SOURCE: Spires, Robert C. “Violations and Pseudo-Violations: Quijote, Buscón, and ‘La novella en el tranvía’.” In Beyond the Metafictional Mode: Directions in the Modern Spanish Novel, pp. 18-31. Lexington, Ky.: The University Press of Kentucky, 1984.

[In the following essay, Spires examines the early precursors of Spanish metafiction: Miguel de Cervantes's Don Quixote, Francisco de Quevedo's Historia de la vida del Buscón, and Benito Perez Galdós's “La novela en el tranvía.”]

As I begin this examination of the precursors of the Spanish metafictional mode with works of Cervantes, Quevedo, and Galdós, I confess to a certain inhibition upon entering such well charted waters. I feel compelled to emphasize, therefore, that my analyses of the Quijote and Buscón will be limited to those episodes featuring the metafictional mode; only in the case of the Galdós short story do I attempt anything resembling a complete reading. The analyses in this [essay] are designed to demonstrate and thereby clarify the concept of violation—the textual strategy of breaking the arbitrary conventions of fiction. By examining these early and somewhat tentative violations of the laws of fiction, I hope to demonstrate how the contemporary novels, although more radical in the strategies they employ, carry the imprint of the earlier models.¹ The metafictional mode, to repeat the thesis proposed in the Introduction, transcends historical classifications.

Critics of almost every persuasion, ranging from Américo Castro to Dorothy Van Ghent, from José Ortega y Gasset to Wolfgang Kayser, have found justification for labeling the Quijote the first modern novel.² Little wonder, therefore, that Robert Alter also found Cervantes' masterpiece an indispensable point of departure for his historical survey of self-conscious narration.³ Notwithstanding the possible objection that I am merely following Alter's footsteps by beginning my analyses with the same novel, I think there is enough contrast between our approaches to minimize any sense of tautology.

Without much question the most celebrated example in the Quijote involving a violation of the boundaries separating the three fictional worlds is the battle in Part One between the novel's protagonist and the Biscayan. As most will recall, the narrator is describing the two combatants with swords raised and shields firmly grasped when he suddenly interrupts his narrative to announce that the account ends here because the “first author” could not find the concluding section of the manuscript. Such a dramatic switch from the story to the act of narrating constitutes an obvious violation of the conventions of fiction. Yet even more blatant is the violation committed by the narrator when he evokes the role of the first author and places the blame on him for the truncation of the story. The narrator, as the subordinate of the first author, is in effect rebelling against his superior. Furthermore, the narrator transgresses the boundary separating the two when, after expressing his irritation at such an inopportune truncation, he usurps the first author's authority and sets out on his own to find the missing documents.

That the continuation of a story depends on locating the missing manuscript challenges, of course, the assumption of authorship established in the prologue and in the famous initial sentence of the novel: “En un lugar de la Mancha de cuyo nombre no quiero acordarme”⁴ “In a place in the Mancha whose name I prefer to forget”]. With the intrusion of the narrator or self-defined “second author” to explain that the “first author” (a Moorish historian named Cide Hamete Benegeli) could not find the remaining manuscript, the identity of the “I” with which the novel begins must be questioned retrospectively. Since the “second author” in effect is only an author when he narrates the search, and otherwise is merely a transcriber, and Cide Hamete as a historian is supposedly also only a combination translator-transcriber, and the anonymous author may in fact be a community of authors, none seems to qualify as the “I” of the narrating act. Indeed, the problem of the source of authority is further complicated when the “second author,” after finally discovering the documents, hires someone to translate them from Arabic to Spanish. Not only does the emergence of a second translator raise the question of this translator's fidelity to the original text, but the second translator also becomes an author when, in Part Two, at the beginnings of chapters 5, 24, and 27, he questions the verisimilitude of Sancho's conversation with his wife, calls attention to the first author's marginal notes, and offers an explanation of the Moorish historian's use of a Catholic oath. As a result of the confusion over who is actually speaking and with what narrative authority or veracity, the boundary separating the primary speaker from the subordinate speakers is completely blurred.

As is evident in the preceding explanation, the whole story of Don Quijote and Sancho seems to depend on someone other than the voice heard at the novel's beginning. Indeed, not only our confidence in, but the very textual existence of, the anonymous author or authors depends on Cide Hamete's transcription, which in turn depends on the transcription and successful search for the manuscript by the “second author,” and finally on the assumption that the translation of it is punctilious. Yet paradoxically none of these supposedly subordinate speakers (Cide Hamete, the “second author,” and the translator) would exist if it were not for the story of the knight and his squire as told by the anonymous author or authors of the manuscript, for these speakers are textual extensions of this narration. Such conflicts of authority, created when subordinate speakers violate the boundary separating them from the primary speaker, function as a textual strategy for directing attention to the arbitrary conventions of all fictional authority. As a result, the focus switches from the illusion to the artifices responsible for creating the illusion. The fictionality of fiction is thus foregrounded, and such a foregrounding reveals that within the text there are not authors but only fictitious figures disguised as authors.

Not content with revealing that authors within a text are mere fictions, Cervantes in Book Two explores the fictionality of the reader. The focus on the world of the text-act reader occurs when a student tells Don Quijote and Sancho about the book he has just read entitled El Ingenioso Hidalgo don Quijote de la Mancha by Cide Hamete Benengeli. As the two protagonists then question the young scholar about their respective projected images in the book, the conversation serves as a critique of Part One. Since, however, the critique consists of fictitious characters contemplating themselves as fictitious characters, they have transgressed the boundary separating the world in which characters perform from the world in which they are seen performing. Don Quijote and Sancho are therefore readers of their own story, albeit the student stands between them and the written text. They are readers, that is to say, in the oral or juglar sense of the word.

The characters themselves, nevertheless, do not consider what they are contemplating to be fictitious. On the contrary, for them the book is a historical record of their exploits, and their primary concern is with the accuracy of the account, especially in view of the Moorish nationality of the author Cide Hamete (Moors are notorious liars, according to Don Quijote). Yet as the discussion continues, Don Quijote as reader-protagonist discovers that his story is best served by poetic rather than historical truth.

The issue of historical versus poetic truth arises when the student, described upon his introduction into the novel as “de condición maliciosa y amigo de donaires y de burlas” (2.3:67) [“of a malicious disposition and very fond of plays on words and practical jokes”], begins to bait the two reader-protagonists. He states, for example, that some people have criticized the book for detailing every one of the physical abuses Don Quijote suffers. The student adds to this affront to Don Quijote's dignity by noting that, since the account of so many beatings becomes farcical, poetic license could easily be exercised. Don Quijote, although far from admitting that his story is a farce, welcomes the suggestion of poetic license, arguing that the author indeed could have omitted some of the incidents without altering the basic truth of the story. After all, he reasons, Aeneas certainly was not as pious as Virgil represented him, nor Ulysses as prudent as Homer indicated. At this point the student does an about-face and argues that historians cannot add or delete anything without compromising the veracity of their accounts; poets, on the other hand, enjoy the freedom to write of things as they should be.

While the malicious motive for the student's critical maneuvering seems obvious, Don Quijote's sudden espousal of poetic over historical truth is more complex. First and foremost, of course, would be his attempt to recapture his dignity, and significantly his first justification for omitting some of the painful incidents is fairness—“equidad” (2.3:71). But there are also indications of more complex psychological processes within the protagonist, processes which in turn have theoretical implications vis-à-vis the work of fiction. When he compares his situation to those of Aeneas and Ulysses, he is identifying with fictitious personages, an identification even more dramatically evident later in the Maese Pedro puppet show episode. But the self he is thus identifying here is his literary self, the self recreated by the student's oral discourse. It is not strange, therefore, that he should compare that verbal construct with other verbal constructs from oral literary tradition. In other words, he is drawing a clear distinction between the verbal representation of him by others and the self that now is the recipient of such a representation. Don Quijote exists at this point simultaneously as actor and audience. And his role as audience, as reader of his own verbal image, allows him to see that the verbal image can never be the thing it represents, the word can never become the object. Little wonder, therefore, that he appeals to poetic license, for now he at least senses—is forced to sense by virtue of the student's maliciously inspired stratagem—that even historical representation is an illusion, a fiction of the reality it pretends to be. And of course we the real readers now have the opportunity to contemplate—by virtue of Cervantes' textual stratagem—how fiction is the vehicle par excellence for displaying language's illusory essence.

The key to recognizing any illusion is recognition of the devices that create it or, in the game of fiction, recognition of the conventions by which the game is played. When Don Quijote listens to and comments on the published account of his misadventures and thereby becomes his own reader, he points not only at the fictionality of the novel's ancedote but at the convention that hides the recipient from view. By violating the boundary between the world in which he performs and the world from which he is seen performing, he draws attention to the text-act reader as an integral element of the fictional mode, or to borrow an expression from Walter Ong, he alerts us to the fact that indeed “The Writer's Audience Is Always a Fiction.”⁵ But at the same time that the world of the text-act reader is invaded, another world is automatically created to replace it; if Don Quijote is now standing where the text-act reader was stationed, the latter is now one step back. A violation exposes but does not destroy the fictional mode. And since every real reader, consciously or subconsciously, attempts to identify with the text-act reader, we stand just behind Don Quijote as he contemplates the conventions that create illusion: the illusion that language is what it represents, that fiction is reality.

In fact, the laying bare of illusion is the motive Cide Hamete himself professes at the end of the novel: “pues no ha sido otro mi deseo de poner en aborrecimiento de los hombres las fingidas y disparatadas historias de los libros de caballerías” (2.74:353) [“For my sole object has been to arouse man's contempt for the false and absurd stories of chivalric novels”]. Yet his professed motive is itself subject to being laid bare. Since within the fiction there is an anonymous author or authors of Don Quijote's and Sancho's story, and since Cide Hamete is merely one of the transcribers, in the final analysis Cide Hamete is but one more reader of the story, as are the “second author,” the translator, and Don Quijote himself. Cide Hamete's professed intent, therefore, has no more inherent textual authority than the statements of any other of these readers pretending to be authors. In fact, one “reading” suggested by this textual strategy is that in the final analysis all authors are merely readers expressing their reading in graphic form. For every apparent creative source there is a prior creative source. Final meaning, therefore, is always deferred to an infinite future of yet another reading. In the most profound sense of the word the Quijote is, as has been noted before, a novel about reading novels.⁶

It would be inadequate and something of a distortion to categorize the Quijote as merely a metafictional novel. The metafictional is one of many modes that play an important role in the novel.⁷ Indeed, the modal complexity of the Quijote may well explain why the novel continues to attract the attention of virtually each new critical school.

The violations of the boundaries separating the three worlds of the fictional mode in the Quijote direct attention to the artifices of fiction. A mere appearance of a violation, on the other hand, can serve as a quite different textual strategy. Any threat to the boundaries between fictional worlds creates tension and thereby emphasizes the textual context in which the threat occurs. If the threat ends in a true violation the effect is metafictional; however, if the threat is never realized, or only tentatively realized, the artifices remain hidden and attention is fixed on the episode or passage in which the indication of a violation occurs. El Buscón [The Swindler in the English version] offers a very good example of a borderline violation whose effect is emphatic but not metafictional. Such an example should help clarify the basic definition of metafiction which has been proposed in this study.

The episode concerns chapter VII of Part II, one of the key chapters of the novel for it marks a definitive downward turn in the picaro's moral and material well-being. The incident in question involves the scheme of the protagonist/narrator Pablos to marry into a wealthy family by convincing the members that he is Don Felipe Tristán, a nobleman and heir to an estate. His strategy seems to be working to perfection until his former master, Don Diego, arrives on the scene. Pablos had served Don Diego when both were students and their relationship was, or so Pablos thought, that of friends rather than servant to master. In spite of the years that have passed, Don Diego immediately suspects that the supposed Don Felipe Tristán is in reality Pablos. When Pablos denies his true identity, Don Diego insults him by begging forgiveness for having mistaken a gentleman for someone as amoral and vile as his former servant. To this insult is added humiliation when the next day, in the presence of his fiancée and Don Diego, Pablos is thrown from a horse he had borrowed without the owner's knowledge. He is further embarrassed when the owner suddenly appears to claim his horse. This episode inspires Don Diego to investigate the motive and confirm the identity of the disguised Pablos, and after having done so, to devise a plan for two thugs to attack and brutally beat the poor imposter.

The apparent violation of narrative level involves Don Diego's investigations and his plots to ambush Pablos. Since Pablos as the first-person narrator naturally was not a witness to these acts of espionage and plots for ambush directed against him, his narration of them could only be by means of someone else's accounts. Yet not only does he fail to identify the sources of his information, but as he narrates the beating he seems to contradict his own previous narrative account: “pero nunca sospeché en don Diego ni en lo que era”⁸ [“but I never suspected Don Diego nor what was going on”]. In spite of the apparent contradiction, the preterite tense, “sospeché,” indicates that the point of focalization is from the protagonist in the past and not from the narrator in his narrative present. That is to say, at the time the beating occurred Pablos never even suspected Don Diego; from his narrative position now, however, he obviously knows differently, as the narration of the plot against him clearly indicates. By focalizing that moment of the beating from the experiencing self's perspective,⁹ Pablos's naive confidence in his former friend's fidelity is juxtaposed with that former friend's treachery.

As this example demonstrates, a tentative or partial violation directs attention to the episode rather than to fiction's artifices. Indeed, since Pablos directs his narrative to a text reader identified as vuestra merced (or v.m. as he is labeled in the text), this text reader might well here question his addresser's reliability. The message to the text-act reader, however, does not concern reliability but a so-called nobleman's sense of honor. As a representative of the noble class Don Diego reveals that his sense of honor is just as corrupt as that of a picaro.¹⁰ Since the text reader's title, vuestra merced, identifies his as also a member of the noble class, he is guilty by association. Thus Pablos is not really talking to but about his text reader; his message assumes a recipient distanced from the world of the story. In a fashion similar to what happens in the Lazarillo, vuestra merced is a part of rather than the intended recipient of the text-act message. In short, Pablos is very much in control of the narrating act as he subtly attacks his own text reader. And since no laws of fiction are actually violated, this is not a case of metafiction but of a textual strategy designed to emphasize a tragic turning point in the fictional life of the protagonist. This distinction between violation and apparent violation is fundamental to my definition of metafiction. There is reason to believe that Quevedo, consummate artist that he was, consciously bent, but without breaking, the fictional mode so as to achieve the effect he wanted.

For the final examples demonstrating the metafictional mode in pre-twentieth-century texts, I will jump from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century and focus on the great Spanish realist novelist Benito Pérez Galdós. (Since in the history of Spanish fiction the eighteenth century is not particularly significant, such a leap is less extreme than it may appear at first glance.) Considering Robert Alter's thesis that the nineteenth century is a period of eclipse for self-conscious narration,¹¹ it may come as a surprise that Galdós not only is an exception but deserves credit as a true innovator in strategies for violating the conventions of fiction. John W. Kronik has analyzed with uncommon insight three novels of Don Benito in which a character violates the world of the fictive author. In El amigo Manso (1882) [Good Friend Manso] the protagonist, by declaring at the novel's very beginning that he does not exist, also in so doing declares his autonomy from the fictive author; the protagonist claims credit for his own eventual development into a character, whereas the other characters, as Kronik demonstrates, are products of the fictive author.¹²

The violation of the fictive author's world is even bolder in Misericordia (1897) [Piety]. In this case the protagonist invents a priest to explain how she gets the money to sustain her mistress, and one day the priest miraculously materializes. As Kronik demonstrates, we have here an example of a character creating another character and in so doing usurping the creative prerogative of the fictive author.¹³ In yet another example of characters usurping the creative function of the fictive author, Kronik explores the way in which the protagonist Fortunata of the novel Fortunata y Jacinta is in effect the product of some half dozen characters who collaborate in her creation.¹⁴La de Bringas (1884) [The Spendthrifts in the English version], on the other hand, offers another type of violation, in this case the fictive author transgressing the world of the story. The most humorous example of such a transgression occurs at the novel's end. After having chronicled Rosalía de Bringas's obsession with material possessions, her desperate attempts to pay her debts, her husband's dismissal from his bureaucratic position in the government, and finally the compromise of her honor in a futile attempt to enlist the aid of a family friend in her economic crisis, the omniscient narrator suddenly appears in the protagonist's world. He says that shortly after the affair with the family friend, he had his own encounter with Rosalía: “Quiso repetir las pruebas de su ruinosa amistad, mas yo me apresuré a ponerles punto, pues si parecía natural que ella fuese el sostén de la cesante familia, no me creía yo en el caso de serlo, contra todos los fueros de la moral y de la economía doméstica”¹⁵ [“She tried to repeat the experience of her disastrous episode with the family friend, but I hastened to head her off, for whereas it seemed fine for her to serve as the provider for her unemployed spouse and her family, I didn't feel it was my place to play the same role, in respect to both moral and economical dicta”].

The preceding examples demonstrate that Galdós, whether consciously or unconsciously, is a disciple of the Cervantes model, and possibly those of Stern, Fielding, and others, for violating the conventions of fiction. His strategies, although certainly more than mere imitations of his predecessors, carry the imprint of the earlier models. Yet one of his first efforts in writing fiction, a short story entitled “La novela en el tranvía” (1871) [“The Streetcar Novel”], seems to suggest that he also learned from the Quevedo model. This story offers an example of a violation of narrative level and then a negation of the violation. Such a backing away from a metafictional focus underscores some of the inherent contradictions in the realistic mode of which Galdós was to become Spain's most celebrated master.¹⁶

The story is a first-person narrative in which the protagonist/narrator meets a friend on a streetcar. The friend, an incurable gossip, begins telling about a conflict involving a countess, a count, and a young man who has a close but plantonic relationship with the countess. The conflict is orchestrated by the household's majordomo who, if successful in his evil machinations designed to lead the count into a crime of passion, hopes to gain control of the family estate. But before the friend can finish the narrative he reaches his destination and departs. The protagonist/narrator then glances at the newspaper serving as a wrapping for some books he is returning to another friend, and discovers the same story of the countess appearing there as a fictitious serial. Again, however, the story is truncated before the denouement, this time by a cut in the newspaper made by the protagonist when he wrapped the books. After his surprise at what he thought was a true story turning out to be fictious, he is even more astonished when the reverse occurs: seated directly across from him now is the majordomo of the serial story.

The events have now taken a fantastic turn since the protagonist/narrator really believes he is observing in the flesh a fictional being: “novelesco, inverosímil, convertido en ser vivo y compañero mío en aquel viaje” (p. 507) [“novelistic, non-verisimilar, transformed into a living being and my companion on that trip”]. Fiction has become reality. Of course, this is merely another game of illusion created by the intrusion of a character from the fourth narrative level into the second narrative level. To clarify, the first narrative level corresponds to the narrating self as he tells his story: “y lo creí como ahora creo que es pluma esto con que escribo” (p. 514) [“I believed it just as now I believe that this thing with which I am writing is a pen”]. The second level, then, corresponds to his narrated experiences on the streetcar. Within this second level, however, first the friend and then the anonymous narrator of the serial tell their respective stories (really the same story), so their act of narrating constitutes the third narrative level. Finally, the fourth level corresponds to the world of which they speak, or the conflict involving the countess, the count, the young man, and the evil majordomo—the latter now apparently sitting on the streetcar of level two. If we had only the friend's incomplete story, the appearance of the majordomo would be merely fortuitous; since we also have the fictious serial, his appearance is fantastic. With this blurring of the boundaries between fact and fiction, between the second and fourth narrative levels, the rules of the game of fiction are placed in a state of suspension. The protagonist/narrator's “reality” is counterpoised by the majordomo's “fictionality.” The two men are now equally real or equally fictitious. The conventions of fiction are suddenly laid bare.

With the conventions now in a state of suspension, the protagonist/narrator feels justified in committing his own violation of narrative level when the majordomo disembarks after first sinisterly examining a letter he is carrying: “Cuando salió el hombre en quien creí ver al terrible mayordomo, me quedé pensando en el incidente de la carta, y me lo expliqué a mi manera, no queriendo ser, en tan delicada cuestión, menos fecundo que el novelista, autor de lo que momentos antes había leído” (p. 507) [“When the man I thought was the terrible majordomo got off, I continued to think about the incident of the letter, and I explained it in my own way, not wishing to be less creative in such a delicate matter than the novelist, the author of what I had read moments before”]. When the protagonist/narrator assumes the responsibility for continuing the story, he violates the third narrative level corresponding to the serial's author; he usurps that author's position and plagiarizes his story material. Yet at this moment of maximum invasion of narrative levels, the seeds are planted to reaffirm the boundaries and negate the apparent violations. Such a restorative process is initiated with the words from the quoted passage, “el hombre en quien creí ver.” Both the verb and its tense mark a difference between the narrating self corresponding to the first level and the experiencing self of the second level. The narrating self is now implying by his use of this verb form that rather than a case of fiction becoming reality, his experiencing self was at the time a victim of self-delusion.

The process of restoring the boundaries between narrative levels—and between “reality” and “fiction”—continues when the protagonist/narrator falls asleep and furthers the countess's story in a dream. Even though his dreaming self corresponds to the third narrative level (or the level corresponding to the friend who began the tale and the serial that continued it), and that which is dreamed to the fourth level, in this case there is no violation, merely a narrated switch in narrative level. And of course since we know he is dreaming, the boundary between “reality” and “fiction” remains intact.

Although the dream extends the story to the point where the count seems about to commit his crime of passion, the protagonist/narrator is awakened before the climactic moment. He then hears a conversation on the streetcar between someone he believes to be the young man of the story and a fellow traveler, and the conversation appears to concern the countess's fate. But when the two young men are about to disembark and the protagonist/narrator interrupts them to ask how the countess dies, they break into laughter and leave. Immediately after their departure a woman gets on with a dog matching the vision of the countess's dog in his dream. Under his questioning she confirms that indeed the dog's mistress has just died, but when he then asks what happened to the count, she laughs and calls him a madman. Then three men get on the streetcar talking about the shooting death of a hapless female victim. Rather than the countess, however, he learns that the victim was their hunting dog. Finally, he again sees the supposed majordomo, attacks him, is arrested, discovers that the man is a respected businessman, and ends the story by admitting that several months passed before he regained his sanity. “Reality” thus reconquers “fiction” and the boundaries between the narrative levels are reaffirmed. All the violations are explained as the protagonist/narrator's illusion.

The strategy of violating and then negating the violations of narrative levels underscores even more the eternal conflict between reality and fiction, truth and illusion. Galdós in this story manipulates the text-act reader into first questioning the very conventions that allow fiction to seem real, and then reaccepting them. When the protagonist/narrator confesses at the end that he was insane at the time he thought the fictitious characters had come to life, the text-act reader should retrospectively dismiss those transformations as illusions. Reality, therefore, comes with the protagonist/narrator's recognition that the characters were “real people” only resembling the creations of his imagination. (Obviously such a reality is itself an illusion, another fiction made to seem real by the conventions of fiction.) The violation-negation strategy in the final analysis draws attention to the paradox of fiction's reality and to the inexorable attraction of its illusions.

The strategy also addresses another dimension of the relationship between fiction and reality, that of the referents. The question of referents is crystalized when the protagonist/narrator is at the edge of sleep and begins considering the influences on his thoughts: “Yo, que he leído muchas y muy malas novelas, di aquel giro a la que, insensiblemente, iba desarrollándose en mi imaginación por las palabras de un amigo, la lectura de un trozo de papel y la vista de un desconocido” (p. 508) [“I, who have read many, and some very bad, novels, tossed around what, unconsciously, was taking form in my imagination thanks to a friend's words, the reading of a section from a newspaper, and the sight of a stranger”]. This passage underscores the complexity of artistic sources for any novelist. In addition to empirically observing his social reality, the realist also borrows, consciously or unconsciously, from what he hears and reads, including fictitious accounts. In view of this borrowing, one can say, as Pirandello later would, that characters search for their own author; whether the author realizes it or not, every work of literature is but one more link in a complex network of literary intertextuality. By means of his manipulation of the metafictional mode in “La novela en el tranvía,” Galdós displays at a very early age a full awareness that realism refers to literature as well as to social reality. The violation-negation strategy, therefore, allows him to display both of these fundamental dimensions of his craft. It is not without irony that Spain's greatest realist novelist was perhaps his century's most blatant violator of the conventions designed to make fiction seem real. Indeed, it is tempting to speculate that Galdós felt it his personal obligation to expose the inherent contradiction in labeling any type of fiction “realism.”

One more word is in order in reference to Galdós and metafiction. His type of modal violations should not be confused with what is commonly labeled the intrusive or editorial narrator. Whereas it is true that an intrusive or editorial narrator interrupts his narrative and thereby calls attention to his own presence, he does not, at least in the typical nineteenth-century realist novel, direct attention to the artifices of fiction. On the contrary, the sententious nature of most such intrusions directs attention from the work to extratextual reality. Interrupting editorial comments aimed at the nature of what has been narrated or how it has been narrated, on the other hand, represent the type of self-consciousness generally labeled metafiction.¹⁷

The metafictional mode, as argued in the Introduction and demonstrated in this chapter, is an atemporal textual strategy involving a violation of the conventions of fiction. In the Quijote, considered by many as the first modern novel, the violations concern authorial source and the sanctity of the text-reader's world, as well as that of the characters (the appearance in the Quijote of a character from the plagiarized version of the novel). Notwithstanding the prominence of the mode in Cervantes' masterpiece, it is not dominant. In fact in El Buscón we have only an isolated example of an apparent violation serving as a textual strategy to emphasize a turning point in the novel. Galdós's “La novela en el tranvía,” then, seems to project the imprint of both Cervantes and Quevedo by violating the fictional mode with the intrusion of characters from an embedded serial novel into the “real” world, a violation then negated by the logic of the narrator's temporary insanity. That only recently the presence of a metafictional mode in the works discussed has captured the attention of critics seems to corroborate the theory of reader expectations.¹⁸ It would seem that critics did not recognize its presence in these works because they were not prepared to expect it. Yet consciously or subconsciously the novelists built on one another's strategies, and whereas the process of assimilation between Cervantes and Galdós took nearly three hundred years, with the emergence of the twentieth century that process was accelerated. The present century's preoccupation with novelistic self-commentary, therefore, is nothing more than a modern expression of strategies developed over several eras.

Notes

1. Luis Goytisolo, in a letter to the author, 2 August 1981, states: “El Quijote, en efecto, y por motivos que convendría analizar, se ha convertido en ‘el modelo’—no tendría sentido hablar aquí de influencias—de novela, no sólo para mí sino también para mis más destacados colegas, los Juanes, Benet, Marsé, Goytisolo.”

2. The works and respective criteria for considering the Quijote the first modern novel are: Américo Castro, El pensamiento de Cervantes (Barcelona: Noguer, 1972), who cites the expression of Renaissance ideas; Dorothy Van Ghent, The English Novel: Form and Function (New York: Harper & Row, 1967), who quotes Lionel Trilling's thesis that all prose fiction is a variation of the theme of Don Quijote; José Ortega y Gasset, Meditaciones del Quijote (Madrid: Espasa-Calpe, 1964), who cites its ability to achieve a plurality of planes or aesthetic profundity; and Wolfgang Kayser, “Origen y crisis de la novela moderna,” trans. Aurelio Fuentes Rojo, Cultura Universitaria 47 (1955): 5-47, who refers to the employment of a “personal narrator.”

3. Alter, Partial Magic.

4. Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, El Ingenioso Hidalgo don Quijote de la Mancha (Madrid: Espasa-Calpe, 1958), Primera Parte, Capítulo Primero, p. 47. For further citations from this edition I will note in arabic numerals Part 1 or 2, the chapter, and the page.

5. Walter J. Ong, S.J., “The Writer's Audience Is Always a Fiction,” PMLA 90 (Jan. 1975): 9-21.

6. The thesis of Mia I. Gerhardt, Don Quijote: La vie et les livres (Amsterdam: N.V. Noord-Hollandsche, 1955). Gerhardt's rather obscure study has been the most influential on my own approach to the novel.

7. One might argue that an even more dramatic metafictional example occurs in Book Two when the protagonist confronts a character from Avellaneda's plagiarized version. Although certainly representing a violation of the world of the story, the effect of that episode strikes me as more concerned with the dispute over the plagiarized version than with the craft of fiction.

8. Francisco de Quevedo, Historia de la vida del Buscón (Madrid: Espasa-Calpe, 1967), p. 128.

9. The term “experiencing self” is borrowed from Franz Stanzel, Narrative Situations in the Novel: Tom Jones, Moby-Dick, The Ambassadors, Ulysses, trans. James P. Pusack (Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1971). Stanzel explains that the first-person narrative presents the protagonist/narrator in two dimensions. His “narrating self” is the narrator in the present in the act of telling the story. This narrating self normally has greater insight and maturity than he had at the time he experienced what he is narrating.

10. Two prominent critics, nevertheless, insist that there is a violation of narrative level. Francisco Rico, La novela picaresca y el punto de vista (Barcelona: Seix Barral, 1969), sees this episode as an artistic oversight in which the narrator does trespass the boundaries of his narrative. Gonzalo Díaz Migoyo, Estructura de la novela: Anatomía de “El Buscón”; (Madrid: Editorial Fundamentos, 1978), on the other hand, believes Quevedo consciously has his narrator violate his limits in order to dramatize this key turning point. Whereas I agree that it is a conscious strategy designed to dramatize the moment, I believe that if one analyzes the point of focalization it is obviously a pseudo rather than an actual violation.

11. “The Self-Conscious Novel in Eclipse,” in Partial Magic, pp. 84-137.

12. John W. Kronik, “El amigo Manso and the Game of Fictive Authority,” Anales Galdosianos 12 (1977): 71-94.

13. John W. Kronik, “Misericordia as Metafiction,” in Homenaje a Antonio Sánchez Barbudo: Ensayos de literatura española moderna (Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 1981), pp. 37- 50.

14. John W. Kronik, “Galdosian Reflections: Feijoo and the Fabrication of Fortunata,” Modern Language Notes 97 (1982): 1-40.

15. Benito Pérez Galdós, “La de Bringas,” in Obras completas, 6 (Madrid: Bolaños y Aguilar, 1960): 507.

16. I am indebted to Vernon A. Chamberlin for calling my attention to this story. I cite from the Obras completas, 6 (Madrid: Bolaños y Aguilar, 1945): 503-15.

17. A narrator interrupting to comment on the nature of what he has narrated would be an example of Gustavo Pérez Firmat's text-scholium formula as he defines it in “Metafiction Again.” See my Introduction to this book for a more detailed explanation of Pérez Firmat's thesis.

18. The primary source of the theory on reader expectations is Hans Robert Jauss, “Literary History as a Challenge to Literary Theory,” New Literary History 11 (Autumn 1970): 8-37.