Confabulation, Collaboration, and Chromolithography: Memory As Construct in the Works of Felipe Alfau Philippe Villeneuve Thesi
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Confabulation, Collaboration, and Chromolithography: Memory as Construct in the Works of Felipe Alfau Philippe Villeneuve Thesis submitted to the Faculty of Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the PhD program in English Literature Department of English Faculty of Arts University of Ottawa © Philippe Villeneuve, Ottawa, Canada, 2013 i Acknowledgements My Parents have babysat almost every Friday since I started working on this dissertation two and a half years ago, allowing me and my wife rare occasions to breathe during a period in our lives when having time to ourselves was indeed a precious gift, and for this I express eternal and infinite gratitude. My wife slaved 40 hours a week at a job I know she hated and still hates today so we could afford rent and groceries and diapers, while I pretended to believe that I would have done the same for her had she been in my shoes. That she loves me more than I do her is an unforgivable blot on my conscience which I can only attenuate by promising to never rush her in the morning again. Having intuitively detected my morbid susceptibility to constructive criticism, my supervisor never openly told me what he thought of my drafts, but always said “many thanks for that” no matter what half-baked ideas I sent his way. His indefatigable assistance during our marathon sessions near the end was also a thing of wonder. My son drove me temporarily insane the first six months of his life. I hope I can return the favour when the teenage years arrive. Three years old and already the greatest teacher I have ever had. ii Abstract This dissertation examines the work of Felipe Alfau, a Spanish-American writer who wrote two novels and a collection of children’s stories in the first half of the twentieth century which were the focus of a short-lived critical enthusiasm in the early 1990s. It recognizes the important contribution made by those early critics, but also tries to make a case for a reading of Alfau at variance with the kinds of readings his work has previously received. Specifically, it points at structural and thematic complexities in Alfau’s narratives that have been attributed to his experimentation with self-reflexivity and metafiction, experimentation which many have claimed anticipates the work of writers of the second half of the century. My dissertation shows how other unrelated concerns may have led him to boldly reconsider the parameters of narrative form. I contend that for Alfau confabulation, collaboration, and art are generators of narratives that present the self as an insoluble mystery. What I intend to demonstrate is that Alfau views these sources as problematic repositories that fail to capture and preserve human experience, yet simultaneously believes that they are the only means at our disposal for doing so. His narratives communicate the frustrations such a paradox entails, but also celebrate human faith in those means in spite of such frustrations. iii Table of Contents. Introduction: Rediscovering and Rereading Felipe Alfau .............................................. 1 Chapter One: Locos and the Confabulatory Novel ......................................................... 20 Chapter Two: Locos and the Metaphysical Detective Story ........................................... 51 Chapter Three: Alfau’s Old and New, but mostly Old Tales from Spain ....................... 87 Chapter Four: Chromos and the Varieties of Picaresque Experience ............................. 121 Conclusion: What Next? ................................................................................................. 163 Works cited ..................................................................................................................... 172 1 Introduction: Rediscovering and Rereading Felipe Alfau For a brief moment in the early 90s, Felipe Alfau enjoyed a certain revival. Dalkey Archive republished his first novel, Locos (1928, pub. 1936), in 1988, and published his second one, Chromos (completed in 1948 but never published), in 1990. That same year, Chromos was shortlisted for the National Book Award. Three years later, Alfau was the focus of the second half of an issue of The Review of Contemporary Fiction (the first half was devoted to the work of Georges Perec). Ilan Stavans, who translated and published Alfau’s poems (1992), wrote the introduction to the split-monograph, in which he concludes by enthusiastically stating: “For too long a member of the Library of Forgotten Masters, [Alfau] is finally thundering out of the shadow” (“Curriculum Vitae” 145). Although the RCF issue devoted to Alfau is a veritable boon for anyone interested in finding out more about such an obscure writer, it does not really seek to provide a sustained critical assessment of his work. Instead, various literary figures offer personal reminiscences describing their on-and-off friendship with Alfau (Chandler Brossard), or the controversy surrounding the 1990 National Book Award nominations (Paul West). Some friends recall Alfau’s eccentric personality, his unconventional views on race, politics, and nationality, his one- week sojourn in Spain in 1958 (Tolby Talbot), or his reclusive last years spent in complete obscurity (Doris Shapiro). Charles Simmons contributes excerpts of his first novel, Powdered Eggs, explaining that one of its characters, Jose Llano, was inspired by Alfau. There is a fascinating interview conducted when Alfau was 90 and living in a retirement home in New York. The longest section reprints excerpts from Old Tales from Spain, an out of print collection 2 of children’s stories Alfau wrote and published in 1929. In fact, of the seventeen contributions, only four offer detailed commentary on a specific aspect of Alfau’s novels. Fortunately, Stavans stayed interested in Alfau’s work following its rediscovery. In 2001, he reprinted his introduction to Alfau’s poems in Art and Anger: Essays on Politics and the Imagination. In 2011, he included a chapter from Alfau’s Locos in his Norton Anthology of Latino Literature, and he has apparently been working on a biography of the writer since 1989. But Alfau’s “thundering out” does not seem to have had a lasting effect on a larger readership. True, some important work has been done. Carlos Ramos published an article in Revista Hispánica Moderna (2003) in which he compares Locos to Benjamin Jarnes’s Locura y muerte de nadie (1929), while Susan Elizabeth Sweeney built on observations made in her contribution to the 1993 issue of RCF to discuss Alfau’s exploration of self-murder as an existential and metaphysical act in Detecting Texts: The Metaphysical Detective Story from Poe to Postmodernism (1999, pp. 254-6). For her part, Regina Galasso, interested in the fate of Spanish- born authors writing in America in English, recently argued that Chromos inverts “the relationship between translator and author” (47), ultimately celebrating the creative powers of translating techniques. Other than these, however, the rare allusions to his work have been confined to a cameo appearance in Enrique Vila-Matas’s novel Bartleby and Co, as an example of the “writer of the no,” that is the writer who decides to cut short his career by simply ceasing to write, and two online articles: one published in the Barcelona Review, in which Jill Adams claims that Alfau was “far ahead of his time, using techniques that would later be ‘discovered’ by such postmodernists as John Barth, Donald Barthelme and Thomas Pynchon” (par. 1) and an article posted on the blog As It Ought to Be, in which Thomas Baughman claims that Alfau was “far ahead of his time, employing authorial techniques that would later be ‘discovered’ by 3 Postmodernists such as John Barth, Donald Barthelme, Thomas Pynchon, and Robert Coover” (par.1). As the eerily similar passages above suggest, the consensus among those who have read Alfau is that he was a precursor to writers more famous than he is. Sweeney claims that, along with Borges, Nabokov, and Flann O’Brien, Alfau invented postmodernism (“Aliens, Aliases” 207), adding that he completed Locos in 1928, when the other three had yet to publish their innovative works. For his part, Stavans contends that John Barth, Robert Coover, and Thomas Pynchon (Sentimental Songs vii), as well as Julio Cortazar, Italo Calvino, and Georges Perec (“Curriculum Vita” 143), all share an unknown precursor in Alfau. Mary McCarthy likewise detects affinities with the aforementioned authors, but also with Umberto Eco (“afterword” 206), citing the “giddy mutability” of Alfau’s characters as his most distinctive feature, while more recently, Steven Moore cites Locos alongside Gilbert Sorrentino’s Mulligan Stew and Desmon MacNamara’s Book of Intrusions as examples of fiction in which characters “take on a life of their own when their creator neglects them” (213). And, indeed, Alfau draws attention to this aspect of his work in the prologue of Locos, describing the attitude of his characters as one of “anarchic collaboration” (xi). Unfortunately, the focus on that one exclusive feature may have contributed to the short- life of critical interest in Alfau’s work for an obvious reason: contending that his claim to greatness lies in his having originated forms of playful metafiction that subsequent writers would be credited with “discovering” does not take into account that metafiction has been around for a while. As Robert Alter points out in Partial Magic: the Novel as a Self-Conscious Genre (1975), playful self-reflexivity was already