, whose fakeness derives from the assumption of a “real” text? What is a genuine text in the first place?

2) The coincidence of the enactment of reading and the allegoric narrative of reading. Self-reflexivity. What’s the point for this mise en abyme? First, it poses that the referent of reading is reading itself. Or, the end point of reading is the beginning of reading; or, vice versa. Secondly, the mise en abyme device prevents the recuperation of a binary polar narrative economy (as in realism, Novel/Reality). This is accomplished by replacing a linear temporal and causal logic with  cyclical, repetitive, acausal, nonbinary parcours that distribute open-ended multiplicities and non-identities. Does this mean that all readings or interpretations are valid? A classical question that has plagued debates in epistemology and hermeneutics. Does the text pose an answer to this question? Or does the text demand that this question be asked? (We should read closer then.) Or perhaps the question should be rephrased to: Is it important to ask what is valid or not? Is it not that what is important is the way all these multiple repetitions of non-identities (the definition of counterfeits, right?) interact and make possible the nostalgia for coincidence or convergence with the other? That the other of reading is what allows reading to happen? Or perhaps, the truth of reading is in the suspension or in the plural it maintains.

   The multiple points of view regarding reading that can be found scattered in the text and in the last section suspend the closure of the question of reading. How could have the Calvino text managed to appropriate the bursting seams of the plural? Perhaps by being plural as well and by always returning to the plural. Since reading is a discrete temporal movement, requiring pauses and gaps (the reader gets tired, the text is made of discontinuous elements: words, sentences, paragraphs, chapters, etc.), the resumption of reading always conceives a different text. The coming and going of the Reader is effectuated by the periodic intervention of Sender and Receiver functions. (Following Greimas, the Subject function of the narrative is centrally played by the Reader, the Object function the novel itself, the Helper and Opponent functions variously played by the Other Reader--a double herself, the Non-Reader, or Ermes Marana. It must be noted that Ermes both prevents the Reader from attaining a totalizing and final comprehension of the textual play and aids the Reader in the play by making possible the existence of the Object of reading itself, however multiple it may be. Ermes Marana is therefore the symbolic agent of textual play and exchanges, the “middle man” between readers, texts and writers, texts and readers, texts and world, and authors and readers.)