SOURCE: Herzberger, David K. “Split Referentiality and the Making of Character in Recent Spanish Metafiction.” Modern Language Notes 103, no. 2 (March 1988): 419-35.

[In the following essay, Herzberger analyzes the characters of the Spanish metafictional novel of the 1970s and 1980s.]

Character in fiction is an invention. Even when real people from outside the text are admitted to its created world, or when known historical events are used to designate time, place, or incident, readers are aware that the characters of a novel are not beings of flesh and blood, but fictional entities made of words. In many instances, however, and particularly in the case of the Realist tradition, characters are made to think, speak, and act as if they were born into the natural flow of life and able to partake of its depth and fullness. The “as if” is crucial here, of course, because it sustains the illusion of authenticity that the narrative text seeks to instill in its own life-likeness and in the reader's response to it. For this reason realistic fiction seems actually to dispense with language that constitutes the characters so that they move in a flow whose substance appears to exceed language. In short, the text works at hiding the literariness of its characters, and the reader who accepts the tradition of such writing most often accedes willfully to its implied norms.¹

The characters of realistic fiction typically display a diversity of traits which the reader can identify as life-like. They are placed in time and space with pertinent social backing, are afforded a range of personality attributes and psychic perplexities which suggest a completeness of being similar to their human counterparts, and frequently gain the oxymoronic status of “real” fictional people. Even when characters are denied a fixed self, or seem to waffle in existential ambiguity amid the philosophical or social boundaries of their existence, they are designed to evoke in the reader the same curiosity for understanding them as do persons in real life. Hence a common way of approaching such well-known figures as Lazarillo de Tormes, Ana Azores, the Marqués de Bradomín, or Pascual Duarte, is to place them in a philosophical, psychological, or social frame and scrutinize their personal dilemmas with the appropriate conceptual scheme and jargon. Of course, the specific way in which this task is carried out turns upon the measures of one's critical methodology, as well as the belief (or non-belief) that consciousness is created and made available within a literary character. Part of such critical investigation has to do as well with the general desire of readers to seek out literary people as the essential center of fiction in order to find in them elements that relate to human existence. Clearly other aspects remain pertinent, but characters have always been granted a special standing as one of the institutional forms of fiction. As Anthony Wall points out, “readers happen to be human beings, who identify with human figures more readily than with trees, rocks, and the weather, even if all of these elements are fictional entities.”²

The characters of metafiction, and in particular for my purposes here, those of the so-called Spanish self-referential novel of the 1970's and 1980's, would in large part seem to stand as a counterpoint to the traditional figures of realistic fiction.³ Certainly the thrust of critical thought on the matter insists upon the self-referring energies of metafictional texts, from the linguistic opacity and self-referentiality of the discourse, to the reflexive involvement of characters with their fictive origin and being. Indeed, metafiction turns the text back on itself in order to explore itself specifically, and in doing so, lays out for inquiry the whole range of its constituent parts. In addition to the central concerns of language and referentiality, a panoply of tectonic and stylistic elements may be opened to scrutiny, as well as such devices as the text within the text, the role of the reader, or the nature of character. The examination of novelistic craft is clearly an important aspect of self-conscious novels, both for revealing strategies of construction and for defining the theory that impels these strategies. Such an examination also calls into question the place of fiction in the world. The realistic novel envisions fiction as a corollary of history and, therefore, its characters as an embodiment of historical accuracy and truth. In contrast, while truth as an ethical or conceptual imperative may inhere as forcefully in metafiction as in traditional writing, the elements of historical truth (i.e., truth of experience) are blurred amid the larger fabric of fictional invention. Thus as the text reveals itself and all within it as artifice, even the most casual reader is compelled to proclaim, “This is not real, it is make-believe!”

In general terms, readers of metafictional novels are required (by the text, of course) to suspend the suspension of disbelief. More concretely for our purposes here, readers are led explicitly to envisage characters as elements of the narrative who relate not to the world of external sense, but to the created world of the text. As Raymond Federman puts it concerning this type of writing:

the people of fiction … [are] no longer well-made characters who carry with them a fixed identity, a stable set of social and psychological attributes—a name, a situation, a profession, a condition, etc. The creatures of the new fiction will be as changeable, as unstable, as … unpredictable as the discourse that makes them. … They will be what they are: word-beings. … That [new] creature will be, in a sense, present to his own making, present to his own absence. This new fictitious creature will be … entirely committed to the fiction in which he finds himself, aware, in fact, only of his role as fictitious being.⁴

Viewed in this way, the literary personage becomes existentially free, undisturbed by problems of the outside world and committed only to the on-goingness of the text. Hence character in metafiction is not only a purely linguistic entity, it is sharply bounded by the narrative and left unpropped against life.

There is something disquieting, however, about the recurrent insistence on the extraordinarily and even exclusively literary nature of metafiction and its characters. For in the same breath that we explain the way in which metafiction lays out the parts of its composition, and in the same context of showing how its characters are defined by the process of literary creation, we tend still to speak of these characters as if they were “real” in the traditional sense of literary characterization. It is common practice to assess metafictional characters according to the way they “live” their lives, to locate the threads of consciousness or unconsciousness which motivate their actions, and to elucidate the legitimacy of their existential pain. Steven Kellman affirms concerning the character/novelist, for example, that, “It is possible to declare, with Whitman, that who touches this book touches a man.”⁵ Gregory Lucente, in his study of Italian metafiction, and Inger Christensen in The Meaning of Metafiction, evoke the notion of self and being in character repeatedly, while Robert Spires returns on several occasions to the way in which existential meaning is resolved for characters through the act of literary creation.⁶ Even Robert Scholes, who frequently scorns the excessive play and shallowness of metafiction, alludes to “the center of consciousness,” or the “heart of the heart” in metafictional characters.⁷

It appears, then, that we wish to have it both ways: on the one hand, we evoke the self-referentiality of the text and affirm the purely linguistic material of which characters are made, while on the other, we attribute to these characters the same body of traits and dilemmas generally associated with the characters of realistic tradition. We identify the technical process of metafiction through which narrative invents itself as something other than the real world, but then proceed to perceive characters as if they embody life in its full range of existential possibilities. What is most important here is not the apparent contradiction of the procedures that we use to engender meaning, but the absence of any attempt on our part to reconcile the opposing propositions. They way in which characters are bound to a symbolic system (the text) but still able to generate life-like qualities would seem to undermine the terms of our critical scheme (self-referential, self-reflexive, self-begetting, etc.) and oblige us to search for new ones.

Rather than continue to speak of self-referential texts and characters which push us always towards the intrinsic, I propose that we begin to discuss the notion of “split”-referential texts and characters, an idea which represents more accurately the way in which metafiction works. Before an explanation is offered of what is meant by split referentiality, however, three points need to be addressed. First, what I am suggesting is not simply a change in terminology. It is that, but it is also a change in our perception of those texts and characters which we currently label as metafiction. Second, by metafictional characters I mean those who are explicitly aware of their own fictionality, as well as those who are created by narrators insistent on revealing the fictionality of the entire narrative enterprise. In both cases the literariness of character is directly conveyed to the reader so that the illusion of reality is broken, but in the second instance the characters themselves may remain ignorant of their fictional status. Third, my proposal should not be construed as a compromise between the terms referential and self-referential, as a drift towards a bland or indistinct center. On the contrary, my aim is to eliminate the idea of self-referring characters in nearly all postwar metafiction by showing how these figures are defined by a permanent tension that endows them with a unique literary meaning. The principles involved in this process are no doubt intuited by most readers, and lie implicit in much of the criticism that has been written on the subject. Nonetheless, the point of departure for examining metafiction has generally privileged the self-referential aspect to such a degree that we have lost sight of the more complex operation which generates our conclusions.

To begin, it will be useful to pose some questions that arise if we perceive characters in terms of self-referentiality. If metafiction openly corroborates the fictionality of its characters, does this corroboration diminish their intimacy with the world of sense extrinsic to the text? In other words, do the characters become any less real or, to pose the inverse, more fictitious, than non-metafictional characters? Can a reader identify with or care about a character who insists that all he is or does grows from a contrived literary text? In a diachronic sense, do metafictional characters further impel what many see as the death of character in contemporary fiction, or are they able to inspire the rebirth of character in forms that are distinct, but equally as rich as those of realistic tradition? Do metafictional protagonists (who most frequently are novelists in postwar Spanish fiction) stand in a dialectical relation to characters and texts they create or of which they form a part, or do they affirm the intrinsic specularity of the metafictional process through interior duplication on the level of theme? Finally, all of these questions can be collapsed into a single (but by no means simple) issue: how do metafictional characters mean?

In order to lay out some possible answers, it will be helpful to draw a brief distinction between transparent language and characters and opaque ones. By the early 1970's in Spain critics and novelists had largely rejected the concept of transparency in language (i.e., words as a window to the world), above all because it failed to do what it intended: capture the full presence of the signified object. Transparent characters in fiction, those offered from a single perspective with the illusion of wholeness about them, similarly were deemed deficient. They failed to convey the depth and complexity of life because they generally aimed to close the gaps and open spaces of multiple meanings. A theoretical and practical turn was thus undertaken by many novelists to correct the perceived shortcomings. Language was endowed with inventive powers which far superseded its ability to represent, and a whole notion of literary language arose that differentiated between literary worlds and life outside of them. The canons of social realism, which governed the course of much Spanish narrative during the 1950's and early 1960's, yielded to the far more suggestive possibility of worlds created from words. Hence language became opaque, texts became self-contained, and literature became self-generating. This is articulated most forcefully in Spanish narrative by Juan Goytisolo in a series of essays collected in El furgón de cola (1967), in the trilogy of Señas de identidad (1967), La reivindicación del conde don Julián (1970), and Juan sin tierra (1975), and by other novelists and critics through the 1960's to the present.⁸ Even a writer such as Gonzalo Torrente Ballester, who resists categorization more than any other postwar novelist, advanced the opacity view of words in a speech to the Real Academia Española in 1977: “Lo dicho, por el solo hecho de ser dicho, posee consistencia propia, se sostiene por sí mismo, del mismo modo que el trazo del lápiz sobre el papel o la mancha de pintura sobre el lienzo valen por sí mismos y no necesitan, para valer y significar, de ulterior cotejo con lo real.”⁹

The newly exploited power of words was a crucial factor in the development of metafiction in the 1970's, as invention replaced mimesis and imagination supplanted observation as crucial narrative determinants. Literary characters, of course, were firmly anchored in these new worlds. Characters were frequently perceived as text inventions rather than life-like figures of flesh and blood, and the subversion or even death of traditional characters in the novel was contemplated as a literary necessity.¹⁰ Again, Juan Goytisolo offers the most acute instance of this thinking: “dinamitar la inveterada noción del personaje de hueso y carne: substituyendo la progressio dramática del relato con un conjunto de agrupaciones textuales movidas por fuerza centrípeta única: núcleo organizador de la propia escritura, plumafuente genésica del proceso textual.”¹¹ Goytisolo clearly posits a parallel between opacity of language and opacity of character: a self-referring discourse which eliminates the external referent; a self-referring character with a sense of self that depends only upon the configurations of the text.¹² It is my contention, however, that the self-referential position as enunciated by Goytisolo and other novelists and critics offers an incomplete picture of metafictional characters and the way in which meaning is generated. The reader is indeed driven from the singleminded notion of extrinsic reference by these characters, but the point where signification occurs does not depend wholly upon the message itself.

The principal generic way in which metafictional characters stand against their realistic counterparts centers on two strategies of self-awareness: they generally know (or suspect) they are part of a unique world of literature, or the narrator places them in a metafictional frame which they do not perceive, but which is manipulated so as to reveal itself and all within it as overtly literary. In either case, the reader is fully conscious of the textual design of metafiction and must contend with its presence in order to give a full accounting of the novel. While one strategy or the other may influence the work differently on the level of theme or plot, the process through which the characters ultimately gain meaning is unaffected. For example, the characters of Vaz de Soto's Fabián express clearly their roles as figures of a literary text: “Tú partes de un contenido, de un material abundante, vivido y experimentado a fondo, y tienes que buscarle expresión. Pero no una expresión convencional, rutinaria, de novela psicológica tradicional, sino una expresión nueva, auténtica, propia, hija de esas nuevas vivencias, de ese mundo diferente que tú has entrevisto o has creido descubrir. …”¹³ Similarly, in Alvaro Cunqueiro's Un hombre que se parecía a Orestes, Doña Inés proclaims, “Todo esto depende de mí, músico, de esta frase que soy yo, en una larga sinfonía repetida monótonamente, ahora adagio, después allegro, alguna vez andante.”¹⁴ On the other hand, in Luis Goytisolo's Recuento, the building of character preoccupies the protagonist/writer (Raúl) so that the eventual figures created may remain unaware of their fictionality, but the reader is fully conscious of it. A similar rendering of character obtains in José María Merino's Novela de Andrés Choz: “Pienso que hacer vivir en la imaginación del lector a unos personajes una historia, con su cortejo de olores y colores y sombras, sigue siendo el mejor de los fines de cualquier relato.”¹⁵ In more radical fashion, Luis Goytisolo's recent Paradoja del ave migratoria (1987) distends this notion to the bounds of the unreal. Goytisolo convolutes the very idea of stable characters through the manipulation of several texts (film, novel, script, diary) which blend to form an ambiguous whole.

Although there are important differences in the above examples in terms of theme, structure, style, etc., they all share a view of literary character which is at once highly referential and highly fictional. On the one hand, the reader is drawn to character on the plane of external reference (i.e., the character has life-like traits because of the denotative foundation of all creation), while on the other the narrative deliberately holds the reader at bay, as if the text were a playful game of invention that adhered only to the rules of its own making. The constant struggle for both dominance and reconciliation between the two tendencies creates the tension inherent in metafictional characters and endows them with possibilities for meaning denied those from whom such tension is absent. This occurs regardless of the specific development of the novel at the level of plot. For example, metafictional characters may defy the laws of time and space (Fragmentos de apocalipsis, 1977); they may authenticate their lives by placing themselves within texts that touch upon the marvelous and the fantastic (El cuarto de atrás, 1978); they may reify their existence by creating other literary texts (Recuento, 1973; Los verdes de mayo hasta el mar, 1976; El mercurio, 1968; etc.); they may rebel against literary roles (Don Juan, 1963; El hombre que se parecía a Orestes, 1969); they may place themselves in the flow of history, which itself may well be a fiction (La rosa de los vientos, 1985); they may not exist at all (Yo no soy yo, evidentemente, 1987). What is crucial about these actions is not the specific possibility afforded the character in each case, but the broader negative principle that persuasively points to the way in which they mean: the belief that self-aware is not synonymous with self-referential. There is no suppression of the representative function in these works, as the self-referring terminology of recent criticism suggests, but an alternative rendering of character through the intervention of ambiguity and tension.

The tension of split-referential characters grows both from the exhortation implicit in all story telling (but made explicit in metafiction) of “it was and it was not,” and by the way in which metafictional characters embody a new semantic pertinence. First of all, the overlapping planes of the exhortation mentioned above lie clearly on the surface of the text. While in realistic fiction the purpose is to show only the first half of the formula (“it was”), in metafiction both parts are plainly drawn: the character “is” (i.e., he/she exists with certain life-like traits), and “is not”—he/she is only made of words. The two components bleed into one another and induce uncertainty as to how the whole might be read. Indeed, the reader is left mentally hovering between the metafictional character as one continuous being and as two discrete ones: one as “real,” the other as literary, or as “real” and literary at the same time. This tension is unyielding in metafictional characters, and serves as a constant point of return in works as diverse as La cólera de Aquiles, Juan sin tierra, El cuarto de atrás, and Recuento. On the one hand, the character will be caught amid the flow of daily concerns such as work, play, love, death, and the like, because the narrative repeatedly isolates and emphasizes these planes of being which parallel the very texture of life as we know it. This can be termed the specular side of the metafictional character which identifies him or her with the known world. On the other side of the reference the tendency, or at least the direction of the tendency, is reversed. The delicate and frequently elusive depth of specularity in character is counterpoised to the persistent allusion of the text to its own construction. In this sense, the character is a literary being whose meaning hinges on the narrative as an opaque verbal system. As a result of these two poles character is at once all verbal surface and all implication and suggestion of human life.

What at first glance seems antithetical in the above explanation, the disparity of the two tendencies as they appear to pull in opposing directions, can be resolved by the congruity addressed by the split reference. As a result of the tension a parallelism emerges between the suspension of the denotative meaning (motivated by the metafictional base) and the suspension of the self-referential meaning (motivated by the specularity of the existential/thematic plane). While it is true that the effect of meaning for the metafictional character is focused on the word, the production of that meaning is borne by both sides of the suspension. The new congruence represented by the metafictional character (i.e., it is neither referential nor self-referential) springs from the perceived proximity of the two sides in spite of their distance. The rapprochement brought about by the split (but not, importantly, the resolution of the difference) is therefore a kind of paradigmatic deviance from each side of the opposition which in effect creates the innovation of the metafictional character. The personages of metafictional texts are no less linked to “reality” than traditional characters, but the link involves a complex strategy which requires the suspension of the ordinary reference used to understand them. In the end, the split leads to a point between the two sides of the formula, the precise location of which depends upon the particular text at hand. As Paul Ricoeur insightfully points out, this point (the split reference) “constitutes the primordial reference to the extent that it suggests, reveals, unconceals … the deep structures of reality to which we are related as mortals who are born into this world and who dwell in it for a while.”¹⁶ The metafictional character is thus really a stereoscopic being whose dimensions of existence reveal the way in which literature and life coalesce. Such a coalescence points to the profoundly serious side of metafiction and enables it to overcome what Robert Scholes has deprecatingly termed the “masturbatory reveling in self-scrutiny.”¹⁷

It is important to remember, however, that the split reference does not merely obtain at the surface level of theme. Two sets of examples will illustrate this. First, if split reference were purely thematic, a novel such as Luis Goytisolo's Recuento would embody the split, while a work such as José María Guelbenzu's El mercurio or Juan Goytisolo's Juan sin tierra would not.¹⁸ This can be adduced by the view that the protagonist/writer in these works holds towards writing. In Recuento the thematic focus at the level of writing is articulated through Raúl at the moment of creation: “El momento áureo, la sensación de que por medio de la palabra escrita, no sólo creaba algo autónomo, vivo por sí mismo, sino que en el curso de este proceso de objetivización por la escritura, conseguía al mismo tiempo comprender el mundo a través de sí mismo y conocerse a sí mismo a través del mundo” (p. 623). In Juan sin tierra, in contrast, Juan Goytisolo assumes an aesthetic position that hinges upon the “autonomía del objeto literario: estructura verbal con sus propias relaciones internas, lenguaje percibido en sí mismo y no como intercesor transparente de un mundo ajeno, exterior …” (p. 312).

Second, the meaning derived at the level of theme often appears to undermine the functioning of split referentiality. The principal characters of recent Spanish metafiction are most often novelists working on a novel, and they use their writing to work through a range of personal and social concerns. In Recuento, for example, Raúl as a “real”-life being resolves in his writing the dilemma of identifying and affirming his notion of self. As he puts it near the end of Recuento, the composing of a text made of words “nos [da] realidad a nosotros” (p. 623). In La cólera de Aquiles Matilde Moret, whose life is filled with deception and ambiguities, duplicates her being in the interpolated novel, “El edicto de Milán.” That is to say, the same type of unreliable perceptions that characterize her relationship with Camila and Roberto inform the text of the work about her own life. In El cuarto de atrás the narrator (Carmen) wishes to rid herself of the symbols of past texts (both social and literary) and enter into the more inviting world of the fantastic. The production of her text duplicates the desire and resolves the dilemma. The kind of intrinsic specularity evident in these works, in which the outer novel serves as referent for the inner one, is common in metafictional characterization. There is scant risk involved because the creation of a work of fiction in each case depends upon the self-involvement of a writer setting out to prove that fiction is more than an invented deception. Such a process, which fails to free words from denotative meaning (i.e., they embody the projected self of the writer) offers up the temptation to regard the characters and their works, as Jerome Klinkowitz suggests, as “one more form of representative fiction.”¹⁹

Klinkowitz's conclusion, however, serves only to reinforce the necessity of reading over and above the level of theme. In fact, it is unimportant in relation to the process of split referentiality whether the thematic plane addresses character on the level of writing (Recuento; Juan sin tierra) or reading (La cólera de aquiles; El castillo de la carta cifrada); whether there is a novel within a novel (La cólera de Aquiles); whether the text produced emerges at the moment of our reading (El mercurio), or whether the product exists before the process (El cuarto de atrás). In all of these novels there is laid out a particular experience of life and the way in which it is activated by literary invention. The characters of these works (all of whom are writers writing), far from subverting the traditional literary contract through which the reader learns something about life, reaffirm the centrality of the self in contemporary fiction by underscoring the reluctance of twentieth century art to validate the object apart from the process by which it is made. In the end, the metafictional character, by virtue of the dual energies of reference, reveals the embedded homology in all recent Spanish metafiction between what Robert Spires has described as “unmasking the conventions to foreground the process of creating fiction” (p. 16), and the paradox created by those textual energies which vivify the experiential component of literature. The realistic tradition of characters “given” to the reader as finished product is displaced by the continual repositioning of the metafictional character as a becoming (or process) at the same moment that the text reveals its own process of becoming.

I have been arguing to this point that there occurs a correspondent suspension of descriptive and self-referential meaning that produces the particular kind of split-referential character unique to metafiction. The self of the metafictional character is located ambiguously amid the structural and semantic pertinences of the dual reference and emerges in a way that privileges process over product. The idea of a self remains crucial to these metafictional figures, of course, because they never abandon metaphysics for pure existence. They may betray the concept of fixed selfhood, as Thomas Docherty has shown about post-modern characters in general,²⁰ but there remains at least a self in constant movement, full of meanings if devoid of Meaning. There does exist, however, a kind of metafiction that runs counter to what I have proposed. Rather than evoke a unique character through enactment of the split reference, it pursues the destruction of character, and with it, the annihilation of the self. I have in mind the recent writing of Torrente Ballester, and in particular, Fragmentos de apocalipsis. While at first glance the novel appears to affirm the invention of a literary self, a closer look shows how it precludes such a possibility, and even eschews it.

The creation of a writer/protagonist in Fragmentos, as occurs in other works of metafiction, would appear to facilitate the probing of the narrator's self. This is certainly the case in works such as Juan sin tierra, La cólera de Aquiles, and Recuento, and is indeed affirmed by the narrator of Fragmentos: “entre aseveraciones y rectificaciones, la verdad irá saliendo, si es que sale, y a lo mejor yo mismo acabo por enterarme de como soy.”²¹ Yet Torrente's work is highly problematic, for he proclaims the purpose of discovering “what I am like” only to undermine the possibility of carrying it out. Is the affirmation of being only a matter of producing a text, or is there a more complex imperative that inheres in this process? Torrente offers no explicit answer, but permits the text to posit a solution which annuls the richness of the split reference and precludes the creation of a metafictional self.

Since writing lies at the center of the narrator's life in Fragmentos, we might inquire into the way in which he goes about his task. We know, of course, that he has written other texts (p. 13), and that he has only recently begun to work on his present novel. At this point in Fragmentos, the openness implied by the inchoate form of the narrator's work is matched by the openness of his own being. As the novel develops, the recurrent whimsical plotting appears to enhance its largely playful nature. Certainly, this is part of Torrente's intention. He enjoys the game of fiction and plays it better than most. But what begins as parody in the work finally leads to dissolution, so that the literary text is denied any stable notion of what it means to be a writer/character/reader at any stage in the production and consumption of a novel. Hence Torrente calls into question the very possibility of locating the individual subject in a literary text.

Recent Spanish metafiction affirms beingness by laying bare the way in which characters are at once “worldly” and “wordly.” In contrast, Torrente sets out to reveal the wholly arbitrary linguistic making of the fictional subject, who is denied authenticity even in his own context. The narrator of Fragmentos proclaims that he aspires to ontological presence through the verbal tools of his trade (“Un conjunto de palabras en el que estaré yo mismo, hecho palabra también” [p. 132]), but his intentions meet with utter failure. Torrente and his characters are poignantly aware that the reality of the literary world can be created and dissolved by an act of the mind coupled with a stroke of the pen (or, perhaps more pertinently, with a touch of the delete button). The narrator's action at the end of the novel (his removal of Lénutchka as a character) has important consequences for metafiction, for it clearly draws to the fore the nihilistic component of parody. Lénutchka's disappearance becomes the ultimate existential indignity, the loss of control and responsibility for one's own life. Her capacity for “living” is annulled by deleting her as a word, which eliminates concurrently her potential for being. Thus denied, she no longer possesses the capacity to signify. And by an explicit parallelism, when the narrator turns from the text at the end of the novel, when he in effect removes himself from the possibility of becoming “un conjunto de palabras” in which he will be able to discover “como soy,” he destroys the process of living, and therefore, his self. He is the same at the end of the novel as he was at the beginning—a non-entity awaiting realization. In sharp contrast to other metafictional works discussed here, the characters of Fragmentos are denied existential possibilities because of the refusal to allow the process of creation to stand in relation to anything outside of itself. Torrente invents characters who are unadulterated entities of a literary text. When he invalidates the process of making that text through the arbitrary removal of its parts (i.e., words), he invalidates as well its ability to refer to anything at all. He mutates the process not to strengthen, but to destroy it. Unlike the realist tradition, therefore, which invokes only the first half of the exhortation “there was and there was not,” or the character of split referentiality, which summons the whole of it, Torrente's metafiction affirms only the final component, “there was not.”

A similar but less dramatic rendering of this idea shapes other metafictional works by Torrente. In La rosa de los vientos, for example, the principal character is presented as a product of history which is written as the discourse itself. Since the narrative is undermined by the conflicting norms of its own writing, however, the entire enterprise is constrained by the indeterminateness of what is real and what is not. The narrative locates the self of the writer/historian within the flow of history, then demonstrates how history is unable to authenticate either itself or what it purports to reveal. As a result, the virtual self of the writer remains precariously adrift in a text which ultimately parodies the possibility of its existence. A similar, but more complicated process can be found in Torrente's most recent novel, Yo no soy yo, evidentemente. Torrente pokes fun not only at the invention of novels, but at their critical exegesis as well. Four literary texts comprise the bulk of Yo no soy yo, but a single or even multiple author cannot be tied to any of them. There is an abundance of characters in the novel, but all are invalidated by the intertextual allusions which undermine their very existence. Through a felicitous touch of irony, Torrente in fact defines how split referentiality builds characters in metafiction (i.e., he lays out the confluence of external reference and intertextuality), but then destroys the whole process by parodying the invention of character and the production of meaning.

In each of these novels, Torrente does not destroy a self previously adumbrated, but refuses to validate the self to begin with. In opposition to a work such as Juan sin tierra, which denies the capacity of language to mean outside itself, but then affirms the creation of a new being through a shuttling back and forth between the “old” and “new” textual senses (i.e., the split reference), Torrente refuses to allow character to authenticate its difference with anything extrinsic to itself. As Alicia Giménez puts it, character for Torrente “No es un Juan sin Tierra, héroe al fin y al cabo de su desmitificación sino que ésta se centra en su misma esencia de personaje, está dentro del ámbito de la literatura, es la negación de unos rasgos típicamente narrativos, es, en suma, una desmitificación de sí mismo como personaje.”²² Torrente crushes the very concept of character through the repeated parody of it as a literary possibility. There is no celebration of self in these novels, no being who affirms “I am,” because the whole purpose is to show the demise of the process through which meaning is generated.

The metafictional character as it has been conceived in postwar Spain represents an important attempt to deconstruct the innocence of fiction. This innocence has shown itself on both sides of the ledger: those who have envisaged character as wholly self-referential, and those who proclaim for it mimetic authenticity. As I have described here, however, metafictional characters (with the exception of those in the work of Torrente Ballester) move in a domain of meaning that is defined by split referentiality. The characters both abolish and preserve their literariness and thus sustain the commingling of their representational and reflexive functioning. They relate to fiction as well as to reality, and display a psychic thickness that affords them a niche in the continuum of character development since the birth of the novel. Metafictional characters are no less ontologically sound than the characters of realistic tradition, neither are they less life-like. On the contrary, they emerge more wholly to the reader by revealing the conditions of their invention, the tension and ambiguity from which they are born. They exist and they do not exist, as the Mayorcan storytellers proclaim. Spanish novelists have been supremely aware of this over the past two decades, and it has enabled them to redistribute the elements of character without destroying it.

Notes

1. It is not my intention here to enter into the metaphysical debate about the ontological status of fictional entities. This has been done elsewhere by both philosophers and literary critics. The problem remains open to discussion, of course, as Thomas Pavel has shown in his recent book Fictional Worlds (Cambridge & London: Harvard University Press, 1986). Pavel offers a fine overview of the metaphysical status of character in chapter two, “Fictional Beings.” For a traditional view of character without metaphysical underpinnings, see W. J. Harvey's well-known Character and the Novel (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1965), and Martin Price's Forms of Life (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983).

2. Anthony Wall, “Characters in Bakhtin's Theory,” STCL, 9 (1984), 41-56.

3. The bibliography on metafiction in general, and specifically on its place in postwar Spanish narrative, is extensive. The best and most comprehensive study of its modal functioning in Spain is Robert Spires' Beyond the Metafictional Mode (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1984). The self-referential movement that is the primary focus of his book spans the 1970's and 1980's. In addition to Spires' book, Robert Alter's Partial Magic: The Novel as a Self-Conscious Genre (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975) remains useful, as does Steven Kellman's The Self-Begetting Novel (New York: Columbia University Press, 1980). Two recent books are also enlightening for the way in which they expand the practical and theoretical base of metafiction: Gregory Lucente's Beautiful Fables: Self-consciousness in Italian Narrative from Manzoni to Calvino (Baltimore & London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986), and Jerome Klinkowitz's The Self Apparent Word (Carbondale & Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1984). For pioneering work in nineteenth-century metafiction, see John Kronik's important studies on Galdós, especially his “Galdosian Reflections: Feijoo and the Fabrication of Fortunata,” MLN, 97 (1982), 1-40.

4. Raymond Federman, “Surfiction—Four Propositions in Form of an Introduction,” in Surfiction Now … and Tomorrow, ed. R. Federman (Chicago: Swallow Press, 1975), pp. 12-13.

5. S. Kellman, p. 8.

6. Gregory Lucente, Beautiful Fables, and Inger Christensen, The Meaning of Metafiction (Bergen: Universitetsforlaget, 1981). In Spires' Beyond the Metafictional Mode, see particularly chapters five through seven.

7. Robert Scholes, Fabulation and Metafiction (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1979), p. 115.

8. Formalist and Structuralist theories of language and discourse began to influence Hispanic criticism during the mid-1960's, though it was not until well into the 1970's that they became an integral part of Spanish thinking. Juan Goytisolo promoted the formalist position in a number of essays and interviews during this period. For an overview of his thinking on language and literature see my “Towards the Word/World Conflict: The Evolution of Juan Goytisolo's Novelistic Theory,” in Perspectivas sobre la novela (Madrid & Chapel Hill: Albatros/Hispanófila, 1979), pp. 103-113. In addition to Goytisolo, Juan Benet has written on formalism (if only to reject it) in El ángel del Señor abandona a Tobías (Barcelona: La Gaya Ciencia, 1976). The innovative theories of the French and Latin American new novel also became more prominent in Spain during this period. For the most part, though, Spanish novelists and critics adapted the ideas of others rather than formulated new theoretical positions on the subject. What is important for the present study, however, is the opening up of Spanish thought to these ideas during the time when metafiction became an important way of scrutinizing new possibilities for the novel.

9. Gonzalo Torrente Ballester, “Discurso de recepción en la Academia Española,” in Informaciones de las Artes y las Letras, No. 445 (31 March 1977), 4.

10. The “readerly” novel, as Barthes calls it in S/Z, is under close scrutiny and attack by structuralists and other innovators who articulate new limits and opportunities for the novel. For example, the subversion of traditional character becomes central to the development of the nouveau roman. As Robbe-Grillet proclaims in “On Several Obsolete Notions,” “The novel of characters belongs entirely to the past.” In For a New Novel, trans. R. Howard (New York: Grove Press, 1965), p. 28. The question that Robbe-Grillet begs, however, is if the metamorphosis of character in fiction is equal to its destruction. In another vein, see Julia L. Wescott's “Subversion of Character Conventions in Benet's Trilogy,” in Critical Approaches to the Writing of Juan Benet, eds. R. Manteiga et al. (Hanover & London: University Press of New England, 1984), pp. 72-87.

11. Juan Goytisolo, Juan sin tierra (Barcelona: Seix Barral, 1975), p. 295.

12. It must be pointed out, however, that in the same way that the discourse is bound to the past (if only as negative point of reference) and therefore to the world, the desire of Goytislo's narrator to create a new kind of self points to concepts of being outside the text. In this case, it is the self of Spanish history that he desperately seeks to deny, as Robert Spires has aptly shown in Beyond the Metafictional Mode (pp. 84-88).

13. José María Vaz de Soto, Fabián (Madrid: Akal Editor, 1977), p. 50.

14. Alvaro Cunqueiro, Un hombre que se parecía a Orestes, (Barcelona: Destino, 1969), p. 180.

15. José María Merino, La novela de Andrés Choz (Madrid: Editorial Magisterio Español, 1976), p. 147.

16. Paul Ricoeur, “The Metaphorical Process as Cognition, Imagination, and Feeling,” in On Metaphor, ed. Sheldon Sacks (Chicago & London: University of Chicago Press, 1978), p. 151.

17. Robert Scholes, Fabulation and Metafiction, p. 218.

18. For a discussion of the way Goytisolo attempts to resolve the word/world dialectic, see my “Luis Goytisolo's Recuento: Towards a Reconciliation of the Word/World Dialectic,” ANP, 3 (1978), 39-55. For a study of the self-referential premise of Juan sin tierra, see Robert Spires' Beyond the Metafictional Mode, chapter five. Spires astutely shows as well the way in which the text undermines its premise.

19. Jerome Klinkowitz, The Self-Apparent Word, p. 46.

20. Thomas Docherty, Reading (Absent) Character (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983), p. XV.

21. Gonzalo Torrente Ballester, Fragmentos de apocalipsis (Barcelona: Destino, 1977), p. 128.

22. Alicia Giménez, “Gonzalo Torrente Ballester: La literatura como placer,” Anthropos, 66-67 (1986), 10.