DARK SAYINGS: TOWARD A THEORY OF THE PARABOLIC MODE

(Spine title: Dark Sayings: Toward a Theory of the Parabolic Mode)

(Thesis format: Monograph)

by

Dura GUngQr

Graduate Program in Comparative Literature

A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy

The School of Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies The University of Western Ontario London, Ontario, Canada

©Dura Gttngdr 2011 Library and Archives Bibliotheque et Canada Archives Canada

Published Heritage Direction du Branch Patrimoine de I'edition

395 Wellington Street 395, rue Wellington Ottawa ON K1A0N4 Ottawa ON K1A 0N4 Canada Canada Your file Votre reference ISBN: 978-0-494-89475-0

Our file Notre reference ISBN: 978-0-494-89475-0

NOTICE: AVIS: The author has granted a non­ L'auteur a accorde une licence non exclusive exclusive license allowing Library and permettant a la Bibliotheque et Archives Archives Canada to reproduce, Canada de reproduire, publier, archiver, publish, archive, preserve, conserve, sauvegarder, conserver, transmettre au public communicate to the public by par telecommunication ou par I'lnternet, preter, telecommunication or on the Internet, distribuer et vendre des theses partout dans le loan, distrbute and sell theses monde, a des fins commerciales ou autres, sur worldwide, for commercial or non­ support microforme, papier, electronique et/ou commercial purposes, in microform, autres formats. paper, electronic and/or any other formats.

The author retains copyright L'auteur conserve la propriete du droit d'auteur ownership and moral rights in this et des droits moraux qui protege cette these. Ni thesis. Neither the thesis nor la these ni des extraits substantiels de celle-ci substantial extracts from it may be ne doivent etre imprimes ou autrement printed or otherwise reproduced reproduits sans son autorisation. without the author's permission.

In compliance with the Canadian Conformement a la loi canadienne sur la Privacy Act some supporting forms protection de la vie privee, quelques may have been removed from this formulaires secondaires ont ete enleves de thesis. cette these.

While these forms may be included Bien que ces formulaires aient inclus dans in the document page count, their la pagination, il n'y aura aucun contenu removal does not represent any loss manquant. of content from the thesis. Canada THE UNIVERSITY OF WESTERN ONTARIO SCHOOL OF GRADUATE AND POSTDOCTORAL STUDIES

CERTIFICATE OF EXAMINATION

Supervisor: Examiners:

Dr. Calm-Andrei Mihailescu Dr. Luca Pocci

Dr. Vladimir Tumanov

Dr. Bryce Traister

Dr. Patrick O'Neill

The thesis by

Duru Giingor

entitled:

Dark Sayings: Toward a Theory of the Parabolic Mode

is accepted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy

Date: January 14,2011 Chair of the Thesis Examination Board: Dr. Albert Katz

ii Abstract

This project attempts to formulate a fluid theory that accounts for the operations of parabolic language, comprising the text, the teller and the listener. The authors selected to this end, Thomas Pynchon, Franz Kafka, Jorge Luis Borges, Italo

Calvino and Flannery O'Connor, are intended as centers around which certain

elements of the parabolic mode gravitate and thus become more clearly discernible,

although they may be traced to the other authors as well. Therefore, the five chapters

of the dissertation converge upon a number of arguments that unfold in each chapter

to a different degree, rather than following one another serially in the gradual

development of one single argument. The in-depth exploration of the various traits

and idiosyncracies that mark each author's use of language yields a number of

insights into the operations of the parabolic mode. These concern, in broad sweeps, a

structure of revelation based on the notion of the nth line, which accounts more

specifically for a parable that has been embedded in a larger text; a pre-textual

structure comprising a parabolic core and lines of re/writing that revolve around it,

which provides a better understanding of how parables come into existence and

operate in isolation; the function of rewriting and repetition in the operations of the

said structures; the phantasmic core of parables; the issue and variations of parabolic

vision; and the relationship between parabolic language and sacrality.

Keywords: parable, parabola, rewriting, repetition, procrastination, sacred,

indirect vision, distortion, Pynchon, Kafka, Borges, Calvino, O'Connor, Melville,

James, Benjamin, Deleuze, Rilke, unfolding, secrecy, turning, nth line, pre-textual

structure, phantasm, gift, humor, lightness.

iii To Sabiha Gttngor

iv Acknowledgements

I am sincerely grateful to Dr. CSlin-Andrei Mih&ilescu for his creative and exacting guidance of this work. Dr. Kugu Tekin has been most generous with her valuable suggestions. Dr. John Mark Vanderheide has always lent me a kind ear in times of doubt and helped me clear the path. Ahu GUngOr TQmbek keeps her unerring good taste and moral support at my disposal, now as ever. I thank both my dear parents,

Sabiha and Ugurtan GUngOr, who set me an inspiring example with their discipline and love of work.

v Table of Contents

Certificate of Examination ...ii

Abstract ...iii

Dedication ...iv

Acknowledgements ...v

Table of Contents ...vi

Introduction ...1

1. Thomas Pynchon: Parable and Parabola in Gravity's Rainbow ...34

2. Franz Kafka: Procrastination and Rewriting in the Parabolic Mode ...65

3. Jorge Luis Borges: Rewriting and Repetition ...100

4. Italo Calvino: Phantasms of Le citta invisibili ... 130

5. Flannery O'Connor: Parable and the Sacred ... 165

Conclusion ...200

General Bibliography ...209

Vita ...219

vi 1

Introduction

Many complain that the words of the wise are always merely parables and of no use in daily life, which is the only life we have. When the sage says: "Go over," he does not mean that we should cross to some actual place, which we could do anyhow if the labor were worth it; he means some fabulous yonder, something unknown to us, something that he cannot designate more precisely either, and therefore cannot help us here in the very least. All these parables really set out to say merely that the incomprehensible is incomprehensible, and we know that already. But the cares we have to struggle with every day: that is a different matter. Concerning this a man once said: Why such reluctance? If you only followed the parables you yourselves would become parables and with that rid of all your daily cares. Another said: / bet that is also a parable. The first said: You have won. The second said: But unfortunately only in parable. The first said: No, in reality: in parable you have lost. "On Parables," Franz Kafka (Trans, by Willa and Edwin Muir)

I. "I bet that is also a parable." The man in the act of betting has his feet firmly planted on the ground. Clenched fists, cunning looks, dirty smiles may all be trivial cliches, but the obstinacy displayed by the feet is of great import. The feet stay where they are, as the man holds his breath and waits, in due rigidity, to hear the result of his bet. Both his insignificant victory in reality, and his defeat in parable, are attributable to his having pointed at something with his finger and called it a parable. He loses in parable because of his stasis, his feet planted on the ground, his failure to move together with something that is always on the move. A parable never stops to say solely that the incomprehensible is incomprehensible; it runs straight through the dead end it pretends to offer. The incomprehensible is incomprehensible not because it is extremely difficult or even impossible to comprehend, but rather because it has nothing to do with comprehension; it is not a static object of knowledge, something to be grasped with more or less clarity - therefore, the statement that "we know that already" only proves how mistaken "we" already are in choosing to approach the incomprehensible in terms of knowledge.

The incomprehensible is a vector that moves in any direction, and the man may 2 attempt to move with it. If, instead, he chooses, as he indeed does, to attach to the incomprehensible a name, a definition, a category, thereby attempting to turn it into something within his grasp, then with a shrill clank he gets trapped in daily life, which is the only life he has because he is unable to move elsewhere.

This study on parables begins with Kafka's "On Parables" not because it

provides a useful literary example to trigger a theoretical discussion, but rather

because it presents the very principles of one such possible theoiy, in a however

condensed and, evidently, parabolic manner. To begin with, the text is marked by

that constant tide of oppositions and contradictions proper to a true parable, whereby

all conclusive statements are no sooner produced than undermined: our daily life,

one is told, is the "only" life we have, and yet how quick is that one and only life,

ridden with mundane cares and struggles, to proliferate into an evasive yet enticing

"parable" that is something separate from "reality." That is, if there is a realm of

parable distinct from reality, then it necessarily follows that daily reality is not the

only life we have.

The text also reflects the two-faced nature of parables, thanks to which they

have been written and interpreted, for centuries, either as simple narrative examples

clarifying a point, or as obscure riddlea The text presents both the example and the

riddle, without validating one over the other; "Concerning this a man once said..."

has all the air of an example that will elaborate, and shed light, upon the preceding

discussion, whereas the very next lines about how to become parables present a

riddle; and not a trivial one at that, but a brilliant alternative to those questions about

parables that ask what they are.

1 propose to approach the problem of parables by way of following their

motion - motion to be understood both as movement and gesture. It is necessary to 3

develop a theory capable of keeping up with "On Parables," as it jumps, within just a few lines, from here to there, from daily life and actual places to the unknown, to

that fabulous yonder, and then again from the present time of contemplation to the

fabulous past of storytelling, where "a man once said" enigmatically...

It is, however, very difficult to move alongside parables without falling into

one trap of interpretation or another. Again and again does the statement "This is, by

the way, a parable" appear in them as a slap on the reader's face, urging her to

realize that the text tells something more, something other than what it actually tells

in its words. That is, a parable entices the reader, either with such explicit

statements, or through more subtle means, to somehow interpret the text, to chase

after its secrets, to reveal its hidden meanings. The paradox is that, once the

parable's own bidding is responded to, most interpretations reduce the parable into

one such meaning or another, or even into the more daring - yet already common -

conclusion that no single meaning can be decisive, and with such reduction, such

rigidification, one loses the ability to follow the parable in motion.

Naturally, the solution to this problem cannot be found in a futile attempt to

write on parables, or on any text for that matter, without interpreting them. While

the strict avoidance of all interpretation proves, in the best cases, to be a doctrine

more faithfully preached than practiced, it is nonetheless possible to avoid a certain

static, totalizing kind of interpretation, and to construct a more flexible alternative,

"a criticism whose sole medium is the life, the ongoing life, of the works

themselves."1 What is needed, to this end, is to turn the process of interpretation into

1 Walter Benjamin, "The First Form of Criticism That Refuses to Judge." In Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Volume 2, 1927-1934. Trans. Rodney Livingstone and others. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999, p. 372. 4 a process of experimentation, as proposed by Gilles Deleuze and F61ix Guattari.2

The kind man in Kafka's parable, the one who invites us to follow and become parables, has perhaps the best way of encouraging the hesitant experimenter: "Why such reluctance?" he asks. And after such a good question, he proceeds with a hypothesis, thus proving that he dwells in a realm completely far and apart from where the betting man stands, even from a strictly grammatical point of view: unlike the latter's factual indicative - "I bet that is a parable" - he plays on conditional

grounds, where every thought, at the tip of an if, shoots forth into uncertainty: "If

you only followed the parables..."

The first objective of this study on parables, therefore, is to establish the kind

of interpretive attitude that allows experimentation with ways of following parables.

The product of such efforts will not be another parable, in critical or theoretical

attire. Nor should such efforts be construed as an attempt to obtain full licence to

speak parabolically about parables. If what J. Hillis Miller3 suggests is true, that is, if

parables indeed have a contaminating force under the influence of which interpreters

of parables start employing a parabolic language themselves, then it is safe to

assume, without seeking any particular licence, that the present study will also be, if

it has not already been, heavily contaminated. However, so long as it remains static,

even the most richly parabolic form of interpretation would not yield any radically

different results from what has been achieved so far in the modern research on

1 In Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature. Trans. Dana Polan. Theory and History of Literature, Volume 30. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986, p.3. 3 See Hillis Miller's "Parable and Performative in the Gospels and in Modern Literature," in Humanizing America's Iconic Book (Eds. Gene M. Tucker and Douglas Knight. Chico, California: Scholar's Press, 1982, pp. 57-71.) Hillis Miller uses what he calls his parable of the comet on a parabolic trajectory, in order to obtain a definition of parables; later he justifies this strategy by stating: The language of parable contaminates, or perhaps it might be better to say inseminates, impregnates, its commentators. Such language forces them to speak parabolically, since it is by definition impossible to speak of what the parables name except parabolically" (61). 5 parables.

The alternative path entails a constant writing in and out of, and around the parable, pursuing one element and observing where it goes, what other elements it connects to, without trying to impose a direction; it involves having no rules or

principles that restrict the potential motion of the parable, bringing it in contact with other, completely alien texts, and observing their silent dialogue, leaving the text behind, then hitting it back again, tracing paths and maps that keep on talking and adding to the text from every possible perspective, so that one sinks deeper and deeper into parable, and finds herself, at a certain point, continuing the parable, rewriting it, rendering the open even more open, the malleable even more malleable.

Before discussing the actual dynamics of this process, however, it will be

necessary to mention a number of presently available definitions of parables, in

order to expose the fundamental difficulties encountered in their very definition.

II.

It is to be inferred that there exist countless dark bodies close to the sun - such as we shall never see. This is, between ourselves, a parable; and a moral psychologist reads the whole starry script only as a parable and sign-language by means of which many things can be kept secret. Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, aphorism 196

Nietzsche's suggestion, delivered in this private manner, as it were with a

hand covering his mouth, is that parables are agents or carriers of secrecy. And,

assuming that there is indeed a parable where he points at, his piece of writing too

may be expected to be somehow guarding over a secret. Nietzsche affirms the

possibility by inserting amidst his reflections the most typical expression to form a

pact of secrecy - entre nous. What is more, by establishing the pact all so ironically

between himself and an ever-growing multitude of his readers - for there is, more

often than not, a dear third party who will hear whatever was supposed to remain

strictly between ourselves - Nietzsche turns the whole world into a secret society to 6 which every individual is potentially a member. Yet no one, neither the active nor the potential members know exactly what the secret is. It should be thus, then, that even when thrown blatantly into the faces of an indiscriminate multitude, a parable manages to keep a secret.

"It is to be inferred that there exist countless dark bodies close to the sun - such as we shall never see." Their very proximity to the sun, rather than any inherent darkness, renders certain astral bodies invisible. And the blinding light of the sun allows us to infer, if not to know for sure, that those bodies exist. It is the sun that

darkens them by the excess of its own light, it is the sun that makes dark bodies

exist, and again the sun that renders our inference of their existence possible. They

are simultaneously made/concealed - the terms are interchangeable, for their

concealment is their very making - and revealed by the sun. These are bodies that

can be reached only with a sideway glance. The sun itself, a different character in

the starry script, has to be likewise approached indirectly, through a tempered

reflection, or perhaps an eclipse. Among all the other secrets it could bear, then,

Nietzsche's parable tells of man's eternal predicament of being able to cast solely

sideway glances. And the parable is one such dark body; it grants no direct access. It

slips out of every hand that attempts to grab it with a straightforward definition, one

that states decisively what is and what is not a parable.

Such is the case with one of the earlier scholars of biblical parables, C.H.

Dodd,4 who, following the tradition of anti-allegorical research on parables

established by Adolf Jlilicher5 at the turn of the twentieth century, declares once and

for all that parables are not allegories. He draws the line of differentiation as clearly

4 See Dodd's The Parables of the Kingdom (London: Nisbet & Co. Ltd, 1935). 5 Julicher, Die Gleichnisreden Jesu (2 vols. TQbingen: J.C.B. Mohr, vol. 1 1888,2d ed. 1899; vol. 2 1899,2d ed. 1910). 7 as possible by stating that parables are "the natural expression of a mind that sees truth in concrete pictures rather than conceives it in abstractions" (15-6); he then proceeds to formulate an even clearer definition: "At its simplest," he argues, "the parable is a metaphor or simile drawn from nature or common life, arresting the hearer by its vividness or strangeness, and leaving the mind in sufficient doubt about

its precise application to tease it into active thought" (16). His definition, in the light of his own differentiation of parable from allegory, falls into contradiction even before it is completed; for, if it is true that parables offer truth in concrete images,

rather than in abstractions, then it becomes difficult to imagine the exact purpose for

which the mind is teased into action. In other words, if a parable is supposed, by

definition, to cast the mind into doubt and confusion, so that it actively seeks the

"precise application," or the meaning, of the parable, this would suggest that the

parable's meaning, its "truth," was not readily available in the concrete pictures it

offered in the first place.

As an alternative to a direct yet quickly dissolving definition, one may

attempt to reach an understanding of what parables are by a number of comparisons,

as Dan O. Via does.6 In the light of his main argument, that biblical parables are

internally unified aesthetic objects to be interpreted as such, Via systematically sets

the parable against such close categories as the similitude or the example story J

stating, in each case, the parable's point of divergence. Thus, unlike in a similitude,

he suggests, "[i]n a parable we have, not the relating of a typical, recurring incident,

6 Via, The Parables: Their Literary and Existential Dimensions (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1967). 7 The division between similitude, example story and parable proper, which Via appears to be following (11), was originally proposed by JQIicher; Rudolph Bultmann later on added a fourth category, hence studying the stories of Jesus as: parables proper, allegories, example stories, and similitudes. Naturally, there is an on-going debate both as to the validity of the distinguishing features of each category, and as to whether certain parables, such as The Good Samaritan," properly belong to one category or another. See Mary Ann Tolbert, Perspectives on the Parables (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1979), p. 16. 8

but a freely invented story told with a series of verbs in a past tense" (11). He

maintains that the parable, contrary to the example story which lacks a certain

"indirect" element, offers "a story which is analogous to, which points to but is not

identical with, a situation or world of thought outside of the story" (II). Despite the

implications of this last statement, furthermore, Via also asserts that the parable is

not an allegory, although some parables - such as "The Prodigal Son," or "The

Workers in the Vineyard" - may possess some allegorical features; he draws, in this

respect, the rather peculiar conclusion that "those stories which do not need to be

taken as allegories ought not to be so taken" (16). Although none of these

comparisons fails to clarify, to a lesser or greater extent, the relatively small set of

biblical parables analyzed by Via, the quickest survey of other biblical and secular

parables proves that they can very well be, or act like, all those things they are said

by many scholars, including Via, not to be. It could be said, therefore, that Via's

insights become more valuable when he recognizes, just like Dodd, the presence of a

strange or "improbable" (11) element in what often presents itself as a realistic

narrative, or when he focuses on the function, rather than the definition, of parables:

"[T]he parables as aesthetic objects are able to engage non-referentially the focal

attention of the whole man upon a configuration of happening existence" (92). The

statement is important in that, as Via himself explains in a footnote, it makes man's

becoming, rather than a static existence, the subject-matter of parables.8

8 "I have adopted the term ['happening existence'] as a brief way of suggesting that in Jesus' parables, as well as in much other literature, human existence is not static but is always occurring - through dramatic encounters, the acquiring of new insights, and the gaining and losing of possibilities" (92). Based on this explanation, there should be no problems in substituting Via's term with the more concise and widely used alternative, "becoming." 9

Other scholars, such as Amos Wilder,9 prefer to first offer a range for parables, rather than a definition, emphasizing the link between the Gospel tradition of parables and their Judaic antecedents, the meshalim.10 This approach allows

Wilder to touch upon a number of possibilities as large and varied as to involve comparisons, metaphors, similitudes, riddles, mysteries, and illustrations; brief figurative phrases, such as "the salt of the earth," as well as narratives that may have a symbolic or exemplary character, such as "The Rich Fool," or "The Lost Sheep"

(80). And after considering all these varieties, Wilder chooses to pay special attention to those parables that have a revelatory character: those that bear, and simultaneously reveal, "the enigma of man" (84). He finds the parables of Jesus to

be those concise and realistic snap-shots of man's daily experience, presented in

narrative form, which possess, despite their realism, a certain "exceptional feature"

(82). Most importantly, according to Wilder, they are intended to suggest the

possibility of man's redemption in this present world, rather than another.

Mary Ann Tolbert observes in parables similar characteristics, such as

brevity, strict economy in character depiction and plot design, and a realism that

goes hand in hand with an element of extravagance.11 Her working definition of,

again biblical, parables is quite remarkable; not because of what it states, but rather

because it epitomizes, in what seems a ludicrous statement at first, the point of

exhaustion that is sooner or later reached in attempting to define parables: "a parable

9 Amos Wilder, Early Christian Rhetoric: The Language of the Gospel (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1964, rev. ed. 1971). 10 The fact that the term parable (parabole) has been used to describe so many different forms in the gospels, as well as in later Christian tradition, is to some degree a natural result of its relationship to the Hebrew term maSal. The types of sayings and stories in the Hebrew Scriptures which are collectively called meSattm vary widely in form, from short proverbs and oracles to longer riddles and fables. In just such a way the term parable appears in the New Testament tradition to cover a variety of forms" (Tolbert 17). 11 Perspectives on the Parables: An Approach to Multiple Interpretations (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1979). 10 is that short, unified story, embedded in a longer gospel narrative, that one chooses

(or the tradition has chosen) for various reasons to call a parable" (17). In view of this looming dead end, many scholars, including Tolbert herself, choose to explore what parables do, instead of what they are. Having thus left the problem of definition behind, Tolbert moves on to investigate what elements or what structure in a given parable causes it to elicit from various interpreters - including those who agree on basic definitions and methodological choices - some completely different, even contradictory interpretations.

Also Frank Kermode12 proves far less interested in formulating a definition of parables than in identifying the highly challenging problems of interpretation generated by parabolic literature: "If we want to think about narratives that mean more and other than they seem to say, and mean different things to different people

... we can hardly do better than consider parables" (23). He focuses on the riddle-like aspect of parables in his endeavour to understand the hermeneutic principles of that miracle by which certain narratives manage to yield an inexhaustible potential for meaning. He shares Paul Ricoeur's conviction that this potential is owed as much to the narrative itself, as to the dialogue established between the narrative and generations of interpreters, whereby ever-new discourses of interpretation link themselves to the discourse of the text (Kermode 44). Paul Ricoeur13 himself heavily stresses this productive aspect of the parable, when he describes it as "a mythos... which has the mimetic power of 'redescribing' human existence" (32); according to

Ricoeur, the parable is a fiction capable of such redescription because it projects its own version of human existence, or its own world, through a metaphorical process

12 Frank Kermode, The Genesis of Secrecy: On the Interpretation of Narrative (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1979). 13 Paul Ricoeur, "Biblical Hermeneutics." Semeia, 4 (1975): pp. 29-148. 11 applied to its narrative form; and it projects its world in such a way as to constantly stimulate a hermeneutic effort, the proper task of which, Ricoeur asserts, is to display the parable's world (34).

Finally, J. Hillis Miller states, in his overall endeavour to outline the

differences between biblical and secular parables, that "parable is a mode of

figurative language which is the indirect indication, at a distance, of something that

cannot be described directly, in literal language."14 After having thus brought up the

earlier-discussed possibility that the parable is conceived with a sideway glance,

Hillis Miller problematizes the kind of "likeness" involved in a parabolic narrative,

as opposed to a metaphor: "The paradox of parable," he suggests, "is that it is a

likeness that rests on a manifest unlikeness between what is given and what cannot

by any means be given directly" (58). However, this "paradox" fails to be a

distinguishing feature, for the modern theory of metaphor tells us that the lack of an

immediate resemblance between the vehicle and the tenor of any ordinary

metaphorical statement is the very feature to render that statement effective.15 It is

perhaps for this reason that Hillis Miller does not touch upon the problem of

(un)likeness in a later work,16 which focuses mainly on "The Minister's Black Veil"

by Nathaniel Hawthorne; yet he continues to insist on his assertion that it is

impossible to express by any other means whatever has been expressed in a parable,

that this impossibility is inscribed into the very definition of parables (63). He then

proceeds to modify this definition, tightening one element here, loosening another

14 In "Parable and Performative in the Gospels and in Modern Literature," p. 58. 13 Philip Wheelright argues, in his Metaphor and Reality (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1962; see pp. 70-91), that most metaphors combine two elements, epiphor and diaphor, which can be said to involve, respectively, a certain comparison, and a synthesis to be obtained by relating a number of comparisons to their immediate contexts. While the epiphor, according to Wheelwright, is based on a certain similarity between vehicle and tenor, such similarity is expected not to be obvious, given that obvious resemblances dramatically reduce the epiphor's "energy-tension." Hawthorne and History: Defacing It (Cambridge: Basil Blackwell, Inc., 1991). 12 there, in an attempt to keep up with the protean face of parabolic narratives. Thus the parable appears, first, as a realistic story with an undisclosed spiritual meaning

(62), and then, as "the material exemplification of an obscure conceptual meaning"

(118), as if it were the same thing to be the carrier, or the example, of a hidden meaning. And as a genre, he suggests, the parable shares a common characteristic with the apocalypse, in that both promise and constantly postpone a moment of revelation, although the parable tends to reflect more frequently the repercussions of its own inevitable misreading (72).

If it seems impossible to conclude, out of the foregoing takes on parables, whether they are examples or riddles, metaphors or allegories, or non-allegories with allegorical features, or realistic stories with some extravagant elements, or likenesses that dwell on extreme unlikenesses between what is told and what is otherwise unspeakable; if there come biblical or secular parables in mind that are surely less or more than, or altogether different from, what these definitions suggest; if the resulting landscape appears, to say the least, messy, then this survey can be said to have fulfilled its purpose. It should not be surprising to find confusion in the study of such a nomadic and evasive mode of discourse as parable, which requires from a scholar, to grant a reliable definition, nothing less than the ability to equally specialize in and conjoin such vast fields of research as hermeneutics, theory of metaphor, theory of allegory, narrative theory and theology, among many others.

Therefore, the present study offers to turn into an advantage the very inconclusiveness of the research on parable, by adopting a strategy of interpretation that will not make conclusions its immediate goal; underlying this decision is the assumption that conclusions are not necessarily the best moments to be offered by literary theory. 13

Youwant to catch this wolf, the old man said Maybe you want the skin so you can get some money. Maybe you can buy some boots or something like that. You can do that. But where is the wolf? The wolf is like the copo de nieve. Snowflake. Snowflake. You catch the snowflake but when you look in your handyoru dont have it no more. Maybe you see this dechado. But before you can see it it is gone. If you want to see it you have to see it on its own ground If you catch it you lose it. And where it goes there is no coming back from. Not even God can bring it back. The Crossing, Cormac McCarthy

III. In their work on Kafka, Deleuze and Guattari argue for the replacement

of the notion of interpretation, or the kind of interpretation that confines texts into

one straightjacket or another, with experimentation, as an alternative path to take.

Although in complete agreement with their objections, I prefer not to exclude the

term interpretation, not simply for convenience's sake, but also due to my conviction

that Deleuze and Guattari also interpret - which is perhaps why every once in a

while they lift their red-hands in the air and state: "We aren't even trying to interpret

..." (7). Clearly, it is the manner of interpretation that makes a difference. Deleuze

and Guattari counter the writing of Kafka "the machine-man," "the experimental-

man," with their own writing. Their writing is always far more than a disposable

commentary; it is a creative, highly productive writing that couples with Kafka's

writing-machine and, as it were, picks up the workings of that machine from where

they were left; the writing of their experimental/interpretive machine continues, in a

way, Kafka's writing, carrying it into horizons it has never touched before - and the

notion of rewriting entails the entirety of this procedure.

Rewriting, as employed herein, refers to all the possible critico-theoretical

activities that somehow augment the text under scrutiny, or deck it with new layers

of writing, instead of stripping away one or more aspects of the text for the sake of

validating another. 14

Contrary to what appearances may suggest, the idea of using rewriting as a

valid hermeneutic activity is actually quite ancient The Judaic tradition of midrash,

which has produced a great body of literature over the centuries, involves rewriting

to a considerable extent: "By midrash the interpreter, either by rewriting the story or explaining it in a more acceptable sense, bridges the gap between an original and a

modern audience" (Kermode x). Kermode draws attention to how large sections of

the Old Testament emerged out of the practice of midrash, and mentions the

speculations that even the Torah itself is a midrashic writing; if so, he remarks, the

Torah can be viewed as a "narrative interpretation of a narrative, a way of finding in

an existing narrative the potential for more narrative" (xi).

Whether the speculations about the Torah are true or not, Jesus' parable of

"The Sower" (in Mark: 4:3-8; Matthew: 13:3-8; Luke: 8:5-8; John: 4:36-7), which is

a commentary on a passage in Isaiah, constitutes a well-known and indisputable case

of countering a narrative with an interpretation written as a narrative, an interpretive

narrative within which parts of the original narrative have been rewritten in an

attempt to better understand those parts.17 And it seems that the evangelists simply

continued this tradition of rewriting from where Jesus himself had left it. As stated

by Tolbert, the evangelists had less interest in preserving the material they inherited

from the times of the historical Jesus, than in making this material address those

issues prevalent in their own times. Thus, "[t]he very writing of the gospels," she

17 Here is the passage in Isaiah (6:6-10) as quoted in Hillis Miller (1982: 63): Then flew one of the seraphims to me, having in his hand a burning coal which he had taken with tongs from the altar. And he touched my mouth, and said: "Behold, this has touched your lips; your guilt is taken away, and your sin forgiven." And I heard the voice of the Lord saying, "Whom shall I send, and who will go for us?" Then I said, "Here am 1! Send me." And he said, "Go, and say to this people: 'Hear and hear, but do not understand; see and see, but do not perceive.' Make the heart of this people fat, and their ears heavy, and shut their eyes; lest they see with their eyes, and hear with their ears, and understand with their hearts, and turn and be healed." 15 observes, "was an exercise in hermeneutics" (62), and the said exercise included the rewriting of the parables, either by actually refashioning them, or by placing them intact in new contexts so that they would emit a different range of meanings more suitable to the needs of the evangelists. Although without focusing on rewriting in particular, Tolbert also suggests that the modern scholar of parables imitate the evangelists' practice, and attempt to see how the parables in the Gospels could relate to the contemporary world, by surrounding them with new contexts.

Furthermore, in addition to biblical parables that somehow rewrite older texts while commenting on them, there are also countless pieces of secular parabolic writing, which are actually rewritings of older texts, even of older parables.

"The Minister's Black Veil," for one, rewrites the life and deeds of a historical

Reverend Moody, who becomes Reverend Hooper in Hawthorne's parable. The

ninth chapter in Melville's Moby-Dick presents a sermon by Father Mapple, in

which the Book of Jonah is rewritten. "The Jolly Corner" by Henry James rewrites

and interlaces two biblical parables, the Prodigal Son, and the Ten Maidens. And

Kafka, last but not the least, repeatedly rewrites the stories of such figures as

Abraham, Prometheus, Odysseus, Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, among others.

Given the way even this present survey about rewriting has quickly shifted

from commentaries to primary texts, one crucial point to emphasize is that the

practice of rewriting can blur - and, as it appears, even eliminate - the distinction

between a primary sacred/secular text, and its interpretation. Perhaps the answer to

the riddle of becoming parable can be sought here. Absorbing, thanks to rewriting,

more and more of that which it interprets, the interpretation can, sometimes, become

kin to what it tries to illuminate. 16

Even the very first paragraph of this introduction attempts to constitute, in its modest way, a useful practice of rewriting; to recall, at the beginning I took the

"betting man" out of Kafka's parable and, instead of just commenting on what

Kafka - and others - had written about him, I wrote more, adding to his attitude, his bodily posture, and his frame of mind, so to turn Kafka's parabolic character into my own conceptual persona, and place my discourse, thanks to that link, alongside that of Kafka. This attempt is, obviously, an echo of the way parables themselves are written; coming from the ancient Greek itapafioXr], the word "parable" suggests "a

placing side by side" (OED). And the present study engages in more of such

"parabolic" activities, which may include, but are not limited to: having the main

text under scrutiny get criss-crossed by other texts that silently echo, or add to its

implications; writing with foreshadowings and afterglows of whatever comes out of

this web of texts; picking random motives from the studied text and rewriting that

text following the track of such motives; and repeating a text exactly as it is, without

adding a word to it, but letting it breathe out, so to speak, new aromas, by virtue of

placing it in a new context, or just laying it parallel to a different text.

... So here I draw a white straight line on the floor, and ask if it could be made shorter without ever being touched I wait for an answer from the crowd, and surrounded by their embarassed silence, I draw a second line parallel to the first. I draw it longer than the first... an Indian tale, rewritten.

IV. Drawing the limits of a field of investigation, when tackling with

parables, proves to be rather problematic, since there really is no history of secular

or literary parables that has readily been traced and opened to debate. There are,

instead, many disparate appearances made by a nomadic mode wandering among

genres, authors and periods, and not even a rough agreement exists among critics as

to what could be approached as a parable - which leads many to limit their 17 discussion of secular parables to Kafka alone. In this respect "The Minister's Black

Veil" constitutes a telling case; it alone, among all the short stories written by

Hawthorne, has been liberally analysed as a parable, rather than an allegory or

anything else, simply because the author has been gracious enough to call it a

parable, in a subtitle. Therefore, rather than undertaking the infinite task of tracing

the history of a mode that can be and indeed has been employed universally, this

study will focus on exploring the inner workings of the mode as employed in the

works of a number of twentieth-century authors, not without occasional references

to earlier figures.

Before proceeding with a sample reading which will help formulating the

first principles of a tentative theory of the secular parabolic mode, however, a

number of other notions need to be discussed: namely, the non-rhetorical nature of

the parabolic mode, the parabolic and the non-parabolic that coexist in parabolic

writing, and, finally, the counter-parabolic tradition set against which, the parabolic

mode can be better approached.

The parabolic mode cannot be understood within a rhetorical tradition, which

makes a logical distinction between literal and figurative language. It descends from

a Judaic tradition of textual composition and interpretation, which, predating

rhetoric, distinguishes rather between light and dark sayings. The critic Gerald L.

Bruns, in his essay on "Midrash and Allegory,"18 explains how the term

"figurative," as employed by Philo of Alexandria, derives from the Greek trepein, to

turn, which means not the transformation of one thing into another, as it happens in

the transferrence of a meaning from one level of language to another, but rather the

18 See "Midrash and Allegory: The Beginnings of Scriptural Interpretation," in The Literary Guide to the Bible (Eds. Robert Alter and Frank Kermode. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1987) pp. 637-8. 18 turning around, or the rotation of something. "[W]hen confronted with a dark saying," Brans remarks, "you can make it plain by turning it toward you, because the light it sheds is on its nether side" (638); he adds, however, that in most cases what needs such a turning is not the saying itself, but the interpreter, who is not in the right position to receive the light.

The turning of the interpreter, which is not detachable from the turns taken

by the parabolic text itself, is neither a conversion nor quite an initiation; although

the parabolic mode flirts consistently with secrecy, which naturally entails a certain

initiation, what the interpreter is initiated into is not the secret itself, but only a

becoming. The parabolic text does not convert the interpreter into someone else,

because what is parabolic itself, being pure becoming, does not exhaust its course,

becoming something else.

This should not, however, suggest that the parabolic text, or the becoming

that the interpreter is initiated into, consists solely of what is parabolic. Veiy often,

what is parabolic runs parallel to the non-parabolic, just as it is formulated in

Kafka's "On Parables," where parable runs alongside reality. Rather than relying

solely on the motion of what goes beyond, the parable thrives on a bifurcation of,

and a subsequent tension between, the parabolic and the non-parabolic, which

extend in two discernible lines. This tension too, then, is to be explored alongside

the tension between the parable's secrecy and its promise of revelation.

In Henry James' "The Figure in the Carpet,"19 the novelist Hugh Vereker

presents, as a gift to the narrator, his secret that there exists an as yet undetected

"general intention" in his works. It is exquisite and very palpable, regulating every

19 In Eight Tales from the Major Phase: In the Cage & Others (Ed. Morton Dauwen Zabel. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1958), pp. 134-173. 19 line Vereker writes; it is a secret against itself, passing unnoticed not because it is hidden, but due to the incurable vulgarity and blindness of the age. This gift divides the characters in the story, and the mode of language in which those characters dwell, with an insurmountable chasm. Those who are not predisposed to receive the secret, that is, those who have ears yet do not hear, do not receive the secret. This is the case of the narrator himself, who later on drags Drayton Deane into his abyss of deprivation, as a form of petty revenge. He is ironically aware of his pettiness, which, he knows, will only increase his unworthiness to receive the secret. As argued by Paul de Man in "The Rhetoric of Temporality,"20 his ironic self does not redeem his petty self, so that his entire story unfolds in a spasmodic non-parabolic line. This line is spasmodic because every word he utters in time is traversed, like a hiccup, by an atemporal ironic awareness of his fall from grace; and it is non- paraboiic, because every thought, sentiment and motivation he presents is fully articulated and illuminated, following in the wake of Auerbach in "Odysseus's

Scar."21

Those few who do receive the secret because of their readily "artistic temperament," which renders them suitable vessels, move in a completely different direction, after a common start. Just like the narrator, George Corvick too tries at first to hunt the secret, and he too fails. It is only when he attains the desired level of emptiness that the secret pounces upon him instead. This is highly reminiscent of what Walter Benjamin discusses in The Storyteller,22 as to how the kernel of a story is received by the listener without any analysis and explanation, in sheer self-

20 In Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1971) pp. 216-218. 21 In Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature (Trans. Willard Trask. Garden City, New York: Doubleday Anchor Books, 1953) p. 19. 22 See "The Storyteller: Observations on the Works ofNikolai Leskov," in Selected Writings, Vol. 3, p. 149. 20 forgetfulness, and how that listener eventually repeats the story, becoming a storyteller himself. The same thing happens to Corvick; once possessed by the kernel of Vereker's secret, he does not, cannot, explain it in a letter, as he is expected to do. He cannot turn the secret into a piece of information; the only thing he can do is to create a "supreme literary portrait," "a kind of critical Van Dyke or

Velasquez" that will trace every tiny motif in Vereker's great design. That is to say, he can only reproduce the secret, repeat it, rewrite it in critical form, like a

Borgesian map that is capable of showing accurately every detail of a land, because it is just as large as that land. Yet, he moves even farther than that. While it is inevitable for those who receive the secret to become secretive, both Corvick and

Gwendolen become an enigma themselves; unlike the narrator who has nothing but words, they cease first to speak, and then to exist in the narrator's reality. It is due to the insufficiency of reason to account for their actions, due to the darkness into which they vanish, that the line they follow can be called parabolic.

Finally, by the term counter-parabolic I refer to all those texts in which the becoming of a secret is brought to its conclusion, where a secret turns, ultimately, into an explanation. This is the case of the mystery surrounding the whereabouts of the letter stolen from a certain royal lady by the Minister D, in Poe's "The Purloined

Letter."23 In the end, Auguste Dupin is capable of delivering a complete explanation of where D-- had hidden it with what kind of logic, and how Dupin himself obtained it without even letting D- realize his loss. Naturally, Poe has also produced many truly parabolic pieces such as The Masque of the Red Death, or The Facts in the

Case ofM. Valdemar,74 which provide no such closure. What one finds in these

23 In Forty-Two Tales (London: Octopus Books Limited, 1979), pp. 161-179. 24 24 In Forty-Two Tales, respectively pp. 342-349, and 275-285. 21 stories, instead, is the coexistence of two separate series, two sets of lines: one extending in the non-parabolic direction of facts, symptoms, and scientific

principles, and the other presenting a mask, which, once removed, becomes even

more impenetrable, and a tongue, which speaks, without touching the lips, from out

of the cave of a dead body.

I call it evil and misanthropic, all this teaching about the one and the perfect and the unmoved and the sufficient and the intransitory. All that is intransitory - that is but an image! And the poets lie too much. But the best images and parables should speak of time and becoming: they should be a eulogy and a justification of all transitoriness. "On the Blissful Islands," Thus Spake Zarathustra, Nietzsche

V. When, on a fine April Fool's Day aboard the Mississippi steamer

Fidele, the man in gray eagerly offers to the gentleman with gold sleeve-buttons a

description of his "Protean easy-chair for the invalid," the reader of Melville's The

Confidence-Man has already grown restless enough with regards to the identity and

the motivations of the Confidence-Man as to suspect an allusion to his

incomprehensible nature in the chair:

My Protean easy-chair is a chair so all over bejointed, behinged, and bepadded, everyway so elastic, springy, and docile to the airiest touch, that in some one of its endlessly-changeable accommodations of back, seat, footboard, and arms, the most restless body, the body most racked, nay, I had almost added the most tormented conscience must, somehow and somewhere, find rest.23

The Confidence-Man is the speaker himself, the man in gray, who is busy, in this

occasion, receiving from out of the wealthy gentleman's pocket as many crisp bank­

notes as are won by his "not unsilvery" tongue (53). Having already disguised

himself as the deaf and dumb stranger in cream-colours, the crippled Black Guinea,

and John Ringman, that is, the man with the weed, he is yet to appear as Mr.

Truman, i.e. the agent for the Black Rapids Coal Company, the herb doctor, the

Philosophical Intelligence Officer, and, finally, Frank Goodman, or the

23 The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade (1857. Ed. Stephen Matterson. London: Penguin Books, 1990), p. 49. 22

Cosmopolitan. It becomes evident, halfway through this silent masquerade, that the man is far less interested in obtaining money from the naTve than in perfecting his ineffable art, and his dialogues with various passengers, during which he displays unfaltering command of commercial, theological and philosophical registers, are what the entire book consists of.

Although without a concrete counterpart exhibited in the World's Fair in

London, the chair is a linguistic creation of the Confidence-Man, one which mirrors its creator as well as the very language within which that creator exists. As something capable of assuming "endlessly-changeable" forms, which is therefore something devoid of form, the chair yields, first and foremost, a suggestive image of the man who can accommodate any interlocutor with the versatility of his conversation, and who can assume any identity, thus gradually effacing the possibility of an original identity hidden beneath endless disguise.26 While this

association is evident enough, the chair attains its true charm when its description is

applied not simply to the protagonist, but rather to the overall language of The

Confidence-Man: for the language employed in the said passage, and everywhere

else in the book, is just as bejointed with prefixes and piles of adjectives, just as

springy and unsettling with frequent double, even triple negatives,27 just as protean

as the chair itself, and the man himself. Just like the Protean easy-chair of the man in

gray, the language of The Confidence-Man deceitfully invites the reader to somehow

26 To be more precise about this point, it is true that the Confidence-Man goes through rapid transformations in the first half of the book, while he settles into the characater of Frank Goodman in the second, hence rendering the number of his appearances far less than "endless;" yet, it should not be forgotten that Frank Goodman is a Cosmopolitan, someone composed of as many varied and bizarre elements as are echoed by his extravagant costume, which combines "a High-land plaid, Emir's robe and French blouse," complete with an Indian belt and aNuremberg pipe (158-9). 27 When, for instance, the misanthropist Missourian compares the Cosmopolitan to the Toucan fowl on account of his dress, the narrator adds that "[t]his ungentle mention of the Toucan was not improbably suggested by the parti-hued, and rather plumagy aspect of the stranger" (158; emphases mine). 23 find rest in its labyrinthine form, rather than gram it itself. The mind tormented by

Melville's persistent manipulation of ambiguity, inconsistency and irrationality is

invited to pull and push all the moving pieces of the book into any order, so as to somehow find some certainty, some clarity, a soothing solution to at least some of

the riddles posed. And rest is precisely the one thing that one cannot hope to find in this language, or aboard this steamer which is always full of strangers, like a fountain "ever overflowing with strange waters, but never with the same strange

particles in every part" (13).

That the Confidence-Man is not too preoccupied with financial gain is

suggested in several occasions: when he bothers to masterfully cheat the barber,

William Cream, out of the negligible price of one shave, or when the herb doctor

gives away some money rather than take it, but perhaps most clearly when he

becomes the subject of the misanthropist Missourian's confused contemplation:

"Was the man a trickster, it must be more for the love than the lucre. Two or three

dirty dollars the motive to so many nice wiles?" (157). Those wiles seem rather to be

inspired by a desire, in the Confidence-Man, to be the cause of any change, any sort

of turning, in the people he interacts with. "[T]he difference between this man and

that man is not so great as the difference between what the same man may be to-day

and what he may be in days to come" (262). It does not matter whether the change is

of great or modest dimensions, or whether it moves in one or another direction; any

transformation in the behavioral pattern seems to satisfy the Confidence-Man: in the

case of the barber, despite all his caution in negotiating as to how and under which

circumstances to remove the sign NO TRUST from his shop, "still the fact

remained, that he engaged to trust men, a thing he had before said he would not do

..." (276). 24

It would not be too far-fetched to suppose, then, that such a character in untiring becoming finds his pleasure in igniting a similar movement in his fellow human beings. His mutations are as strikingly sharp as fluid: every assumed personality, however complete with dress, speech, personal history and worldview, is always already in a state of becoming whoever will come on stage next: so does the man with the weed, having concluded his transaction with the merchant, Mr.

Roberts, manifest an unexpected softness, tinged with melancholy, which makes

him seem "almost transformed into another being" (33), someone who will be

known, in fact, as the man in gray.

In a way, the Confidence-Man is devoid of an outside, a face, a relatively

stable surface whereby he could be recognized as one, and no other, man; instead of

a face, he presents a fleeting screen that could be traversed by any face. He does not

seem to have an inside either; never does the book provide the vaguest hint at his

true self underneath the screen; it rather affirms, in one occasion, the possibility that

there is no such thing. This is the moment when the Cosmopolitan, having had

enough with the philosophy of Mark Winsome, steps out of the fictitious character

that he has assumed in order to exchange a hypothetical dialogue with Winsome's

disciple Egbert, and impatiently excuses himself from his company, "leaving his

companion at a loss to determine where exactly the fictitious character had been

dropped, and the real one, if any, resumed" (264; emphasis mine). Then, either it is

true that the Confidence-Man is both faceless28 and selfless, or he possesses the sort

of identity that cannot be known - and there is more to say about Melville's

28 In this respect, Melville's Confidence-Man is comparable to Hawthorne's Reverend Hooper. When Mr. Hooper appears in public for the first time with a piece of black crape covering his face, his parishoners' immediate reaction is to doubt whether his face still exists, although his mouth and chin remain visible: "'I can't really feel as if good Mr. Hooper's face was behind that piece of crape,' said the sexton" (184). 25 treatment of those things that are within, and those that are beyond, human knowledge.

The Confidence-Man is on the move aboard a steamer, traveling on an ever-flowing river.Time, transitoriness, movement and becoming without end are emphasized to such an extent that the last sentence of the book does the farthest thing from bringing it to a conclusion: "Something further may follow of this

Masquerade" (298). From out of the masquerade, that is, out of the Confidence-

Man's becoming and collision with other characters, there emerges a complex web

of stories that bursts open the book's scope both in space and time, in every

direction.

Excuse me, my dear friend, but it strikes me that in going into the philosophy of the subject, you go somewhat out of your depth.' 'So said the incautious wader-out to the ocean; but the ocean replied: "It is just the other way, my wet friend," and drowned him.' 'That, Charlie, is a fable about as unjust to the ocean, as some of Aesop's are to the animals...' (240)

It is rather problematic, for reasons discussed earlier, to determine which of these

stories could be called parables proper, rather than anything else. The quickest way

of overcoming this difficulty would be that of applying to the narratives of The

Confidence-Man the two scales proposed by Frank Kermode (24) in his attempt to

identify which sorts of stories could fall into the parabolic range: The scale of

narrativity, which is related to length and narrative complexity, and that of opacity,

which measures where a given story stands between a simple example and an

unsolvable enigma. The use of these flexible scales, instead of a definition or

classification, allows Kermode to treat as parabolic a large variety of sayings and

stories.

Following the same method, one finds in The Confidence-Man charming

little riddles, such as the one told by Black Guinea in response to a gentleman who 26 asks where he sleeps at nights in St Louis: "On der floor of der good baker's oven, sar" he says (16), then revealing playfully that the merciful baker is nothing but the sun. The book presents several brief example stories, as the one told when suspicion arises among a number of passengers that Black Guinea may be a white impostor.

The story is about a man in Arkansas, who, having been found guilty of murder by an official, yet possibly unjust, court, is rescued by the people for another trial;

"they, as it turned out, found him even guiltier than the court had done, and forthwith proceeded to execution; so that the gallows presented the truly warning spectacle of a man hanged by his friends" (18). However, none of these stories,

being true to the parabolic mode, fails to problematize their own examplarity:

knowing that there should be a link between Black Guinea and the man in Arkansas,

so as to justify the reference to his case, knowing also that Black Guinea is indeed a

white confidence man cheating the charitable out of their alms, the reader finds in

this story of "a man hanged by his friends" far more of a puzzle than an explanatory

example. Similarly, when considered in its context, Egbert's, that is, the hypothetical

Charlie's simple fable about the ocean and the incautious wader relates, without his

knowledge, more to his own situation in conversing with Frank Goodman, i.e. the

Confidence-Man in disguise, than to any difficulties, on Frank's part, to understand

Egbert's discourse. The fable, as it were, cuts loose from its teller and repeats itself

on a separate, ironic level, suggesting that Egbert himself should be compared to the

fool who swims in waters unfathomable: "It is just the other way around, my wet

friend."

In addition to the well-known and longer stories about Charlemont, the

Gentleman-Madman (in Chapter 34), and China Aster (in Ch. 40), there are also

stories told and received as parables, such as that of "the worthy old woman of 27

Goshen" (161-2); stories that respond, that are laid parallel to, other stories told in a dialogue, as between the young clergyman and the cynical man with the wooden leg

(39); and finally, passages that echo and sometimes parody biblical parables: as when the man with the wooden leg, who clearly sees through Black Guinea's disguise, is called a "Canada thistle" by the charitable Methodist, before being violently shaken by the same.29

All these stories are the dynamic components of a great parabolic machine at work; and the product of the machine does not simply consist of establishing a dialogue among various stories at different levels in an attempt to make some of them more accessible; in fact, the book repeatedly criticizes, rejects, even ridicules basic, explanatory analogy. The Confidence-Man as Frank Goodman, for one, starkly refuses the application of China Aster's tragic case to his own, after having patiently listened to Egbert's narration: "... neither am I China Aster, nor do I stand in his position" (263). In another occasion, while serenely conversing with the inferior steamer operator Charlie Noble, he lays bare the lack of imagination involved in expecting a hangman, such as Jack Ketch, to become a butcher, were he suddenly thrown out of his current employment: "... it would hardly be suitable to the dignity of our nature, that an individual, once employed in attending the last hours of human unfortunates, should, that office being extinct, transfer himself to the business of attending the last hours of the unfortunate cattle" (210); he proves

29 "Look you," speaks disdainfully the man with the wooden leg (21-2): "I have been called a Canada thistle. Very good. And a seedy one: still better. And the seedy Canada thistle has been pretty well shaken among ye; best of all. Dare say some seed has been shaken out; and won't it spring though? And when it does spring, do you cut down the young thistles, and won't they spring the more? It's encouraging and coaxing 'em. Now, when with my thistles your farms shall be well stocked, why then - you may abandon 'em!" "What does all that mean, now? asked the country merchant, staring.'' 28 how narrow and incomplete this parallel is by suggesting that a man of Ketch's occupation could as well turn to be an excellent valet, matchless in "giving a

finishing tie to a gentleman's cravat" (210).

Rather than explanations and clarifications by way of analogy, then, the

machine generates all sorts of entrances into and exits from the readable scope of the

book, in the form of doubts and inconsistencies, which keep all the components in

motion. In Chapter 14, Melville brackets the masquerade on Fidele in order to

reflect upon the public's expectations about consistency in a fictional character's

thoughts and actions. He not only concludes that, if a character appears to be

inconsistent, this should be attributed to what is "past finding out" in human nature,

rather than to a lack of skill or knowledge on the author's part (85); he also

highlights his own characters' inconsistencies. While the case of the Confidence-

Man is obvious enough, minor characters such as William Cream also puzzle the

reader with unpredictable behavior. There is no way of understanding, for instance,

for what reason the barber, who repeats twice, and quite agressively, that Frank's

"sort of talk is not in his line" (266; 269), suddenly becomes a sociable man; one

who is capable both of following that sort of talk, and of responding to it with equal

sophistication.

And as to doubts, Melville paints a highly complex landscape. His

distinction between what is within and what is beyond human knowledge becomes,

once again, explicit, when he has the old gentleman, with whom the Cosmopolitan

has a final conversation in the book, state that: "'there are doubts, sir, which, if man

have them, it is not man that can solve them'" (286). Accordingly there are, in The

Confidence-Man, all sorts of doubtful situations aroused by diverse types of secrecy;

namely, those that involve the unknown, which at least presents the possibility of 29 being known, and those that play around the enigmatic, which cannot ever be known.

Examples to the first type of secrecy are abundant: when Mr. Roberts drops his business card on the deck while giving a half-dollar to Black Guinea out of his pocket, Black Guinea moves forward and, as if by accident, covers the card with his stump (23). Although no explanations are provided to his action at that moment or later on, it soon becomes clear that the card will be used by the Confidence-Man,

in his next disguise as John Ringman, to fake an acquaintance with the same Mr.

Roberts, this being a rather common confidence trick.

The tenacious, almost devilish sort of worldly wisdom displayed by the

character of the ragged young peddler, on the other hand, cannot be so easily

accounted for. After skillfully selling a "traveller's patent lock" to the old

gentleman, this boy turns to the Cosmopolitan with the same purpose; and his

response to the Cosmopolitan's polite refusal - 'Excuse me, my fine fellow, but I

never use such blacksmiths' things' - proves that he, among all the learned,

experienced and suspicious men aboard, recognizes the Confidence-Man: '"Those

who give the blacksmith most work seldom do,' said the boy tipping him a wink

expressive of a degree of indefinite knowingness, not uninteresting to consider in

one of his years" (291). Although the secret of this wisdom is not disclosed in the

book itself, such secrecy at least does not defy reason; it is possible to suppose, for

instance, that the boy might have several times encountered the Confidence-Man at

work aboard various steamers, or might have chanced upon him while slipping out

of one disguise, or else, might have talked to one or more of his victims.

No such reasonings are tenable, however, in the case of the disembodied

voice that thrice comes from beyond a curtained berth, as if tearing the book's fabric 30 of rational space and time, and thrice exposes the Confidence-Man; in fact, while the

Confidence-Man has only been entertained by the sharpness of the boy, he shows all signs of fear and confusion when his dealings with the old gentleman are interrupted by the enigmatic voice.30

The voice interferes with the Cosmopolitan's speech for the first time when he addresses the old man with: "'And so you have good news there, sir - the very best of good news.' 'Too good to be true,' here came from one of the curtained berths. 'Hark!' said the cosmopolitan. 'Some one talks in his sleep'" (285). The second interruption occurs while the Cosmopolitan is reading aloud a biblical passage to the old man: "'With much communication he will tempt thee; he will smile upon thee, and speak thee fair... When thou hearest these things, awake in thy sleep.' 'Who's that describing the confidence-man?' here came from the berth again.

'Awake in his sleep, sure enough, ain't he?' said the cosmopolitan, again looking off

in surprise. 'Same voice as before, ain't it? Strange sort of dreamy man, that. Which

is his berth, pray?"' (286-7; emphases mine). And the third interruption takes place

when the old man explains to the Cosmopolitan that what he has just read aloud cannot be too reliable, given that it is apocrypha: "'What's that about the

Apocalypse? here a third time came from the berth. 'He's seeing visions now, ain't

he?' said the cosmopolitan" (287). The vision presented here is indeed that of an

imminent Apocalypse, a revelation, a complete unmasking of the Confidence-Man

30 In a similar vein, what James presents in "The Figure in the Carpet" as Vereker's "inner meaning" (151) is the kind of secret which appears, at first sight, to be simply unknown, and which turns, gradually, into a haunting enigma that will never be known. And speaking of turning, this constitutes the other central notion that links James' story to Melville's work: in the former, the secret offered by Vereker as a gift to the other characters forces them to take a turn in the course of their lives, one way or another; likewise in the latter text we find a principal character, the Confidence-Man, who seeks to trick people, not for the sake of financial gain, but rather to make them turn in a new direction. Both of these examples bear echoes from Gerald L. Brims' earlier-mentioned reference to parables as dark sayings, which need to be turned themselves, while at the same time eliciting a turning from the interpreter herself. Here as well as in the two examples invoked, turning has a physical aspect, and more shall be said in the following chapters about turning within this frame. 31 that will occur neither in the book, nor within the reader's reasoning, but the coming of which is nonetheless promised. Only that, this is all of course within the book.

The vision, the promise, the beyond are all inside the book as parts of the parabolic

machine, which operates without conclusions, in the tensile conjunction of an

apocalyptic promise, and a haunting agglomerate of secrecy, which is the obverse of

the promise, and its perpetual frustration.

... in reading Shakespeare in my closet, struck by some passage, I have laid down the volume, and said: "This Shakespeare is a queer man. " At times seeming irresponsible, he does not always seem reliable. There appears to be a certain - what shall I call it? - hidden sun, say about him, at once enlightening and mystifying. The Confidence-Man, Melville

VI. The first of the following chapters takes issue with Gravity's Rainbow by

Thomas Pynchon, exposing the substantial role played by parables and the parabolic

mode at the thematic and structural levels of the book, in their intimate connection

with what has been the usual recipient of critical attention, the geometric parabola;

based on the resulting insights, the chapter draws a crucial distinction between an

arrested institutional parable and an other parable, which reappears in subsequent

chapters under different names, deriving from other or similar tensions.

Furthermore, a theoretical structure is formulated specifically for the embedded

parable, based on the notion of the nth line, while other key notions such as the gift,

paths of escape and becoming invisible, also make their first appearance.

The next chapter on Franz Kafka focuses on the operations of another, pre-

textual structure that manifests when the parable is tackled in isolation - although the

two structures are considered to be inseparable, one enveloping the other. Within

this frame, the chapter explores the various possibilities and implications of

rewriting, although rewriting bears equal weight in another discussion organically

linked to the former. This would be the problem of time and the potential solution of 32 procrastination, a principal instrument of which is again detected in the parabolic mode.

Another issue that emerges from the close readings of Kafka's work, that of humor, constitutes the principal theme of the third chapter on Jorge Luis Borges, alongside the duo of rewriting and repetition. Starting with the toils of Borges' famous fictional author Pierre Menard, this chapter dwells on the tensions inherent to humor, on the paradox of a new sameness, and on the corollary problems of resemblance.

The following chapter on Le citta invisibili (Invisible Cities) by Italo Calvino travels a long span, covering the contrasting modes of description and narration, and the notion of time under the rule of each, as well as phantasms and the art of memory, until it reaches the possibility that parables constitute a peculiar gift, which is subject to a specific economy of exchange, and which seeks to abandon the very vehicle that contains it while being exchanged.

The fifth chapter juxtaposes the indirect vision of Calvino with the distorted and split vision of Flannery O'Connor, as a starting point for a discussion of the sacred as understood by the latter, and the manners in which the parabolic mode proves capable of, not only approaching, but also bearing sacrality. Moreover, another treatment of humor as a paradoxical force takes place in this chapter, within the general frame of the equivocity that infiltrates O'Connor's writings at multiple levels; this is followed by a number of reflections on O'Connor's use of the formula as if..., which leads to a more comprehensive assessment of the parabolic mode, with examples drawn from modern secular pieces as well as the parables of Jesus.

The authors selected for the purposes of the present study constitute centers around which specific aspects and elements of the parabolic mode tend to gravitate, 33 although all the other elements are also invariably, though to a smaller extent, present. Accordingly, regardless of the ordinary reading sequence to which they are subject, regardless also of the fact that certain themes, appearing in seed-form in one chapter, pass into and unfold fully in the next, these chapters are not intended to follow one another sequentially, in the gradual development of one single argument,

but rather to be placed side by side in a multitude of reflections. Such a placement

does not even imply any exact parallels running in between the chapters; instead,

there simply is a number of themes and motifs, such as unfolding, or lightness, along

which the lines of the chapters variously converge and resonate. Resonance is, in

fact, the term that would best define the relationship that has been aimed for these

chapters. 34

Thomas Pynchon: Parable and Parabola in Gravity's Rainbow

I. At the first reading of Gravity's Rainbow (hereafter GR), the brief opening paragraph can be only obscure to the reader: "A screaming comes across the sky. It has happened before, but there is nothing to compare it to now" (3). One cannot know who or what emits such screaming under what circumstances. That it has happened before, and is somehow persisting now, is about all one could hope to gather at this time; it cannot even be established with any certainty whether the subject pronoun "it" refers to the "screaming" itself or to some other event to which the screaming is merely an accompaniment.

Only after reading into the novel is it possible to relate the screaming to the sound of the German V-2 rocket, which, being supersonic, is heard coming through the sky when it has already hit the target. Only then one could notice, furthermore, how insistently Rilke's Duino Elegies are invoked throughout the book; how it is strewn with images of angels, terrifying or otherwise, emanating from the faces of women, clouds, windmills and, most particularly, the rocket itself, which is referred to as a "bright angel of death" (760)1. And finally, only the committed reader would pick up the Elegies themselves to discover the opening lines of the first one: "Who, if I screamed, among the hierarchy of angels / would hear me?"2 Some understanding of GR's first paragraph, hence, arises only when one returns to it.

Once again, then, "[a] screaming comes across the sky." Unlike in the

Elegies, here it is not man but the "angel," that is, the rocket, which is screaming;

1 For a detailed analysis of GR's allusions to the Elegies, see Hohmann, Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow (New York: Peter Lang, 1986). 2 "Wer, wenn ich schriee, hflrte mich denn aus der Engel / Ordnungen?" Rainer Maria Rilke, "The First Elegy," Duino Elegies (Trans. C. F. Maclntyre. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1961, lines 1-2). 35

being able to hear it scream indicates that men afar are dead, for it has blasted there already: "It has happened before " In other words, the book opens with the screech of a trumpet warning about a destruction that has taken place prior to the

warning, thus foreshadowing the pathos of the preterite to crowd all the coming

pages. It is hopelessly, impossibly late to be saved - as declared in the fourth brief

sentence of the novel - and the human screams that could have been compared to

that of the rocket have now ceased, so that.. there is nothing to compare it to

now." However, despite the room it provides for some such speculations, a return to

GR's initial paragraph still does not result in an ample disclosure of its deferred

meaning. Much more remains to be said, to be specific, about the use of the present

participle "screaming" as a noun, instead of the available noun form itself, which

would have been the grammatically more appropriate choice. Indeed, why must a

"screanw'ng" come across the sky, rather than a simple "scream"?

One suspects some considerable deliberation, on Pynchon's part, to have

made such an odd choice in writing the very first sentence of his novel. Incidentally,

this opening moment following the blast of a V-2 constitutes, in the pages soon to

follow, the focus of the fearful musings of none other than Tyrone Slothrop, one of

the novel's most prominent characters - no matter how sketchy characterization in

GR tends to be. In fact, the young American lieutenant is introduced to the reader

precisely when he is being terrified by the first V-2 attacks over London. Having

survived all the previous buzzbombs (the V-ls), which at least grant the possibility

of escape, some "10 seconds to get under something" (21), he now shivers

uncontrollably at the thought of a sudden and unforeseeable death brought by the V-

2:"... a Word, spoken with no warning into your ear, and then silence forever"

(25). It is the cluelessness of this death that frightens him the most; to be so cruelly 36 stripped of time to prepare, time to invoke a warm memory or formulate a redeeming thought, before being dumped into nothingness: .. it could happen any time, the next second, right, just suddenly ... shit... just zero, just nothing ... and..."

(25).3

And yet, even Slothrop's own reflection falls short of hitting that zero with a full stop, finishing instead with an "and" followed by an ellipsis. In fact, there is an abundance of such ellipses, spacing words and /'^concluding sentences, in the entirety of GR; the book ends, one should emphasize, without a full stop, its very last sentence being "Now everybody-" (760). Molly Hite, in her Ideas of Order in the Novels of Thomas Pynchon, interprets this lack of a final period as an invitation

for the reader to somehow not stop there; and the overall stylistic pattern, as one of

the many indications of "Pynchon's commitment to incompleteness" (138). "[T]he

ellipses," she remarks, "imply that an action, description, or train of thought simply

goes on, further than the narrative can or will follow. In this way the novel presents

itself as a collection of intricately interrelated but open-ended sections" (138).

Accordingly, to nullify Slothrop's terror of "just nothing," one has only to recall all

the great and small things in GR, past and present, that indeed decline, diminish,

even die, but never quite hit the rock-bottom of nothingness: things such as Walter

Rathenau's spirit speaking from beyond death about "structures favoring death"

(167), or far less significant things, such as the wealth of Slothrop's Puritan

ancestors melting away "in long rallentando, in infinite series just perceptibly, term

by term, dying... but never quite to the zero..." (28). Just as the Orphic dispersal of

Slothrop's self occurs without a properly tragic end, just as the title of the novel's

3 In this quote and all others, the ellipses with space between the points are mine; those without are Pynchon's own. 37 first part - "Beyond the Zero" - suggests rather overtly, reaching the zero in GR does not entail an absolute end; there always is some surviving element, human, animal, inorganic or whatsoever, some agent that pierces through the frozen grasp of nothingness and keeps moving, if only at a grammatical level.

Thus a screaming stretches across the sky, on and on, detached spatio- temporally from the rocket that has blasted into immobility. To go one step further, subsequent to the blast signaling the end of the rocket's parabolic trajectory, the screaming actually reveals itself as tracing another, hidden parabola that cannot be equated with that of the rocket. In other words, the supersonicity of the rocket does not simply result in the reversal of a cause-effect relationship - of that relationship

whereby one expects to hear first the arrival of the rocket, and then its blast. The

detachment from the body of the rocket transfigures the sound, pushing it into a

realm of relativity. While the rocket itself follows the trajectory of the absolute and

leaves not much room for debate as to what exactly it brings, the belated screaming

reaches the surviving ears as something open and malleable enough to yield to

varied interpretations. To whomever wishes to do so, the screaming does not deny

the possibility that it indeed is a cry of protest against celestial orders; or that what is

heard is the ghost of the angel mourning for its own fall, for the Moon it failed to

reach.4

4 As is reflected in GR through the story of Franz POkler, many of the engineers employed in the development of the German Vergeltungswaffe, or revenge-weapons, were originally enthusiasts of space-travel. So is POkler, before transforming into a dissociated, inert and impotent instrument; the first - but only the first - version of his summertime daughter Use also cherishes the same naive fancy, dreaming of flying to the Moon with the rocket built by Pdkler, and of living there by the Sea of Tranquillity, together with her Mutti and Papi (410). Even when turned into a weapon, the rocket still symbolizes, through the curve traced by its ascent and fall, a doomed attempt to transcend the human sphere: "This ascent will be betrayed to Gravity. But the Rocket engine, the deep cry of combustion that jars the soul, promises escape. The victim [in this case a literal sacrificial victim, Gottfried, snugly fitted into the Rocket 00000], in bondage to falling, rises on a promise, a prophecy, of Escape ...."(758). 38

Certainly, what the screaming accomplishes in this manner, for the short while it lasts, is next to nothing. Such things as the motion suggested by the present participle suffix -ing, or the sound that outlives the rocket, cannot provide, or even hint at, any compensation for what does get irretrievably destroyed; no grand redemption, no sparkling affirmation of life could emerge from a gain so small. And yet, the very virtue of the parabola traced by the screaming lies in the smallness and insignificance of that which it is capable of achieving; it is valuable for its ability to carve out the tiniest air pocket in the heart of smothering greatness - whether it be the greatness of salvation or that of damnation. While failing to issue a timely warning as to the imminent destruction, the screaming of the rocket still performs an

act - however slight - of kindness towards the newly dead: that of screaming in their

stead. Hence, the opening line of GR not only prefigures the preterite's impossible

situation, as was stated earlier; as such, with all the irony and bitter despair invoked

by such an act of kindness, the screaming across the sky also constitutes a first

variation on the theme of kind things developed throughout GR.5

II. The book produces ample examples attesting to the truth of the statement

that "kindness is a sturdy enough ship for these oceans" (21): kindness is found

flowing through the naked bodies of impromptu lovers spooning one gloomy

afternoon; in the eyes of the happy pigs escorted by William Slothrop to their

slaughter; in a piece of cloth soaked with John Dillinger's blood; even in a mere

fragrance, rising from Pirate Prentice's banana breakfast. The last instance occurs

when Pirate, upon waking from die novel's initial dream episode, witnesses the

ascent of a V-2 launched from the Hague, which would hit London in less than five

5 For a number of approaches to Pynchon's treatment of the notions of kindness and grace, see Hohmann 120-8; Moore 280; and Werner 91-2. 39 minutes. He quietly considers his options: he may choose between warning his friends, looking for shelter, or calling the Operations, for none of which there is enough time. He chooses, therefore, to pick bananas from his rooftop bananery, in hopes of being perhaps able to make one more of his famous breakfasts. It is in this atmosphere of vulnerable uncertainty, in this morning torpor of mortal danger that

Pirate's bananas are chopped, mashed, whipped, baked, fried, almost conjured into a dizzying variety of banana omlettes, banana bread, banana waffles, banana casseroles, sandwiches, puddings, and much, much more, breathing out an aroma that rises "[a]s a spell, against falling objects" (10):

Now there grows among all the rooms ... the fragile, musaceous odor of Breakfast: flowery, permeating, surprising, more than the color of winter sunlight, taking over not so much through any brute pungency or volume as by the high intricacy to the weaving of its molecules, sharing the conjuror's secret by which - though it is not often Death is told so clearly to fuck off - the living genetic chains prove even labyrinthine enough to preserve some human face down ten or twenty generations... so the same assertion-through-structure allows this war morning's banana fragrance to meander, repossess, prevail. Is there any reason not to open every window, and let the kind scent blanket all Chelsea? (emphasis added)

The decision to prepare breakfast under such circumstances is highly reminiscent of the decision to break into song at the end of GR. This parallel should be intentional, given that the book also symmetrically begins and ends with a V-2 falling. The reader at the end is addressed as part of an audience sitting in a dark movie theatre, into the old roof of which a rocket will crash in, again, less than five minutes. Yet, in both instances there appears a fragile force contradicting the predominant - perhaps the "official" - sentiment that it is too late, that there simply is no time left. At the end, there is at least a jolly singing to accompany sensual consolations, "[t]here is time, if you need the comfort, to touch the person next to 40 you, or to reach between your own cold legs..." (760); and at the beginning there is the kind fragrance of Pirate's banana breakfast to inhale.

Just as a mere bunch of bananas surpasses all culinary expectations in a mad proliferation of delicacies, their mere smell too proves potent enough to chisel a poignant nook of time, out of the very lack of it. The scent is kind, not because it somehow postpones death, but rather because it defines the perimeter of that brief while wherein one could exist, till death. And it succeeds in telling death "so clearly to fuck off' by virtue of performing - or rather being - a gesture for its own sake. For after all, the scent does nothing but smell beautifully, and in doing so it encloses an olfactory landscape; it clears up a soothing place for the multitudes who shall either continue to toil in a daily dose of misery, or be killed indiscriminately by the rocket in less than five minutes. This scent speaks to the many who have not been preordained to any salvation, or any due damnation, neither in this world nor in the celestial orders; to all the preterite,6 in brief, who are destined for an unremarkable existence, and death, in mud.

Pirate's bananas themselves are the fruit of that mud: of a cross-generational mixture of dead plants, sow manure, bad meals, and bad meals vomited, which has turned at a certain point, probably out of the sheer saturation of trash, into some

"unbelievable black topsoil in which anything could grow, not the least being bananas" (5). This image of saturated trash - turned into fertile mud in the breakfast

6 In his essay on "Paranoia, Pynchon, and Pretention," Louis Mackey provides the clearest definition of the term "preterite," as opposed to the "reprobate" (56): "The first discrimination in the divine decrees is between Elect and Reprobate. But some writers subdivide the Reprobate. There are the Reprobate in the strict sense, whom God designates for damnation. And there are the Preterite, whom he passes over and does not sign either for salvation or perdition, but who are of course damned anyway by the inertia of sin....they are included only as omitted. Negatively prehended by God, they go their way to an end that is just as ineluctable and just as desolate as the damnation of the Reprobate. Maybe more so, since it is not distinguished by divine notice. Deprived of the dignity imparted by God's individuating wrath, the Preterite perish en masse in His ignorance." (in Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow. Edited and with an introduction by Harold Bloom. New York: Chelsea House Publishers, 1986). 41 episode - appears in GR repeatedly. It is clear that Pynchon's sympathy for "waste"

in The Crying of Lot 49 has overflown into his next work, where various combinations and accumulations of garbage even yield entire records about one's

place in a certain culture; thus Slothrop, in his pre-war days in Berkshire,

Massachusetts, reads a chronicle of the American preterite - himself included - as

per roadside rubbish: "rusted beer cans, rubbers yellow with preterite seed, Kleenex

wadded to brain shapes hiding preterite snot, preterite tears, newspapers, broken

glass, pieces of automobile" (626). And a documentary of his recent years in war-

torn London emanates from the multiple strata of garbage spread across his desk,

which "hasn't been cleaned down to the original wood surface since 1942," and

which includes everything, from "Thayer's Slippery Elm Throat Lozenges" to "the

pink inner thigh of a pouting pin-up girl," alongside "paperclips, Zippo flints, rubber

bands, staples, cigarette butts" and what not (18).7

However, going beyond the common notions of what could be disposed of as

rubbish, the junkyards of GR include all sorts of things and forms of life for which

no one has any use, and which nonetheless persist in their humble, thus defiant, way.

To mention a few among such microcosms, there is the quiet community of crimson

water bugs at the White Visitation, munching away Thomas Gwenhidwy's lentils

and beans; unstoppable little pests, which, in another conjecture far and away, in a

stable in Betlehem, experience and fail to grasp the birth of the Saviour: "A tranquil

world:... the day's cycle damped to only a soft easy sway of light The crying of

the infant reached you perhaps, as bursts of energy from the invisible distance,

nearly unsensed, often ignored" (174). And then there are the pigs on the road,

7 "This description builds up a revealing picture of Slothrop and of the wartime British atmosphere surrounding him, suggesting the ways in which Slothrop himself is a jumbled composite of tastes and tendencies, always open to new accretions" (Hite 135). 42 rolling in the mud, loved and walked to their inexorable carnage by Tyrone's first

American ancestor, William Slothrop (555):

Despite the folklore and the injunctions in his own Bible, William came to love their nobility and personal freedom, their gift for finding comfort in the mud on a hot day - pigs out on the road, in company together, were everything Boston wasn't, and you can imagine what the end of the journey, the weighing, slaughter and dreary pigless return back up into the hills must've been like for William. Of course he took it as a parable - knew that the squealing bloody horror at the end of the pike was in exact balance to all their happy sounds, their untroubled pink eyelashes and kind eyes, their smiles, their grace in cross­ country movement, (emphases added)

His fellowship with the pigs is in fact so powerful as to cause William to

keep longing "for the one pig that wouldn't die, that would validate all the ones

who'd had to" (555). He is eventually condemned as a heretic. His book, On

Pretention, duly banned and burned in Boston, makes a case for the preterite, the

"second Sheep," which, so William proposes, should be sanctified for being the

precondition for their diametrical opposite, the Saviour, to exist. He posthumously

reveals to the contemporaiy Slothrop the hidden communion between the human

preterite and the realms of pigs, waterbugs and suicidal lemmings, when he whispers

into Slothrop's ear that Jesus "saw it from the lemming point of view. Without the

millions who had plunged and drowned, there could have been no miracle. The

successful loner was only the other part of it: the last piece to the jigsaw puzzle..."

(554).

Kindness dwells in, and interconnects these discarded realms; it cannot be

located in a transcendent source, as a form of divine grace, insofar as the celestial

orders of GR seem hostile, whenever not indifferent. With no power to change the

situation for better or worse, kindness appears to rise to the surface from within the

flow of events. It is kind, for instance, of Seaman "Pig" Bodine to offer to a now 43 dissolved Slothrop the piece of cloth stained with John Dillinger's blood, alongside the story of how he came to possess it, in order merely to remind Slothrop of the grace that arises out of an action, out of the sheer gesture, Fegardless of its cause, duration, and result (741):

That's Dillinger's blood there. Still warm when I got to it. They wouldn't want you thinking he was anything but a 'common criminal'... he still did what he did. He went out socked Them right in the toilet privacy of Their banks. Who cares what he was thinking about, long as it didn't get in the way? A- and it doesn't even matter why we 're doing this, either. Rocky? Yeah, what we need isn't reasons, but just that grace. The physical grace to keep it working.

When used with the adjective "physical," grace in GR moves away from the

notion of divine grace, referring instead to "a specific quality best described as

gracefulness or elegance" (Hohmann 121). It is a graceful gesture, and as such it is

found even in Bodine's own act of tossing a story and a token in Slothrop's

direction, when it was not invited and can seek no purpose - for Bodine is well

aware of how irretrievably dissolved Slothrop is. In such a story offered as a kind

gift, even though it has no use for anyone, there is something highly parabolic, in the

old gospel style: if Slothrop were anywhere capable of comprehending the story, it

wouldn't be necessary to tell it at all, but given that he has no such capacity, the

actual telling of the story cannot help him either.8 In fact, it will be argued herein

that parables, of a peculiar sort, are one of the major agents of kindness at work in

GR. And the ensuing analysis will lead to the further argument that the very

8 According to Hillis Miller (1991; 72), a Gospel parable has a marked quality of redundance; it is the kind of"gift" that is not needed by those who already have the knowledge of the Kingdom of Heaven, and those who lack this knowledge also lack the capacity to receive the gift properly. Needless to say, what Miller contributes to, with these insights, is the age-long debate concerning the implications of that famous passage in Mark, where Jesus says: To you has been given the secret of the kingdom of God, but for those outside everything is in parables; so that they may indeed see but not perceive, and may indeed hear but not understand; lest they should turn again, and be forgiven" (4:11-12) 44 structure or organizing principle of GR is parabolic, both in the senses of parable and parabola.

HI. While both the terms "parable" and "parabola" occur in GR, it is clearly the latter which has prominence in the novel. The parabola is found, first and foremost, in the trajectory of the V-2, which is also the arch of the rainbow. Then it appears in constellations of structures and systems, which, in a centrifugal motion, drive farther and farther away from the figure of the rocket. Or, to put it more accurately, it accompanies the rocket itself, as the figure drives away from the physical ballistic missile. The parabola gradually reveals itself to encompass the path of anything and everything that has - at least the semblance of - a beginning and an end, or a birth and a death, with a struggle or a glory in the middle: human life, empires, technologies, love affairs, stories ... The entrance to the underground

Mittelwerke in Nordhausen, the birthplace of the V-2, is designed as a parabola

(298). Following an accident on the testing grounds, the hand of the rocket engineer

Franz PBkler draws a parabola over the buildings, as he describes to his daughter

Use how the rocket is supposed to fly (410). A parabola looms behind the progressions of symphonic music: "A parabola! A trap! You were never immune over there from the simple-minded German symphonic arc, tonic to dominant, back again to tonic" (443).9 Another stream of parabolas is traced almost imperceptibly by the light of a bulb: "The bulb appears to burn steadily, but this is really a succession of electric peaks and valleys..(642).

Charles Hohmann (262) links the figure of the parabola to G/?'s death-love theme, which, he opines, manifests itself primarily in the form of a sadomasochistic

9 Steven Weisenburger glosses this passage as follows: "Beethoven ... is widely noted for his three- and four-part structures in the major symphonies. His so-called per aspera ad astra (from struggle to victory) motif works like this: (1) outer struggle, (2) comfort and reassurance, (3) internal struggle, and (4) victory. Beethoven's Fifth Symphony perfectly exemplifies this parabolic movement" (208). 45 homosexual power-struggle. For Dwight Eddins (142) the parabola's relation to death is more pronounced; he refers to it as an "iconic death shape," "described by the Rocket's dialectic with gravity." Richard Poirier (15) too notes that "sex, love, life, death have all been fused" not only into the assembly of the rocket, but also to its parabolic trajectory. Elaborating upon what Slothrop witnesses one day, a

"rainbow cock driven down out of pubic clouds into Earth" (GR 729), Leo Bersani concludes that the figure of the parabola "can itself be taken to chart a kind of erotic relation of resistance and abandonment to gravity" (111). While that may well be true, other critics, such as Molly Hite, charge it with much greater significance. Hite identifies the parabola as the "linear, teleological and deterministic" structural metaphor of the novel, presenting "a unified vision of a world hurtling towards annihilation" (98); she then proceeds to explore how the novel's multi-layered open- ended action works, in schizoid fashion, against the impositions of that structural metaphor, and that stifling vision. However, according to Hite the "parabola is also a metaphor for control and structure. It represents the kind of conceptual system that human beings use to circumscribe and rationalize their experience in order to take charge of it" (98). As an expansion of Hite's view, it will be contended herein that actually the metaphoric range of the parabola incorporates both the realms where

"control and structure" prevail, and those where any such attempts at rationalization fail; in this respect, the parabola is just as ambivalent a figure as the rocket out of whose motion it originates.

What is important to note, for the purposes of the present discussion, is that, in its countless manifestations throughout GR, the parabola is not just a stationary shape; it is rather a motion in a certain shape. Immobility is something imposed upon the parabola, be it by geometry, calculus, or architecture. And, this maddening 46

peekaboo of the parabola from everywhere in the text drives the paranoid reader to expect, and thus see, more and more of it in every nook and comer. Interestingly,

such inclinations, either on the part of the reader or the characters themselves, are

openly ridiculed in the text at several points:

This parabola here happens to be the inspiration of a Speer disciple named Etzel Olsch. He had noted this parabola shape around on Autobahn overpasses, sports stadiums u.s.w., and thought it was the most contemporary thing he'd ever seen. Imagine his astonishment on finding that the parabola was also the shape of the path intended for the rocket through space. (What he actually said was, "Oh, that's nice.") [298]

The passage provides good reason to suspect that Pynchon does not really

favor such an urge to discover telling correspondences between things high and low,

far and near; yet, it is also certain that in GR he has taken every care to create such

parallels. This seeming contradiction dissolves under the hypothesis that Pynchon

does not oppose the possibility that there are creatures, and stories, following

parallel paths; or that seemingly incompatible and distant worlds are interlinked by

invisible means, such as kindness; that indeed "everything is connected, everything

in the Creation" (703). What he rather opposes, or ridicules, is perhaps the very act

of connecting some of the dots, of articulating a few of those correspondences in

excitement, in hopes of attaining some form of a revelation. Indeed, what great

significance could be attached to the discovery that the entrance to the tunnels where

the V-2 is made, and the trajectory of the V-2, both describe parabolas? Such a

correspondence is truly no more than nice. And yet, the promise of revelation that

seems to emanate from the parallels is an issue worth addressing in depth; before

that, however, one should recall at the moment that such a layering of

correspondences, or laying parallel of lines, is what the word "parable" meant

originally. 47

GR presents a fully fledged parable, with a distinct title, in the parodic story of Byron (647): the story of how one immortal light bulb, one exceptional loner with all the time at his disposal, plunges into life beaming with rebellious ambitions; and how, after numerous losses, betrayals and narrow escapes, he finally falls into bitter impotence before the unyielding wall of "Their" system. "The Story of Byron the

Bulb" bears all the traits of classic parabolic writing: while allowing itself to be easily detached from the main text and appreciated as an aesthetic unit, it also clearly dialogues with the text, bestowing upon it - and thereby itself acquiring - much finer, more intricate hues of significance. Again in true parabolic fashion, it

pretends to be a recapitulation of all the complexities of the main text in miniature

form, posing as a compact pill that can be swallowed with much greater ease,

whereas it in fact renders the text even more complex, by stretching certain variables

to their logical extremes; by rewriting, that is to say, the tale of the hero who decides

to set things right, and who this time possesses the greatest gift conceivable, that of

immortality - unlike poor Slothrop who is marked, if anything, by mediocrity.

Alongside the story of Byron, there are several other episodes fashioned in a

solemn or mock-parabolic style, such as the tale about Enzian the wise, and the

arrogant engineer,10 or the moment when the narrator speculates that "[l]iving inside

the System is like riding across the country in a bus driven by a maniac bent on

suicide..." (412). The encounter between Enzian and the engineer is presented as an

10 "In the days when the white engineers were disputing the attributes of the feeder system that was to be, one of them came to Enzian of BleicherOde and said, 'We cannot agree on the chamber pressure. Our calculations show that a working pressure of 40 attt would be the most desirable. But all the data we know of are grouped around a value of only some 10 atfl.' 'Then clearly,' replied the Nguarorerue, 'you must listen to the data.' 'But that would not be the most perfect or efficient value,' protested the German. 'Proud man,' said the Nguarorerue. 'What are these data, if not direct revelation? Where have they come from, if not from the Rocket which is to be? How do you presume to compare a number you have only derived on paper with a number that is the Rocket's own? Avoid pride, and design to some compromise value.' (314-5)." 48 extract "from Tales of the Schwarzkommando, collected by Steve Edelman " (315), so that its parodic rabbinical tones are accentuated by the Borgesian tongue-in-cheek style of referencing. Yet, there could be a further meaning to such a style. Both this tale of Enzian and "The Story of Byron the Bulb" have a rather institutional aspect: despite their generic differences, they both bear all the due paraphernalia of bureaucratic approval and authorization, such as clear titles, references, distinct fonts and indentions, as if they were allowed to be written as such in the body of

GR. The possibility of a mechanism of censorship operating to "Their" benefit in the text - a mechanism which, as shall soon be discussed, is of course counteracted by other voices - becomes particularly significant in the case of Byron, given that his is a story of failure, in spite of his unique gift. The hint as to the presence of hidden censors comes from the protean narrator of GR himself, a few lines before the official introduction of Byron; at this point the narrator interrupts his words - which are intended to warm up the reader to the idea of immortality in a light bulb - with a rather curious parenthetical remark: "Statistically (so Their story goes), every n- thousandth light bulb is gonna be perfect..." (647; emphasis mine). That is to say, the reader is discreetly cautioned not to take the forthcoming story without a grain of salt, as it has clearly passed through "Their" hands.

The other episode mentioned, the one that compares the experience of living inside the System to a ride with an insane bus driver, does not bear such official stamps. What this passage has to offer, instead, are the shifts and progressions of parabolic philosophical writing, quite after the fashion of Kierkegaard. The thought of a System that declares the notions of cyclical time its arch-enemy, that knows only to take and never to give something back, a system that will inevitably "crash to its death... dragging with it innocent souls all along the chain of life" (412) leads 49 the narrator to invoke an image that could contain all this terror without defining it; but once the need to suppose is met, once living does become an unavoidable ride at the mercies of a maniac, the image blooms almost into a living story, taking off in the unpredictable directions of, indeed, an insane bus-ride (413):

On you roll, across a countryside whose light is forever changing....There are stops at odd hours of the mornings, for reasons that are not announced: you get out to stretch in lime- lit courtyards where the old men sit around the table under enormous eucalyptus trees you can smell in the night, shuffling the ancient decks oily and worn, throwing down swords and cups and trumps major in the tremor of light while behind them the bus is idling, waiting - passengers will now reclaim their seats and much as you'd like to stay, right here, learn the game, find your old age around this quiet table, it's no use.

Finally, in addition to all such episodes, GR also presents a number of events, situations and notions meant or taken as parables by the various figures in the text. It should be noted that the term parable as such tends to appear in these instances,

perhaps simply because these are precisely the moments when one willfully

insinuates or places another line alongside what is present. The narrator's lengthy

parenthetical gloss on Maxwell's Demon11 is one such case: "later witnesses

suggested that Clerk Maxwell intended his Demon not so much as a convenience in

discussing a thermodynamic idea as a parable about the actual existence of

11 In The Style of Connectedness, Thomas Moore summarizes this hypothetical case elaborated by James Clerk Maxwell, which constitutes a violation of the Second Law of Thermodynamics stating that 'entropy will always increase:' "Imagine... a rectangular box with impermeable walls, inside which a known quantity of gas is distributed at maximum equilibrium. Imagine, running down through the box, an impermeable partition containing a tiny gate or trap door. The door is controlled by a small device, or tiny intelligent being, able to distinguish faster-moving from slower-moving molecules in the gas. As each fast molecule approaches, the Demon lets it pass through the trap door into one half of the chamber; the slower molecules he concentrates in the other half. Since heat is a function of the speed of molecular movement, the Demon will in this way be able to 'unmix' the gas, to lower the entropy of the system: one half of the box will contain a high concentration of fast molecules and so will be hotter than the other half (175-6). Moore then surveys the twentienth-century interpretations of the Demon's possible fate inside the box, based on a number of scientific developments and shifts in perspective, so that in the end even the Demon cannot avoid being recognized as "a born loser, and this, for Pynchon's symbolic purposes, is the centrally germane fact about him" (177). 50 personnel like Liebig..." (411) - the likes of Liebig being those capable of channelling the mind of an architect such as Kekute into chemistiy, so that he would

be granted the dream of Ouroboros, understand how the six carbon atoms of benzene

form a ring, and thus father organic chemistry, "at the expense of everything else"

(411).

The excursions taken by Slothrop around London in search of V-2 pieces that

survive the blast lead to another such moment, when his Puritan legacy becomes

manifest in his "reflex" of reading an other text through the world (25):

Ruins he goes daily to look in are each a sermon on vanity. That he finds, as weeks wear on, no least fragment of any rocket, preaches how indivisible is the act of death... Slothrop's Progress: London the secular city instructs him: turn any corner and he can find himself inside a parable.

That Pynchon intends the terms parable and parabola to be interrelated could

be inferred from yet another instance where the two are used together, when

Slothrop finally visits the underground rocket works: "In under parabola and

parable, straight into the mountain, sunlight gone, into the cold, the dark, long

echoes of the Mittelwerke" (299). And, in a critical moment, in the frustrated

reflections of William Slothrop on the fate of pigs, the two terms finally fuse

together. To recall, the reader is told how William takes the whole plight of the pigs

as a parable, during his own "dreary pigless" journeys back home. The use of the

term parable in such a highly Puritan context leads the reader to believe that, what

William deduces out of these happy marches into the slaughter house is some sort of

a moral or spiritual insight. While that assumption is not necessarily incorrect, the

ensuing image still surprises the reader by delivering that parabolic content through

the moving curve of a parabola, where the extremes of happiness and horror

counterpoise to perfection (555; emphasis mine): 51

Of course he took it as a parable - knew that the squealing bloody horror at the end of the pike was in exact balance to all their happy sounds, their untroubled pink eyelashes and kind eyes, their smiles, their grace in cross-country movement.

Both Tyrone's and William's dealings with the world around them can be, and have been, quickly explained as a compulsory response conditioned by Puritan thought. Nonetheless, there is a certain unmistakable freedom in such an interpretive effort. In other words, neither William nor Tyrone has been so restrained, so

ideologically apprehended as to be given parables, the way, for instance, "The Story

of Byron the Bulb" is given to the reader; they rather take as parables whatever they

please. While this is clearly not the vision of an absolute freedom, since their very

choices and manners of taking this or that as a parable are still ideologically

informed, it is at least enough freedom to allow them mobility. Taking a chunk of

life as a parable is a moment of breaking free from the given; it is a sudden and not

so easily detectable divergence from the official views and authorized versions of

experience - the one route of escape available to the preterite. It should therefore

come as no surprise that GR abounds with parabolic episodes that partake of this

spirit of independence at many levels. Such episodes are driven, as it were, by a

different kind of parabola still on the move, just like the one hidden in the first

screaming of the rocket at the novel's beginning. The speed with which they flash

through the text, and the very frequency in which they dwell, appear to be radically

different from that of the official story of Byron, or the sample tale from

"Edelman's" collection.

Byron himself makes several such fleeting appearances, as a secret operative

of the Counterforce, long before and after being introduced under "Their" harness;

he sneaks into POkler's dreams to reveal to him the whole plot behind the veils, the 52 intricate pattern of truth which is "more grand and sweeping than POkler could ever have imagined" (427); he is sanctified, together with all his mortal fellows, as "one of the great secret ikons of the Humility, the multitudes who are passed over by God and History" (299); and finally, he embraces as a kindred spirit Slothrop's preterite kazoo, the other instrument of subversion and rebellion, against the arguments of his present host Gustav, who believes that the omnipotent evil light bulb company has meddled even with the kazoo: "But what Gustav's light bulb - none other than our friend Byron - wants to say is no, it's not that way at all, it's a declaration of brotherhood by the Kazoo for all the captive and oppressed light bulbs...." (745).

"The Story of Byron the Bulb" is an institutional parable, whose motion or sense has been arrested to fit into a narrow range of meaning - it is written in "Their" language; whereas in his "dream-dialogues" with POkler, Byron uses a language of his own, irreproducible, with words made perhaps of modulations in his "electric peaks and valleys," tickling P&kler's brain waves ever so lightly. This and all his other random appearances in GR present a parable in the raw, unchecked and highly unsettling.

This other parable, to name it simply, is a crucial agent of kindness set to work in GR against the far-reaching hands of totalitarian authority, be it disguised behind the mask of international cartels, behavioral psychology, or God. The other parable's kindness lies in its speed and lack of closure; these two determining features allow escape from the authority's manifold structures that freeze living motion for the sake of control, or a comforting explanation.

Such structures, in Pynchon's treatment, range from calculus, rocket engineering, and filmmaking techniques, to the very notion of human - or other - memory; and as such, they appear and are addressed practically everywhere in the 53 text. Yet, Pynchon elaborates on the grip of such structures perhaps most delicately in the story of how the inert engineer Franz POkler every summer unites with a child, who may or may not be his own daughter Ilse. Pdkler conceives the original Ilse with his wife Leni, when one night he comes home all aroused, after having seen a

pornographic film featuring the actress Greta Erdmann. The fusion of Leni with

Greta in his fantasy causes Pdkler to regard Ilse as some sort of a movie-child. And after spending six years receiving visits from one such possible Ilse, he realizes how

she has truly become a movie-child. In other words, Pdkler perceives a parallelism

between these summer-time visits, and one strategy employed by the scientists to

solve the rocket's stability problem at supersonic speed. The engineers would drop

iron models of the rocket from bomber-planes flying at 20.000 feet, and photograph

their fall from the ground. Then they would spend hours looking at the frozen

frames of the rocket at around 3000 feet, recorded when the rocket had just broken

the speed of sound. This would make things much easier, much more manageable

(407). POkler understands how "They" use the same strategy to create the illusive

continuity of a daughter for him, while leaving no single element out of their control

(422).

And Pynchon suggests that paranoid characters like Pdkler himself follow

the same manic, or perhaps simply human, impulse to control the vast flow of

experience, by imposing thereupon intricate plots that explain everything; that is, by

generating memories that gather all - or most, or even selected - pieces into one

coherent, unshakeable narrative. "Isn't that every paranoid's wish," the narrator

asks, "to perfect methods of immobility?" (572) Towards the very end of GR, the

workings of that impulse unfold in the episode narrating the sacrifice of Gottfried, 54 who has been fitted inside the mysterious rocket OOOOO, built and launched under the command of Major Weissmann, Gottfried's lover.

As Gottfried falls together with the rocket at the speed of about a mile per second, and has only a few more seconds left to be, he overcomes the cliche and

attempts to remember his life as something even more still than the individual

frames of a film. He turns all recollections into a children's book with thin pages and

delicately colored illustrations. However, failing to bear the speed, the pages of the

book start tearing and fly away, while Gottfried desperately struggles to catch as

much as he can (759):

... it's like falling to sleep- they begin to blur CATCH you can hold it steady enough to see a suspender-belt straining down your thighs, white straps as slender as the legs of a fawn and the points of the black... the black CATCH you've let a number of them go by, Gottfried, important ones you didn't want to miss... you know this is the last time... CATCH ...

Gottfried's mind snatching at his recollections acts in no different way than

the shutter of a camera. A camera may objectively record the descent of the

OOOOO, just like that of the iron models. Yet Gottried himself inside the rocket is

falling so fast that he cannot register the moment as present experience; things occur

long before he can perceive them: "CATCH when did the roaring stop?

Brennschluss,12 when was Brennschluss it can't be this soon" (759). And he is

falling so fast that he cannot even catch his past experience. He happens to be riding,

from the inside, a parabola that neither mind nor shutter can arrest fully.

There are numerous things in GR, humble light-footed figures or bits of

narrative, that are capable of escaping the controlling shutter by their own drive and

sheer speed, darting towards random destinations; and wherever they flit, the text

12 The term Brennschluss, or the "end of burning" refers to the moment when the fuel of a V-2 is cut off at the altitude of about 20 kilometers, and the rocket begins its free fall (Weisenburger 18). 55

presents an other parable that cannot even be considered open-ended, but rather almost barely written. Against the workings of structures that impose immobility,

hence, the other parable favors movement at such high speed that it passes

unnoticed.

A beacon of this kind of liberating speed that the preterite could and do aspire for, is the story of Ursula, the pet lemming, which is no more than a grain in

the bulk of GR. It becomes clear, by the time Ursula has escaped the hands of her

young owner Ludwig, that she has already been fleeing even while with him; that,

by moving too quickly, she has carved out a space for herself to be free; that, by

never ceasing to move, she has evaded an actual camera, so as not to leave behind a

perfect image of herself. By somehow accelerating her being, as it were, to a

frequency slightly higher than that to which the rest of the world belongs, she has

succeeded in not being fully present even when in sight. And once out of sight, she

flees so utterly and completely as to blur in the text the certainty of her very

existence:

The only control in the picture right now is the damned lemming. If she exists. The kid shows Slothrop photos he's packing in his wallet: Ursula, eyes bright and shy, peeking out from under a pile of cabbage leaves... Ursula in a cage decked with a giant ribbon and swastika'd seal, first prize in a Hitler Youth pet show... Some part of her is always blurred, too quick for the shutter. (556; emphases mine)

It is an elegant detail that Ursula's fuzzy pictures are shown to Slothrop, of

all the characters in GR, for Slothrop is certainly the greatest of such escape artists;

he too eventually reaches the point of cancelling himself out of the text, even though

he sets out as a key figure at the centre of the novel's major mysteries. In fact, when

the story of Ursula is placed beside the winding path of Slothrop, it becomes

possible to discern in the latter much less of a tragedy, caused by the scattering of 56 his self in the wind, and much more of a state of grace. "By the end of the novel,"

Hite remarks, "Slothrop has lost his identity; he is no longer a unified character.

However unsettling this outcome may be, one implication is that he has escaped control..." (118).

The success of such an escape depends not only on unceasing motion, but also on a process of transformation that is triggered precisely by being always on the move. Slothrop meets the first condition spontaneously, dragging himself all over the war zone; and shifting his identity initially from himself to the war correspondent Ian Scuffling, then from Rocketman to the Russian soldier Max

Schlepzig, and later on to Plechazunga the Pig-Hero, he proves to have fulfilled the other condition too. Yet, his ultimate deliverance may not have come about, if the only thing he has escaped from were a single consistent identity, rather than his memories, given that the inner structures of immobility are founded mainly upon memory. It is Slothrop's natural tendency to let go of the past, ever since the onset of his journey: "A lot of stuff prior to 1944 is getting blurry now" (GR 21). And as he keeps moving, even his deepest yearnings for people and things of the past - for

Imipolex G, or Katje or Bianca - shrivel and fall without a trace: "He creates a bureaucracy of departure, inoculations against forgetting, exit visas stamped with love-bites... but coming back is something he's already forgotten about" (470-1).

Thus he trots away from every attachment, till he becomes something like the Fool of the Tarot.

One has to be cautious here, for, as is known, Slothrop's quest remains unfinished, and his Tarot reading likewise incomplete (738); he is never quite indisputably identified with the Fool, the way, for instance, Major Weissman's present is associated with the Tower and his future with the World (749), or the way 57

Slothrop himself earlier bears the marie of Meng, Youthful Folly, the fourth hexagram of the I-Ching (378). Yet, perhaps ultimately that very uncertainty is appropriate for him who becomes the Fool, which is the most enigmatic of all the major arcana. As the narrator of GR himself points out, the Fool has "no agreed assignment in the deck" (724), no decisive niche of its own, its sequential place being variously debated as to be at the beginning or the very end, or in between

Judgment, the card numbered twenty, and the World, numbered twenty-one

(Weisenburger 300). While some interpretations attribute to the Fool the number 22, and others 0, it in fact does not have a number. As such it signals, not the absence of a number, but rather the fundamental other of numbers and numbering; it covers a state of becoming that goes beyond control through quantification or language:

He is outside the pack, that is the human city, beyond the walls .... Safe behind the walls of his city, the observer concludes that he is a fool. The Hermetic philosopher, however, will mutter that this is a Master.... [B]e he zero or twenty-two, he goes forward, conspicuously solar, across the virgin soil of knowledge beyond the city of men.13

The silence that Slothrop dissolves into, like that of the Fool, is highly telling. Just like the Fool who remains in sight but beyond reach, Slothrop too, following his fragmentation, does not fail to appear in the text - and he too defies the shutter like Ursula - but one can no longer know what happens to him; one can only follow him, thus becoming another Slothrop. Indeed, upon his final communion with the Fool, Slothrop's very story transmutes into a path of initiation that may be experienced, but not explained from a safe distance; and needless to add, the cards constituting the major arcana are in fact distinct paths of initiation:

13 Jean Chevalier and Alain Gheerbrant, A Dictionary of Symbols (Trans. John Buchanan-Brown, London: Penguin Books, 1996), pp. 397-8. 58

There's supposed to be a last photograph of him on the only record album ever put out by the Fool, an English rock group There is no -way to tell which of the faces is Slothrop's: the only printed credit that might apply to him is "Harmonica, kazoo - a friend." But knowing his Tarot, we would expect to look among the Humility, among the gray and preterite souls, to look for him adrift in the hostile light of the sky, the darkness of the sea.... (742; emphasis mine)

IV. Behind the seeming fluidity of GR, there looms a constant staccato; words do not really flow, but rather pile up, piece by detached piece, to form a vast paratactic wreckage - wreckage as Pynchon's critique of greatness. Against that greatness, the other parable, which is no more nor less than a parable beyond institutional control, joins the ranks of the text's underground Counterforce that is concealed in the very mechanics and manner of writing. The other parable sides with the notorious low style, period samplings of pop culture, crass jokes and bad puns, as well as the ellipses discussed earlier, mocking "Their" celebration of closures and closed systems.

Through the barely perceptible operations of the other parable, even timeless sayings such as "tossing one's pearls to the swine" transform, the purity of the pearl of wisdom being transferred upon the living flesh of the swine, rather than getting trampled under their hooves; thus William Slothrop reminisces about "starts in the very early mornings when the backs of his herd glowed like pearl" (555). And thus, always for the sake of the pigs, even solid biblical parables, such as the episode of

Legion in Mark (V: 1-20), spring out of the hermetic seals of authoritative interpretation, to be rewritten in such a way as to expose in a flash the calamitous injustice that a harmless herd of swine has to suffer, for no sin other than simply happening to be there in the background, when the Saviour decides to save one possessed man; the parable becomes William's own, as he mourns over: 59

all his Gadarene swine who'd rushed into extinction like lemmings, possessed not by demons but by trust for men, which the men kept betraying... possessed by innocence they couldn't lose... by faith in William as another variety of pig, at home with the Earth, sharing the same gift of life.... (555)

Yet another parable finds voice through GR's narrator, with the effortless introduction that befits a masterful teller - "Remember the story about the kid who hates kreplach?" This one illuminates the "Fearful Assembly" of the rocket and the

impossibility of easing it into friendly familiarity, while humbly shaking, as a side- effect, the foundations of grave institutions like psychiatiy. To quote at some length, the kid:

...breaks out in these horrible green hives... in the mere presence of kreplach. Kid's mother takes him to the psychiatrist. "Fear of the unknown," diagnoses this gray eminence, "let him watch you making the kreplach, that'll ease him into it." Home to Mother's kitchen. "Now," sez Mother, "I'm going to make us a delicious surprise!" "Oh, boy!" cries the kid, "that's keen, Mom!" ... "Making a little volcano in the flour here, and breaking these eggs into it." "Can I help ya mix it up? Oh, boy!" "Now, I'm going to roll the dough out, see? into a nice flat sheet, now I'm cutting it up into squares-" "This is terrif, Mom!" "Now I spoon some of the hamburger into this little square, and now I fold it over into a tri-" "GAAHHHH!" screams the kid, in absolute terror-"kreplachr (737)

And also Maxwell's vigilant Demon receives the blessing of a fleeting

rewriting, after the narrator finishes listing all the odd visitors of Der Platz, ranging

from dopers, I-Ching devotees and "defectors from the great aspirin factory in

Leverkusen," to "stumblebum magicians", "Ouija-board jokesters, poltergeists," and

"all kinds of astral-plane tankers and feebs" (746). When the list is completed,

Maxwell's Demon becomes, without even being mentioned, Rilke's distant pure

Angel, into whose face the twisted beauty of mortal flesh stares with no shame:

But the alternative is to start keeping some out and not others, and nobody's ready for that....Decisions like that are for some angel stationed very high, watching us at our many 60

perversities, crawling across black satin, gagging on whip- handles, licking the blood from a lover's vein-hit, all of it, every lost giggle or sigh, being carried on under a sentence of death whose deep beauty the angel has never been close to....

The aforementioned episode in GR, where William Slothrop takes the fate of the pigs as a parable, encourages one to argue that in a parable Pynchon sees the moving curve of a parabola. Yet, given the innumerable correspondences, interconnections and duplications among the characters and the plotlines of GR, it does not seem too far-fetched to suspect that in the novel Pynchon may also be exploiting the other sense of the term parable, that is, a placing side by side. Such a conjunction of the parable and the parabola may appear to be just a detail, one among the novel's myriad; but it in fact bears quite some significance, if considered in the light of the novel's both thematic and stylistic focus on the notions of paranoia and pretention. Enough has already been said herein about the relation between

GR's various parables and the preterite, including the subtle routes of flight and the modest compensations granted to the latter by the other parable: the official stories of Byron, Maxwell's Demon, the Great Dream sent to Kekute and the like are all parables fixed, both literally and figuratively, to "Their" advantage (the way such things as elections are fixed); but the bug colony that witnesses the birth of the

Saviour, Ursula the lemming, Snake the homicidal horse, the Kirghiz Light, the kazoo that magically returns to Slothrop, and all such other interpolated stories present parables defiantly on the move. Most of them are not even told fully, not finished, and therefore not disposable.14 Each constitutes a path of escape whereby the preterite kick themselves out of the master plan, to become invisible; and

14 Unlike the ajtys, the Kirghiz "singing-duel" witnessed by Tchitcherine which, as he predicts, will soon be transcribed "in the New Turkic Alphabet he helped frame ... and this is how they will get lost" (357). 61

"invisibility" is the gift of the Fool, "the freedom of the irrational, the magical, of absolutely uncoerced, open choice" (Moore 241).

As to Pynchon's treatment of paranoia, by now it has been widely noted that

in GR paranoia is not a pathological case marked by delusions of persecution, but

rather a normal stance triggered by the recognition - not the suspicion, as Bersani

(102) emphasizes - of the fact that"everything is connected, everything in the

Creation." To haunt the average paranoid reader even further, this statement about

the connectedness of everything is repeatedly affirmed and repudiated throughout

GR On the one hand, links and parallels could be, and have been, established

between nearly everyone and everything presented in the novel, in the tedious

manner of a cross-generational soap opera: pigs, lemmings, Slothrop and all the

other preterite souls; POkler's paranoia and that of Slothrop; Bianca and Ilse; Enzian,

Gottfried and Katje; Katje and Bianca; Slothrop and Gottfried.... And then again, as

discussed earlier, the parabola of the rainbow is this and that, and the Rocket is,

beside everything else, the Cross, the Phallus, the Tower of the Tarot deck, and the

Kabbalists' Tree of Life, which is the body of God, so on and so forth ad nauseam.

On the other hand, everyone and everything in GR - down to Gwenhidwy's water

bugs - seems painfully singular, each creature, thought and moment, whether lofty

or vulgar, rippling with the beauty of ephemera.15 The spasmodic beat of the novel

itself is fashioned so that it elicits from the reader a vertigo and a sense of mourning

15 The tension between these two possibilities is epitomized, yet again, in a parodic mode, in the form of a mystical chicken-fetus correspondence (643): "There were touches of royal purple in the air, and not bright enough to blur out over their edges, or change the substance of the night. They dribbled down, lengthening out, one by one - ever seen a chicken fetus, just beginning? oh of course not, you're a city boy. There's a lot to learn, out on the farm. Teaches you what a chicken fetus looks like, so that if you... see one, or several, up in the sky reproduced in purple, you'll know what they look like - that's a heap better than the city, son, there you just move from crisis to crisis, each one brand- new, nothing to couple it back onto..." (643-4). 62 for the tremendous wealth and variety it has to offer, which no one can possibly retain all together.

And it is precisely this ambiguity that ignites a biting temptation to discover a certain secret geometry in GR - to bring to light the beautiful figure hidden in its carpet. Early on in the novel Leni and Franz POkler, talking about astrology, confront the two principal strategies that may be adopted to this end: either to seek any number of cause-and-effect relationships that will link one thing to the other and then to the next in a series, so that the pattern will eventually be closed in and reveal itself. Or, to take in all such interrelations not as a series, but in parallel, as Leni struggles to explain to her husband intuitively, without success (159):

"Tides, radio interference, damned little else. There is no way for changes out there to produce changes here." "Not produce," she tried, "not cause. It all goes along together. Parallel, not series. Metaphor. Signs and symptoms. Mapping on to different coordinate systems, I don't know..." They saw Die Frau im Mond. Franz was amused, condescending. He picked at technical points. He knew some of the people who'd worked on the special effects. Leni saw a dream of flight. One of many possible. Real flight and dreams of flight go together. Both are part of the same movement. Not A before B, but all together....

Some six hundred pages later, yet another parallel is established with the return of

Fritz Lang's film, this time to give greater authority to Leni's ill-defended thesis.

The narrator informs the reader that the typical countdown for the launch of a rocket was invented by Lang while making Die Frau im Mond: "He put it into the launch scene to heighten the suspense" (753). Then another returning figure, Steve

Edelman, the compiler of the Tales of the Schwarzkommando, takes the floor to deliver a disquisition on God and Creation, as a spokesperson of Kabbalists.

Edelman summarizes how the first wave of energy that God shot out into emptiness has divided itself into ten separate spheres known as the Sephiroth, and how a 63 mystical union with God involves crossing a path from the tenth Sephiroth down to the ninth, the eighth and so forth, in the manner of the rocket countdown (753):

Now the Sephiroth fall into a pattern, which is called the Tree of Life. It is also the body of God. Drawn among the ten spheres are 22 paths. Each path corresponds to a letter of the Hebrew alphabet, and also to one of the cards called 'Major Arcana' in the Tarot. So although the Rocket countdown appears to be serial, it actually conceals the Tree of Life, which must be apprehended all at once, together, in parallel.

While ridiculing, to repeat, the impulse to establish any number of analogical

relationships among its innumerable parallels, GR's greatest challenge to the reader

is to apprehend, or better still, to walk on all the parallels and correspondences at once. The impossibility of such a feat does not diminish at all the temptation to take the challenge. For this is the veiy structure of a revelation that has nothing to do

with a presence transcending the text, but rather is the text's own - revelation that is

so tantalizingly imminent, so much on the brink and at the tip of the tongue, and yet

forever so far, in the text.

This structure is essentially parabolic, in that parabolic form, if not tainted by

an authoritative interpretation, offers no more than a semblance of a secret

geometry. If a parable poses simply as the nth line placed beside the others, the nth

line which could be supplanted by any number of others and which nonetheless

appears to bear the gravity of a key, this illusion does not last. The parable, by its

nature, pushes the reader back, not even to the previous line, but rather to the void of

uncertainty in between. And it is at least a happy coincidence that the nondescript

space in between certainties, the "excluded middles" between ones and zeros, is

precisely the niche that Pynchon carves out for his preterite; for kind souls such as

Roger Mexico who, early on in GR, counters the stolid Pavlovian Edward

Pointsman:"... to Mexico belongs the domain between zero and one-the middle 64

Pointsman has excluded from his persuasion - the probabilities" (55). In other words, parables in GR indeed belong to the humble realms of the preterite, in more ways than are usually imagined.

Deborah L. Madsen approaches the rocket in GR as an essentially ambivalent figura, the ambivalence being mainly attributable to the rocket's parabolic trajectory. Thanks to its manner of flight, the rocket belongs both to what Madsen, borrowing Kant's term, calls the noumerton, which is "Their" rational and deterministic world, and to the world of the nouminous, which "They" fail to account for, inhabited by magic, chance and indeterminacy. While the ascent of the missile is under "Their" full control, subject to predictable rules and laws, its descent is not; no one can predetermine where exactly the rocket will hit. Madsen remarks that, when the rocket reaches the Brennschluss and the fuel is cut off, it

"moves out of one pretextual frame of reference and into another, revealing as it goes the limited nature of 'Their' rational explanatory structures..." (113). As was shown at the beginning of this chapter, such a radical shift on the part of the rocket does not fail to find an echo in its own detached sound, in the screaming that opens itself to multiple interpretations for whoever survives the rocket's blast - with ears to hear. In view of all the multiple occurrences in GR where an interplay of the parable and the parabola functions both as a closed and an open form, a form equally capable of obeying and opposing interpretive restrictions, one is inclined to see in the parabola described by the rocket not a mere trajectory, but rather the rocket's own shadow. 65

Franz Kafka: Procrastination and Rewriting in the Parabolic Mode

Every evening after prayer, the Baal Shem went to his room. Two candles were set in front of him and the mysterious Book of Creation put on the table among other books. Then all those who needed his counsel were admitted in a body, and he spoke with them until the eleventh hour. One evening, when the people left, one of them said to the man beside him how much good the wards the Baal Shem had directed to him, had done him. But the other told him not to talk such nonsense, that they had entered the room together and from that moment on the master had spoken to no one except himself. A third, who heard this, joined in the conversation with a smile, saying how curious that both were mistaken, for the rabbi had carried on an intimate conversation with him the entire evening. Then a fourth and afifth made the same claim, andfinally all began to talk at once and tell what they had experienced But the next instant they alt fell silent.1

I. If embedded in a larger text, the parabolic mode constitutes a structure of revelation on the brink. This structure, by always allowing an nth line to be placed beside the others, keeps accumulating knowledge, perspectives and approaches to the given problem, thus drawing endlessly nearer to the solution, without ever reaching it. The haunting proximity of revelation invariably proves deceptive, in that, as stated at the end of the previous chapter, the nth line pushes the reader back

- back not even to the earlier lines of thought or narration, but rather to the void looming from underneath them. The reader of GR reaches "The Story of Byron the

Bulb" as a safe harbor in the storm, hoping now to make some sense out of this compact rewriting of the text's main motifs, only to get lost in a higher level of confusion. However, still the question remains: Why should one fail to return to the previous line(s)? Why does the void come to the foreground?

To return to an earlier level of articulation is indeed impossible, for, the moment any nth line is added to the picture, whatever lay before ceases to be what it used to be; it undergoes a change, no matter how imperceptible, which affects equally both the new and the old, charging them with nuances that would not have existed, had they each been isolated. Benjamin mentions, in a short piece entitled "In

1 "The Address," in Martin Buber's Tales of the Hasidim (Trans. Olga Marx. New York: Schocken Books, 1947), p. 57. 66 the Sun," a Hasidic notion of the world to come, which will be quite the same as the present world, "only a little bit different;"2 in other words, it is only due to a slight change in the details of the old world that a whole new one emerges. The changes brought by the supplanting of the nth line are likewise negligible and vast. Their classic example is found in Kafka's tricky lament that "the incomprehensible is incomprehensible." At a first glance, the statement appears to be no more than an expression of despair, clad in tautology. And yet, as discussed in the introduction,

beyond the appearance of pointless repetition there occurs, from the noun "the

incomprehensible," to the adjective "incomprehensible," a change of such

magnitude as to produce, out of the former, an entire realm of thought and being

beyond reason, and, out of the latter, an alternative way of approaching that realm.

And the process of interpretation presents a similar impossibility of

returning. Very simply put, one never truly reads the same text twice. Every new

interpretive effort transmutes retroactively both the original text, in cases where it

stands by itself, and all the preceding interpretive efforts, in cases where what once

used to be the original text fuses with a number of interpretations directed at it.

Among the examples to the latter kind of writing, there are those books with the

greatest claims on authority, such as the Torah or the I-Ching, as well as those

standing on far humbler pedestals. The present study maintains The Trial3 to be yet

another example of this kind, in that it offers the parable "Before the Law," not like

2 Benjamin invokes this understanding of the next world in order to illuminate the operations of imagination: "The Hasidim have a saying about the world to come. Everything there will be arranged just as it is with us. The room we have now will be just the same in the world to come; where our child lies sleeping, it will sleep in the world to come. The clothes we are wearing we shall also wear in the next world. Everything will be the same as here - only a little bit different Thus it is with imagination. It merely draws a veil over the distance. Everything remains just as it is, but the veil flutters and everything changes imperceptibly beneath it" (Selected Writings, Vol. 2, p. 664). 3 Franz Kafka, The Trial. Trans. Willa and Edwin Muir. New York: Modem Library, 1956. 67 an added flavor, but rather like the dark heart, out of which the whole labyrinth of the text spreads.

"Before the Law" intertwines with its own interpretations as soon as the priest finishes telling it. What appears to be a "never-ending series of reflections" is presented, in Benjamin's view, "at such a significant moment that it looks as if the novel were nothing but the unfolding of the parable."4 Each interpretation proposed, either by K. or the priest, triggers a return to some moment or detail of the parable; such return, resulting inconclusive, is only followed by another move forward, and thus repeatedly back and forth, with each movement bringing about - subtle to

imperceptible - changes.

The task of the critic, in dealing with such a text, involves reading what has

not been written, as much as what has been. For Benjamin, the ability "to read what

was never written" is the definition of clairvoyance.5 Clairvoyance, which is a

"reading prior to all languages, from entrails, the stars or dances" (722), is what lies

in the origins of language and writing. And clairvoyant practices themselves depend

on the "mimetic gift or faculty," which is the ability to put the things of the world,

however dissimilar, into relations with each other, this being only a human

replication or augmentation of nature's own tendencies to produce similarities, or to

behave mimetically. The mimetic faculty has two aspects: there is a "mimetic

production," which involves the generation of such similarities, whether by man or

nature, and then there is a "mimetic comprehension," which is the perception of

such readily produced similarities. While the perception of the mimetic component

of any given text - as opposed to its communicative or semiotic component - is

4 "Franz Kafka: On the Tenth Anniversary of His Death," in Selected Writings, Vol.2, p. 802. 5 See "Doctrine of the Similar" and "On the Mimetic Faculty" in Selected Writings, Vol. 2, pp. 694-8 and 720-2. 68 essential in reading, Benjamin states clearly that true insight into the mimetic faculty

"is gained less by demonstrating found similarities, than by replicating the processes

which generate such similarities" (694). Therefore, to rephrase what is said above,

one's interpretive efforts must indeed not consist of simply reading what is written

in and around "Before the Law" from one perspective or the other; one should rather

attempt to counter the writing of the text with more writing. The critic who fails to

do so shares the fate of the man waiting before the Law.

The parable rises like an open yet unyielding door. While speaking

indiscriminately to everyone, it addresses each reader individually; its obscure

message is intended for him only, for him to read and be illuminated thereby. And

the reader too must, mimicking the parable, open up like a door, to be able to receive

that which is to be granted by the parable. He too, in a sense, has to offer passage. If

he, having gone that far, does nothing but wait for admittance, would the mere lapse

of time, or sustained indolence, suffice for access to be granted him? In Kafka's

conjecture, as is known, this proves far too insufficient; the man from the country

dies at the end of a lifelong wait before the Law, as the doorkeeper announces that

he will close forever the door that was intended for the man only.

In another conjecture, at a certain point the man realizes that he himself has

been an open door, and that he failed to grant access to the Law, for he had nothing

of value to grant. He recalls how the doorkeeper has responded to each one of his

previous attempts at bribing him, saying "I take this only to keep you from feeling

that you have left something undone."6 This recollection leads the man to the

discovery of what he has indeed left undone, the one course of action that he has

6 "Ich nehme es nur an, damit du nicht glaubst, etwas versSumt zu haben." See "Before the Law / Vor Dem Gesetz" in Franz Kafka: Parables and Paradoxes. Ed. Nahum N. Glatzer. Trans. Wiila and Edwin Muir, and others. New York: Schocken Books, 1971, pp. 60- 79. 69 never taken. He immediately grabs a piece of paper and starts writing stories about the door of the Law, the doorkeeper, and himself. Or else, suppose he starts drawing the door before him, together with the doorkeeper. He does not hesitate a second on account of his lack of training and taste, since he knows he has a lifetime to master the craft, and, in any case, nothing better to do.

Of the scene in front of him, he produces thousands of versions: perhaps fictional ones, where an exhausted messenger manages to come out of the door from inside, with a message to be delivered to the man from the country, or where the doorkeeper does finally let the man pass. Or, perhaps, the man's work is realistic to the minutest detail, though with a barely noticeable difference somewhere: something as slight as a shadow cast by the door, which is disproportionate to that of the doorkeeper; a fold in the doorkeeper's rich robe that looks like a letter, or a passing cloud that resembles a grimace without a face. Once such a body of work is

produced, it becomes irrelevant if and when the man from the country dies. Sooner

or later, the doorkeeper comes to take a yawning look at what this simple man has

been toiling over for so many years. Being the haughty dispassionate observer he is,

he does not take too long to catch one of those nearly imperceptible irregularities,

then another, then another, and yet another, till he gets obsessed about the enigma of

these countless worlds that are all the same, yet each a little different. Only after a

while does he figure that he has turned into a man waiting before a door, hoping to

be granted access.

In yet another conjecture, the reader gasps at the unexpected insight that this

story could actually have a happy ending. After the death of the man from the

country, the doorkeeper is to shut the door that was intended for him only, simply

because the man has indeed crossed the door at his dying moment, and the door, 70 having thus fulfilled its function, no longer needs to remain open. From the very beginning, this crossing could only have been permitted as a gift of transfiguration at the moment of death, should the man willingly consume his entire life for the sole purpose of gaining access to the Law. And to herald the approach of the man's silent crossing, in his last hours there has been pouring into his, by now quite dimmed, vision: "... a radiance which breaks out imperishably from the door to the law" (The

Trial 167). The light that possibly only the man can see,7 and the promised act of closing the door, together bear witness to a miracle that otherwise remains unexpressed in the text, since no language can follow the man through the door without a similar transfiguration.

There could be no end to the sort of exercise above, which - flexing the mimetic faculty as understood by Benjamin - replicates the hermeneutic efforts of K. and the priest in the first place, those employed in Kafka's oeuvre at large in the second, and finally, those of Kafka's perceptive critics like Benjamin himself. In fact, Benjamin's first response, to an author in whose parables he discerns

Scheherazade's inexhaustible capacity to tell more, is to add to the narrative stream one more piece of his own; it is thus, and with a clear nod to the midrashic tradition of interpreting narratives with more narratives, that he introduces the reader to the world of Kafka through the story of the little industrious clerk Shuvalkin.8

7 This would be one of the many "opinions" that the priest presents to K. alter telling the parable: "[Some people] even believe that, at least towards the end, [the doorkeeper] is subordinate to the man in knowledge too, for the latter sees the radiance which breaks out from the entrance to the law, while the door-keeper must because of his duty be standing with his back to the entrance and says nothing to indicate he has noticed any change" (171). 8 See Selected Writings, Vol. 2, p. 794. Shuvalkin's is only the first of the stories that Benjamin weaves into his disquisition; it is followed by the Talmudic legend of the princess in exile (80S), and the story of the beggar who wishes to be a king forced to flee his palace in nothing but his nightshirt (812), alongside several retellings from Kafka's parables and longer pieces. Also Milan Kundera, in his essay on Kafka, employs an opening strategy remarkably similar to that of Benjamin's (see " 'Somewhere Behind'," in Critical Essays on Franz Kafka. Ed. Ruth V. Gross. Boston: G.K. Hall & Co., 1990, pp. 21-31). He begins by retelling a true story about an engineer who, having been 71

n. When an author establishes in the text the possibility for any new

narratives to be attached to the tails of the others in a theoretically open series, conclusion in the traditional sense becomes problematic. Clearly, not that the text fails to come to an end, but the end thus constructed is invariably impregnated with a

potential continuation. Melville's The Confidence-Man, to recall a case invoked in

the introduction, concludes with "Something further may follow of this

Masquerade;" Gravity's Rainbow does away even with the final period, offering

"Now everybody-" for an end; and Kafka's reputation for {/^finishing his works

goes without saying.

In the parabolic mode, such a closure that is cheated out of its own finality is

not only inescapable; it is also highly desirable. Benjamin asserts that in Kafka's

work "narrative art regains the significance it had in the mouth of Scheherazade: its

ability to postpone the future" (807). Indeed, after the cases of Melville and Pynchon

discussed earlier, and perhaps even to a greater degree, Kafka's writings strain to put

off that future, which is the end of the text or the telling, the last word preceding

silence.

As to what might be motivating such an urge to postpone the future, the

answer could be sought in a particular form of despair, which rises out of an ill-

unjustly accused of a crime, eventually finds himself forced to actually commit that crime; at the end of his narration, Kundera identifies the story as "one that we would immediately call Kafkan," and proceeds to explore what exactly that term entails (22), just as Benjamin announces, after telling about Shuvalkin's encounter with Potemkin, that Shuvalkin's world, "[t]he world of offices and registries, of musty, shabby, dark rooms, is Kafka's world" (795). Perhaps this resemblance of opening strategies results, simply, from Kafka's power as a storyteller, as understood by Benjamin himself; a power which eventually turns, those listeners who can receive the narration with enough abandonment, into tellers of stories themselves, whether they be the ones they have thus heard, or new ones: "... [H]e listens to the tales in such a way that the gift of retelling them comes to him all by itself" ("The Storyteller: Observations on the Works of Nikolai Leskov," Selected Writings, Vol. 3, p. 149). 72 tuned relationship with time. As Josef K., upon hearing the priest's narration,

promptly complains (167),9 the message of salvation comes too late, when it can no

longer be of any use - just like the sound of the V-2, which arrives to warn about the

mortal danger only when the rocket itself has already blasted. And just as it is in

Pynchon's work, in Kafka too this despair leads, not to an absolute zero, but rather

to a variety of modest consolations which stem from, or are otherwise attributable

to, a state of unfinishedness. In "An Imperial Message," an infinity of space and

time gradually floods the path of the messenger, erasing the man and the mission;

yet the message itself still reaches the recipient, through the unpredicted medium of

a dream; in fact, the intimacy of this new channel suggests that it has never been

necessary to deliver the message in the first place, that it has always been with

"you:" "...Nobody could fight his way through here, least of all one with a message

from a dead man. - But you sit at your window when evening falls and dream it to

yourself."10 It could well be argued that it is the very incompletion of the

messenger's mission which brings the dream-message into existence in all its grace.

Indeed, Benjamin locates the Kafkan grace nowhere else than "in the fact that his

books are incomplete,"11 and the only possible hope, in the "beings in an unfinished

state" that crowd Kafka's imagination, like the assistants of The Castle: "It is for

them and their kind, the unfinished and the hapless, that there is hope."12 Whereas

for less fortunate figures, like K. and perhaps Kafka himself, procrastination prevails

9 "'So the door-keeper deceived the man,' said K. at once, very much taken by the stoiy. [...] 'The door-keeper gave the message of salvation only when it could no longer help die man' " {The Trial 167-8). 10 "An Imperial Message," Parables and Paradoxes, p. 15. 11 "We have drawn attention to the dubious religious interpretations of Kafka's work, according to which the Castle is to be seen as the seat of grace. Yet it is the fact that his books are incomplete which shows the true working of grace in his writings. The fact that the Law never finds expression as such - this and nothing else is the gracious dispensation of the fragment" ("Franz Kafka: Beitn Bau der Chinesischen Mauer," Selected Writings, Vol. 2, p. 497). 12 Selected Writings, Vol. 2, p. 798. 73 as the only mode of thought and behavior capable of approximating - for a while - the full bliss of incompletion: "In Der Prozefi, postponement is the hope of the accused man only if the proceedings do not gradually turn into the judgment."13

In Kafka's treatment, procrastination does not merely denote an incapability to perform the task at hand in a timely fashion, or, to put it more simply, an absence of proper action; it rather emerges as a form of anti-action which is willfully

performed in order to avoid doing something else: "Without any particular reason,

just to avoid returning to his desk for a while, he opened the window" (The Trial

105). Indulgence in this kind of procrastination at any length, therefore, yields a

forking sequence of acts, an alternative to the series of what should have been done.

And the unfolding of the divergent sequence constitutes, in its turn, an alternative

temporal flow which is at odds with chronological time.

For whoever dwells in the time of procrastination, the dreaded then of the

deadline is far more present than now, so that time ceases to move from the usual

now to then, and then, and then finally... It rather flows from then to before, but first, but even before that... with each step, perceived as an insurmountable obstacle,

branching off to the next, so that one gets distracted from the immanence of then,

safely lost in details.

In The Trial, the painter Titorelli depicts to K. the three kinds of acquittal,

that is, three possible futures, that the accused could aspire for. He begins with

"actual acquittal," which, in his words, "is of course best" (120), one that especially

a man convinced of his innocence should seek without any external assistance. Only

that K. instantly perceives a contradiction in the painter's statement, which leads the

latter to disclose that this path, with hope gleaming at the end, is likely to exist

13 Selected Writings, Vol. 2, p. 807. 74 solely in legends: "I've listened to countless proceedings... and -1 must confess -

I've never been present at a single actual acquittal.' 'So not one single acquittal,' said K. as if addressing himself and his hopes" (121). Thus, steering K. away from the first alley of despair, the painter brings up the possibility of "apparent acquittal," whereby the accused, once acquitted, could only expect to be arrested again at any moment, and then acquitted again, and arrested again, so on and so forth ad

infinitum; as the second option proves to equal, if not surpass, the first one in the

desolation that it promises, the painter next proposes to explain "prolongation," by

which method "the proceedings are kept permanently in their first stages" (125);

should this course of action be taken, however, there rises the necessity, for

appearance's sake, to create the illusion of some progress: "The case has to be kept

constantly moving in the small area to which it has been artificially restricted" (126).

And such progress can only be faked if the defendant is willing to concentrate, for

an indefinite period of time, on nothing but his case, literally turning himself into a

dog at the threshold of judges and advocates - like the merchant Block whom K.

will in fact meet in the subsequent chapter.

Since none of his prospects offers even the slightest chance of true liberation,

K. stands up to leave, declaring that he will soon come visit the painter again, and

hence postponing, once more, his obligation to make a choice. Or else, one might

also think that he has no need to choose, since the path of prolongation, or

procrastination, is what he has long been treading anyways. In any case, although K.

makes it evident that at that moment he wishes nothing more than breaking free

from the suffocating atmosphere of the attic, the painter detains him. He pulls, from

under his bed, an unframed painting that he intends to sell to K., "[a] Moorland

Scene-" "It showed two spindly trees standing some distance apart in sombre green 75 grass. In the background there was a multicoloured sunset" (128). As K. states immediately that he wishes to buy it, the painter produces another tableau that he refers to as "a companion piece," even though the two paintings seem to be identical:"... there was not the slightest perceptible difference between this and the first picture. Here were the trees, here the grass, and there the sunset" (128).

Purchasing the second painting as well, K. is shown yet another, which he again rushes to buy, although this one too is "the absolutely identical same old moorland scene" (128). The painter stops there, but his words suggest that his supply of moorland scenes is far from being exhausted, like the magical treasure chests of fairy tales that yield gold forever (128):

I'm really pleased you like the pictures. I'll give you all the pictures I have under here too. They are all moorland scenes; I've painted so many moorland scenes. Some people don't like pictures like this, they think they're too bleak, but others, and you're one of them, love just this bleakness.

Certainly, the three paintings that K. feels obligated to buy without even knowing the cost14 bear echoes from the three options just presented to him, aligned on an ever-darkening slope. Considering the emphasis placed on the identity of the paintings, there is reason to suspect that the three kinds of acquittal too may be delineating the one and the same picture of a bleak future. And yet again, there is the possibility that the three paintings, which likely belong to an open series, are indeed not identical; perhaps each painting conceals a slight yet significant difference behind the appearance of sameness. It could well be that the three canvases, as if woven by the three Moiras, offer K. three ostensibly identical fates to choose from, in which it is K.'s crucial challenge to distinguish, and learn from, the divergent

14 "'How much are the three pictures?' 'We'll talk about that next time,' said the painter. 'You're in a hurry now, and we are staying in touch after all"' (128). 76 detail - a tell-tale irregularity that could lead K. to a quiet nook in his own world, where he could curl up and live relatively undisturbed, thus joining the ranks of

Kafka's other "scurrying" creatures,15 as well as Pynchon's flitting preterite.

Furthermore, perhaps the threefold repetition, which is indeed after the fashion of fairy tales, is necessary for K.'s destiny to be sealed, so that the triptych also foreshadows that other, this time moonlit, landscape wherein the figure of K. will be distorted into an unnatural pose, and stabbed in the heart. Is bleakness the only message of the triptych, or do the paintings have more to reveal to K.? Or is it his very "love" of bleakness that K. needs to come to terms with, in the sense that he must not only accept that strange love, but also recognize its considerable depth and

implications?

Whatever answers could be generated to the questions above, still the fact

remains that K. prefers to seek relief for his momentary discomfort caused by the

lack of air, in order to avoid delving into the intricacies of a legal case that should

present a far greater menace to his life. Despite appearances, however, this is not a

typical instance of choosing the lesser evil. On the contrary, it is an unmistakeable

trait of the Kafkan character to always move from bad to worse. While the

proceedings held against K. do threaten - and eventually take - his life, he knows

that he could meet the same fate much faster if he gets literally deprived of air. And

yet, he steps out of the painter's airless attic in such a hurry, only to find himself in

an even more stifling nest of court offices: "In front of him stretched a long passage

and from it blew a draught of air, in comparison with which the air in the studio was

13 "Incidentally, it is worth paying attention to the kinds of animals Kafka chooses to embody his ideas. They always dwell in the interior of the earth, or, like the beetle in "Die Verwandlung"... they are creatures that hide away on the ground, in cracks and crannies. This scurrying away seems to the author the only appropriate behaviour for the isolated members of his generation and their context, with their ignorance of the law" (Benjamin, Selected Writings, Vol. 2, p. 498). 77 refreshing" (129). Accordingly, he is justified in no longer concerning himself with the painter's words, focusing, instead, on the singular effort of exiting the court offices. Indeed, after admonishing K. in the passageway not to "take too long to consider" what he has been told, Titorelli departs from K.'s conscience, and even the text itself, never to return: "K. did not even look around at him" (129).

It must, however, be emphasized that the painter is thus pushed away into

K.'s future, rather than his past; the person of Titorelli and all the worries that he

might represent for K. now belong to a future that K. has no immediate obligation to

react to, since he must first attend to the more urgent business of getting some fresh

air. It is thus that K. snatches the little time that otherwise might not have fallen to

his share, since it is perpetually too late. In other words, his lack of synchrony, with

time itself, leads K. to progress by regressing.

What is notable about this regression is the fact that it is marked, despite its

frenzy, by a peculiar kind of slowness enveloping K. like a buffer zone: K.'s

obliviousness of that which is to come does not simply coexist with, but rather

thrives on, an acute awareness of the details of each passing moment; in their

richness, these details block the path of what is to come and, as it were, slow down

its approach, allowing K. to procrastinate by observing them. In fact, as Benjamin

asserts, there is a direct link between the notion of procrastination and such a

frenzied proliferation of details: "[Procrastination is the true meaning of that

noteworthy and often striking fullness of detail which according to Max Brod lay at

the heart of Kafka's search for perfection and the true way...."16 Yet, the very

existence of such details depends on K.'s ability to detect them; there can be no

details without a neurotically keen observer to notice them. In other words, it is K.

Selected Writings, Vol.2, p. 496. 78 who summons them around himself to the point of paralysis and/or suffocation, so that he might have something to occupy himself with; it is K. who wills the details

into existence, as agents that graciously cut off the future in its inexorable advance

towards the present - almost as if the present did not exist per se, but were created

out of each such cut, by the willfull and concentrated effort of the Kafkan character

to distract himself: "As long as you don't stop climbing, the stairs won't end, under

your climbing feet they will go on growing upwards."17

Distraction in the details of the process constitutes the only haven against the

anxiety of the looming end. Kafka's procrastination is an artful practice dedicated to

the achievement of such distraction, and the parabolic mode, the very means to

achieve it.

III. Before discussing the specific role of parables in such a practice,

however, it must be noted that the practice is certain to fail, sooner or later. To

repeat Benjamin's careful formulation, prolongation is the hope and haven of the

accused man only provided that the proceedings themselves do not turn into the

judgment; but they do. The moment inevitably comes when the proceedings

conflate, not only with the judgment itself, but also with its swift execution - the

epitomy of such conflation being the " remarkable apparatus" of "In the Penal

Colony."18 This could almost be regarded as the resilience, if not the revenge, of the

future which, having been put off for so long, imposes itself with such a devouring

force as to do away with the entire slow procedure - hence the apparatus ends up

jabbing the officer lifeless in a flash, instead of taking the usual twelve hours to

17 "Advocates" in Franz Kafka: The Complete Stories. Trans. Tania and James Stern, and ed. Nahum N. Glatzer. New York: Schocken Books, 1971, p. 451. 18 "In the Penal Colony" in The Complete Stories, trans. Willa and Edwin Muir, pp. 140-167. 79 inscribe and properly enlighten him, as it has done with all the other condemned men.19

Still, the bit of time snatched by way of prolongation is not without its value, despite its poignance and due to it. Just like the fragrance of the banana breakfast that enwraps discardable souls within minutes of their possible annihilation in GR, thus offering a kind place to dwell in before death arrives, so too the singing of

Josephine the mouse yields, without saving any one, a fragile comer where the life of her fellow mice could unfold in all colours:"20

Here in the brief intervals between their struggles our people dream .... And into these dreams Josephine's piping drops note by note.... Something of our poor brief childhood is in it, something of lost happiness that can never be found again, but also something of active daily life, of its small gaieties, unaccountable and yet springing up and not to be obliterated.

The modesty of such makeshift dwellings of distraction - be they of an

olfactory or musical or any other kind - proves deceptive, since they do not abide by

conventional spatiotemporal boundaries. While, to all appearances, it remains true

that then the end does come, the stretch of time till then manages to bubble out of the

limits of the deadline; for, as the distance between then and now is broken into

smaller and smaller units of lived experience, each such unit implodes, as it were, into

a complex private universe expanding in any direction - with any intensity of details -

ad infinitum. In fact, in Kafka's imagination, just as it shall be seen in the case of

Borges, infinity always takes one by surprise, because it invariably lurks from what

seems to be a manageable spatiotemporal reach - such as the distance between the

village and the Castle.

19 "In the Penal Colony," p. 165. 20 "Josephine the Singer, or the Mouse Folk" in The Complete Stories, trans. Willa and Edwin Muir, p. 370. 80

The multidimensional unfolding of each such unit appears to work, at a first glance, to the disadvantage of the Kafkan character: there appears in his horizon a simple enough task to be fulfilled, a meeting to be arranged, or a conversation to be

held with a certain person; a mere trifle added to one's busy yet regularly flowing schedule, something to be dealt with in one's spare time. So K., for one, thinks that it

would be greatly beneficial to his case to write a "short account of his life and, in the

case of each relatively important event, explain the reasons for his action..." (The

Trial 89). No sooner said, however, the job gets literally undone in K.'s mind, the

"short account" breaking down into an incalculable pile of memories (100-1):

... it was impossible ever to get the plea ready.... because in ignorance of the actual accusation and even of any further charges arising from it one had to recall the most trivial actions and events of one's life, present them and review them from every angle. And furthermore, how depressing such a task was.

However, the same structure proves to serve the interests of the character as

well. Thanks to it, all the worries about what lies ahead melt into a blissful maze of

increasing complications, which yields blind alleys to rest at, and dark corners to

play in, to think or worry about other things, to forget. And once oblivion is attained,

one may further occupy oneself with such sentiments and activities as the guilt

arising from, and the futile struggle against, oblivion itself.21 Thus it is that

Benjamin, for instance, takes note of Kafka's Abraham who, unlike his biblical

counterpart, "benefit[s] by postponement, even though he may have to trade his

place in tradition for it;"22 in Kafka's rewriting, the patriarch never gets to face his

dire sacrificial duties, since he is constantly kept busy by the effervescence of his

domestic existence: he would be "prepared to satisfy the demand for a sacrifice

21"... Willy Haas was fiilly justified in decoding the unadmitted guilt that the trial of Joseph K. conjures up: it is guilt over forgetting. Kafka's writing is simply full of configurations of forgetting - of silent pleas to recall things to mind" (Benjamin, Selected Writings, Vol. 2, p. 498). 22 Selected Writings, Vol. 2, p. 807. 81 immediately, with the promptness of a waiter, but [is] unable to bring it off because he [cannot] get away, being indispensable; the household need[s] him, there [is] perpetually something or other to put in order, the house [is] never ready ...,"23

Whether working for or against the character, the manner of unfolding of a

Kafkan parable stands apart, in Benjamin's view, from the unfolding of any other parabolic narrative:

The word "unfolding" has a double meaning. A bud unfolds into a blossom, but the boat which one teaches children to make by folding paper unfolds into a flat sheet of paper. This second kind of "unfolding" is really appropriate to the parable; it is the reader's pleasure to smooth it out so that he has the meaning on the palm of his hand. Kafka's parables, however, unfold in the first sense, the way a bud turns into a blossom.24

Before turning to Kafka's parables in particular, it is to be said - at the risk of appearing presumptious - that Benjamin himself, had he been posed the question in a separate context, would have most likely rejected the inevitable implications of the passage above: that all parables in general, except those written by Kafka, could be ultimately reduced to some graspable flat message or meaning, the way origami figures could, despite their variety and intricacies, sink back into the same sheet of paper. Such a notion would starkly oppose Benjamin's rather obvious and profound appreciation of dark and unyielding stories.25 So, one could simply argue that, what

Benjamin sees at work in Kafka's parables actually applies to many other parables as well. This would be yet another way of formulating the distinction drawn within the frame of GR between the arrested institutional parable, and the other parable. In other words, there are those parables which, under the pressure of interpretation, flatten into the limits of comprehension, and those which, in response to such

23 "Abraham," Parables and Paradoxes, p. 41. 24 Selected Writings, Vol. 2, p. 802. 25 Such as the one about the Egyptian king Psammenitus, found in the Histories of Herodotus, that he so lovingly recounts in "The Storyteller," Selected Writings, Vol. 3, p. 148. 82 pressure, release an unexpected charge of complexity from out of their original concentrated form. In fact, according to Benjamin himself an ageless power of germination is the shared trait of, not only parables, but rather of any truly good story: "A stoiy is different. It does not expend itself. It preserves and concentrates its energy and is capable of releasing it even after a long time."26

However, perhaps there is more to the comparison with the paper boat than

Benjamin allows for. Sometimes the Kafkan narrative could very well be said to develop in a series of origami-like foldings and unfoldings; that is to say, the story folds and unfolds, produces and erases and produces over and over again variations over the same sets of possibilities. So one finds in "Josephine the Singer," for instance, a narrative rhythm truly reminiscent of the ebb and flow, whereby paragraph after paragraph Josephine's singing becomes quite the same thing as, and infinitely different from, and absolutely the same thing as, the piping of all the other mouse folk.

This plasticity - if one may simply call it so - is essential to the parabolic mode, and appears in many forms. Parables pose as a kind of pre-text, as a text that can and will be written over and over again, before and after the writing of the finished piece. They are the malleable ghostly core that remains at the heart of all finished works, waiting to be tapped into - as Kafka does in each of his exercises in rewriting. If the parabolic mode is at all instrumental in the achievement of that desired state of distraction through procrastination, this is mainly due to its plasticity; it is through the endless possibilities of writing, undoing and rewriting the parable as a pre-text that time is made. Had there ever been a muse to grace over the art of writing parables, it would have been Penelope.

26 Selected Writings, Vol. 3, p. 148. 83

IV. The scrupulous reader of The Odyssey shall remember the details of

Odysseus'/Ulysses' encounter with the Sirens in Book XII: the hero, following to the letter Kirke's instructions, kneads a large cake of beeswax into small bits and plugs the ears of all his crew, and then has himself tightly bound to the ship's mast with unobstructed ears, so that he could freely listen to the Sirens' song without bringing destruction upon himself and the crew.27 The opening of "The Silence of the Sirens"28 modifies this encounter without warning to the reader: now Ulysses, in order to avoid hearing the Sirens, is said to have used both the wax and the chains upon himself, despite the universally recognized ineffectiveness of such safety measures; for, as the text reminds the reader, "[t]he song of the Sirens could pierce through everything

[including bits of beeswax], and the longing of those they seduced would have broken far stronger bonds than chains and masts." In other words, behind the initial pretence of undertaking a regular interpretation of the story, the text has already set out to

produce a completely different version of it, attempting to reflect upon the

motivations and strategies of another Ulysses who ostensibly succeeds in hearing

nothing from the Sirens, when, by every known reason, he should have heard

something and perished for it.

As the story, rewritten, goes, the Sirens have two weapons: their singing,

which lures men to the rocks whereupon they shall be devoured by the monstrous

songstresses; and "a still more fatal weapon," their deliberate silence, which leaves

men in the grip of the delusion that they have somehow escaped the inescapable,

that is, the Sirens' singing, when the Sirens have not been singing at all: "Against

the feeling of having triumphed over them by one's own strength, and the

27 See The Odyssey. Trans. Robert Fitzgerald. New York: Anchor Books, 1963, pp. 210-6. 28 "The Silence of the Sirens" in The Complete Stories, trans. Willa and Edwin Muir, pp. 430-2. 84 consequent exaltation that bears down everything before it, no earthly powers can resist." That is to say, while the Sirens' singing destroys men's flesh, their silence brings about a spiritual destruction - a sort of megalomania, based on a false victory, which consumes men from within, with no external signs. And Ulysses' challenge is to find a way of escaping both of these weapons.

Yet, when he draws near them, the Sirens let out another kind of silence. The text is at first ambiguous in this respect, stating that this silence is either attributable to the Sirens' decision to use their second, deadlier weapon against such a potent enemy; or, that it is the "look of bliss on the face of Ulysses, who was thinking of

nothing but his wax and his chains, [that] made them forget their singing." Soon

after, however, the ambiguity dissolves and the second possibility is declared to be

the true case: the Sirens are silent simply because, distracted by Ulysses' beauteous

looks, they have forgotten to employ either of their weapons; which is to say, they

have forgotten themselves, that they are Sirens: "They no longer had any desire to

allure; all that they wanted was to hold as long as they could the radiance that fell

from Ulysses' great eyes." And Ulysses responds in kind to this forgetting, by

forgetting about the Sirens himself. He erases their existence, within the limits of his

perception, by means of another "childish" yet highly effective trick: since he

focuses "his gaze on the distance," that is, since he simply avoids looking in their

direction, "the Sirens literally [vanish] before his resolution...".

The text initially claims that all this time Ulysses, "if one may so express it,

did not hear their silence; he thought they were singing and that he alone did not

hear them." In other words, he has been enjoying yet another kind of silence: not the

silence used by the Sirens as a weapon, and not the silence of their forgetting, but

rather the silence of him miraculously suppressing their song by means of his 85 ridiculous measures; to put it differently, a silence granted by his ignorance. Unlike the former two, this silence properly belongs to Ulysses.

At this point, the new version of the story proves to be as problematic as the old, not only because it presents Ulysses a bit like a lucky fool, but also, and most importantly, because it fails to account for Ulysses' escape from the Sirens' second weapon; that is to say, it remains to be explained how it is at all possible that he

manages to avoid the self-consuming delusional megalomania that would inevitably arise from such a victory. Therefore, the text produces yet another rewriting which

attributes to Ulysses a fourth, and incomparably profound, kind of silence - this time

befitting that craftiest of all men:

A codicil to the foregoing has also been handed down. Ulysses, it is said, was so full of guile, was such a fox, that not even the goddess of fate could pierce his armor. Perhaps he had really noticed, although here the human understanding is beyond its depths, that the Sirens were silent, and held up to them and to the gods the aforementioned pretense merely as a sort of shield.

The shield of pretense that helps Ulysses triumph over his enemies must have

been somehow borrowed from Perseus, for it too works as a mirror, striking the

Sirens with their own terrible weapon, that of silence. Ulysses' pretended naivete,

i.e. his seeming reliance on the wax and the chains, creates a mirage - of the purity

of will - that consumes the Sirens from within, without of course destroying them

literally, just the way the Sirens' deliberate silence would have undone a man

without any outward signs: "If the Sirens had possessed consciousness they would

have been annihilated at that moment. But they remained as they had been; all that

had happened was that Ulysses had escaped them." He escapes because he holds

absolutely silent: silent about the Sirens' silence, so as to keep looking like the

blessed, beautiful, resolute fool who has managed to suppress their song, silent 86 within his own consciousness, so as not to inflate into the delusional megalomaniac fool, and silent before the gods, so as not to be the fool to attract their unforgiving envy. And this would be the silence resulting from Ulysses' infinite knowledge.

Although refashioning the original story in an attempt to achieve a deeper, keener understanding of it, "The Silence of the Sirens" never betrays the inconclusiveness intrinsic to the parabolic mode; the products of rewriting remain suspended in uncertainty, the word "perhaps" prefacing almost every speculation:

"Perhaps he had really noticed...that the Sirens were silent...." Finally, it must be evident that "The Silence of the Sirens" is deceptive as a title, since it suggests that there is only one kind of silence and that it belongs exclusively to the Sirens, while a close reading of the text reveals the presence of - at least - four, two emanating from the Sirens and the other two from Ulysses.

In "Prometheus,"29 Kafka reverses this playful trick, opening the short piece with the sentence: "There are four legends concerning Prometheus." The statement leads one to assume that what follows will offer four different stories about the fate of the mythical figure; and the continuation, "According to the first...," initially confirms the validity of such an assumption. The first legend turns out to be the very one handed down by tradition: Prometheus "was clamped to a rock in the Caucasus for betraying the secrets of the gods to men, and the gods sent eagles to feed on his liver, which was perpetually renewed." However, the next paragraph opening with the same formula, "According to the second," does not offer an alternative version of the legend. It merely continues the first story, just telling what happens to

Prometheus next: "Prometheus, goaded by the pain of the tearing beaks, pressed himself deeper and deeper into the rock until he became one with it." Likewise with

29 "Prometheus" in The Complete Stones, trans. Willa and Edwin Muir, p. 432. 87 the so-called "third" legend, which provides the next instalment of the same

narrative, wherein the cause of this perpetual torture fades away from the memory of

all the parties involved: "his treachery was forgotten in the course of thousands of

years, forgotten by the gods, the eagles, forgotten by himself." And the natural

consequence of this forgetting, which would be boredom and lassitude, is told of in

the "fourth" legend: "According to the fourth everyone grew weary of the

meaningless affair. The gods grew weary, the eagles grew weary, the wound closed

wearily."

There is an obvious incongruity between the initial promise and the actual

unfolding of the text; only one legend concerning Prometheus is told - not four - and

in quite a logical fashion too: each paragraph covers a part of the story that

reasonably derives from, and leads to, the situations depicted, respectively, in the

preceding and the subsequent paragraphs. Alongside the mass of rock that in the end

is declared to be "inexplicable," this incongruity itsef remains inexplicable.

And then again, what is it about the rock that is so inexplicable? Despite the

clarity of the earlier parts, the text is remarkably obscure on this point: "There

remained the inexplicable mass of rock. The legend tried to explain the inexplicable.

As it came out of a substratum of truth it had in turn to end in the inexplicable"

(emphasis mine). No clues, set aside explanations, are given as to why exactly the

rock should be such a mysteiy, and it is highly significant that the text, just like the

legend that it talks about, here ends in the dark.

In genuinely attempting to approach something recognized to be

inexplicable, one's strategy of choice would not probably be straightforward

explanation. Indeed, the fruit of the first encounter with the inexplicable was a myth,

rather than an expos6, and Kafka himself avoids that path, adopting instead a 88 midrashic strategy of rewriting the old myth; while doing so, he chooses to mirror its

inexplicableness, by adding confusing elements to his own rewriting, such as the

promise and the absence of four different versions. Thus, Kafka's "Prometheus" does not certainly explain, but rather slowly "becomes one with" the inexplicable

mass of the original myth, the way Prometheus himself is said to become one with

the rock. In other words, it is by no accident that the rock and the text - both the old

myth and the rewriting - share the same traits of inexplicableness, for perhaps the

rock is the page, the blank page upon which the figure of Prometheus has been

stretched, consumed and regenerated through centuries of writing.

While both "Prometheus" and "The Silence of the Sirens" are rewritings in

the traditional sense, Kafka's oeuvre also includes other, more peculiar rewriting

exercises which do not necessarily play around older stories; they rather keep

erasing, and then building back upon, their own words. One such aphorism from the

ZUrau collection30 begins by cancelling out a suggestion that has been made before

the writing began: "It isn't necessary that you leave home. Sit at your desk and

listen." And each of the following two sentences likewise objects to what is

preceding, recommending instead a seemingly simpler course of action: "Don't even

listen, just wait. Don't wait, be still and alone." The simplicity of the alternatives is

deceptive, since waiting without listening, and being still and alone without waiting

for something to happen, if at all attempted, prove rather difficult feats to

accomplish.

With such high demands, the aphorism progresses by scratching out and

writing over its own propositions, as if, layer by layer, retreating into an inner

30 See The Zurau Aphorisms of Franz Kafka. Trans. Geoffrey Brock and Michael Hofmann, commentary by Roberto Calasso. New York: Schocken Books, 2006, p. 108. 89 sanctuary; in there "[t]he whole world will offer itself to you to be unmasked, it can do no other..." In a way, even the last order is cancelled out, given that, //"truly still and alone, one will be in the company of "the whole world," rather than alone.

Furthermore, this is merely a promise, not a fact; the world will allow itself to be

unmasked only by those who strip themselves to the bone, peeling off even the desire to wait at the sanctuary.31 In other words, the one strategy that the text does

not scratch out is a magical one; to use Benjaminian terminology, one that has to do

with mimetic production: Mirror beforehand what you would like the world to do,

and, in response, the world, unmasked, "will writhe before you in ecstasy." Indeed,

the aphorism even yields a mirrorlike reversal with that last word: it suggests that, in communion with the man withdrawn to his innermost core, that is, with the enstatic

man, the world will appear in ecstasy.

The mimetic element, that is, the peculiar mirroring effect observed in this

aphorism is far from being unique; there are similar elements employed, at the level

of style or narrative, not only in "The Silence of the Sirens" and "Prometheus," but

in several other pieces by Kafka as well. To recall, Ulysses mimics the Sirens' use

of silence as a weapon, and he does so, again, with a mirrorlike reversal: they use it

for offense, he, for defense, "as a sort of shield." The text of Prometheus does not

admonish anyone to behave mimetically - as the aphorism does - but itself imitates

the inexplicableness of the old myth by incorporating something inexplicable to its

own style. And among other cases with such mirroring effects, there is the 'I' of

31 Just to note in passing, the central image of a gradual, yet absolute stripping at work here resonates with the unfinished "Holy of Holies" to a remarkable degree: "Before setting foot in the Holy of Holies you must take off your shoes, yet not only your shoes, but everything; you must take off your traveling garment and lay down your luggage; and under that you must shed your nakedness and everything that is under the nakedness and everything that hides beneath that, and then the core and the core of the core, then the remainder and then the residue and then even the glimmer of undying fire. Only the fire itself is absorbed by the Holy of Holies and lets itself be absorbed by it; neither can resist the other" (The Diaries of Franz Kafka, p. 87). 90

"Home-Coming," another prodigal son in a tormented rewriting, who, standing before the kitchen door in the yard of his father's old farm, imagines people sitting on the other side with "a secret they are keeping from [him];" and soon enough, he feels himself to be in possession of a secret that he wishes to guard with jealousy:

"The longer one hesitates before the door, the more estranged one becomes. What would happen if someone were to open the door now and ask me a question? Would

not I myself then behave like one who wants to keep his secret?"32 Sancho Panza, in yet another rewriting, keeps feeding his demon, Don Quixote, with entertaining

"romances of chivalry and adventure," in order to distract him from his real target,

"which should have been Sancho Panza himself;" so that eventually the demon

returns the favor, embarking on adventures which provide Sancho Panza with "great

and edifying entertainment to the end of his days,"33 precisely the way those chivalric romances would. And finally, the philosopher in "The Top," convinced

that the understanding of all things could be achieved by "the understanding of any

detail," such as a spinning top, remains consistently blind to the uncanny

resemblance that he bears to his unseizable object of study: "The screaming of

children ... chased him away, and he tottered like a top under a clumsy whip'''

(emphasis mine).34

Naturally, the detection of such mimetic elements leads to the question of

their raisort d'etre in the parabolic mode. Perhaps such elements are the remnants or

echoes of a much older and far more profound form of mimetic behavior - the kind

that lies also at the heart of the practice of rewriting. Indeed, understanding the

32 "Home-Coming" in The Complete Stories, trans. Tania and James Stern, pp. 445-6. 33 The Truth about Sancho Panza" in The Complete Stories, trans. Willa and Edwin Muir, p. 430. 34 "The Top" in The Complete Stories, trans. Tania and James Stern, p. 444; the sense of endless repetition that arises from this story is also significant for the purposes of the discussion on time and repetition soon to follow. 91

purpose or function of rewriting within the hermeneutic tradition requires more careful thought than the notion seems to claim initially. How is it exactly that

rewriting helps one cast a keener look into a certain text? How is it that sometimes one rewrites an old story, that is, alters it by presenting events, characters or

dialogues that are either completely new or unpredictable in the directions they take,

in order to draw one step closer to that old story? If such indeed is the purpose of

rewriting - with which widespread view the present study concurs - this would

confirm that there is always another story behind or beyond both the old and the

new versions; that the parabolic mode is truly pre-textual in this sense. It would

suggest that there is a core, which, like the sun, cannot be looked at or expressed

directly, and that both the old and the new stories are the products of an indirect,

sideway glance at the ever-elusive core - as has been discussed in the introduction.

This is precisely where the value of parables stems from: that they succeed, as Heinz

Politzer puts it succinctly, in "[expressing] the inexpressible without betraying it"

(84).35

As the reader picks up any text produced out of such a sideway glance at the

core, one of two things is likely to occur: either nothing happens, for the reader

remains untouched by the text and leaves it behind. Or, the reading is brought to a

33 Despite the validity of Politzer's general argument, problems do inevitably occur due to his all- inclusive application of the notion that, what each Kafkan parable employs, for the purpose of approaching "the inexpressible" without "betraying" it, is a paradox. While it is true that some parables, including some of Kafka's, unfold around a central and excruciating paradox, others simply do not In other words, once having formulated his thesis, Politzer sometimes forces a paradox out of the work under discussion, so that it adheres to his overarching formula, when what he calls a paradox could easily pass as a simple reversal. Such, for instance, is the way he reads The Bucket Rider:" "As a statement of man's forlornness in a wintery world," he notes, "this beginning [of the story] is lyrically perfect. To continue it and give it the form of a Kafkan parable, he had to search for a central paradox. The vision of a man riding on a bucket instead of carrying it offered itself to him." It should also be noted that Politzer here uses the notion of expression within the frame of representation, whereas Deleuze develops a non-representational treatment of the subject in the wake of Spinoza, especially in his book on Spinoza and also in The Fold. (See Politzer's Franz Kafka: Parable and Paradox, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1962, p. 88). 92 jolting halt on account of something that flashes through the mind with a hint of that core, yet far too quickly to be grasped, and the reader reads again; the second reading triggers a similar flash and halt, and so on the process repeats itself indefinitely. In other words, there occurs the kind of reading Benjamin conceives of with respect to the "realm of similarity:" "The perception of similarity is in every case bound to a flashing up. It flits past, can possibly be won again, but cannot really

be held fast as can other perceptions. It offers itself to the eye as fleetingly and transitorily as a constellation of stars."36 Such a reading is bound to repeat itself,

over and over again without rest, since whatever grazes the edge of understanding

cannot be retained, and its escape only leads to other attempts at tracing it, each

marked by a varying shift of focus. Precisely because the core remains unyielding,

ever-new bodies of thought are thus gradually pulled in to revolve around it in

countless patterns. The origins of the practice of rewriting for hermeneutic purposes

are to be sought in the earliest moments when such patterns have been put into

words.

In fact, it is not too difficult to imagine even the origins of reading and

writing to be inextricably tangled in the same place. If a clairvoyant reading of such

things as stars, entrails or shoulder blades is truly the predecessor of language, as

Benjamin suggests, one can instantly recognize that such an act contains in itself as

much writing as reading; to put it differently, there is a writing which predates the

creation of graphic signs, and which has always been simultaneous with the act of

reading; the passive observation of the stars and the active production of the

innumerable possible links among them, and between them and eveiything else,

36 Selected Writings, Vol. 2, pp. 695-6. 93 have always occurred simultaneously. From the beginning, reading and writing have been inseparably bound in the same process.

Coming back to rewriting, this practice is not intended to sculpt the core into any finished and polished form. In the hands of authors like Kafka, it rather works as a means of establishing a dialogue or a space of communion with the core, in order to reflect one's understanding by means of quiet mimicry, by producing something like the core37 - it is perhaps in this sense that writing itself has been, for Kafka, "a form of prayer."38 And when a line of communication partakes of the prayer's delicacy, any fault in discernment leads to the path of the aforementioned philosopher, into whose predicament with the spinning top Kafka might have placed far more substance than one suspects. "The Top" is, in a nutshell, a parable about a miscarried dialogue with the parabolic core. For the sake of the close reading to follow, here is the full stoiy:

A certain philosopher used to hang about wherever children were at play. And whenever he saw a boy with a top, he would lie in wait. As soon as the top began to spin the philosopher went in pursuit and tried to catch it. He was not perturbed when the children noisily protested and tried to keep him away from their toy; so long as he could catch the top while it was spinning, he was happy, but only for a moment; then he threw it to the ground and walked away. For he believed that the understanding of any detail, that of a spinning top, for instance, was sufficient for the understanding of all things. For this reason he did not busy himself with great problems, it seemed to him uneconomical. Once the smallest detail was understood, then everything was understood, which was why he busied himself only with the spinning top. And whenever preparations were being made for the spinning of the top, he hoped that this time it would succeed: as soon as the top began to spin, and he was running breathlessly after it, the hope would turn to certainty, but when he held the silly piece of wood in his hand, he felt nauseated. The screaming of the children, which hitherto he had not heard and which now suddenly pierced his ears, chased him away, and he tottered like a top under a clumsy whip.

37 To invoke an earlier discussion, one finds a perfect dramatization of this kind of dialogue in The Figure in the Carpet," where George Corvick attempts to counter the novelist Hugh Vereker's masterful literary creation with a critical masterpiece. 38 See Dearest Father, trans. Ernst Kaiser and Eithne Wilkins, New York: Schocken, 1954, p. 312. 94

There are two points that immediately strike one as curious. First, it will be admitted that, while certainly not instigating any side-splitting laughter, the stoiy does present an odd element of humor in the image of a respectable adult running after a plaything and being screamed at by children, repeatedly. One is led to wonder if such humor is merely an accessory, or if it results from a more important cause.

The other point has to do with the stoiy's three-part structure. The first part depicts the philosopher's obsessive behavior, without disclosing the underlying reason. The second part reveals his ultimate ambition, pulling the reader away from ridicule, towards a more empathetic stance; for, at least the better-informed reader will recognize that perennial mystical line of thought, which considers nothing to be too small not to cast a light upon the rest of the world, and which intrigued many other authors, including Borges. Indeed, now the philosopher appears mad for engaging in something not too trivial, but rather too grand. In the third part, however, the narration spins back to the initial depiction of his constantly failing efforts, and probably due to this failure, the reader likewise returns from empathy back to an alienated, and perhaps even intensified, laughter; after all, while it is funny enough to picture an adult suddenly diving into the playground to play a game of his own, it is by far more ridiculous to picture one who does so for completely serious purposes, who in fact "runs breathlessly" after a spinning top in order to attain universal understanding. And from a stylistic point of view, it seems significant that both the narration and its reading follow a circular path, in tune with the top's spinning.

Moreover, it is worth noting that alongside that of the philosopher's, also the reader's understanding remains frustrated, since the story keeps in the dark two crucial issues: It does not explain the grounds for the philosopher's particular 95 choice; that is, why the top should, in the philosopher's view, be the smallest detail to understand, rather than, say, an ink pot, a coat, or a chicken. Could the top be somehow special?39 And second, we are not told where exactly it is that the philosopher's project fails. Is it possible that, every time a top is set to spin, he perhaps understands it, but then realizes that understanding that detail does not necessarily lead to the understanding of everything else? Or does he fail, is he repeatedly failing to understand the top itself in the first place? The reference to the top as a "silly piece of wood," which likely reflects the philosopher's own sentiments, rather supports the latter assumption, that the philosopher cannot understand the top.

In fact, the philosopher's chosen object of study is not just a top. His target is actually composed of many things: the spinning, which is essential to the idea of a top, the round object, which is rather "silly" without the spinning motion, the whip, which, like a shadowy yet indispensable element, is not even mentioned until the very end of the story, and, last but not least, the human player, the shadow behind the shadows, as it were, without whose action no spinning is possible. Therefore, it may well be that the philosopher's repeated failure stems from his insistence on trying to catch the wrong target; he is chasing after the composite spinning top for his wholesale understanding project, and even though he can, with a little skill, catch the top in his hand while it is still spinning, he cannot catch the spinning itself.

39 Observing the tops in action makes it easier to speculate on what charms they might have held, not only for our good philosopher, but also for Kafka himself, assuming him to be a far more acute observer. Such an observer will notice, without necessarily knowing the underlying rules of physics, that, when flung with a whip to spin, the top first wobbles for a bit and then begins to spin upright; and after spinning upright for a nice long while, it tumbles and falls with a rough final thrash. It is possible to conjecture that Kafka the riddler read that progression, from wobbling to spinning upright and then finally crashing into immobility, in the style of Oedipus before the Sphinx; that is, as an allegory of human life. Moreover, the unsuspected grace that one finds in the motion of such a modest object brings to mind Kleist's marionette dancers, and Kafka's well-known fondness of Kleist. 96

Whether he catches the top or not, the spinning remains ungraspable and destined, each time, to die, leaving behind a nauseating corpse.

His plight is all the more acute for the fact that, while he fails to understand this small detail - and perhaps as a consequence, everything else as well - his own body has achieved such an intuitive understanding of the target that it can move

"like a top under a clumsy whip." In other words, he is at a loss not only with the spinning, but also with the human element, with himself, since he is suffering from a rupture between a misguided conscious mind, and a body that has not still forgotten how to behave mimetically.

Yet, failing once, twice or an n number of times does not lead the philosopher to quit or change his original conviction. His struggle seems to unfold in a timeless series of repetitions, which suggests that he must have a way of somehow recharging himself, for otherwise his repetitions would have been impossible. After each failure, therefore, either his memory gets wiped clean, or his conviction proves stronger than the towering pile of his previous failures, so that he undertakes each new attempt as if it were truly new. To better articulate the paradox here, each repetition constitutes the first term in a series that opens indefinitely into the future.

Each repetition is the ever-first repetition, and therefore, logically, no repetition at all. That the philosopher should thus be permanently stuck in a beginning is quite significant, if one considers how Kafka himself has always been a writer of beginnings, and rather reluctant when it comes to endings.

What is more, each such non-repetition, if one might call it so, bears a split significance, as if the philosopher's own rupture had, at one point, seeped into his actions, since each of his efforts is heroic and ridiculous, depending on the uncertain outcome: heroic for he might finally succeed, and ridiculous for he might fail yet 97 again. Deleuze, in Difference and Repetitionexplains how repetition invariably occurs in drama due to some kind of hidden knowledge, and occurs twice, either as a comic or a tragic repetition. Whether it will be comic or tragic depends on two factors concerning that hidden knowledge; first, if such knowledge, concealed from the character, is natural or commonsensical, the character will engage in a comic repetition; if it is, instead, some kind of "terrible, esoteric" knowledge, one will get a tragic repetition. Second, the exact way in which the character is prohibited access to that knowledge also proves decisive in making that repetition tragic or comic.

What is peculiar to Kafka's philosopher is that he, locked away from the knowledge of becoming-like-the-top, which his own body seems to be in possession of,

performs both the tragic and the comic repetitions simultaneously, and thence arises

the stoiy's odd humor.

If one continues with Deleuze's understanding of repetition, things actually

become even more complicated, as far as the knowledge hidden from the

philospher's consciousness is concerned. As Deleuze states (18): "I do not repeat

because I repress. I repress because I repeat, I forget because I repeat. I repress,

because I can live certain things or certain experiences only in the mode of

repetition. I am determined to repress whatever would prevent me from living them

thus...." If that could be held true also for the philosopher, it would be necessaiy to

conclude that he wills his own rupture, his ignorance of what his body knows, for he

is obsessed with whatever he is experiencing during his repeated act. Everything he

does is for the sake of his non-repetition - for the "physical grace" of keep on doing

it, to recall Seaman "Pig" Bodine's reflections in GR.

40 Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton, New York: Columbia University Press, 1994, p. 15. 98

There is, yet again, a far gloomier possibility, based on the earlier-noted fact that the story never specifies where exactly the philosopher fails; perhaps, each time he catches the top in his hand, he does understand it so profoundly as to attain a simultaneous understanding of the rest of the universe, and he experiences a fresh wave of nausea not because he fails, but rather because he succeeds, because such an understanding cannot be but nauseating. And he repeats the feat over and over again, in beaten hopes of a prettier apocalypse.

V. As the respective discussions on Pynchon and Kafka have shown, there are two closely interrelated structural models that apply to the parabolic mode, depending on whether the parable is embedded in a larger text or written to stand alone; in fact, any parable can be detached as an aesthetic whole, or attached to another text to acquire, and to simultaneously bestow upon that text, new shades of meaning. In the latter case, there comes to the fore the tempting yet inconclusive structure of revelation, which is based on the addition of the nth line, and in the former, the pre-textual structure, which is built around the perpetual negotiation of the distance between the core and the lines of re/writing.

The pre-textual structure leaves ample room for its own betrayal and manipulation; accordingly, the perennial exploitation of the parabolic mode by institutional theology comes as no surprise, when naming the core god is the only finishing touch required to make such a structure serve the purposes of whichever religion. Yet, to the present day, the prey has been putting up a good fight; never breaking completely free nor renouncing its drive to do so, it has struck a dynamic balance on the edge, thus growing vibrant in a constant coming-and-going that renders that edge a spectacle to see. And in the meantime, one might go so far as to claim, it has let literature be. 99

Indeed, the implications of the pre-textual structure are considerable. From the ceaseless and ever-failing approach at the core there germinate the very seeds of literary production; rewritings and reworkings of a core idea which are to be supplanted by countless others, and which are, perhaps for that very reason, marked by an overall roughness, even sketchiness in their making. From this perspective, it does not seem accidental that most parables display a well-noted simplicity of language, settings, events and characters; never finished works, only drafts that follow one another over the centuries, as if produced by an immortal and forever obstinate author. It is certain that such a notion occupied much of Borges' imagination, alongside the sameness of apparently different and chronologically distant authors, as well as the very act of repetition. 100

Jorge Luis Borges: Rewriting and Repetition

I. By his own testimony, the literary production of Jorge Luis Borges consists of the periodic rehashing of the same handful of ideas, which captivated him alongside plentiful other authors before and since. Among the things that remain invariably old under the sun, there is even his suggestion that "throughout history humankind has told two stories;"1 the young F. Scott Fitzgerald held the same conviction, only that, for him those stories were Cinderella and Jack the Giant

Killer, whereas Borges, in the garb of Baltasar Espinosa, was thinking of the adventures of Odysseus and the suffering of Jesus. In this light, then, the notion of a new sameness does not appear altogether inconceivable.

It is possible, however, that even a handful was often too numerous for a mind so keen on exploring the significance of the one event that befalls a person in life, washing away all the other experiences. The eponymous heroine of "Emma

Zunz" identifies that single event as the untimely and unjust death of her father, which "seguirfa sucediendo sin fin."2 For Pedro Damidn in "La otra muerte" ("The

Other Death"), it would be his collapse into cowardice during the Battle of Masoller, which he manages to rectify in his deathbed by re-living that experience in a dream, thus causing a whole new subsequent history of the world to develop - however minimal the differences might be between the old and the new histories. For one of the anonymous prostitutes of 'La Estrella' in "La noche de los dones," it is her having been taken captive during an Indian raid, which she goes on repeating as if in

1 "The Gospel According to Mark," Collected Fictions, trans. Andrew Hurley. New York: Viking 1998, p. 400. 2 "... [it] would go on happening, endlessly, forever after" ("Emma Zunz," Collected Fictions 217). "Acto conti'nuo comprendid que esa voluntad era inutil porque la muerte de su padre era lo unico que habia sucedido en el mundo, y seguiria sucediendo sin fin" ("Emma Zunz," El Aleph. 1949. Buenos Aires: Emec£ Editores, S. A., 1971, p. 62). 101 a trance, "como quien dice una oraci6n."3 "El proveedor de iniquidades Monk

Eastman" opens with the description of a fluid and deadly knife fight, after which the victor calmly "se acomoda el chambergo y consagra su vejez a la narracidn de ese duelo tan limpio."4 And Tom Castro, after serving his time for attempting to steal the identity of Roger Charles Tichborne, likewise wanders around Great

Britain, "pronunciando pequefias conferencias en las que decla[ra] su inocencia o afir[ma] su culpa."5

The liminality of the event is unmistakable; it remains outside time and detached from every one, including the very person who has experienced it. It is infinitely repeatable, either in action or in words, and in both cases accuracy in the details proves highly irrelevant, so long as the essence is preserved.

Opposite from such an experience, there stands the articulation of the one single line or word, a miraculous concentrate of language, less often discovered than granted by grace, which somehow contains the totality of marvels to be found within the sphere of literary or cosmic creation. The captive Tzinacdn, the last priest of the

Pyramid of Qaholom in "La escritura del Dios" ("The Handwriting of the God"), sets out to decipher the ancient language of that god which, consisting of one such magical word, would equal the whole universe. What he discovers in the end is not one, but rather fourteen ostensibly random words, which, nonetheless, do not fail to bestow the promised omnipotence upon the one who speaks them - clearly, with a

3"... like a person saying a prayer" ("The Night of the Gifts," Collected Fictions 448). "La muchacha habld c6mo si estuviera sola y de algun modo yo senti que no podia pensar en otra cosa y que esa cosa era lo unico que le habia pasado en la vida" {El libro de arena Buenos Aires: Emec£ Editores, S. A., 1975, p. 92). 4 Historia universal de la infamia. Buenos Aires: Emecl Editores, S. A., 1954, p. 53."... [he] adjusts his high-crowned hat and spends his final years recounting the story of this clean duel" ("Monk Eastman, Purveyor of Iniquities," A Universal History of Infamy, trans. Norman Thomas di Giovanni. New York: E.P. Dutton & Co., Inc., 1972, p. 51). 5 "El impostor inverosfmil Tom Castro," Historia universal de la infamia 40."... he toured the hamlets and centers of the United Kingdom, giving little lectures in which he alternately pleaded his innocence or his guilt" ("Tom Castro, the Implausible Impostor," A Universal History of Infamy 38). 102 nod to the Kabbalistic tradition seeking the correct pronunciation of the

Tetragrammaton.6 The poet in "El espejo y la mdscara" produces, in his third and final trial, a single line of poetry which comprises all the possible forms and manifestations of beauty, and which is, therefore, "un don vedado a los hombres,"7 bringing destruction both upon the poet and his king. The narrator in "Undr" glosses the poetry of the Urns as consisting of "una sola palabra;"8 and likewise the literary canon of Tl6n is said to incorporate several famous poems that consist of "una sola enorme palabra."9

Certainly, the singular event, being subjective, may be amply illustrated, while the singular act of language, even in its least ambitious form as one-word poetry, is likely to remain within the limits of Borges' and his reader's imagination.10 What is more, although delivering the same eclipsing impact over all the other events, or all the other creations of language, the two kinds of one seem to

6 While the conception of divine creation as an act of speech is indeed well-known within the judeo- christian tradition, it is by no means unique to it. For instance, the Council Book of the Quiche Maya, Popol Vuh, to which Borges makes an indirect reference in "The Handwriting of the God" ('Vi los origenes que narra el Libro del Comun') presents a highly similar understanding: "And then the earth arose because of them [the gods], it was simply their word that brought it forth. For the forming of the earth they said "Earth." It arose suddenly, just like a cloud, like a mist, now forming, unfolding. Then the mountains were separated from the water, all at once the great mountains came forth." See Popol Vuh: The Mayan Book of the Dawn of Life (Trans. Dennis Tedlock. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1985), pp. 65-6. 7 "El [el pecado] de haber conocido la Belleza, que es un don vedado a los hombres" (El libro de arena 107). "The sin of having known Beauty, which is a gift forbidden to men" ("The Mirror and the Mask," The Book of Sand, trans. Norman Thomas di Giovanni. New York: E. P. Dutton, 1977, p. 79). 8 "[M]e bast6 saber que la poesia de los urnos consta de una sola palabra para emprender su busca..." (Libro de arena, 113). "...[T]o learn that the poetry of the Urns consists of a single word was enough for me to set out in search of them..." (The Book of Sand 83). 9 "Hay poemas famosos compuestos de una sola enorme palabra" ("T18n, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius," El jardin de senderos que se bifurcan. 1941. Ficciones. Buenos Aires: Emecl Editores, S. A., 1956, p. 21; all references henceforth will be from this first section of the collection, unless indicated otherwise). 10 Except in the case of "Undr," where the title of the story constitutes one such single-word poem, meaning maravilla (wonder), spoken by a dying poet (El libro de arena 119); however, perhaps realizing that the power of the word is less than what it should be, Borges has his narrator respond to the poet with another such poem, which, this time, remains undisclosed: "Tom£ el harpa y cantl con una palabra distinta" (119; "I took up the harp and sang to a different word;" The Book of Sand 87). 103

belong to distinct spheres. Still, the question remains as to what exactly such oneness entails in the writings of Borges.

Is the one thing that ever happens to a man necessarily the biggest and most

important event that happens to him? Or could it be something minor, a wholly

negligible affair on the surface, like caressing a sleepy cat in a dim coffee house? In

other words, should that oneness be understood simply as the highest degree on a

scale? And likewise does, for instance, the single word that somehow embodies all

of the Emperor's infinite abode in the "Pardbola del palacio" ("Parable of the

Palace")11 owe its disarming magnitude to its economy, i.e. to the fact that one gets

to say one single word, instead of a great many? If the scales of importance and

verbal thrift prove inappropriate, perhaps the oneness of the event and of the

utterance could rather be understood as a form of distillation, of purity. A purity of

subjective vision, in the case of the event, and a purity of subjective intent, in the

case of the utterance - one recalls, in this respect, Kafka's keen awareness of any

moment in which even his most unassuming sentences would partake of that purity

and thus attain perfection.12 Just as any man has the potential to be Shakespeare or

Cervantes while going through the steps of a singular creation such as King Lear or

Don Quixote, so is any word in one's vocabulary capable of becoming that explosive

all-encompassing word, if purified to the required degree.

The pure event and the pure word, to re-name them thus, have some points of

convergence, the most crucial being their repeatability. The latter, being a product of

language, yields to repetition naturally (so long as one is prepared to generate at

each utterance yet another universe containing the old, Borges would add), and the

11 In El Hacedor. Buenos Aires: Emecl Editores, S. A., 1960. 12 "When I arbitrarily write a single sentence, for instance, 'He looked out of the window,' it already has perfection" (The Diaries of Franz Kafka, 1910-1913, trans. Joseph Kresh. New York: Schocken, 1948, p. 45.) 104 former can be repeated both as action or as narration, as noted earlier. To go one step further, as long as purity persists, Borges seems to place little or no distinction between the act of experiencing an event, whether humble or elevated, and the act of retelling such an event. To invoke once again the reflections of Espinosa, lost amidst flood waters, "... los hombres, a lo largo del tiempo, hart repetido siempre dos historicis: la de un bajel perdido que busca por los mares mediterr&neos una isla querida, y la de un dios que se hace crucificar en el G61gota."13 It is indeed difficult to establish whether the verb "repeter," in this context, refers to the repeated

narrations of those two stories, or rather to the re-occurrence of the events narrated

in them, involving actors that are historically different but essentially the same.14 In

view of how Borges' own story climaxes with the looming crucifixion of Espinosa

in the hands of the freshly devout Gutres, one is obliged to declare both possibilities correct. Following in the wake of Mircea Eiiade, repetition by way of - ritual -

storytelling lets the teller step out of his historical time of narration and return to the

in illo tempore of action.15 In its purest form, storytelling allows one to repeat the

singular event as if it were one's own, as if one were indeed Jesus or Odysseus,

rather than a mere performer engaged in a verbal representation of the event.

13 "El evangelio segun Marcos," El informe de Brodie. Buenos Aires: Emec£ Editores, S. A., 1970, pp. 128-9;"... throughout history men have always repeated two stories: the one about a lost ship searching for a dear island in the Mediterranean seas, and the one about a god who has himself crucified on Golgotha" (emphases and translation mine). 14 J. D. Crossan notes how in another story from El Aleph, "El hombre en el umbral" ("The Man on the Threshold") Borges actually goes as far as "equatfing] story and event" (140); that is, he synchronizes the occurrence of the event, namely, the secret trial and execution of a corrupt British judge by the inhabitants of a city in India, with the retelling of that same event by an old beggar, as if it were a story about times long past. 15 "Any ritual whatever... unfolds not only in a consecrated space (i.e., one different in essence from profane space) but also in a "sacred time," "once upon a time" (in illo tempore, ab origine), that is, when the ritual was performed for the first time by a god, an ancestor, or a hero." See Mircea Eiiade, The Myth of the Eternal Return, trans. Willard R. Trask. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 1971, p. 21. 105

n. Then there is the curious case of Pierre Menard, among the more daring of Borges' imaginary authors, who casts aside the possibility of becoming Miguel de

Cervantes as too easy, in his attempt at repeating one such singular event, the writing of Don Quixote: "Ser, de alguna manera, Cervantes y llegar al Quijote le parecid menos arduo por —consiguiente, menos interesante— que seguir siendo

Pierre Menard y llegar al Quijote, a trav6s de las experiencias de Pierre Menard."16

It is significant that the text telling about the toils of an author engaged in a task of rewriting, is itself such a bizarre concoction that it almost insists on being reread repeatedly. And one of the factors to which the text owes its peculiarity is a disarming element of humor unfolding in two streaks.

There is, first and foremost, a great deal of parodic humor targeting the

conventions and the petty polemics of literary criticism, which Borges achieves by

forging his text as a necrology penned by an anonymous critic. In the first

paragraph, the critic expresses great disdain for the amount of misunderstandings

that surrounds the fictional French author Pierre Menard, after his death in the early

twentieth century, and proceeds to offer what he calls "a brief rectification." The

critic's pompous style suggests a parasitic personality who seeks to justify his

authority by reference to the two aristocratic members of his literary circle, "the

countess de Bagnoregio" and "the baroness de Bacourt;" certainly, the recipients of

this servile homage are themselves presented in an unfavorable light, since their

names mean, respectively, "royal bath" and "public toilet" (De Costa 51). One

cannot also help laughing at the self-importance betrayed by the manner in which

the critic capitalizes certain words in what could hardly pass as anything more than a

16 "Pierre Menard, autor del Quijote," Ficciones 50; "Being, somehow, Cervantes, and arriving thereby at the Quixote - that looked to Menard less challenging (and therefore less interesting) than continuing to be Pierre Menard and coming to the Quixote through the experiences of Pierre Menard." ("Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote," Collected Fictions 91). 106 stream of banalities, as if he were writing some profound allegory: "Dirfase que ayer nos reunimos ante el mArmol final y entre los cipreses infaustos y ya el Error trata de empaflar su Memoria...."17 And, alongside the parody manifest from the beginning, another wave of humor rises with the gradual revelation of Menard's so-called

"invisible work," that is, his fragmentaiy Quixote placed beside excerpts from the

Quixote.

Since the text is neither curbed nor too subtle in its attempt at being funny, it seems truly strange that its humor should often be ignored, or even remain

completely unnoticed by some critics. In his study on "Humor in Borges," Ren6 de

Costa (7) notes how the Argentine author partakes of Kafka's fate in this respect,

both being held in too much awe to laugh at their jokes, and invokes the

embarassment of Gerard Genette "whose essay on Borges... seems to have missed

the irony of the two narrative voices in "Pierre Menard," conflating them into one,

and what is worse, assigning the effete voice of Menard's admirer to Borges

himself' (52). And a far more infamous case concerning Ernesto Palacio, a right-

wing Argentine historian, is told by Borges himself, in a 1979 interview with

Antonio Carrizo: "I recall how Ernesto Palacio told me that he already knew all

about Pierre Menard..., who must have been a real nut. 'He sure was,' I replied."

(qtd. in De Costa 50). Pleasant as that encounter must have been for Borges, there is

reason to believe that his recourse to humor in this text is not motivated solely by the

temptation to elicit fake erudition from his fellow men of letters. Indeed, humor in

"Pierre Menard" may be playing far more than an accesorial role - as in the case of

"The Top" discussed earlier.

17 Ficciones 45;"... only yesterday were we gathered before his marmoreal place of rest, among the dreary cypresses, and already Error is attempting to tarnish his bright Memory" (Collected Fictions 89). 107

Getting the joke, de Costa remarks (17), is a matter of split seconds, a flash of the wit with which we must be in sync; whenever it takes longer than that, or one

finds herself hearing a paraphrase delivered at a slower pace, the joke is rather upon

oneself. And while the failure to get a joke inspires feelings of shame or inadequacy,

the opposite case arouses in us what Thomas Hobbes, in Leviathan, refers to as a

sense of "sudden glory:" "Laughter is nothing else but sudden glory arising from a

... conception of some eminency in ourselves by comparison with the infirmity of

others" (qtd. in De Costa 17). So we laugh while reading "Pierre Menard," for are

we not indisputably superior to this nutcase Frenchman and his toadying necrologist.

Only that, chances are, we are not.

There is something in "Pierre Menard," by way of a joke, which flashes past

too quickly even for the quickest wit to catch instantly; this would be the text's

defiant way of reasoning, which makes such a strong case for the absurd that it

brings the reader, more than once, on the brink of persuasion, responding to her

laughter with some jeering of its own. "Pierre Menard" perhaps constitutes Borges'

personal tribute to Zeno's paradoxes, one of which, concerning Achilles and the

tortoise, is in fact mentioned in the text. Faithful to the spirit of those paradoxes,

which disarm the audience by pushing logic to its extreme and therefore appearing,

at the same time, obviously wrong and maddeningly true, Borges places the reader

in the veiy cleft between awe and laughter, and demands to get a sober hearing for a

number of questions, such as these: Considering that a literary masterpiece like Don

Quixote is the product of a veiy, very large yet not infinite number of combinatorial

choices regarding words, sentences and paragraphs, could it be possible to repeat all

of those choices, to somehow thread, as it were, the exact same impossibly tangled

path in the maze of language, so as to arrive at the same final product? And if one 108 were ever to succeed in such a feat, even partially, what would the nature and the implications of this "new" masterpiece be? The critic himself begins his apology of

Menard by simultaneously acknowledging and problematizing the absurdity of numbering certain fragments of the Quixote among Menard's lifework: "Yo s6 que tal afirmacidn parece un dislate; justificar ese 'dislate' es el objeto primordial de esta nota."18 This initial promise proves ultimately honored, not only by means of the critic's conscious efforts, but also due to other collaborating factors in the text that are not necessarily under his control.

The feat attempted by Menard is indeed comparable to that of Kafka's

philosopher in "The Top," since it continually oscillates between madness and

grandness, two forces which, fight all they might, fail to cancel each other out, while

their opposition infiltrates the text at several levels. To mention the most obvious

way in which this opposition plays out, there are the two narrative voices, that of

Menard himself and that of the critic; and while the latter's discourse is often

straight-out preposterous, the former has a more convincing way of presenting his

project. There is also a division proposed by the critic between the "visible" and the

"invisible" writing of Menard, which, at a first glance, strikes one as ridiculous, like

other arguments coming from the same source; however, a careful reading of a

certain footnote in the text proves how Menard's "invisible" writing can in fact be

accepted as a valid category that includes more than the Quixote fragments. The

footnote is attached by the critic to his list of Menard's visible production: "Madame

Henri Bachelier enumera asimismo una versi6n literal de la versidn literal que hizo

Quevedo de la Introduction a la vie devote de san Francisco de Sales. En la

18 Ficciones 49; "I know that such a claim is in the face of it absurd; justifying that 'absurdity' shall be the primary object of this note" (Collected Fictions 90). 109

biblioteca de Pierre Menard no hay rastros de tal obra. Debe tratarse de una broma de nuestro amigo, mal escuchada."19 Waisman, in The Irreverence of the Periphery,

begs to differ with the possibility of a misunderstood joke, contending, instead, that

Menard might have very well produced such a translation, and that the critic's

failure to detect such a work in Menard's personal library could be attributable to the

simple fact that"... there would be no way to distinguish Menard's version from

Saint Francis de Sales' 'original,' since the two would look exactly the same and

would thus fall into the category of Menard's 'invisible work.'"20 And there is

plenty of evidence in the text that Menard has taken care to preserve his "invisible

work" as such, methodically destroying all his drafts,21 as if predicting the

ludicrousness of their manifest form.

The crown piece of these invisible writings is not revealed in the text all at

once; there is a certain build, a crescendo leading to the full disclosure of Menard's

Quixote. The critic lures the reader into the mystery by first stating how this work

could be the most important writing produced in the twentieth century, and then

relating how he finds traces of Menard's characteristic style everywhere in the

Quixote, including the many sections that Menard never attempted to reconstruct:

"^Confesar^ ... que leo el Quijote —todo el Quijote— como si lo hubiera pensado

Menard?"22 Then he further increases the suspense by asserting that"... el

19 Ficciones 48; "Mme. Henri Bachelier also lists a literal translation of Quevedo's literal translation of St. Francis de Sales's Introduction a la vie devote. In Pierre Menard's library there is no trace of such a work. This must be an instance of one of our friend's droll jokes, misheard or misunderstood" (Collected Fictions 90). See Sergio Gabriel Waisman's Borges and Translation: The Irreverence of the Periphery. Cranbury, NJ: Associated University Presses, 2005, p. 102. 21"... desgarr6 miles de pdginas manuscritas. No permiti6 que fueran examinadas por nadie y cuid6 que no le sobrevivieran" (Ficciones 56);"... he ripped up thousands of handwritten pages. He would allow no one to see them, and he took care that they not survive him" (Collected Fictions 95). 22 Ficciones 51; "Shall I confess... that I read the Quixote - the entire Quixote - as if Menard had conceived it?" (Collected Fictions 92). 110

fragmentario Quijote de Menard es m&s sutil que el de Cervantes."23 And finally, juxtaposing two identical fragments, one attributed to Cervantes and the other to

Menard, the critic triumphantly declares the latter to be "casi infinitamente m&s

rico,"24 while the absurdity - and perhaps the simultaneous plausibility - of the

whole premise hits one in the face.

What follows immediately after the sequences of build and revelation is a

rather suggestive sentence: "No hay ejercicio intelectual que no sea finalmente

iniitil."25 The statement seems to refer to the very exercise out of which Borges' text

has emerged; that is, the one undertaken to see what it would mean to try to recreate

a masterpiece, to try to once again hit the right path out of countless choices, and to

succeed in it. For, the attempt at reconstructing the Quixote, the process of rewriting

as presented by Menard himself in his letters, is not altogether trifling, at least as a

thought experiment, since it lays bare the possibly absolute dominion of chance over

our beloved literary monuments, and the perennial fantasies of immortality seeking

to restore that chaos into an order that could be repeated.26 Whereas the - even

fragmentary - success of such an attempt, the final product as revealed, cannot help

provoking laughter. Yet, the uselessness of what is to be gained at the end does not

certainly keep the exercise itself from being rewarding, if only by way of delighting

our mortal minds during the short course of our lives, as Borges does with his text.

23 Ficciones 53;"... Menard's fragmentary Quixote is more subtle than Cervantes'" (Collected Fictions 93). 24 Ficciones 54;"... almost infinitely richer" {CollectedFictions 94). 25 Ficciones 55; "There is no intellectual exercise that is not ultimately pointless" (Collected Fictions 94). 26 In this respect, Menard's project deeply resonates with the hopes of the anonymous narrator of "La Biblioteca de Babel:" "La Biblioteca es ilimitaday periodica. Si un eterno viajero la atravesara en cualquier direcci6n, comprobaria al cabo de los siglos que los mismos volumenes se repiten en el mismo desorden (que, repetido, seria un orden: el Orden). Mi soledad se alegra con esa elegante esperanza" (Ficciones 95);"The Library is unlimited but periodic. If an eternal traveler should journey in any direction, he would find after untold centuries that the same volumes are repeated in the same disorder - which, repeated, becomes order: The Order. My solitude is cheered up by that elegant hope" ("The Library of Babel," Collected Fictions 118). Ill

(Incidentally, this would be another instance of an opposition that shapes up the text, this time between the process and the success of rewriting.)

Starting with the last quoted sentence, there occurs a subdued shift in the narrative voice; it acquires a certain new weight and credibility that cannot be easily attributed to the critic, though it certainly does not belong to Menard either. It is my contention that this is a third voice, perhaps Borges' own, brought in with a conciliatory mission. In the last paragraph, it is this third shadowy voice which finally strikes an accord between the categories of visible and invisible writings, through an unexpected twist:

Menard (acaso sin quererlo) ha enriquecido mediante una tlcnica nueva el arte detenido y rudimentario de la lectura: la t£cnica del anacronismo deliberado y de las atribuciones err6neas. Esa t£cnica de aplicaci6n infinita nos insta a recorrer la Odisea como si fuera posterior a la Erteida.... Esa tdcnica puebla de aventura los libros m&s calmosos.27

Based on Menard's rewriting practice as commented upon by the critic, one is led to assume that visible, that is, conventional writings, constitute singular events fixed at one point or period in time and attributable to one or more, known or anonymous, authors, while invisible writings constitute an open series, where the singular event of a visible piece of writing could be repeated for any number of times by any number of authors, thus putting the notion of singularity into question. The third voice offers an elegant solution to the opposition, by channeling the category of invisible writing into an innovative definition of what one could achieve by the simple act of reading. Reading, in other words, could function as a kind of invisible writing, that is, an exercise of anachronistic rewriting h la Menard.

27 Ficciones 56; "Menard has (perhaps unwittingly) enriched the slow and rudimentary art of reading by means of a new technique - the technique of deliberate anachronism and fallacious attribution. That technique, requiring infinite patience and concentration, encourages us to read the Odyssey as though it came after the &neid.... This technique fills the calmest books with adventure" (Collected Fictions 95). 112

In his cited letters, Menard refers to the Quixote as the "original" text, placing its originality in between quotation marks, while his posthumous critic discusses the same text as the "final"2* Quixote. This parallel in their punctuation suggests how the Quixote, as a peculiar "palimpsest," could be both original and final, its place in time being not so fixed as to be clearly demarcated with a before and an after:"... es lfcito ver en el Quijote 'final' una especie de palimpsesto, en el que deben traslucirse los rastros —tenues pero no indescifrables— de la 'previa' escritura de nuestro amigo."29

It will be noted that Borges reworks these reflections, dating from 1939, in

his reputed 1951 essay on "Kafka y sus precursores" ("Kafka and his Precursors").30

In fact, readers who are familiar with most of his work will immediately react that it

is not only then, but at every point of his career that Borges reworks and rewrites,

folds and unfolds his texts to no end, in Kafka's (not quite Benjamin's)

aforementioned origami style. And while doing so, he mingles the art of reading

with writing, because each reading of a given text generates a new interpretation that

brings about changes in that text, changes in its reception, changes which, leaving

the wording intact, occur nonetheless, and which, therefore could be regarded as an

invisible form of rewriting. To better explore the implications of this assertion, let us

return to the possibility that "Pierre Menard" is an attempt, on Borges' part, to create

a literary paradox31 based on the tense conflation of the formidable and the

28 The original Spanish words "original" and "final" - occuring, respectively, in pp. 52 and 56 of Ficciones - are translated as "original" and "final" in pp. 93 and 95 of Collected Fictions. 29 Ficciones 56;"... it is legitimate to see the 'final' Quixote as a kind of palimpsest, in which the traces - faint but not undecipherable - of our friend's 'previous' text must shine through" (Collected Fictions 94). 30 In Otras inquisiciones (Other Inquisitions), Buenos Aires: Emec6 Editores, S.A., 1960. 31 Borges elsewhere succinctly defines the term "paradox" as "something true that at first appearance seems false" (See Borges on Writing, ed. by Norman Thomas di Giovanni, Daniel Halpem, and Frank MacShane. New York: E.P. Dutton & Co., Inc., 1973, p. 104). 113 ridiculous; and let us reassess the ostensibly harmless reference, within this literary paradox, to the second of Zeno's paradoxes of motion, upon which Menard is said to have produced a conventional monograph entitled Les problemes d'un probleme

(Ficciones 47).

The said paradox, to recall, has the swift-footed Achilles run a race with a naturally disadvantaged rival, to whom he generously offers a certain head start, to his own detriment; for, every time he reaches a point which was occupied by the tortoise, the tortoise has had enough time to shuffle a little further ahead. In other words, he "has an infinite number of finite catch-ups to do before he can catch the tortoise," which therefore never happens.32

Could it be that Borges fashioned his Menard like another Achilles chasing after Cervantes' Quixote, as if it were another surprisingly slippery tortoise?33

Perhaps, it is impossible for Menard to rewrite the Quixote not only for all the obvious reasons mentioned earlier, but also because his target, the text which has been supposedly closed up and fixed in time long before the arrival of Menard, is anything but fixed and closed; because the Quixote is still taking in whatever sets of

values, whichever fads of interpretation we approach it with, thus constantly

changing, no matter how imperceptibly, and thus proving just as evasive as the old

tortoise. Menard himself, the reader is informed, was not unaware of these

transformations: "El Quijote —me dijo Menard— fu£ ante todo un libro agradable;

ahora es una ocasidn de brindis patri6tico, de soberbia gramatical, de obscenas

32 See Nick Huggett, "Zeno's Paradoxes," The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2008 Edition). Ed. Edward N. Zalta. Online. Internet URL = . 33 Borges tackles with the problems posed by the contest also in his 1932 collection, Discusion, as well as in "Avatares de la tortuga" ("Avatars of the Tortoise") in Otras inquicisiones (Other Inquisitions). "Here," M. S. Stabb notes, "Borges develops the idea that the 'vertiginous' regressus in infinitum suggested by the paradox 'may be applicable to everything' - to literature, the problem of knowledge, and so on" (See Borges Revisited, Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1991, p. 35). 114 ediciones de lujo."34 In that case, one is tempted to find fault in Menard for failing to specify which Quixote exactly he attempted to rewrite, since the one read in the

course of the seventeenth century is not quite the same as the one Kafka read and

rewrote in a single paragraph, as "The Truth about Sancho Panza," nor does the one

currently studied at departments of literature for various purposes have much in

common with the one read on the beach.

Yet again, one might be too hasty in declaring Menard's efforts a failure. The

critic refers to those efforts, at different times, as "interminablemente heroica" and

"de antemano futil;"35 is it not possible to use the exact same phrases to characterise

the adventures of Don Quixote himself? Is it not, therefore, plausible to conjecture

that perhaps Menard did secretly succeed in repeating the Quixote, only not in

writing, which would have been one of those predictable ways of going about the

challenge that he avowedly scorns. Perhaps, rather than repeating the literary feats of

Cervantes, Menard chose to repeat, through his own futile yet heroic experiences,

the brave and insane feats of Don Quixote.

Let us first assume, however, that Menard was successful in writing, rather

than in action; that the fragments reconstructed by Menard are indeed "infinitely

richer" than the corresponding passages in the Quixote, even though they are

identical down to punctuation. Such an assertion about the product would have to be

held true and reasonable, rather than absurd, if one accepts all the premises about the

process leading to that product, such as Menard's inclinations to reach the Quixote

through his own experiences, rather than those of Cervantes, or the two diametric

34 Ficciones 55; The Quixote, Menard remarked, was first and foremost a pleasant book; it is now an occasion for patriotic toasts, grammatical arrogance, obscene de luxe editions" (Collected Fictions 94). 35 Respectively, pp. 48 & 55 in Ficciones-, "interminably heroic" and "futile from the outset" {Collected Fictions 90 & 95). 115 strategies that he professes to follow to that end: "La primera me permite ensayar variantes de tipo formal o psicol6gico; la segunda me obliga a sacrificarlas al texto

'original' y a razonar de un modo irrefutable esa aniquilaci6n...."36 In other words, if one sticks to the rules of the text's game down to the letter, it becomes necessaiy to admit that Menard's fragments, which are the same as those of Cervantes, are also new. In his Repetition, Kierkegaard offers the clearest insight into this opposition:

"The dialectic of repetition is easy; for what is repeated has been, otherwise it could not be repeated, but precisely the fact that it has been gives to repetition the character of novelty."37

In fact, Kierkegaard's treatment of repetition remains highly relevant even under the former assumption that Menard's efforts have truly been focusing on the figure, rather than the text, of Don Quixote. In that case, Menard would also be repeating the feats of the melancholy young lover, who repeats, in his turn, the experience of being Job by means of his own torments. As explained by Constantine

Constantius, Kierkegaard's chosen persona in the said work, these torments are attributable to the young man's generously requited love for an altogether worthy girl, who, in a proper muse-like fashion, somehow brings out of the young man a hidden poetic potential, which ultimately leads the latter to the realization that his - now sublimated - love cannot possibly be fulfilled by conventional means like marriage; he therefore has no choice but to break all ties with his fiancee, out of too much, rather than too little, love for her, while appearing to everyone, including the lady herself, as a despicable cheat (88).

34 Ficciones 52;"... the first allows me to try out formal or psychological variants; the second forces me to sacrifice them to the 'original' text and to come, by irrefutable arguments, to those eradications..." (Collected Fictions 93). 31 Seren Kierkegaard, Repetition: An Essay in Experimented Psychology. Trans, with introduction and notes by Walter Lowrie. New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1964, p. 52. 116

In despair he begins considering the possibility of a return to the original state of affairs, in order to rectify the wrong for which he is publicly held responsible:" ... what concerns him is return, conceived in a purely formal sense.

[...] The discord into which he has been thrown by contact with her would be resolved by the fact that he had actually returned to her" (89). And such return is only conceivable as a repetition, which turns out to be a "baffling problem" both for the young man and his sympathizer, Constantius (90). In the end, the young man's return to the lady proves impossible, since she speedily marries someone else; yet he does conclude that repetition is possible, if not in the form that he has anticipated. It is when he knows himself to be innocent, against the whole world, that he reaches

Job in a "transcendent" movement, by "erecting himself above himself:"38 "The secret in Job, the vital power... is that in spite of everything Job is in the right"

(113); and "[h]im I understand, these words I make my own" (111). In rereading the book of Job, the young man repeats Job's agonies, experiencing afresh each word that he gradually takes possession of, while the figure of Job in return takes possession of the young man, as if there has always been only one single archetypal man, extending into the full span of time or beyond it, whose inculpability is universally tried: "Although I have read the book again and again, every word is new to me. When I come across a word it is at that instant born, primitively, or makes a primitive impression upon my soul. [...] A half word, and with that... my soul slips into his thought and there remains" (110). His lengthy stay in that atemporal bandwidth, as it were, leads the young man only to return, once again, to himself, hence proving the ultimate possibility of both repetition and returning: "I

38 Unlike Constantine Constantius who professes to be incapable of such a movement: "It is lucky that the young man does not seek any enlightenment firom me, for I have abandoned my theory, I am adrift. Repetition is too transcendent for me also. I can circumnavigate myself, but I cannot erect myself above myself. I cannot find the Archimedean point" (90). 117 am again myself. [...] Did I not get everything doubly restored? Did I not get myself again, precisely in such a way that I must doubly feel its significance?" (125-6). In this light, then, Menard's speculated repetition of the feats of Don Quixote, instead of those of Cervantes, could likewise be considered an unpredicted divergence from the path of writing he has originally planned, which nonetheless takes him to the desired destination.

It should be emphasized, however, that such musings on Menard's possible success are never meant to contradict or invalidate the text's overall effect of absurdity. In other words, the opposition noted earlier between the formidable process and the ridiculous success of re/writing persists,39 parallel to the structure of

"The Top," where the philosopher's repeated attempts are simultaneously tragic and comic. The coexistence of the opposing elements in both cases leads one to wonder if this sort of opposition is inherent to repetition as a paradoxical category -

Kierkegaard's understanding of the dialectic of repetition, cited above, would support this hypothesis. In fact, such oppositions surface even in Kierkegaard's own manner of tackling with the concept of repetition. On the one hand, he light- heartedly refers to his book as a "whimsical" work (22), not to be taken too seriously, and on the other, he places considerable importance on its subject-matter, arguing repetition to be "the interest of metaphysics and at the same time the interest upon which metaphysics founders" (53). Furthermore, he claims to have treated the subject only "aesthetically and psychologically," rather than philosophically, and to

39 Lisa Block de Behar herself holds what is, in her opinion, a very commonly defended argument, that "Borges' entire imagination is articulated paradoxically," and that "yes and no, one diction against the other, they oppose and support each other in a reciprocal way" (111); in fact, she observes, Borges employs even single words in a paradoxical fashion, forcing into coexistence the two opposite meanings of such a verb as to cleave, which are to rend and to adhere (113): "Borges' language has its foundation in simultaneous usage, at the same time, of different, contrary meanings" (115). See Block de Behar's Borges: The Passion of an Endless Quotation, trans. William Egginton. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2003. 118 that end he employs a great deal of humor generated by the unresolved conflation of opposites:"... the word [repetition] at one moment signifies everything, and the next moment the most insignificant thing, and the transition, or rather the perpetual falling from the stars, is justified as a burlesque contrast" (22).40 Needless to remark, this yo-yo effect is, again, highly reminiscent of Kafka's spinning top, which is now a "silly piece of wood" and now a key to the universe, as well as Menard's Quixote fragments, the status of which sways in between uselessness and supreme value in the twentieth-century literary canon. In the case of all three texts, in other words, repetition proves to be closely knit with humor. For, if the movement of repetition

is, at the same time, up-ending towards the birth and celebration of a new sameness,

and down-ending towards the exhaustion of an old novelty, perhaps only humor is

capable of containing the opposition, suspending it in the absurd. Kierkegaard

himself must have been fully aware of these connections between repetition, humor

and the absurd, since it is strategic humor which grounds his whole text on

repetition, and the absurd is declared to be the only means whereby the impossible

occurrence of repetition becomes possible: "For him [the young man] it is still a sure

thing that the realization of his love is impossible. So he has come to the borders of

the marvellous, and if after all this is to come about, it must come about by virtue of

the absurd" (90). [In fact, such humor and absurdity extend even beyond

Kierkegaard's intentions, into the realm of his biography, which, as noted by Walter

Lowrie, is highly relevant for a proper understanding of Repetition (16-7). It turns

out, the figure of the young man was only a thin veil over Kierkegaard's agonized

break-up with his own fiancle Regina, to whom he had been hoping to return while

40 These reflections are voiced by another of Kierkegaard's personas, Vigilius Haufniensis, in The Concept of Dread, as quoted at length by the editor Walter Lowrie, in his introduction to Repetition. 119 writing the book in Berlin; naturally, the news of Regina's engagement to another man led Kierkegaard to drastically revise the end, which was originally intended to

involve a reunion of the couple, and to add long disquisitions on the contemptible nature of feminine fickleness. Although he removed most of these bitter passages targeting the young lady before sending the text to the printer, what he did keep stands ironic witness for how repetition is indeed only possible as a transcendence,

and how frustrated desire - coming from the Latin de-sidere, i.e. "from the stars" -

truly generates humor in the form of a "perpetual falling from the stars."]

III. Solomon saith: There is no new thing upon the earth. So that as Plato had an imagination, that all Knowledge was but remembrance; so Solomon giveth his sentence, that all novelty is but oblivion. Francis Bacon: Essays, LVIII

Borges uses the above as an epigraph to "El inmortal" ("The Immortal")41

and although packed in a witty reversal, Bacon's reflections follow from the

Platonic anamnesis quite naturally; that is to say, if one adheres to the theory that all

true knowledge consists of recollecting what the soul has forgotten at the moment of

incarnation, then whatever one believes to have newly apprehended should,

logically, indicate one's oblivion of that theory, or of the fact that one is merely

recollecting. Whereas Kierkegaard, in a more interesting vein of thought, relates the

concept of recollection to the category of repetition, albeit with a major difference:

"Repetition and recollection are the same movement, only in opposite directions; for

what is recollected has been, is repeated backwards, whereas repetition properly so

called is recollected forwards" (33). Indeed, such a forward movement of

recollection applies directly to the young man's path of repetition, which involves,

41 In ElAleph 7. 120 first, a transcendent leap into the figure of Job, whom he becomes by repeating his pattern, and then a return to his future self, to the man who has already succeeded in his struggle for repetition; so that he recollects in advance the man whom he will become, and thereby actually becomes that man - in other words, his present is not constituted out of his past, but rather out of his future. (This would be a variation from the case of Joseph K., whose present is made out of the proliferation of details that cut off the future in its advance towards K.)

Borges' own thoughts too depart from Bacon's notion of novelty as oblivion

in a more engaging direction: he reminds his reader that oblivion is often the very

thing that leads to, or enables, knowledge. In this respect, Ireneo Funes' flawless

memory, crippling the simplest operations of generalization or abstraction,

constitutes the paradigmatic case; while true knowledge entails a know-how, a

certain ability to do or make things, if only in the field of ideas, Funes' knowledge,

which derives from an inability to forget, fully dismantles his creativity.42

Furthermore, both in "Pierre Menard" and in "Examen de la obra de Herbert Quain"

("A Survey of the Works of Herbert Quain"), Borges presents oblivion as a form of

purification, rather than a loss. Referring to Quain's first published book, his yet

again anonymous reviewer confesses to have forgotten most of its plot; yet, he says,

"he aquf su plan; tal como ahora lo empobrece (tal como ahora lo purifica) mi

olvido."43 Such forgetfulness is a gift, one that triggers a return to the afore of a

beginning: "Mi recuerdo general del Quijote, simplificado por el olvido y la

indiferencia, puede muy bien equivaler a la imprecisa imagen anterior de un libro no

42 "Funes el memorioso," Artificios. 1944. Ficciones. Buenos Aires: Emecl Editores, S. A., 1956. 43 Ficciones 78; "this is the general scheme of it, impoverished (or purified) by my forgetfulness" (Collected Fictions 108). 121 escrito."44 In other words, while the Platonic theory of recollection places the

individual at the end of a series extending from the past, the Borgesian oblivion

places her before a series extending into the future, where she prefigures that action

or event which she will be experiencing anew. Just like Kierkegaard, Borges too

places one before oneself.

This would be an appropriate choice for the author of "El Aleph," since, as

Lisa Block de Behar remarks, the aleph of the Hebrew alphabet is not really a letter,

but rather the aspiration, the concentration of the will, that precedes and grounds the

articulation of all letters (10):

... [Borges'] whole ceuvre constitutes a sort of aleph, the first letter touching on an immense universe, the disproportionate aleph that is found, in places, in all places, before the beginning, before the creation, on whose account the beginning does not appear because something had already started before.

To formulate otherwise, the aleph emblematizes that void, recognized both by

Kierkegaard and Borges, wherein occurs the repetition in advance of that which is to

come; as such, it bears a direct link both with the structure of revelation and the pre-

textual structure of the parabolic mode. As it has already been noted herein,

parabolic texts are not only open-ended, with the constant possibility of adding the

n-th line, but also just as open at their outset, since there is always another writing

preceding any given beginning.

The affinities between Kierkegaard and Borges are significant, considering

that both, alongside Kafka, are counted among the great parabolists of the western

tradition - notwithstanding, one should add, Borges' not infrequent critique of the

term parable understood as a didactic or moralizing form. In this respect Borges

44 Ficciones 52; "My general recollection of the Quixote, simplified by forgetfulness and indifference, might well be the equivalent of the vague foreshadowing of a yet unwritten book" (Collected Fictions 92). 122 makes his clearest statement in the foreword to Brodie's Report."... no soy, ni he sido jam&s, lo que antes se llamaba un fabulista o un predicador de parabolas y ahora un escritor comprometido. No aspiro a ser Esopo."45 Yet he seldom hesitates to embrace the parabolic mode in its non-institutional, untamed manifestations, where it becomes akin to riddles and enigmas, rather than example stories.46 It is worth, therefore, meditating upon the underpinnings of Borges' predilection for the category and act of repetition, on the one hand, and the parabolic mode, on the other.

One conjecture in this regard could be derived from the notion of forgetfulness.

Reading a parable is a somewhat demented experience: one reads with a sense of having just drawn a blank; what one reads seems very familiar, at the tip of the tongue, as it were, and yet, the harder one focuses on it, the faster the parable escapes from one's mental grip - hence the necessity of sideway glances and repeated readings. In the dark waters of parables the reader is rarely steered by remembrance, but rather often propelled by forgetfulness, in the fashion of a senile repetitive chase after the elusive word. Borges' writing is strongly marked by such a drive of forgetfulness, and his keen critics like John Updike have taken note of its paradoxical nature, given that the effects of ignorance, of endless repetition in forgetfulness, are achieved thanks to Borges' celebrated knowledge in the field of letters. In fact, Updike must have had in view Borges' own speculations about

45 El irtforme de Brodie 10; "...I am not, nor have I ever been, what used to be called a fabulist or spinner of parables, what these days is called an auteur engage. I do not aspire to be /Esop" (iCollected Fictions 345). 46 Such, for instance, are the cases of"EI jardin de senderos que se bifurcan" (The Garden of Forking Paths"), "ParSbola de Cervantes y de Quijote" ("Parable of Cervantes and the Quixote"), "Paradiso, XXXI," "Parabola del palacio," "Ei evangelio segun Marcos," and "La memoria de Shakespeare" ("Shakespeare's Memory"). Both J.D. Crossan (113-4; 127) and Carter Wheelock note Borges' discretionary stance towards parable, as well as allegory; in the latter case too, Borges' objection is directed at the ideological manipulation of the mode, rather than the mode itself: "Borges does not mind being called an allegorist if only the implication of didacticism is removed. Stripped of its moralism, allegory becomes a valid and powerful esthetic device, a long metaphor rich in suggestion" [C. Wheelock, "Borges' New Prose," TriQuarterfy 25, Prose for Borges (Fall 1972), p. 408.] 123

forgetfulness as a form of purification, for he too invokes an image of distillation opening up the way to creation: "From his immense reading he [Borges] has distilled a fervent narrowness. The same parables, the same quotations recur; one

lengthy passage from Chesterton is reproduced three times."47 I would like to

conjoin, by a wide leap, this "fervent narrowness" that Updike sees at play in

Borges' work, whereby the same elements are repetitively juggled into new

configurations, with what Paul de Man deems to be the reason for Borges' frequent

recourse to a particular rhetorical device, namely parataxis.

Such reason, de Man argues, is to be discovered in Borges' conception of the

mind in its defensive reflex of imposing an order upon the chaos of experience; an

order to be obtained at the cost of breaking "the unity of experience into the

enumeration of its discontinuous parts. Hence [Borges'] rejection of style lie and his

preference for what grammarians call parataxis, the mere placing of events side by

side, without conjunctions."48 As it shall be recalled, this urge to freeze the

vertiginous flow of experience into cinematographic stills of, first perception and

then memory, constitutes one of the overarching themes of Gravity's Rainbow,

while, in a different vein, also the Kafkan character often seeks to acquire some kind

of control over what is - or will be - happening to him by fragmenting each moment

into innumerable details. In the case of Borges, such tendencies materialize in the

form of incomplete, or starkly impossible, lists and catalogues that take over fluid

narrations. And the very choppiness of the paratactic style produces an unsuspected

benefit. The inventor of that infamous zoological classification found in "cierta

47 Here Updike is referring specifically to Otras inquisiciones. See John Updike, The Author as Librarian," in Critical Essays on Jorge Luis Borges, ed. Jaime Alazraki. Boston, Massachusetts: G.K. Hall & Co., 1987, p. 66. 48 Paul de Man, Critical Writings, 1953-1978. Ed. Lindsay Waters. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989, p. 128. 124 enciclopedia china"49 would have been, it seems, in full agreement with the following musings of Kierkegaard (66):

A wit has said that one might divide mankind into officers, serving-maids and chimney-sweeps. To my mind this remark is not only witty but profound, and it would require a great speculative talent to devise a better classification. When a classification does not ideally exhaust its object, a haphazard classification is altogether preferable, because it sets imagination in motion.

Borges opens up, in other words, a vast field of play by the agency of the void lurking behind the disconnected items of his lists - by the words that his reader senses to be missing among those that he provides.30 When the binding element of an experience is removed from the scene, it becomes possible to freely shuffle its constituent parts into any order. Hence, the parataxis that marks Borges's writing is simply the obverse of that "narrowness," that forgetfulness which purifies the debris of knowledge until no more than a few - possibly blue - pebbles remain, and both paths lead to the sphere of repetition, although through different means.

As it shall be immediately obvious, the potential for the free play of imagination carried by the paratactic text can only be actualized by the reader.

Whereas the distillation of an immensity of knowledge and possibilities down into a

49 From "El idioma anali'tico de John Wilkins" ("The Analytical Language of John Wilkins) in Otras inquisiciones; the said classification includes animals that are " embalsamados," "innumerables," "dibujados con un pincel finisimo de pelo de camello," "incluidos en esta clasificacidn," and "fabulosos," among others (104-5). 30 To the junction of the " fervent narrowness" and "parataxis" in the parabolic mode, one might add - at the expense of some unintentional alliteration - two terms suggested by Block de Behar, one of which has already been discussed herein, while an avatar of the other has already appeared in an earlier chapter: namely, "paradox " and "pretention." Block de Behar remarks that both paradox and pretention, the latter of which she considers even more paradoxical than the former, generate "a verbal autoreferentiality at the same time as they suspend it The suspended reference remains and does not, goes and comes, as much what one says as what one does not say is said, is neglected, and is maintained" (107-8); while the connection between parable and paradox has received ample critical attention and requires no additional explanation, the connection between parabolic - as well as allegoric - texts and the figure of pretention could also be immediately evident, if one considers their shared traits of revealing, or saying, by way of concealing, i.e. not saying anything. And to these four terms one might suggest the addition of a literal quintessence, "prophecy," which shall be mentioned in the pages soon to follow. 125 few essential elements, which provides, again, ample room to develop variations, is a potential tackled with, and actualized by Borges, in the form of his text. That is to say, this sort of writing - distilled and paratactic - lends itself to repetition both in

its making and its reception; it is peculiarly prone to re/writings and re/readings, and

it has already been discussed herein that a very thin line separates those two realms.

Borges himself must have had a similar view on the subject, for he comments, for

instance, on Cervantes' delight in "confundir lo objetivo y lo subjetivo, el mundo del

lector y el mundo del libro."51

To indulge in a little detour here, in one of the earlier episodes of Lolita,

Nabokov has Charlotte, the fresh and doomed bride of Humbert Humbert, swim in a

lake in a peculiarly slow and dreamy fashion, which, her reluctant and

hypersensitive husband, reflecting on the possibility of a "perfect murder," identifies

as a common pattern: "So there was Charlotte swimming on with dutiful

awkwardness..., but not without a certain solemn pleasure ...; and as I watched, with

the stark lucidity of a future recollection (you know - trying to see things as you will

remember having seen them)...."52 That is, Charlotte is orchestrating, from the future

perspective of a memory that she somehow already has, the elements of her present

to form the experience that will turn into that memory. What she is doing is a fresh,

brand-new act, and yet it is also a repetition; the repetition of something that has not

even occurred yet, but it is a repetition nonetheless, since it models itself by

reference to something else, namely the future memory.

The nature of the repetitions inherent to the parabolic mode is no different.

However, this modeling or, to return to Benjaminian terminology, this mimetic

31 From "Magias paricales del Quijote" in Otras inquisiciones S3. 32 Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita. 1955. New York: Chelsea House, 1993, p. 86. 126 element has nothing to do with a surface imitation - that would have been impossible, since the model itself has not really been formed yet; it does not operate as a becoming based on surface semblances - an aping of a readily available, i.e. previous, model (in any case, it would matter very little whether the model is a previous or a future one, since, as it has already been noted herein, Borges has a propensity to unsettle the placement of texts within certain timelines, referring to the

Quixote simultaneously as "original" and "final," and making Menard's version precede that of Cervantes). If anything, this kind of modeling is comparable to the structure of prophecies, which appears to have occupied Borges' mind both in practice and in theory.53 Just as any foreshadowing shapes the future as much as getting shaped by it in a fluid becoming, so do the repetitions in the parabolic mode, the endless series of re/writings or re/tellings and rereadings, unfold in a becoming­ like the core, which has nothing to do with an imitation of the elusive core. Deleuze and Guattari assert that, in dancing like a tarantula to cure oneself from its bite, i.e. in performing the Tarantella, "[o]ne does not imitate; one constitutes a block of becoming. Imitation enters in only as an adjustment of the block, like a finishing touch...;"54 likewise, they remark, the folk hero Alexis the Trotter, famous for his ability to run, rear, whinny and kick like a horse, becomes far more like a horse

33 In "El arte narrativo y la magia" ("Narrative Art and Magic"), to invoke one example, Borges develops a careful comparison between a natural and a magical process of causality, the latter of which he declares to be based on premonitions and foreshadowings; he argues that such prophetic elements, being eventually fulfilled, enable the achievement of verisimilitude, or the suspension of disbelief, even in the most fantastic of fictions (Discusion, Buenos Aires: Emecl Editores, 1964, pp. 71-7.)- "The effect of the prior insinuations," Wheelock (152) notes, "is to supply the reader with attributes of the thing to come, so that when it does come it requires no convincing description. The reader supplies the image of it himself... and because he supplies it he 'believes' it;" see Carter Wheelock, "Borges and the 'Death' of the Text", in Hispanic Review, Vol. 53, No.2 (Spring, 1985): 151-161. 54 Gilles Deleuze and Mix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia Trans. Brian Massumi. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1987, p. 305. 127 when engaged in an activity, such as playing a musical instrument, which cannot possibly constitute a surface imitation of a horse; to quote at some length:

Sources tell us that he was never as much of a horse as when he played the harmonica; precisely because he no longer needed a regulating or secondary imitation. It is said that he called his harmonica his "chops-destroyer" and played the instrument twice as fast as anyone else, doubled the beat, imposed a nonhuman tempo. Alexis became all the more horse when the horse's bit became a harmonica, and the horse's trot went into double time (305).

To put it succinctly, the mimetic element of a repetition in the parabolic mode lies in the becoming, in the action itself, rather than in a surface resemblance that one tries to establish with a model. And it is quite reasonable to contend that Borges must have understood the act of repetition along these lines; after all he brought into existence, at one end of his creative spectrum, Pierre Menard, whose attempt at repeating the Quixote resulted in fragments that are identical with Cervantes' writing; and at the other, Maria Justina Rubio de J&uregui, the protagonist of "La seflora mayor" ("The Elderly Lady"), who repeats her stories about the past at the actual edge of dementia, "siempre con las mismas palabras y en el mismo orden, como si fueran el Padrenuestro,"55 although, as the narrator suspects, such words do not match with whatever images might have survived in her mind as recollections of that past. It is, in other words, a pure accident that Menard's words happened to correspond with those of Cervantes; he might have very well envisioned another knight - pink, chubby, mountless, or an ungulate himself - and regardless of the utter lack of similarity between his Quixote and the other, he would have still achieved a successful repetition.

55 El informe de Brodie 78;"... always with the same words and in the same order, as though they were the Paternoster..." (Collected Fictions 378). 128

IV. The distilled "narrowness" and the paratactic style of Borges' writing are two elements which, resulting in an open field of repetition by way of reconfiguration, constitute a literary possibility that another author, Italo Calvino, puts into full use in a combinatory "machine,"56 playfully exploring its widest implications in such works as II castello dei destini incrociati (The Castle of

Crossed Destinies, 1973), Se una notte d'inverno un viaggiatore {If on a Winter's

Night a Traveler, 1979), or Le citta invisibili (Invisible Cities, 1972). In the latter text, the clearest references to such a machine at work occur when Kublai Khan envisions the multitudinous constituents of his vast empire as grains of sand in a desert:57 "Nella mente del Kan l'impero si rifletteva in un deserto di dati labili e intercambiabili come grani di sabbia...."58 (30); or when he takes note of how "... le citt& di Marco Polo s'assomigliavano, come se il passaggio dall'una all'altra non implicasse un viaggio ma uno scambio d'elementi;"59 or else when, as it happens throughout the text, each question is reformulated in several other ways, and each statement appears together with its double, its refutation and a variation, or two:

"Tutto perchg Marco Polo potesse spiegare o immaginare di spiegare o essere

56 Calvino uses the term "macchina letteraria" ("literary machine") in a lecture of 1967, "Cibernetica e fantasmi" (qtd. in Contardo Calligaris, Italo Calvino. Milano: U. Mursia, 1973, p. 99); he likewise refers to the Tarot deck as "a machine for constructing stories" in The Castle of Crossed Destinies (Trans. William Weaver. San Diego: Harcourt, 1979, p. 126. See also Calvino's essay collection The Literature Machine (Trans. Patrick Creagh. London: Seeker and Warburg, 1987). 57 This being a simile too Borgesian not to note; in fact, in his Six Memos /or the Next Millenium Calvino does invoke both Borges and Kafka as literary masters and sources of inspiration, alongside others such as Joyce, Musil, Gadda, Proust, Balzac, Flaubert, de Quincey and, last but not the least, Val£ry, who was, let us remember, Borges' own hidden muse and parodic target in writing "Pierre Menard." (Italo Calvino, Six Memos for the Next Millennium. Trans. Patrick Creagh. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1988.) 58 Italo Calvino, Le citta invisibili. Torino: Einaudi, 1972, p. 30; "In the Khan's mind the empire was reflected in a desert of labile and interchangeable data, like grains of sand..." (Invisible Cities. Trans. William Weaver. London: Vintage, 1997, p. 22). 59 Le citta invisibili 49;"... Marco Polo's cities resemble one another, as if the passage from one to another involved not a journey but a change of elements" (Invisible Cities 43). 129 immaginato spiegare o riuscire finalmente a spiegare a se stesso che ...."60 The following chapter focuses on the complex operations of this machine, mainly to achieve a better understanding of the parabolic core, which shall be argued herein to be of a phantasmic nature.

60 Le citta imisibUi 34; "AH this so that Marco Polo could explain or imagine explaining or be imagined explaining or succeed finally in explaining to himself that..." (Invisible Cities 28). 130

Italo Calvino: Phantasms of Le citta invisibili

I. Thomas Pynchon's emblem of choice for theological pretention is the geometric parabola, with its two opposing extremities poised in a perfect arch, since such an exact balance suggests the necessity, if not the sanctity, of those who are damned; for, Pynchon holds, the very existence of the preterite guarantees the existence of their diametric opposite, that is, the Savior, and the shape of the parabola evokes this paradoxical relationship at its multiple levels. In Borges too one frequently notes the notion that one extreme, such as utmost despair and malice

in one man, or in mankind as a whole, ensures the logical existence of its opposite, and that, therefore, one might go as far as willfully sinking into abomination, only to further purify one's celestial double. For Borges, however, it is the mirror which

best emblematizes this paradox, the mirror as the uncanny interface between the

thing and its reflection, identical yet reversed; therefore and multiply - not identical.

In Le citta invisibili (hereafter CI) by Italo Calvino, one notes the same predilection

for mirrors and mirror games, starting with the very title of the work, which reverses

the initials of its author. Indeed, in the spirit of actual mirrors, there is practically no

limit to the range of things that Calvino's cities could be thought to be reflecting: the

spiritual landscape of a human being and/or the author himself, with all its tortuous

structures of memory and desire, its indelible traces of guilt, pain and joy, its reason

and absurdities; the deep-running aspiration for order in chaos, and the chaos that

results from such an aspiration; the multifarious labyrinthine social organizations

that man is capable of engendering; mortality, ours and that of the gods; the flux,

texture or solid thickness of time; the depth and wealth of one man's solitude,

moving amidst throngs of men; the shape of dreams; the world as such, seeming as 131 if it could fit into one's gaze in manageable installments, when each and every piece soon oozes out of any frame of control and simplicity, and mingles into a great tidal wave, or many, washing over the reader repeatedly. Naturally, somewhere in this bounty of reflections one also detects a definition of what parables do, or what attraction they might hold for those who lend an ear to them: "D'una citti non godi le sette o le settantasette meraviglie, ma la risposta che dk a una tua domanda. - O la domanda che ti pone obbligandoti a rispondere, come Tebe per bocca della Sfinge."1

CI is undoubtedly one of those texts which, by foregrounding their peculiar structure, pose the question of how and in what order they should or could be read.

In the case of Calvino's work, aside from an ordinary cover-to-cover reading, one might first read through the dialogues between Kublai Khan and Marco Polo, which frame the text's nine chapters containing the descriptions of the cities; and then those descriptions themselves, which are divided into thematic and numbered quintets. One might first read Chapters I and IX, which are structural mirror images of each other,2 and then the rest; one might individually chase each of the eleven themes - such as "il cielo" ("the sky"), or "i morti" ("the dead") - unfolding in five installments throughout the book, each featuring a distinct city, and do this in any

1 Le cittA invisibili SO;" 'You take delight not in a city's seven or seventy wonders, but in the answer it gives to a question of yours.' 'Or the question it asks you, forcing you to answer, like Thebes through the mouth of the Sphinx" (Invisible Cities, henceforth IC, 44). 2 This, as also noted by Carolyn Springer (291) whose article, Textual Geography: The Role of the Reader in 'Invisible Cities'", offers a detailed gloss of CTs "extra-diegetic" components (290) - including the peculiar table of contents, the chapter and section headings and the empty spaces in between them - as well as transferring the mathematical order of the table of contents into musical and graphic representations (in Modern Language Studies, Vol. IS, No.4, (Autumn, 198S): 289-299). At this point it appears suitable to invoke again the temptation that the parabolic mode holds for the reader to discover a secret geometry in a given text, as mentioned earlier with reference to Henry James and Pynchon. Certainly Calvino too does not neglect to throw the reader a bait from the very beginning, enticing her to unearth that "filigrana d'un disegno cos) sottile da sfuggire al morso dei termiti" (14; "the tracery of a pattern so subtle [that] it could escape the termites' gnawing," 6); so much so that Springer wonders whether the zigzag line obtained by converting the mathematical order of the table of contents into a graphic one, is meant to represent the contours of the mountains traversed by Marco Polo to reach the court of Kublai Khan: "These schemes may seem fanciful; but they are faithful to the spirit of Calvino, who repeatedly challenges us to trace the "invisible thread" of his discourse..." (291). 132 order; likewise one might discern and follow thematically-related duos or trios, such as "i segni" ("signs") and "gli scambi" ("exchanges"); or else, one might group the descriptions under one's own theme(s), such as "dreams" or "doubles." Needless to add, while the re-reading of any literary text is bound to deliver a fresh impact on the reader, different in degree, in kind or both, in the case of books like CI the reading experience, and thereby the text itself, prove to be all the more protean.

The dialogues between Marco Polo and the Khan are divided into pairs that serve as a prologue and an epilogue to each of the nine chapters.3 The prologue I,

which opens up the series in the present tense, soon gets to an impersonal and rather

lengthy description - "Nella vita degli imperatori c'6 un momento..."4 - and after, as

it were, the cleft of this "moment," the tense switches into the imperfect.5 Time, it

seems, becomes destabilized as of the very beginning, in that particular moment, no

longer flowing from the past into the future through the present; or else, it

immediately reveals itself to have never moved in such a way, laying bare its

fullness, where the present, the past, and the future can and do occur simultaneously.

In fact, in a crucial passage in the epilogue VI, the three terms are written without

punctuation marks to divide them up, to suggest their solidity, or the lack of a flow

from one to the other:"... la spugna gonfia di materia vitale che non scorre piu,

l'ingorgo di passato presente futuro che blocca le esistenze calcificate nell'illusione

3 Accordingly, each unit of dialogue shall be henceforth identified as, for instance, prologue III or epilogue V, by reference to the chapter thus numbered in CI, which the respective unit either precedes or follows. CI 13; "In the lives of emperors there is a moment..." (IC 5). 3 Before and during the said descriptive "moment," the ruling tense for the verbs, whether active or passive, is the present, and accordingly, where required, also the subjunctive mood is used in its present form: "Non i detto [present, passive] che Kublai Kan creda [present subjunctive, or 'congiuntivo presente'] a tutto quel che dice [present, active] Marco Polo quando gli descrive [present, active] le citt& visitate nelle sue ambascerie ..." (13, emphases mine); "Kublai Khan does not necessarily believe [or, more accurately, it is not said that Kublai Khan believes] everything Marco Polo says when he describes the cities visited on his expeditions" (IC 5). Following the said moment, however, the text reads: "Solo nei resoconti di Marco Polo, Kublai Kan riusciva a discemere..." (13); "Only in Marco Polo's accounts was Kublai Khan able to discern..." (5-6; emphases mine). 133 del movimento;"6 And a closer look at the two official openings of the text renders its temporal structure even more intricate. The first words of the prologue I bear an unmistakable legend-like tone - "Non e detto che Kublai Kan ..." - as if this were an ancient story handed over by tradition and being now recounted again; yet the use of the past tense is strangely delayed until after the aforementioned "moment," thus

belying the impression that one is about to read about bygone days. Then comes the

very first description of a city, posing a problem far more complicated than the

classic in medias res: "Partendosi di I& e andando tre giornate verso levante, 1'uomo

si trova a Diomira...."7 Despite appearances, then, Diomira is not the first city in the

collection; it must at least be the second, preceded by a city which is truly invisible,

referred to simply as "1&" ("there"); but since such an opening entails a continuity of

traveling with no beginning or end, it is more likely that Diomira is rather the nth

city, preceded, and, certainly, to be followed by many others. Moreover, not only

these expeditions themselves but also, and most crucially, their recounting purports

to have been going on long before this faux-start8 - in such a way as to suggest, after

the fashion of Borges, the uncanny identity of action and narration, although, as it

shall soon be discussed, Calvino makes a specific point out of keeping narration in

CI to the bare minimum. And finally, the unknown bulk of the afore looming at the

introduction of Diomira is also an oblique reflection of the frame narrative, insofar

6 CI 106;"... the sponge swollen with vital matter that no longer flows, the jam of past, present, future, that blocks existences calcified in the illusion of movement" (IC 99). While the translator chooses to use punctuation, presumably for a smoother read, it should be noted that stylistic restraint from using punctuation marks is a technique that Calvino employs consistently throughout CI, not only to accentuate his views about time, but also, perhaps, to lay bare the sameness of so many notions that claim a distinction for themselves; such, for instance, is the sequence of "passatempi amicizie maldicenze" (70; "pastimes, friends, gossip," 64), or "chi cavalca carreggia re ma vola" (145; "those who ride, or drive, or row, or fly," 137). 7 CI 15; "Leaving there and proceeding for three days toward the east, you reach Diomira..." IC 7. 8 As the book unfolds, it becomes increasingly difficult to decide whether the expeditions to, and the descriptions of, the cities are attributable exclusively to Marco Polo, whether they are factual - in their own fictional world - or imaginary, and whether it is Marco Polo or the Khan who imagines them, or both. 134 as the beginning of each chapter is preceded by another beginning in the form of a prologue, while its end is followed by another end in the form of an epilogue, which, in its turn, is to be followed by another prologue preceding yet another beginning, and so on.

As already noted above, this series does not dwell in a linear time; not only the tense repeatedly shifts from and into the present, the imperfect and the absolute past ("passato remoto"), but the order of the events narrated in the frame is continuously scrambled as well. The early days of Marco's arrival at the Khan's court, when, ignorant of the emperor's language, he uses mime and various objects to describe his cities; his eventual verbal conversations with the emperor, which are first supplemented and then substituted by a sign language; and finally their sinking into full and motionless silence, while their dialogue somehow continues, all of this storyline unfolds, as it were, simultaneously, in a present that is also the past and the future.9 To explain the peculiar texture of this time, Calvino has Marco answer

Kublai's question - "II tuo viaggio si svolge solo nel passato?" - in the following way: "... anche se si trattava del passato era un passato che cambiava man mano egli avanzava nel suo viaggio, perch£ il passato del viaggiatore cambia a seconda dell'itinerario compiuto, non diciamo il passato prossimo cui ogni giorno che passa

9 The temporal complexity of the text perhaps finds its fullest proof and exposition in the epilogue II {CI 45-6), which goes back in time to Marco's miming stage depicted in the prologue n. In fact, the epilogue constitutes a more detailed rewriting of that prologue, describing Marco's gradual progress from miming into spoken language, then into verbal communication supported by sign language, and then finally into a communication which, being either maimed or intensified by die absence of words and gestures, continues to absorb Marco Polo and the Khan. In other words, after regressing into the past, the epilogue prophetically jumps ahead into the future as well, depicting the ultimate encounters between the emperor and Marco, since the subsequent pro-and-epilogues of the text pick up the earlier episodes of this plot line, until they return to this last moment: "nelle loro conversazioni restavano il pit) del tempo zitti e immobiir (46; "in their conversations, most of the time, they remained silent and immobile," IC 39). 135 aggiunge un giorno, ma il passaio piu remoto."10 (34; emphasis mine) - it must indeed be in view of such convictions that Calvino himself allows the storytelling tense "passato remoto" to be checked by the simple present throughout CI.

IL Why is it that Kublai Khan listens to Marco Polo's descriptions? In more than one occasion the text, by way of an answer, invites the reader to look in the direction of the Khan's strong urge - and dimming hope - of comprehending and thereby coming to possess his empire in its boundless diversity:11II giorno in cui conoscerd tutti gli emblemi, - chiese a Marco, - riuscird a possedere il mio impero, finalmente?"12 And his thirst for possession seems to stem from a desire to achieve a sense of order and peace within himself, to be literally able to lull himself to sleep with that vision of order, the way little children insist on hearing stories before falling asleep.13 In fact it is rather clear, especially in view of the epilogue IV, that the central opposition playing out in the text is between the order which the Khan seeks, and the chaos, or rather the free-play and multiplicity of experience which cannot be contained by any order14 and which Marco clearly embraces, as he lets his

10 CI 34; "Docs your journey take place only in the past?";"... even if it was a matter of the past it was a past that changed gradually as he advanced on his journey, because the traveler's past changes according to the route he has followed; not the immediate past, that is, to which each day that goes by adds a day, but the more remote past." (IC 28) " A hope which is, in fact, impersonally foresworn in the very first prologue of the text, where the narrator mentions, with reference to one's conquered territories, the sentiments of melancholy ("malinconia") and relief ("sollievo") stemming from the knowledge that "presto rinunceremo a conoscerli e a comprenderli..." (CI 13; "we shall soon give up any thought of knowing and understanding them..." IC 5). One suspects this to be a covert invitation simultaneously directed at the reader, who is at the fringe of a reading experience that will prove no less challenging to a clear and untroubled grasp. For a discussion on the identification of "knowing" with "possessing" in CI, see also Carol P. James' "Seriality and Nacrativity in Calvino's Le cittd invisibili" in MLN, Vol. 97, No.l, Italian Issue (Jan., 1982), p. 154. 12 CI 30; "'On the day when I know all the emblems,' he asked Marco, 'shall I be able to possess my empire, at last?"' (IC 22-3). 13 "D'abitudine il Gran Kan terminava le sue sere assaporando a occhi socchiusi questi racconti fincW il suo primo sbadigiio non dava il segnale al corteo dei paggi d'accendere le fiaccole per guidare il sovrano al Padiglione dell'Augusto sonno" (CI 93); "As a rule the Great Khan concluded his day savoring these tales with half-closed eyes until his first yawn was the signal for the suite of pages to light the flames that guided the monarch to the Pavilion of August Slumber" (IC 85). It is for the same reason that the thematic categorization of the cities does not quite satify many readers: "... Sophronia, a "citti sottile," might more logically be associated with memory, while 136 cities proliferate in every possible, and impossible, spatio-temporal dimension. In the said epilogue the Khan and Marco take turns to propose a Platonic ideal for a city, obtaining results that are diametrically opposed. The Khan states the following:

"... ho costruito nella mia mente un modello di citt& da cui dedurre tutte le citt& possibili.... Esso racchiude tutto quello che risponde alia norma."13 In response

Marco remarks: "Anch'io ho pensato un modello di citt& da cui deduco tutte le altre

.... 6 una citt& fatta solo d'eccezioni, preclusioni, contraddizioni, incongruenze, controsensi It is not too surprising to note that this opposition too is prefigured

in the text, in the preceding prologue IV which expounds on the two moods that

predominate Kublai Khan's temper: melancholia and euphoria. In the melancholy

mood the Khan is said to perceive his empire as a corpse rotting in a marshland;17

that is, as a deceased order decomposing into a frenetic heterogeneity of elements,

both visible and invisible. In his euphoric mood, on the other hand, he sees all the

many components of his empire as the sparkling faces of a diamond; in other words,

he intuits an overarching order recuperated from the apparently chaotic

multiplicity.18 Since it is Kublai's mood which determines these perceptions, each

must be as correct and valid as the other. In fact, the moods themselves cannot be

said to invalidate each other, given that periodic fits of exhilaration constitute a

Esmeralda, listed under "Le citt& e gli scambi," has more in common with the cluster of "citt& sottili ..."(Springer 292). 13 CI 75;Ihave constructed inmy mind a model city from which all possiblecities can be deduced.... 'It contains everything corresponding to the norm'" (IC 69). 16 CI 75: "'I have also thought of a model city from which I deduce all the others.... 'It is a city made only of exceptions, exclusions, incongruities, contradictions'" (IC 69). 17 "So bene che il mio impero marcisce come un cadavere nella palude, il cui contagio appesta tanto i corvi che lo beccano quanto i bambit che ctescono concimati dal suo Iiquame" (CI 65); "I know well that my empire is rotting like a corpse in a swamp, whose contagion infects the crows that peck it as well as the bamboo that grows, fertilized by its humors" (IC 59). 18 "... il mio impero b fatto della materia dei cristalli, e aggrega le sue molecole secondo un disegno perfetto. In mezzo al ribollire degli dementi prende forma un diamante splendido e durissimo ..." (CI 66); "... my empire is made of the stuff of crystals, its molecules arranged in a perfect pattern. Amid the surge of the elements, a splendid hard diamond takes shape ..." (IC 60). 137

predictable aspect of the melancholy character, euphoria being simply the obverse of

melancholia;19 and certainly, such reflections apply directly to the pristine and clearcut order and the uncontrollable multiplicity of the text of CI itself.

That there is a certain resonance between CI and the Thousand and One

Nights has been readily noted by critics.20 However, if there is a parallel to be drawn

between, on the one hand, the Venetian merchant Marco Polo keeping the emperor

of the Tartars company with the visions of distant cities, and on the other,

Scheherazade taking subtle possession of Shahiyar's nights in order first to distract

and eventually to cure him of his murderous madness with her stories, some caution

is called for; mainly due to the fact that Marco has descriptions rather than stories to

offer, in order to satisfy the Khan's childlike avidity to hear from him more and

more: "Dimmi ancora un'altra cittA "21 Kublai Khan's command is a bizarre one,

where the word "city" has clearly replaced - and therefore invokes all the more

strongly - the word "story" which is traditionally found in such formulations. Yet, an

unfliching Marco Polo almost always refrains from overt narration,22 and it is

certainly worth pondering upon the implications of following the path of description

instead of that of narration.23 Despite such a crucial divergence, nevertheless, the

19 In Eros and Magic in the Renaissance, loan P. Couliano offers a detailed historical survey of the various qualities attributed to, and distinctions drawn for, the melancholy character; he notes that for Aristotle, whose own source is Theophrastus, it is symptomatic of "hot," as opposed to "cold," melancholy to have such euphoric periods. And these qualifications have certainly been preserved in the course of centuries, coagulating in the later image of the Romantic genius (trans. Margaret Cook. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1987, pp. 46-52). Certainly Calvino, who elsewhere characterizes melancholy as "sadness that has taken on lightness," is familiar with the contemporary studies on this topic, starting with Saturn and Melancholy by Klibansky, Panofsky and Saxl (see Six Memos 19). 20 See, for instance, Springer (290) and Marie-Laure Ryan's article "Stacks, Frames and Boundaries, or Narrative as Computer Language" in Poetics Today, Vol. 11, No. 4, Narratology Revisited II (Winter, 1990), p. 875. 21 CI 94; "Tell me another city..." (/C 85). 22 The only exception is found in the description of the city of Cecilia, where Marco explicitly says: "Ti risponderd con un racconto" (C/ 158; "I will answer you with a story," IC152). 23 To confirm Calvino's treatment of description as a category of its own, one might also refer to his comments about one of his later books, Palomar (1983) being the outcome of a more focused effort 138 resonance between the two texts endures and perhaps even intensifies through to the end of CI; for it is quite plausible to conjecture that in the end Marco Polo does - or at least appears that he could - manage to cure the Khan from his obsession to try to possess his empire, the impossibility of which turns his existence into a living hell.

Life itself, in Marco's view, is hell, or rather, hell is here with us in life, rathen than looming beyond death, and there are only two ways out of it: The first one entails an assimilation of hell into one's perceptions and reflections, and thereby into one's very being, so as to become unable to discern it, while the second, the harder and therefore the worthier path, is to learn to carefully distinguish, within

hell, the glimpses of that which is not hell.24 In other words, he instructs the Khan in

the art of looking, looking with passion and dedication, but without trying to possess

by way of ordering the myriad components of his empire as a series of memories or

narratives, whether they be his or offered by someone like Marco Polo. He shows

the Khan that there is hope in letting the grains of sand just be, as they are, and gaze

at the grace with which they slide out of his palms.

Marco's suggested form or mode of remedy for despair is that of

understanding without conceptualizing, which constitutes a purely aesthetic gaze -

or a light gaze, as perhaps Calvino himself would say. For, in the prologue V, he

ascribes the quality of "lightness" ("leggerezza") to the last and possibly the most

bountiful stage of any act of conquest, whether such conquest be of lands and

peoples by way of an imperial army or, one is tempted to think, that of ideas by the

in the practice of description; Calvino declares description to be a "very neglected art" and contrasts it to his other exercises in writing stories (Six Memos 75). 24 "II primo riesce facile a molti: accettare 1'inferno e diventarne parte fino al punto di non vederlo piu. II secondo i rischioso ed esige attenzione e apprendimento continui; cercare e saper riconoscere chi e cosa, in mezzo all'inferno, non & inferno, e fario durare, e dargli spazio" (CI 170); "The first is easy for many: accept the inferno and become such a part of it that you can no longer see it The second is risky and demands constant vigilance and apprehension: seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of the infemo, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space." 139 intellect. The first movement of any conquest, Kublai Khan muses, results in a growth towards the outside, a quantifiable expansion of the boundaries, and it is certainly in the same manner that one masters a new field of knowledge. Then comes the second movement which entails a qualitative growth whereby the conquered territories are reorganized and made to yield their fruit in abundance;25 and likewise the mastery of any field sets in motion the production of new ideas. Yet such bounty can only be achieved at a certain cost: the vastly increased responsibilities to manage one's multifarious empire bring into existence a sense of enchainment, while similarly most intellectual conquerors begin to suffer from a disproportionate sense of gravity, getting, one way or another, too entangled with the products of their learning.26 It is after the realization of this burden of ripeness that the third movement kicks in, not by necessity but rather by grace, as a growth in lightness: il suo stesso peso che sta schiacciando 1'impero,' pensa Kublai, e nei suoi sogni ora appaiano citt& leggere come aquiloni ...."27 The grace of lightness seems to have touched the Khan himself in this prologue, considering the rare sight of the playful manner in which he elaborates upon Marco's description of one such light city, that of Lalage; the inhabitants of Lalage strive to offer the Moon

23 tempo che il mio impero, gi& troppo cresciuto verso il fuori, • pensava il Kan, - cominci a crescere al di dentro'.... Ora molte stagioni d'abbondanza hanno colmato i granai. I fiumi in piena hanno trascinato foreste di travi destinate a sostenere tetti di bronzo di templi e palazzi. Carovane di schiavi hanno spostato montagne di marmo serpentino attraverso il continente" (CI 79); '"My empire has grown too far toward the outside. It is time,' the Khan thought, 'for it to grow within itself,' .... Now many seasons of abundance have filled the granaries. The rivers in flood have borne forests of beams to support the bronze roofs of temples and palaces. Caravans of slaves have shifted mountains of serpentine marble across the continent" (IC 73). 2611 Gran Kan contempla un impero ricoperto di citt& che pesano sulla terra e sugli uomini, stipato di ricchezze e d'ingorghi, stracarico d'omamenti e d'incombenze, complicate di meccanismi e di gerarchie, gonfio, teso, grove" (CI 79); "The Great Khan contemplates an empire covered with cities that weigh upon the earth and upon mankind, crammed with wealth and traffic, overladen with ornaments and offices, complicated with mechanisms and hierarchies, swollen, tense, ponderous" (IC 73). 27 CI 79; '"The empire is being crushed by its own weight,' Kublai thinks, and in his dreams now cities light as kites appear..." (IC 73). 140 numerous perches to have pleasant rest stops on, during its journey over the night sky, so that:

... la Luna conceda a ogni cosa nella ciM di crescere e ricrescere senza fine. - C'fc qualcosa che tu non sai, - aggiunse il Kan. - Riconoscente la Luna ha dato alia citt& di Lalage un privilegio piu raro: crescere in leggerezza.28

If it appears that Marco Polo chooses description over narration, such an observation should not lead one to conclude that narratives are charged with a negative value in CI; not only it is true that a narrative is invariably lurking from around each corner of description, whether thanks to the reader's imagination or through Calvino's suggestive use of words, but sometimes it is also nearly impossible to tell where one ends and the other takes over. Such is the case depicting the moment when Marco, in the penultimate epilogue VIII reveals to the Khan for the first time - yet again - that he has fully acquired Kublai's language: "II Gran Kan non s'era fin'allora reso conto che lo straniero sapesse esprimersi fluentemente nella sua lingua, ma non era questo a stupirlo."29 (139). What baffles the Khan is rather the acuity of the semiotic analysis that Marco performs upon his chessboard: "-La tua scacchiera... d un intarsio di due legni: ebano e acero. II tassello ... fit tagliato in uno strato del tronco che crebbe in un anno di siccitA.... Qui si scorge un nodo appena accennato: una gemma tentd di spuntare in un giorno di primavera precoce, ma...."30 The details of what Marco has to say about the board are mostly permissible; that is, one might believe that they constitute a convincing series of

28 CI 80;*"... the Moon would grant everything in the city the power to grow and grow endlessly.' 'There is something you do not know,' the Khan adds. 'The grateful moon has granted the city of Lalage a rarer privilege: to grow in lightness.'" (IC 74). 29 CI 139; "Until then the Great Khan had not realized that the foreigner knew how to express himself fluently in his language, but it was not this fluency that amazed him" (IC 131). 30 CI 139; "Your chessboard... is inlaid with two woods: ebony and maple. The square... was cut from the ring of a trunk that grew in a year of drought.... Here a barely hinted knot can be made out: a bud tried to burgeon on a premature spring day, but..." (IC 131). 141 observations coming from a man gifted with the gaze of a detective. However, when it comes to the vision of"donne alle finestre," it becomes clear that the material description has left its place to the flights of imagination, offering the first glimpses of a narrative being born: "La quantity di cose che si potevano leggere in un pezzetto di legno liscio e vuoto sommergeva Kublai; gi& Polo era venuto a parlare dei boschi d'ebano, delle zattere di tronchi che discendono i fiumi, degli approdi, delle donne alle finestre..."31 One might say that Marco simply prefers the dawning prefiguration of a story to the story itself, frilly told and finished, perhaps due to the greater freedom, the potentiality, the lightness of the former option; and therefore he employs the mode of description in such a way as to shy away, just by a few steps, from the threshold of narration. Thus also the inhabitants of the city of Cloe shrink from actualizing any of their countless fantasies, for fear of exhausting the possibilities: "Se uomini e donne cominciassero a vivere i loro effimeri sogni, ogni fantasma diventerebbe una persona con cui cominciare una storia d'inseguimenti, di finzioni, di malintesi, d'urti, di oppressioni, e la giostra delle fantasie si fermerebbe."32 And likewise the very last words of CI - "... e farlo durare, e dargli spazio"33 - leave the reader on a note of openness and potentiality which is subtly crafted at two levels: At a stylistic level, the anaphoric use of the conjunction "e" presupposes or provokes the addition of a third or an nth, in the spirit of the parabolic mode; and at the level of content, is it not plausible to think that descriptions constitute the very means to make something endure, by offering it a

31 CI 140; "The quantity of things that could be read in a little piece of smooth and empty wood overwhelmed Kublai; Polo was already talking about ebony forests, about rafts laden with logs that come down the rivers, of docks, of women at the windows... (/C 132). 32 CI 57; "If men and women began to live their ephemeral dreams, every phantom would become a person with whom to begin a story of pursuits, pretenses, misunderstandings, clashes, oppressions, and the carousel of fantasies would stop" (IC 52, emphases added). 33 CI 170; "... and make it endure, and give it space" (trans, mine), it referrring to whichever thing that is "not hell." 142 peculiar literary space to exist in? Indeed, that which is contained in a description is preserved timelessly, since the absence of narration precludes both beginnings and endings.

The opposition between the respective stances of Kublai Khan and Marco

Polo climaxes in the prologue VI, when Marco declares to have exhausted the list of all the cities he has come to know, and the Khan commands him to talk about the only city about which he never seemed to have spoken a word, that is, the

merchant's native Venice. Marco surprisingly confesses to not have spoken about

anything but Venice, saying: "[0]gni volta che descrivo una cM dico qualcosa di

Venezia."34 Such a reply is unacceptable for the Khan who, being the wrong sort of

a purist, wishes to hear about each city for and in itself: "Quando ti chiedo d'altre

citt&, voglio sentirti dire di quelle. E di Venezia, quando ti chiedo di Venezia."35 It is

at this point that the parabolic frame of Marco's mind manifests itself, since for

Marco, every nth line of description is to be placed beside the line of Venice, which,

being itself preserved in an inarticulate form, precedes and occupies the afore of all

the other lines:

- Per distinguere le qualM delle altre, devo partire da una prima citt& che resta implicita. Per me b Venezia. - Dovresti allora cominciare ogni racconto dei tuoi viaggi dalla partenza, descrivendo Venezia cosi com'6, tutta quanta, senza omettere nulla di cid che ricordi di lei. [...] - Le immagini della memoria, una volta fissate con le parole, si cancellano, disse Polo. - Forse Venezia ho paura di perderla tutta in una volta, se ne parlo. O forse, parlando d'altre citti, l'ho gi& perduta a poco a poco.36

34 CI 94; "Every time I describe a city I am saying something about Venice" (IC 86). 33 CI 94; "When I ask you about other cities, I want to hear about them. And about Venice, when I ask you about Venice" {IC 86). 36 CI 94; "'To distinguish the other cities' qualities, I must speak of a first city that remains implicit For me it is Venice.' 'You should then begin each tale of your travels from the departure, describing Venice as it is, all of it, not omitting anything you remember of it' [...] 'Memory's images, once they are fixed in words, are erased,' Polo said. 'Perhaps I am afraid of losing Venice all at once, if I speak of it. Or perhaps, speaking of other cities, I have already lost it little by little" (IC 86-7). Marco's fear, let us note in passing, is not unfounded at all, since in the previous chapter we have seen 143

The issue touched upon at the end of the dialogue, namely that of the primacy of images in the memory and the duplicity of language, or the way words herald the death or loss of that which they refer to, is certainly an old one, clearly holding some interest for Calvino himself in CI. Indeed, here Calvino is drawing heavily on a tradition37 which, having been invented in ancient Greece as an essential component of rhetoric and carried into the Middle Ages through the mediation of Roman practitioners such as Cicero and Quintilian, had finally sunk into slow oblivion during the Renaissance, inextricably mixed up with the study of magic and the occult, in the hands of figures like Marsilio Ficino, Pico della

Mirandola and Giordano Bruno.38 This would be the Art of Memory, to which

Calvino raises a rather incontestable monument in the city of Zora. Zora, we are told, has the peculiar trait of being literally unforgettable, although it has no spectacular sights to offer. It is:

come un'armatura o reticolo nelle cui caselle ognuno pu6 disporre le cose che vuole ricordare: nomi di uomini illustri, virtu, numeri, classificazioni vegetali e minerali, date di battaglie, costellazioni, parti del discorso. Tra ogni nozione e ogni punto dell'itinerario potr& stabilire un nesso d'affinit& o di contrasto che serva da richiamo istantaneo alia memoria. Cosicch6 gli uomini piu sapienti del mondo sono quelli che sanno a mente Zora.39

Borges's elderly protagonist, Sra. de Jduregui, stricken with - or blessed by - the exact same condition, marked by the dissolution of the link between words and the images of memory. 37 In fact, as noted by Teresa de Lauretis, one of the main tasks that Calvino sets upon himself throughout his career as an author and critic is that of bridging the gap between the emerging post- WWII culture in Italy, and the literary, philosophical and popular traditions dating from the Middle Ages; see 'TSfarrative Discourse in Calvino: Praxis or Poiesis?" in PMLA, Vol. 90, No. 3 (May, 1975), p. 414. See Frances A. Yates, The Art of Memory (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1966), and Couliano's Eros and Magic in the Renaissance. It should be noted, in passing, that Calvino expresses great admiration for Yates' scholarship in his Six Memos (19). CI 23-4;"... like an armature, a honeycomb in whose cells each of us can place the things he wants to remember: names of famous men, virtues, numbers, vegetable and mineral classifications, dates of battles, constellations, parts of speech. Between each idea and each point of the itinerary an affinity or a contrast can be established, serving as an immediate aid to memory. So the world's most learned men are those who have memorized Zora" (/C 15-6). 144

What distinguishes Zora, it seems, is rather its clear-cut structure which gets imprinted upon the visitor's mind without an effort on his/her part, so that one becomes able, at any time, to bring forth a vivid image of its numerous nooks and corners in their actual place in the succession of things. As such, Zora constitutes the ideal location for anyone wishing to master the Art of Memory, since it facilitates the first step of the mnemotechnic procedure, and thereby also the subsequent ones, to a crucial extent: The first stage, as explained in the earliest extant treatise on the subject - the anonymous Ad C. Herennium libri IV- and summarized by Frances A.

Yates (6-12), consists in choosing and memorizing the details of a certain location,

customarily an architectural structure, which one either knows in actuality or is able

to imagine as clearly as possible; then one mentally marks off various places within

this structure, say the door or the painting on the wall, etc., following an exact order,

and memorizes them in that order, as if s/he were taking imaginary walks inside the

structure; then comes the stage of charging these spots with the things that one

wishes to remember, by way of imagining dramatic scenes with unusual elements,

and establishing various types of associations between the scene imagined to take

place in that specific spot and the thing to be remembered. If thus joined with a

mental image, whatever one wishes to commit to memory remains infallibly at one's

disposal. This, in a nutshell, is how the Art of Memory works, and it should be clear,

in this light, that Calvino envisions Zora as the mnemonic artist's dream come true,

for here one has not just a building, but rather an entire city that quietly insinuates

itself to one's memory, as a vast rewritable slate; a ghostly skeleton that gets fleshed

out in so many different ways, to generate spectacularly complex beasts roaming the

inner waters of countless travelers, unknown to the world outside unless the traveler

chooses to speak of them. 145

And that is the fundamental dilemma that Calvino's perpetual traveler faces; as noted above, Marco Polo confesses to the Khan to have avoided talking about

Venice directly, although each city that he does talk about is like a colorful lens

through which he contemplates anew the quiet image of that city ever-impressed

upon his mind. On the one hand, he wishes to make that inner city known to the

world, and language offers itself as the universally accepted instrument for such a

purpose - although he does have recourse to alternative forms of communication as

well; on the other, should he convert the image of Venice into a description, or still

worse, a narration of Venice, he runs the material risk of losing it, for it is images

that remain carved in the mind, while words are prone to be eventually forgotten. In

fact, it is on this principle that the Art of Memory itself is founded: that not words,

but rather phantasms, i.e., images that are perceptible to the soui, are the key to a

boundless and infallible memory. Marco Polo wishes to preserve Venice as a pure

phantasm, unvocalized yet under the constant gaze of his soul.

Could it be that Marco Polo's phantasmic Venice is a parabolic core, around

and in communion with which the whole web of the other cities is woven? Perhaps

it would not be too farfetched to think that all parables have a phantasmic core; that

the core of every parable is a phantasm which, despite being incommunicable

through language, could be accessed by the soul.

In his exposition of the Aristotelian theory of the faculty of phantasy, loan P.

Couliano explains that phantasms consist of sensory information transformed by the

the spirit (also called pneuma, phantasia or inner sense) into images that are

perceptible to the soul;40 "... the soul cannot grasp anything that is not converted into

40 See, for additional comprehensive discussions of phantasms - also referred to as "memory-images" - Mary J. Camithers' The Book of Memory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), and 146 a sequence of phantasms" (S). The spirit, in its turn, is understood as the sidereal vessel which enwraps and enables the soul to dwell in the body; it forms an apparatus (the proton organon) which "furnishes the conditions necessary to resolve the contradiction between the corporeal and the incorporeal" (4); without the mediation of the spirit, "body and soul would be completely unaware of each other, blind as each is to the dominion of the other" (4). By itself, the soul can have no access to the stimuli of the sensory world nor even inhabit a body, itself being too

immaterial; nor could the body, without the aid of the spirit, receive any of the vital activities transmitted by the soul, movement included.

Couliano's succinct manner of framing the interactions of the spirit with the

body and the soul as a problem of communication, or the overcoming of a language

barrier, bears a set of highly significant implications for a deeper understanding of

the dialogue between Marco Polo and the Khan: "[BJody and soul speak two

languages, which are not only different, even inconsistent, but also inaudible to each

other. The inner sense alone is able to hear and comprehend them both, also having

the role of translating one into the other" (S). Such an understanding of the spirit as a

polyglot intermediary capable of bridging the chasm between the soul and the body,

leads one to speculate whether or not Calvino might have indeed envisioned Kublai

Khan as the remote soul ruling over a vastly complicated body that it has no way of

knowing directly, while Marco Polo emblematizes the spirit, which, like a perpetual

messenger, brings to the soul news of the body and the material sphere that

surrounds it. In any case, the fact that Marco Polo and the Khan could understand

each other often proves no less than a miracle; this is particularly so in the prologue

Giorgio Agamben's Stamps: Word and Phantasm in Western Culture (Trans. Ronald L. Martinez. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993). 147

VIII, which once again dwells upon the time when Marco Polo has been serving the

Khan as an "informatore muto" ("mute informant"), where the Khan challenges

Marco to describe him the cities he has visited, by using nothing but the Khan's chessboard; it goes without saying - and here Calvino is nodding in the direction of

Saussurean linguistics - that each piece does not quite possess its own proper meaning, but rather acquires diverse meanings based on its relation to all the other pieces that surrounds it: thus "...una regina poteva essere una dama affacciata al balcone, una fontana, una chiesa dalla cupola cuspidata, una pianta di mele cotogne."41 And despite the obvious difficulties, Marco succeeds in offering to the

Khan "le prospettive e gli spazi di citti bianche e nere nelle notti di luna,"42 by manipulating the chess pieces into various arrangements on the board without saying a word. Certainly, it is impossible to know whether the cities imagined by the Khan, based on such descriptions, bear any resemblance whatsoever to the visions that

Marco himself has been trying to convey (this is the same perpetual dilemma that marks the use of tarot cards in II castello dei destini incrociati). One might safely assume that the two visions could be miles apart, and such is usually the case even when interlocutors engage in the most articulated verbal communication. What is therefore truly magical is that some communication between the parties occurs at all, as a consoling by-product of so many impossibilities; the spirit, being itself already immaterial, never physically bridges the chasm that separates the body from the soul. Then, any successful act of communication of a human being, whether within himself or with another, must yet again be regarded as a manifestation of grace.

41 Cl 128; "a queen could be a lady looking down from her balcony, a fountain, a church with a pointed dome, a quince tree" (/C121). CI 128; "the perspectives and the spaces of black and white cities on moonlit nights" (/C 122). 148

To revert to the discussion of phantasms, Couliano remarks that phantasms constitute "the words of the soul's language," and as such they have "absolute primacy" over the words of any spoken language (5). The whole of ars memoria depends on the primacy and dominion of phantasms over words, since "whatever is seen, thanks to its intrinsic quality of image, is easy to remember, whereas abstract concepts or linguistic sequences require some phantasmic support or other to charge the memory" (32-3).

Tradition locates the seat of the spiritual apparatus in the heart, while the spirit (pneuma) itself has been regarded as a vital vapor circulating in the arteries alongside blood, in fact as the "subtler part" of blood (6-7). Accordingly, one

suspects that the idiomatic way of referring to the process of memorization, namely

"learning by heart," is likely to be a residue of the ancient understanding that

phantasms reflected on the "double-faced mirror"43 of the spiritual apparatus, in

order for the soul to contemplate, are never lost. This is the essence of the Art of

Memory which, as Yates calls it, constitutes a form of "inner writing" accomplished

by the disciplined manipulation of phantasms upon one's spirit: "Those who know

the letters of the alphabet can write down what is dictated to them and read out what

they have written. Likewise those who have learned mnemonics can set in places

what they have heard and deliver it from memory" (6-7).

It is tempting to conjecture that Nietzsche might have been considering the

same process when he wrote that, "Of all writings I love only that which is written

with blood. Write with blood: and you will discover that blood is spirit. [...] He who

writes in blood and aphorisms does not want to be read, he wants to be learned by

43Expounding on the principles of pneumatic magic, Couliano states that the pneuma, mediating between the body and the soul, is "... a mirror, but a double-faced mirror that reflects both what is above (the eternal prototypes of the soul) and what is below (information from the sensory organs)" (114). 149 heart."44 Going deeper into the fact that there are indeed many literary traditions which thrive on oral tranmission, which even wither and die once fixed in written language, one wonders whether Nietzsche here is talking about a connection that can be established with a language first and foremost at an individual level, where the words pronounced are so purely charged by the will that they indeed imprint the spirit of whoever receives them, cutting through the sphere of articulated language, so that one never forgets them while remembering next to nothing of the actual words used.

This is how true parables are known, by heart, and carried across centuries. If the parabolic core is indeed a phantasm, and the lines of re/writing produced in search of that core are, as is generally recognized, the kind of simple, unadorned writing that naturally commits itself to memory, shedding even more layers as it does come to be known by heart, then perhaps a parable could be thought of as a writing that seeks to ultimately abandon its language, to discard it at a certain point of its reception, as a vehicle that has no more use for the understanding, while the

listener communes with the phantasm beyond words.

If such is the path that Marco Polo himself is treading, he proves to be

already one step ahead, since he has removed most narrative elements from his

discourse, while Kublai Khan continues to cling on narration as a safer mode,

obstinately referring to Marco's descriptions as "racconti" (94).45

44 In "Of Reading and Writing," Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1885), trans. R. J. Hollingdale. London: Penguin Books, 1961, p. 67. One might even include Deleuze in the circle of suspicion, when he writes that, "A great book is always the inverse of another book that could only be written in the soul, with silence and blood" ("Bartleby; Or, The Formula," in Essays Critical and Clinical. Trans. Daniel W. Smith and Michael A. Greco. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997, p. 72). 43 Certainly, such an attachment to narratives is only too human and, if one might be allowed a moment of introspection, its presence can be abundantly felt in these very pages on Calvino's work, considering the attention that has already been, and will continue to be paid upon the frame narrative of CI. 150

One hypothesis of the Khan on the nature of Marco's journey is that it is

"dawero un viaggio nella memoria."46 There is nothing too striking in the idea of a journey that takes place in the memoiy in the wake of a physical journey, where one

plays back the various moments of that journey in a private phantasmic show. Yet, if

one could think of a journey that unfolds solely in the memory, on the surface of one's pneumatic mirror, things become much more intriguing. From such a conjecture one might soon, and without too great a leap, arrive at the possibility that perhaps the whole of CI is conceived as a theatre of phantasms; a series of

phantasmic emanations that appear upon the pneuma of an unknown sorcerer, at his

behest. As to the identity of this sorcerer - Marco Polo? the Khan? or simply

Calvino's authorial persona? - it is certainly true that Calvino hints at a large number

of possibilities, never fully affirming one over the others; he has his protagonists

speculate that perhaps the venue of their nocturnal conversations, the Khan's

beautiful hanging garden, is no more than an illusion, or rather that it is the entire

world surrounding the garden which does not exist (123); that Marco Polo and

Kublai Khan have never met in actuality and that their encounters have always come

to pass in their dreams; that the Khan has never stopped charging ahead to conquer

new lands, covered in blood and dust, and Marco has never stopped wandering,

although both their souls are capable of leaving their bodies and meeting on a

different plane (109); the aforementioned prologue V (79) suggests that the Khan's

whole wide empire rises from his willful daydreaming, cities and lands changing

shape and acquiring new qualities according to his contemplations; or that it is his

actual dreams, over which he has no such control, that somehow materialize and

46 "Dunque b dawero un viaggio nella memoria, il tuo" (CI 10S);So then, yours is truly a journey through memory!'" (IC 98). 151 spread out into the waking world. In the prologue VII (109) one discerns the possibility that the venue for the dialogues of the Khan and Marco Polo is indeed a dream space where time is experienced in its fullness - and hence the temporal structure of the frame - so that, even though the Khan and the Venetian merchant will not meet in the waking life until much later in the future, here they are able to connect nonetheless: "Neanch'io sono sicuro d'essere qui, a passeggiare tra le fontane di porfidoe non a cavalcare incrostato di sudore e di sangue alia testa del mio esercito, conquistando i paesi che tu dovrai descrivere „.."47 And in the city of

Irene (131) one finds by far the most uncanny moment of CI; here the invisible narrator of the frame invades, for the first and only time, the stream of descriptions, permanently subverting the illusion that all these cities have been told of by Marco, with a few modifications and/or variations possibly proposed by the Khan: "A questo punto Kublai Khan s'aspetta che Marco parli d'Irene com'd vista da dentro. E

Marco non pud farlo ...,"48 Indeed, just as Marco cannot speak of this city as seen from the inside, since the city seen from the inside is not the same as that gazed at from a plateau, so can the reader no longer contemplate upon these descriptions from the safe viewpoint of the frame narrative, which has, up until this point, been cleanly divided from the visions of the cities, since now the assumed describer and his primary audience are themselves inscribed into a vision; what is more, in his last words concerning Irene, the intrusive narrator unmistakably appropriates a habit that earlier, in the prologue VI, Marco Polo himself declares to have been practicing; namely, that of perpetually circling his thoughts around the image of Venice without

47 CI 109; "I, too, am not sure I am here, strolling among the porphyry fountains and not riding, caked with sweat and blood, at the head of my army, conquering the lands you will have to describe ..." (IC 103; emphases mine). 48 CI 131; "At this point Kublai Khan expects Marco to speak of Irene as it is seen from within. But Marco cannot do this..." (/C124). 152 ever speaking of her: "forse di Irene ho gi& parlato sotto altri nomi; forse non ho parlato che di Irene."49

Nevertheless, one might dare arguing that what is even more uncanny than the problems posed by the peculiar description of Irene is the fact that such problems matter so little; the text moves ahead, and so do most readers, often unperturbed by, or perhaps even unaware of, such details. Perhaps the very reason underlying

Calvino's steady recourse to ambiguity throughout CI is to achieve an effect of effervescence, so that these visions of cities could fleet and evaporate before the readers' gaze one after another. Indeed, Calvino might have very well crafted CI as a rich and multicolored spectacle that one, both he himself and his reader, can only gaze at without ever possessing by a clear grasp - just as it has been foretold, we know, in the beginning; a phantasmic spectacle that in the end bursts like a bubble, leaving no trace behind, precisely because it trivializes or obfuscates almost anything that could be said about it. "Forse I'impero, pensd Kublai, non & altro che uno zodiaco di fantasmi della mente."50

HI. The notion of exchange ("gli scambi") constitutes one of the eleven running themes of CI and, given that Marco Polo is first and foremost a merchant, it merits some particular attention. The five cities that are described under this title are

Eufemia, the aforementioned Cloe, Eutropia, Ersilia, and Smeraldina. Although

Eufemia appears to be a regular enough commercial centre where all kinds of merchandise are traded, the narrator hastens to point out that it is not only for the sake of exchanging tangible goods that people come to this city; that they are rather more concerned about the countless stories that they swap around campfires at night:

49 CI 132; "perhaps I have already spoken of Irene under other names; perhaps I have spoken only of bene" (IC125). 30 CI 30; "Perhaps, Kublai thought, the empire is nothing but a zodiac of the mind's phantasms" (22). 153

"... a ogni parola che uno dice - come 'lupo', 'sorella', 'tesoro nascosto', 'battaglia',

'scabbia', 'amanti' - gli altri raccontano ognuno la sua storia di lupi, di sorelle, di tesori, di scabbia, di amanti, di battaglie."51 What is worth noting is that in the end,

in order to refer to these special items of exchange in Eufemia, the narrator substitutes his previous choice, "storia," with "memoria," thus himself performing an intriguing exchange:

... tu sai che nel lungo viaggio che ti attende, quando ... ci si mette a ripensare tutti i propri ricordi a uno a uno, il tuo lupo sar& diventato un altro lupo, tua sorella una sorella diversa, la tua battaglia altre battaglie, al ritorno da Eufemia, la citt& in cui ci si scambia la memoria ....52

If Calvino's reason for replacing stories with memories is to suggest their

inherent affinity or to blur the distinction between the two, such a motivation itself

requires an explanation, which does not necessarily lie somewhere too far; perhaps

Calvino regards stories simply as memories transfigured, memories that attain that

much-desired state of leggerezza by shedding their personal burden at the moment

of exchange; for, indeed, while one mourns for the sister devoured by the big bad

wolf, or the hidden treasure that has slid away from one's hands, or the bloody battle

in which one has lost all his friends, all such things befalling someone else can be

savored from a distance as adventures which, no matter how tragic or excruciating,

prove ultimately harmless - catharsis is, after all, quite salubrious. From this

perspective one might speculate that the very name of the city - Eufemia sharing its

root with euphemism - must be owed to the trading of harsh and thorny memories

with smooth and inoffensive stories.

51 CI 43;"... at each word that one man says - such as 'wolf, 'sister', 'hidden treasure', 'battle', 'scabies', 'lovers' - the others tell, each one, his tale of wolves, sisters, treasures, scabies, lovers, battles" (IC 36). 32 CI 43-4;"... you know that in the long journey ahead of you, when... you start summoning up your memories one by one, your wolf will have become another wolf, your sister a different sister, your battle other battles, on your return from Euphemia, the city where memory is traded..." (IC 36-7). 154

While those passing through Eufemia could all profess to some experience, the inhabitants of Cloe are mainly people to whom nothing ever happens, for no reason other than their ascetic determination to avoid experience, which proves no small feat. For, each personage described in detail among the typical inhabitants of

Cloe is so colorful and evocative that s/he seems either to have just stepped out of a story, or to be inspiring someone to write one. Indeed, it appears that Cloe is the city where people trade nothing but quick, fleeting glances, "senza che ci si scambi una parola... quasi senza alzare gli occhi,"53 so that a tremendous amount of activity is triggered in the imagination, while the visible material sphere of the city remains unchanged. In other words, figures such as the young man with snow-white hair, the blind man strolling with a cheetah on a leash, or the courtesan with a fan of ostrich feathers, are all intended to fulfil a reciprocal function: that of feeding into the faculty of phantasy of the others. Clearly knowing that any attempt to exchange the phantasms themselves through language would bring them to an end, the inhabitants of Cloe kindly cooperate to ensure, not quite that no story ever begins in their city, but rather that no story begins to be told out loud.54

The next city in the series is Eutropia, consisting of not one, but many cities out of which only one is inhabited at a time, while the others are kept ready and waiting. Periodically, when the monotony of life brims over tolerable limits, the whole city is exchanged for a new one; that is to say, the whole city moves to inhabit one of the other, theretofore empty cities, and almost every aspect of the inhabitants' personal and professional lives is also reshuffled, so that each man acquires a new profession, a fresh wife, new friends and a different view to enjoy from his house,

33 CI 57;"... without a word exchanged... almost without an eye raised" (IC 51). 54 See the respective quote from the description of Cloe on p. 139 herein. 155 almost becoming, one would think, a brand new person. And yet, although mobilized for an essential change, the city does no more than reconfiguring its personae: since the number of possible positions to occupy in a given city is, however large, not infinite, the inhabitants of Eutropia too end up becoming actors with changing faces or masks, cast in the ever-same roles: "Sola tra tutte le citt& dell'impero, Eutropia permane identica a se stessa. Mercurio, dio dei volubili, al quale la cittA i sacra, fece questo ambiguo miracolo."55 As such, Eutropia is the exact opposite of Cloe, which features an unchanging surface concealing a turbulent inner life. And last but not least, it is significant that Mercury or Hermes, the patron of merchants and thiefs, ruling over every form of exchange including those that have to do with language (hermetics and hermeneutics), is invoked precisely at the centre of the quintet about exchanges.56

In fact, after the description of Eutropia the series undergoes a subtle change, growing obscure, in that it becomes difficult to state what exactly is being exchanged, and between whom, in the fourth and the fifth cities. The inhabitants of

Ersilia fasten between the buildings of their city countless threads of four colors,

"bianchi o neri o grigi o bianco-e-neri a seconda se segnano relazioni di parentela, scambio, autoritd, rappresentanza."57 And when the city becomes uninhabitable due to the thick web of threads, they leave the city, somehow dismantling and carrying along all of the buildings, so that only the tangled web is left behind. From a

55 CI 71; "Alone, among all the cities of the empire, Eutropia remains always the same. Mercury, god of the fickle, to whom the city is sacred, worked this ambiguous miracle" (IC 65). 56 In Six Memos for the Next Millenium (52) Calvino reflects that, like most writers, thinkers and artists he too has a solitary and contemplative, i.e., a saturnine disposition, but that he nonetheless aspires to resemble those under the sign of Mercury: "Mercury with his winged feet, light and airborne, astute, agile, adaptable, free and easy, established the relationships of the gods among themselves and those between the gods and men, between universal laws and individual destinies, between the forces of nature and the forms of culture, between the objects of the world and all thinking subjects. What better patron could I possibly choose to support my proposals for literature?" 37 CI 82: "white or black or gray or black-and-white according to whether they mark a relationship of blood, of trade, authority, agency" (IC 76). 156 distance, they contemplate this design, thinking that "[6] quello ancora la citt& di

Ersilia, e loro sono niente,"58 which leads them to build another city elsewhere, going through the same steps, and then yet another, ever struggling, without satisfaction, to achieve a residual design of threads that is "piu complicata e insieme piu regolare"59 than the previous one. The result of these efforts is a number of peculiar city ruins that have been carefully crafted by their old inhabitants; and no matter how debatable the durability of mere threads and supporting poles should be, they are enigmatically said to be more enduring than stone walls and the bones of the dead: "Cosi viaggiando nel territorio di Ersilia incontri le rovine delle cittA abbandonate, senza le mura che non durano, senza le ossa dei morti che il vento fa rotolare: ragnatele di rapporti intricati che cercano una forma."60 Parting from these last words, one is led to think that what Calvino is so obliquely depicting through

Ersilia is the creative process, and more specifically, the process of writing,61 whereby one exchanges, as it were, an inner vision with a material work that attempts to flesh out, to give a definite form, to that vision. Such an attempt proving

- almost always - intolerably unsatisfactory, even though one instills one's very soul into the work and cannot even recognize oneself beyond it, one has no choice but to try it all over again, and then again. And needless to add, texts that survive centuries are no more robustly built than spiderwebs and, within their own scale, no less; neither their inevitable imperfection, their sketchiness, their failure to embody the ideal form that they long for, nor the lightness of the trace they leave upon the

38 "That is the city of Eisilia still, and they are nothing" (76). 59 "... more complex and at the same time more regular..." (76). 60 "Thus, when traveling in the territory of Ersilia, you come upon the ruins of the abandoned cities, without the walls which do not last, without the bones of the dead which the wind rolls away: spider- webs of intricate relationships seeking a form" (76). 61 In this light, it is possible to assume that the restricted spectrum of the threads, which the narrator bothers to mention, might be invoking the appearance of die written page. 157 face of the earth prevent them from outlasting a great many monuments of solid rock.

In the depiction of the city of Smeraldina, it is possible to discern a continuation of the motive of the aesthetic-creative process, this time, it seems, treated from the perspective of the dialectics of tradition and innovation. The city offers its inhabitants a very large number of water ways and multi-levelled land routes to be variously combined, so as to ensure "ogni giorno lo svago d'un nuovo itinerario per andare negli stessi luoghi."62 What is at stake in Smeraldina, then, is not so much an actual exchange as a series of choices made over the multiple itineraries, and the destinations in themselves appear to be far less important than the trajectories that lead to them. In this fashion, the narrator declares, "[l]e vite piu abitudinarie e tranquille a Smeraldina trascorrono senza ripetersi."63 Then the itineraries get further multiplied to incorporate rooftops and sewers, for those less conformist inhabitants leading "secret and adventurous lives," such as cats, rats, clandestine lovers, thieves, conspirators and smugglers. And finally the city's swallows are introduced as the third set of inhabitants ruling over the airy routes, which explode the possibilities of movement - this time in all the three dimensions - into infinity:

"Una mappa di Smeraldina dovrebbe comprendere... tutti questi tracciati, solidi e liquidi, palesi e nascosti. Piu difficile & fissare sulla carta le vie delle rondini, che tagliano Paria sopra i tetti, calano lungo parabole invisibili ad ali ferme... sovrastano da ogni punto dei loro sentieri d'aria tutti i punti della cittk.

62 CI 95;"... every day the pleasure of a new itinerary to reach the same places" (SC 88). 63 "The most fixed and calm lives in Esmeralda are spent without any repetition." 64 "A map of Esmeralda should include, marked in different colored inks, all these routes, solid and liquid, evident and hidden. It is more difficult to fix on the map the routes of the swallows, who cut the air over the roofs, dropping along invisible parabolas with their still wings..., dominating from every point of their airy paths all the points of the city" (/C 89). 158

The tripartite categorization of the inhabitants of the city, ending yet again on a note

of lightness, seems almost a literary retake of the biblical parable of the sower.

While all paths add interest to the inhabitants' lives, as a protective charm against

the boredom of being, the harder they become to follow, the greater the freedom and

variety they offer, although only those who partake of the weightless agility and the

precise acrobatics of swallows could enjoy them. One senses, under the thin disguise

of such details, an acute meditation about the nature and the possibilities of literary

play, thanks to which one continues to discover new ways of talking about affairs

which, unthinkable centuries ago, have already been labeled old.65

Indeed, it is possible to consider all the five units of the theme of exchanges

to be a running commentary on the process of creation, only that the last stage is

shown first, and then the steps are rewound to the very beginning: the city of

Eufemia sheds light on the moment when the finished work, however finished it

could be, finally finds an audience and continues its journey transfigured in the

hearts of those who receive it. What is depicted through the veil of Cloe, however, is

the earliest stage of poiesis, when the faculty of phantasy, i.e. imagination, is ripened

and triggered into activity, although there is no tangible outcome as yet. In the same

vein, the inhabitants' recurrent practice of resettling in a series of "new" Eutropias

might well be taken to invoke the creative mind's timeless quest for innovation,

which tends to reveal the fundamental sameness of things or, to put it otherwise, the

limits of human experience; however, the selfsame vision of Eutropia suggests also

a moment of reconciliation with the discovery of such limits; Mercury, whom the

63 "The polymorphic visions of the eyes and the spirit," says Calvino, "are contained in uniform lines of small or capital letters, periods, commas, parentheses - pages of signs, packed as closely together as grains of sand, representing the many-colored spectacle of the world on a surface that is always the same and always different, like dunes shifted by the desert wind" (Six Memos 99). 159 city honors, performs an "ambiguous miracle" indeed, by granting the gift of immutability to those who toil for change. Yet, such ambiguity should not necessarily be construed within the frame of human subjection to divine whims.

What renders the miracle ambiguous rather lies in the crossroads opened up by the

recognition of such a dilemma, or in the choices one makes as to how to proceed after this point; any step towards the exploration of a new same - as has been discussed in the previous chapter - disambiguates Mercury's gesture as a kindly one. Only then the search for innovation turns into an ever-restless strain toward

perfection, as emblematized in the city of Ersilia, and the fruits of all these

endeavors, the myriad ways of journeying toward the same destinations, are

displayed in Smeraldina, where the vision of swallows with motionless wings

soaring along parabolic trajectories quietly speaks of a perfect balance struck

between fixity and change.

It has already been established herein that, were one to stick to the fiction

that through these cities Marco Polo the merchant has once pushed on under the

protection of Mercury, it would be merely for convenience's sake. In fact, what is

ever-changing, in due honour of the mentioned god, is not only the face of the

wandering merchant, but also his merchandise. Marco Polo himself informs the

Khan that even his most exact repetitions of description are prone to result in a

difference:

- Quando ritornerai al Ponente, ripeterai alia tua gente gli stessi racconti che fai a me? - Io parlo parlo, - dice Marco, - ma chi m'ascolta ritiene solo le parole che aspetta. Altra g la descrizione del mondo cui tu presti benigno orecchio, altra quella che far& il giro dei capannelli di scaricatori e gondolieri sulle fondamenta di casa mia il giorno del 160

mio ritorno.... Chi comanda al racconto non 6 la voce: b l'orecchio.66

Let it be noted, as yet another illustration of an earlier argument, how Marco patiently turns into a "descrizione" that which the Khan refers as "racconti." If reversed, the same exchange proves also the truth of what Marco is saying just now, that no matter how he delivers his words, if the Khan desires to hear a story, he will be convinced that he has heard a story.

A good merchant traveling far must always worry about the freshness of his merchandise, either choosing to trade in unperishable products or finding reliable methods of prolonging freshness. The hermetic seal, from this perspective, reveals itself as yet another gift of Mercury to Marco Polo, or all those who trade in parables. Benjamin knew this very well: that the opacity, the resistance, the silence of parabolic writing is the very means to keep it alive and fit for exchanges; that the less is offered to the listener, the more he will receive and, what is more, retain indefinitely that which he receives.67 The practice of strict economy in the development of settings, plots and characters constitutes one of the readily known kinds of hermetic seals found in parabolic writing. Marco's recourse to description would be another, whereby all action is frozen into a timeless state of potentiality.

66 CI 143; "'When you return to the West, will you repeat to your people the same tales you tell me? 'I speak and speak,' Marco says, 'but the listener retains only the words he is expecting. The description of the world to which you lend a benevolent ear is one thing; the description that will go the rounds of the groups of stevedores and gondoliers on the street outside my house the day of my return is another.... It is not the voice that commands the story: it is the ear'" (IC 135). Needless to add, these reflections on the nature of reception run parallel to my own reading of Kafka's "Before the Law" in the second chapter, wherein the door of the Law (i.e., the parable) is intended only for the man from the country, although it is in this fashion singularly intended for every other man as well. 67 "There is nothing," Benjamin says, "that commends a story to memory more effectively than that chaste compactness which precludes psychological analysis. And the more natural the process by which the storyteller forgoes psychological shading, the greater becomes the story's claim to a place in the memory of the listener... the greater will be his [the listener's] inclination to repeat it to someone else someday..." ("The Storyteller," Selected Writings, Vol. 3, p. 149). 161

Of whichever kind it may be, Mercury's gift keeps parabolic writing in currency; it in fact turns parables themselves into some kind of currency, making them easy to retain and prone to be exchanged. It is important to note, however, that the transmission of parables pertains to an economy of gift-exchange, which proves, as elaborately illustrated by Marcel Mauss, no less binding than barter-or money-

based contracts.

In The Gift, Mauss establishes that the one who gives a gift invariably offers a part of himself as well;"... one gives away what is in reality a part of one's nature and substance, while to receive something is to receive a part of someone's spiritual

essence."68 And precisely because the gift is impregnated with a spirit, it could pose

a danger to the party who receives it, since it is believed to have "a magical and

religious hold over the recipient" (10). This is why in many archaic societies around

the world, whoever receives such a gift hastens either to part with it by making a gift

of it to a third party, or to give a greater, more valuable gift to the original giver; it is

for the same reasons, Mauss adds, that in ancient Germanic languages the word Gift

denotes both a gift and poison (62). Thus it often happens that a certain gift travels

around an entire community as if it were a celebrated personage paying visits to

each household, acquiring a spiritual essence from each giver, so that in the end it

comes to bear the collective spirit of the community, although it cannot possibly

belong to and remain exclusively with any one individual.

There is, Mauss continues to observe, a prominent element of destruction in

the practice of potlatch, various forms of which are found in many North-West

American and North-East Asian cultures. Leaders or those who are in a position of

68 The Gift: Forms and Functions of Exchange in Archaic Societies, trans. Ian Cunnison with an intro. by E. E. Evans-Pritehard. New York: The Norton Library, 1967, p. 10. 162 wealth and power often prove their worth for occupying such positions by performing magnificent, that is to say, fully self-destructive acts of gift-giving, which are sometimes also understood as offerings to the gods (14). If the exchange of gifts does indeed have a spiritual aspect, then it results that such figures are also emptying out their spiritual vessel to the last drop, until truly nothing remains behind. And yet, what Bataille refers to as a "limitless loss"69 constitutes the very act that ensures and maintains wealth, elevating the man who can perform it beyond and above his rivals (whom he is aggressively trying to subdue by way of giving away enormous quantities of valuable items): "wealth appears as an acquisition to the extent that power is acquired by a rich man, but it is entirely directed toward loss in the sense that this power is characterized as power to lose. It is only through loss that glory and honor are linked to wealth" (122). A boundless spiritual loss, by the same token, translates into a substantial enrichment of the self.

When the archaic origins of gift-exchange prove so highly paradoxical at multiple levels, J. Hillis Miller's characterization of Gospel parables as a peculiar kind of gift appears all the more appropriate. To recall, Hillis Miller suggests that a parable constitutes a gift that has no use for someone who already has a profound understanding of the Kingdom of Heaven; that is to say, only those who do not readily possess such an understanding can benefit from it. Yet, those who do not have this gift lack also the means to properly receive it, so that they can never have it. In other words, this logic makes the parable into a gift that no one truly receives, since it is either beyond or beneath their reach, although the words themselves that make up the parable remain in circulation.

69 See Georges Bataille's "The Notion of Expenditure" in Visions of Excess; Selected Writings, 1927- 1939. Trans. Allan Stoek), with Carl R. Lovitt and Donald M. Leslie, Jr. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985, p. 123. 163

Yet, one cannot help wondering if it is valid to make, or to adopt unquestioningly such an implied elitist division, starkly put, between those who get it and those who do not, when it has already been amply argued herein that a parable is precisely something not to be gotten; when, furthermore, such a practice would be

undoubtedly frowned upon by all the great parabolists studied heretofore, Pynchon,

Kafka, Borges and Calvino being all relentless sympathizers of those left outside.

Perhaps it is the human condition to never get the parable and yet to receive it

nonetheless, to receive it as something already lost, or something that is a loss,

something for one to become lost in.

The image of a wrapped-up gift box with a hidden content that may or may

not be accessed is certainly not suitable for parables. The origami figure invoked

earlier constitutes indeed a far more effective choice. The parable remains afloat in

an economy of gift-exchanges in the form of an intricate origami design, folded and

unfolded repeatedly in countless different angles in such a way that the notions of

inside and outside, or the front and the back of the sheet of paper get inextricably

welded, while every act of unfolding the parable leads to further folds of rewriting,

whether explicit ones or those that are implicit in interpretive efforts. For, as

suggested by Deleuze in The Fold, unfolding should not be construed as the opposite

of folding: "A fold is always folded within a fold, like a cavern in a cavern. The unit

of matter, the smallest element of the labyrinth, is the fold.... Unfolding is ... not the

contrary of folding, but follows the fold up to the following fold."70

If gifts can indeed be impregnated with a spiritual essence while they

evidently also have a material aspect, and if they do exert a certain power over their

70 Gilles Deleuze, The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque, trans. Tom Conley. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993, p. 6. 164 recipients, then it is possible to envision the parable in action as poison, slowly insinuating a spirit of incomprehension into each new recipient - only that what distinguishes poison from medicine in this context is not the dosage, as it is traditionally the case, but rather the recipient's subjective point of view about the dark gift. In any case, the perpetual loss of the parable in each new recipient, generation after generation, constitutes the very manner of its survival (by contagion), while the parable itself seeks, during these transactions, to lose the vessel of language which carries it around. Thus, having followed so many convoluted paths, one reaches a dictum that reverberates with one of Jesus' many riddling sayings: the parable is found only when it is truly lost. 165

I. It is certainly no accident that the motif of lightness manifests throughout the text and the study herein of Le citta irtvisibili, whether it be in the form of an intellectual and spiritual elevation, or something that springs up from the act of merely foreshadowing, rather than fully telling a story, or else the act of minimizing the stoiy altogether in favor of descriptions; whether the lightness of exchanging an aching personal memory with those of others, or that ineffable quality of the tireless literary pursuit that Calvino only hints at through a flock of swallows (little shapes black-and-white) darting along the uncounted airy paths of the city of Smeraldina. In fact, lightness as a multifaceted notion constitutes the first of the six values that

Calvino, in his renowned unfinished Norton Lectures, wishes for the twenty-first century literature to cherish and foster.1

Calvino initially approaches lightness through the figure of Perseus; he relates how Perseus' success, in decapitating Medusa without being turned into stone, results from his telling choice of employing an indirect gaze, and how, after his victory, he carries around the Gorgon's severed head hidden in a bag, using it as a weapon against other enemies only in the direst of circumstances and handling it each time with utmost delicacy. "Perseus's strength," Calvino reflects, "always lies in a refusal to look directly, but not in a refusal of the reality in which he is fated to live; he carries the reality with him and accepts it as his particular burden" (Six

Memos 5). Here, more than ever, Calvino speaks under the sign of Mercury - and as

1 Before his death Calvino wrote five of the six intended lectures, under the titles of "Lightness," "Quickness," "Exactitude," "Visibility," and "Multiplicity," while the sixth, which, according to Esther Calvino, would have been entitled "Consistency," was never written. In an introductory note to these Six Memos for the Next Millenium Esther Calvino remarks that her husband was in fact tempted to deliver eight, rather than six, lectures, and that he would entitle the eighth: "Sul cominciare e sul finire" ["On beginning and aiding," trans, mine]. 166 a patron saint of the parabolic mode, one is tempted to say - discerning a light, empowering, even liberating quality in a gaze that flies sideways. And, more importantly, he practices what he preaches at the exact moment of preaching it. It is with the same touch of lightness, the same reluctance to capture and conclude, that

Calvino declares that he shall not "spoil" the image of Perseus preparing a soft bed of seaweed for Medusa's head, "by attempting glosses or interpretations" about it

(6). Instead, he prefers to offer a comparison (with an excerpt from Eugenio

Montale, to be specific).2 For the purposes of the present study, Calvino's attitude in

this instance merits as much attention as the content of his discussion.

It is not at all surprising that a creative temper such as Calvino's should

shrink from tainting the beauty that he senses in the story by extracting some

meaning out of it; also, that he should choose to place numerous additional stories

running parallel to his discussions of the other themes in the lecture series.3 What

such minor details reveal is nothing other than the gesture of adding an nth line,

which a parabolic core seduces out of many who come into contact with it. And such

a gesture, which is essentially artistic, resonates most closely with the religious

man's perennial gesture of choosing silence before something he holds too delicate,

too ethereal, too much beyond the limits of ordinary existence to be named directly,

that is, the sacred. The chosen silence, however, is one that nevertheless speaks,

through words chosen with much thought to tiptoe in the dark. "The word," Calvino

(77) says,

2 He bases his comparison on the observation that Montale's poem "Piccolo testamento" ("Little Testament") speaks of how the lightest and subtlest of things could take a stand against a "hellish monster, a Lucifer with pitch-black wings" (6), just like the light-footed Perseus against Medusa. 3 It is in this fashion, for instance, that Calvino begins and concludes his treatment of "Quickness" with, respectively, the legend of Charlemagne and the magic ring, and the story of Chuang-tzu commissioned by his sovereign to draw a crab, for which task he takes a country house, twelve servants and ten years of passive preparation (see Six Memos, pp.31-2 and 54). 167

connects the visible trace with the invisible thing, the absent thing, the thing that is desired or feared, like a frail emergency bridge flung over an abyss. For this reason, the proper use of language, for me personally, is one that enables us to approach things (present or absent) with discretion, attention and caution, with respect for what things (present or absent) communicate without words.

When something is held sacred - and as suggested by Eliade, absolutely any thing, any person, object or event can be the seat of a hierophany and therefore become sacred while continuing to be its mere old self4 - it can only be held by the lightness of Perseus' gaze, with eyes that dare not trail further in than the periphery.

Perseus' gaze is not only shared equally by artistic and religious dispositions, but it is of course often found conjoined in one mind. Flannery O'Connor is widely noted as one such author.

Indeed few others could relate more emphatically, or more intimately, than

O'Connor to the necessity of altering one's vision in order to commune with, or to come to the presence of, the sacred. A Catholic in the widely Protestant American

South, one who proclaims herself to be "no vague believer,"5 O'Connor's view of the sacred, absolute - as opposed to mundane - reality, is one that speaks for itself beyond the domain of institutional religion. Like Calvino, O'Connor too is permanently preoccupied with what lies hidden beyond the reach of words, and what the craft of writing could do to approach it, ever groping on the fringe of ordinary human understanding;6 "If the writer believes," O'Connor claims,

4 "A sacred stone," Eliade observes, "remains a stone; apparently (or, more precisely, from the profane point of view), nothing distinguishes it from all other stones. But for those to whom a stone reveals itself as sacred, its immediate reality is transmuted into a supernatural reality. In other words, for those who have a religious experience all nature is capable of revealing itself as cosmic sacrality" (The Sacred and the Profane, trans. Willard R. Trask, New York: Harper & Row, 1961, p.12). "The Fiction Writer and His Country" in O'Connor's Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose (Eds. Sally and Robert Fitzgerald. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1961), p. 32 (hereafter MM). 6 For the same reason, she also pays considerable attention to other writers' concerns about bringing the reader one step closer to the invisible. About Joseph Conrad, for instance, she reflects that "[h]e was interested in rendering justice to the visible universe because it suggested an invisible one," and 168

that our life is and will remain essentially mysterious, if he looks upon us as beings existing in a created order to whose laws we freely respond, then what he sees on the surface will be of interest to him only as he can go through it into an experience of mystery itself. His kind of fiction will always be pushing its own limits outward toward the limits of mystery, because for this kind of writer, the meaning of a story does not begin except at a depth where adequate motivation and adequate psychology and the various determinations have been exhausted.7

However, again like Calvino, who requests his praise for lightness not to be brushed aside as a form of escapism,8 O'Connor too takes care to deny that such a writer focused on the mystery of existence would necessarily be prone "to slight the concrete" (MM 42). Instead, after acknowledging the concrete reality, accessible through the senses, to be the starting point of any fiction, she notes how the writer who seeks the mystery "will use the concrete in a more drastic way. His way will much more obviously be the way of distortion" (42). In other words, Calvino, in approaching the invisible, the mystery, the sacred, the absolute reality, or that which communicates without words,9 chooses to lighten up his vision by way of casting it indirectly - although that is not the only method he suggests for the practice of lightness; whereas O'Connor chooses to employ a distorted vision. The distortion of the concrete, as understood by O'Connor, entails the cultivation of the ability to gaze simultaneously at two distinct levels of reality:

[The writer is]... looking for one image that will connect or combine or embody two points; one is a point in the concrete, then quotes from him the following: "My task... is, by the power of the written word, to make you hear, to make you feel - it is, before all, to make you see. That - and no more, and it is everything. If I succeed, you shall find there, according to your deserts, encouragement, consolation, fear, charm, all you demand - and, perhaps, also that glimpse of truth for which you have forgotten to ask" (In "The Nature and Aim of Fiction," MM 80). 7 "The Grotesque in Southern Fiction," MA/41-2. 8 O'Connor states: "I'm always highly irritated by people who imply that writing fiction is an escape from reality. It is a plunge into reality and it's very shocking to the system. If the novelist is not sustained by a hope of money, then he must be sustained by a hope of salvation, or he simply won't survive the ordeal" (MM 77-8). 9 Such terms, it shall be understood, cannot help being only approximative and hence multiply in proportion with the number of minds assessing their efficacy. 169

and the other is a point not visible to the naked eye, but believed in by him firmly, just as real to him, really, as the one that eveiybody sees (42).

Such a strategy will surely bring to mind the medieval fourfold method of exegesis, and in fact O'Connor herself professes familiarity with it10 However, in her actual practice of fiction, the distortion of the writer's gaze - and thereby of the concrete reality - comes off as something physical, rather than intellectual ("One eye, large and staring, moved slightly to the left as if it had become unmoored. The other remained fixed on him....""). This bifocal gaze entails rather a drawing apart of the eyes, a passage into a trance-like, self-forgetful state, and a standing far too near one's subject to be able to see it in clean lines set in a determinate spatiotemporal

frame. Yet, it is this blinding proximity, this inability to see normally, this

anamorphic way of seeing in grotesquely flat or large or twisted forms, figures and

forces, which allows the writer to see things as they unfold in the fullness of time.

O'Connor is convinced that the prophet and the cross-eyed freak dwell in the same

body:12 "In the novelist's case, prophecy is a matter of seeing near things with their

extensions of meaning and thus of seeing far things close up. The prophet is a realist

of distances...." (44).

What, then, is the nature of the writing that results from such a vision? A

wild one, O'Connor admits, one that is "violent and comic," at the same time,

"because of the discrepancies that it seeks to combine" (43); indeed, the humor that

10 The medieval commentators on Scripture found three kinds of meaning in the literal level of the sacred text: one they called allegorical, in which one fact pointed to another; one they called tropological, or moral, which had to do with what should be done; and one they called anagogical, which had to do with the Divine life and our participation in it. Although this was a method applied to biblical exegesis, it was also an attitude toward all of creation, and a way of reading nature which included most possibilities..." ("The Nature and Aim of Fiction," MM 72-3). 11 "Everything That Rises Must Converge," in O'Connor's Collected Works (ed. Sally Fitzgerald. New York, NY: Library of America, 1988), p. 500 (hereafter CW). 12 In fact, O'Connor claims that it is essential for any one answering the call of fiction-writing to direct that gaze upon his or her own self and see the freak within; also, that "[t]he writer should never be ashamed of staring" (MM 82 & 84). 170 arises from the sudden conflation of the high with the low, which, in some critics' view defines the American, as well as most other, comic imagination,'3 is not too dissimilar from acts of physical or psychological violence that inadvertently (or, in the case of O'Connor's fiction, with plenty of unobserved forewarning) smash

together bodies or minds. It is to be observed, at any rate, that in O'Connor's view

the distortion of the writer's vision does not lead him/her, as a consequence, to draw away from the truth. She defends, on the contrary, that distortion is precisely the

means of approaching the truth,14 and the reader too is expected to undergo a certain

change, a turning, if s/he is to do the same.15 Yet one may point out, without falling

into an intentional fallacy, that O'Connor does not presume to turn the reader into

anything; she rather aspires to place the reader at the most advantageous vantage

point from which to contemplate her fiction, so that the reader too could, like

herself, see double, through a split vision. It is only then possible to contemplate in

her writing the often shattering operations of grace within nature, or the mystery

inhabiting the very heart of pettiness. O'Connor offers a split vision of the world

solely because she seeks to restore to the modern mind a loss that has been suffered,

she claims, starting with the Manicheans, when matter and spirit, reason and

imagination, physical nature and mystery have been separated.16

13 In his introduction to The Comic Imagination in American Literature, the editor Louis D. Rubin, Jr. explains: "Here, indeed is the elementary, basic American humorous situation - the 'great American joke,' and in one very obvious form. The humor arises out of the gap between the cultural ideal and the everyday fact, with the ideal shown to be somewhat hollow and hypocritical, and the fact crude and disgusting" (New Brunswick, New Jersey: Ruthers University Press, 1973, p. 12). 14 Praising The Metamorphosis" by Kafka for the "realistic fashion" in which it depicts "the dual nature of man," O'Connor states: The truth is not distorted here, but rather, a certain distortion is used to get at the truth. If we admit, as we must, that appearance is not the same thing as reality, then we must give the artist the liberty to make certain rearrangements of nature if these will lead to greater depths of vision" ("Writing Short Stories," MM 97-8). "Art never responds to the wish to make it democratic; it is not for everybody; it is only for those who are willing to undergo the effort needed to understand it" ("Catholic Novelists," MM 189). 16 She notes: The Manicheans separated spirit and matter. To them all material things were evil. They sought pure spirit and tried to approach the infinite directly without any mediation of matter. 171

However, rather than hinting at a glorious reunion of such binary divisions,

O'Connor chooses to show, quite after the fashion of Borges, how absolutely anything can simultaneously be itself and its exact opposite. The as yet disembodied devil in The Violent Bear It Away works hard to convince young inebriated Tarwater otherwise, saying "You can do one thing or you can do the opposite,"17 but never both things at once, although, of course, the devil himself, as the fallen angel, is the master of contradictory acts and states of being. And yet, his words are repeatedly falsified in the novel, as we see Tarwater's great-uncle being a blindly ignorant lunatic and a true seer at the same time; as we see Tarwater drowning his mentally disabled cousin Bishop, while at the same time baptizing him with superhuman love.

In other words, it is through a paradox that O'Connor's split vision fleshes itself out

-just as in the cases of Kafka and Borges.

II. For her steady recourse to the grotesque, whether through humor or violence, O'Connor offers two reasons in distinct essays. First of all, considering the readers who may not share her beliefs about the mystery of existence, she speaks of the necessity to make one's "vision apparent by shock...." In the manner of a traditional spiritual teacher - such as Jesus the parabolist - concerned about the capacity of the audience to understand, she says: "... to the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost-blind you draw large and startling figures."18

Yet, she claims, such figures do not simply serve to jolt the reader into wakefulness by causing laughter or terror, or both. Or rather, that state of absorbed attention which she seeks to elicit, where one begins to see with eyes "burned

This is also pretty much the modern spirit, and for the sensibility infected with it, fiction is hard if not impossible to write because fiction is so very much an incarnational art" (MM 68). 17 The Violent Bear It Away, CW 354. 1S "The Fiction Writer and His Country," MM 34. 172 clean,"19 where one's mere gaze takes the form of a prayer,20 is only the first step towards a deeper encounter with the mystery, which entails a turning of the gaze inward, to one's self. Grotesque figures, O'Connor observes, "seem to carry an invisible burden; their fanaticism is a reproach, not merely an eccentricity;"21 through that reproach the reader is expected to see, first, what is blatantly exposed - like the sun22 - and then, what shall remain invisible until one reaches the point from which to contemplate such things with "their extensions of meaning."

Until that time, almost every main character created to take his/her place within O'Connor's universe23 flickers with a split significance. As if to epitomize this doubleness, we are told, at the opening of "Good Country People," about how

Mrs. Hopewell's fat blonde overeducated daughter Joy has changed her name into

"Hulga" as soon as she was able to do so, and how one day the same Joy/Hulga, outraged by her mother's shallow existence, has stood up from the kitchen table to scream: '"Woman! do you ever look inside? Do you ever look inside and see what you are not? God!'... 'Malebranche was right: we are not our own light. We are not our own light!"'24 The repetition that occurs at the end is not accidental; that last sentence travels the entire span of the story and returns, like an echo, or a mirror image, to hit Joy/Hulga in the face, when the Bible salesman whom she sets out to seduce and thus educate, strips her, through the emblem of her wooden leg, down to her soul, so that she is left in the end to contemplate what she is not.

19 "... for he himself had been burned clean and burned clean again. He had learned by fire" {The Violent Bear It Away, 332). 20 See Edward Kessler's Flannery O 'Connor and the Language of Apocalypse (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1986), p. 47. 21 "The Grotesque in Southern Fiction," MM 44. 22 "I am not one of the subtle sensitive writers like Eudora Welty. I see only what is outside and what sticks out a mile, such things as the sun that nobody has to uncover or be bright to see" (qtd. in Kessler, 26). 23 O'Connor summarizes writing as "the ability to create life with words" (MM 88). 24 "Good Country People," CW 268. 173

All the men and women created by O'Connor are, as it were, submerged in the universal mystery, possessed by, and possessing a fraction of it. Forces both devilish and divine travel across them like a shadow that they themselves have no way of knowing directly, so that each man and woman serves as a mirror and a messenger for another, who invariably recognizes that shadow as a face they have known all along. The "stranger" - i.e. the devil - that floats around Tarwater as a voice that he very soon gets used to, while digging a grave for his great-uncle, resurfaces a few hours later in the body and the experiences of the salesman who offers the boy a ride to the city and a twisted teaching on love, displaying in the mean time an uncannily strong aversion to any idea of "turning."25 A younger avatar of the intellectual Joy/Hulga, again fat and blonde, appears in "Revelation" under the name of Mary Grace, yet this time as the deliverer, rather than the recipient of the message, descending upon Mrs. Turpin's self-satisfied conscience with the inadvertent fierceness of an angel: "She [Mary Grace] was looking at her as if she had known and disliked her all her life - all of Mrs. Turpin's life, it seemed too, not just all the girl's life."26 The Misfit of "A Good Man is Hard to Find" is likewise no stranger to the grandmother who, on the verge of the death that he brings, gets to

25" 'You're turned around,' the child said; 'it's the same fire.' The stranger twisted his rutted face sharply. 'I've never been turned around in my life,' he said. 'And I didn't come from any fire. I come from Mobile" {The Violent Bear It Away, CW 362). It is certainly a deliberate choice on O'Connor's part to shift from "the salesman" to "the stranger," the latter being a phrase consistently used earlier to refer to the disembodied voice conversing with Tarwater. (See, for instance, pp. 336,34S, 352). Aside from the "stranger's" rather blatantly suggestive denial of any relation to fire, it is worth noting that Mobile is also the proclaimed destination of Mr. Shiftlet in The Life You Save May Be Your Own" (183), the crippled carpenter who successfully executes his plan of marrying and abandoning on the road the blonde fat mentally disabled Lucynell Crater in order to get himself a car, this recurrence being only one instance of the web of mysterious reincarnations with which O'Connor weaves her characters. 26 "Revelation," CW 640. 174 know herself as she is in the layers underneath the shell of the well-bred and well- dressed old lady.27

Of course, the products of O'Connor's split vision are not limited to characters alone. It is rather the entire story that unfolds along lines of rupture, where characters incarnating the high and the low to the point of paradox interact through intricate structures of symmetry and prefiguration. In "Greenleaf," the initial description of Mr. Greenleaf as seen through the eyes of his perpetually frustrated employer Mrs. May comes off as ingeniously comic, but nothing more: "He walked with a high-shouldered creep and he never appeared to come directly forward. He walked on the perimeter of some invisible circle and if you wanted to look him in the face, you had to move and get in front of him" (CW 502-3). The crab-like gait appears to be just the right final touch to complete the portrayal of the lazy worker bent on doing the bare minimum required to ensure the continuation of his employment; similarly, it is difficult to suspect any transcendence in the tacit yet ferociously fought battle between him and Mrs. May, which is triggered by the growing success of his twin boys in the world, as opposed to Mrs. May's two sons who fall variously short of their mother's expectations.

Yet, the story's steady focus on his "deep-set fox-colored" (503), "wary,"

"bright" (519) eyes forewarns the careful reader about what, for the lack of a better word, may be called an inhuman wisdom which in the end manifests in Mr.

Greenleaf, no matter how incommensurate it might seem with his capacities delineated earlier. In fact, it is singularly interesting that the shift of vision prefigured in the story through Mr. Greenleaf s eyes is something that befalls his

27 The grandmother had the peculiar feeling that the bespectacled man was someone she knew. His face was as familiar to her as if she had known him all her life but she could not recall who he was" ("A Good Man Is Hard To Find," CW 146). 175 rival, Mrs. May. As the bull gores her, Mrs. May looks like someone "whose sight has been suddenly restored but who finds the light unbearable" (523). The moment of her violent death bestows upon her a spherical vision - just like the one offered by the aleph of Borges; and Mr. Greenleaf, with his "high-shouldered creep," appears now to have always sensed the presence of such a sphere of mystery, so that the invisible bond between two diametrically opposed characters is finally exposed:

"... she saw him coming though she was not looking in his direction. She saw him approaching on the outside of some invisible circle, the tree line gaping behind him

and nothing under his feet"(524). Moreover, the precise manner of Mrs. May's death

establishes another such underground connection between herself and someone she

scorns even more intensely than Mr. Greenleaf: his "large and loose" wife, who

occupies herself on a daily basis with rapturous "prayer healing" sessions in the dirt

(505), one of which Mrs. May accidentally witnesses to her great indignation. Just as

Mr. Greenleaf s eyes foretell about Mrs. May's final shift of vision, so does Mrs.

Greenleaf s shriek in the woods - "'Oh Jesus, stab me in the heart!"' (506) - foretell

about the opening of Mrs. May's heart, through the mediation of the bull, to the

world that lies beyond her tiny one:

One of his horns sank until it pierced her heart and the other curved around her side and held her in an unbreakable grip. She continued to stare straight ahead but the entire scene in front of her had changed - the tree line was a dark wound in a world that was nothing but sky .... (523)

In fact the bull is, alongside Mr. and Mrs. Greenleaf, the third element of the trinity

encircling Mrs. May, of which she discerns only the mundane nuisance and never

the filigree of prefigurations. The bull makes its first appearance beside Mrs. May as 176 early as in the opening sentence of the story,28 and from that moment on it not only gives her frequent daytime glimpses of itself, but it also appears in both of the dreams that Mrs. May has in the two nights preceding her death, first as an emblem of the inexorable time chewing away all the mortals "with the same steady rhythm"

(301), and then, having mutated from the red ball of the setting sun into a bullet, charging straight at her "through the tree line," to break open "the outside wall of her brain" (519).

The typological symmetry created by the repetition of the images of the invisible circle (connecting Mr. Greenleaf and Mrs. May), and of the stabbing of the heart (connecting Mrs. Greenleaf and Mrs. May) fulfills two distinct functions: on the one hand, it bares the split natures of Mr. and Mrs. Greenleaf, and by their means, of Mrs. May herself, as creatures who cannot possibly be grasped by reference to their material existence on earth alone; they all prove to be made of multiple layers, the depths of which they themselves cannot fully sound. On the other, the symmetrical structure lets the two images interpenetrate: the heart and the invisible circle are one, for this is the divine heart which is the seat of all creation, which Mr. Greenleaf never dares to approach directly, and which Mrs. Greenleaf seeks to reach by having her own heart pierced. This is where Mrs. May finds herself through grace - for "'even the mercy of the Lord burns'"29 - when the safe boundaries of her own home and of the organ pumping blood in her chest, as the two visible shells of her innermost heart, have been broken into. However, once again, the recognition of such symmetries in the story does not lead too far; rather than revealing, the symmetry only teases about that "last discovery" that Mrs. May

28 "Mrs. May's bedroom window was low and faced on the east and the bull, silvered in the moonlight, stood under it, his head raised as if he listened - like some patient god come down to woo her - for a stir inside the room" (SOI). 29 The Violent Bear It Away, CW 342. 177 appears to be sharing with the dying bull (524). From this perspective, furthermore, the typology proves to be reversed, where what befalls Mrs. May in the end constitutes only the promise, or an obscure glimpse, of that which has already been fulfilled in the person of Mrs. Greenleaf, who, no matter how crazed she might seem to the profane observer, has indeed acquired a magical power of healing ('"She cured a man oncet that half his gut was eat out with worms,'" 522), and Mr.

Greenleaf, whose deference of the sacred circle, however superstitious or even blindly instinctive it might be, has been, one might think, rewarded by two sons who

prosper and never fight, as if they were "one man in two skins" (516).

The fact that Mrs. May's dreams have been precognitive, foretelling the

future, cannot be understood until the end of the story. That is to say, "Greenleaf,"

together with the rest of O'Connor's stories marked by various prefigurations,

dwells in the fullness of time, where the past and the future are no less present than

the present; whereas the reader is forced to experience that time in a linear fashion,

and s/he too recognizes the signs of warning, just like the characters in the stories,

when it is already too late,30 when the reader, alongside the surviving characters, is

left alone to contemplate the vista of an astounding vastness, dark woods or the sky

stretching infinitely in every direction ("Finally, far downstream, the old man rose

like some ancient water monster and stood empty-handed, staring with his dull eyes

as far down the river line as he could see"31). Yet, unlike the characters, the reader is

allowed to turn; in fact, precisely due to the abundance of prefigurations,

O'Connor's writing requires at least one turning from the reader, a return to the

beginning necessitated by the haunting sense of deja lue. And if the story is any

30 In this respect O'Connor is aligned, on the one hand, with Calvino and Borges, in her conception of time as being saturated, and on the other, with Pynchon and Kafka, in her depiction of man's twisted and discordant relation with time. 31 "The River," CW171. 178 good, O'Connor argues, the turnings multiply indefinitely: "A story is good when you continue to see more and more in it, and when it continues to escape you."32

To attest to such a wealth of interpretive possibilities, often even the words spoken by O'Connor's characters partake of a split significance; sometimes such double talk is charged, again, with prefigurations about the unfolding drama, seeming random negligible details at the first reading, and sadly otherwise at the subsequent ones, as when the grandmother of "A Good Man Is Hard To Find," wishing to visit her relatives in Tennessee rather than travel to Florida with the rest of the family, tries hard to convince her unswerving son by showing him the news about the Misfit's latest victims: "Just you read it. I wouldn't take my children in

any direction with a criminal like that aloose in it. I couldn't answer to my

conscience if I did" (CW137). It turns out, the family takes the doomed turn from

the highway to the dirt road, where they soon meet the Misfit, precisely due to the

grandmother's crafty insistence on seeing an old mansion she once knew, baiting the

children with the story of a hidden treasure.

And sometimes the double talk produces an effect of pure parody, which is at

the same time, as per the usual nature of the parodic genre, a severe critique. Often it

is the unambiguously religious or spiritual discourses that O'Connor targets in these

instances, and her manner of exposing the false prophets manipulating the styles of

the true ones is rather ruthless. In "The Life You Save May Be Your Own," she

depicts Mr. Shiftlet as the embodiment of such deep-seated corruption, a crippled

"carpenter" whose first noticeable deed before the run-down home of Mrs. Lucynell

Crater is to spread out his arms and watch the sunset, "his figure form[ing] a

crooked cross" (CW 173). Soon after that, that is, immediately after ascertaining that

32 "Writing Short Stories," MM 102. 179 there is an old rusty car on the farm, where the equally corrupt Mrs. Crater lives together with her eponymous idiot daughter, this twisted doppelganger of Jesus yields to the sudden urge to tell a parable about "the human heart," which he seems to have practiced in private and repeated in other occasions to achieve its full dramatic effect (174):

'There's one of these doctors in Atlanta that's taken a knife and cut the human heart - the human heart,' he repeated, leaning forward... 'and studied it like it was a day-old chicken, and lady,' he said, allowing a long significant pause in which his head slid forward and his clay-colored eyes brightened, 'he don't know no more about it than you or me.' 'That's right,' the old woman said. 'Why, if he was to take that knife and cut into every corner of it, he still wouldn't know no more than you or me. What you want to bet?' "Nothing,' the old woman said wisely.

The rest of the story shows the bargaining process between the two characters,

detailing how Mrs. Crater offers to Mr. Shiftlet the hand of her daughter in order to

obtain a permanent unpaid worker on the farm, and how Mr. Shiftlet accepts this

offer with as many favorable conditions as he could get for himself, with the sole

purpose of fleeing with the car. Until near the end of the story, this intention,

however consistently hinted at, remains concealed behind Mr. Shiftlet's exuberant

proclamations about such things as his "moral intelligence" (176), and the making of

a man: "'Lady, a man is divided into two parts, body and spirit. [...] The body, lady,

is like a house: it don't go anywhere; but the spirit, lady, is like a automobile: always

on the move, always..." (179). Succinctly put, the parable of the ineffable heart too

is of a split nature; spoken through the lips of Mr. Shiftlet, it proves a mockery,

meaning simply "I want your car," but with O'Connor's precise depiction of the

comic manner of its delivery and reception, it nevertheless speaks the truth about the 180 descent and the entrapment of a man's, i.e. Mr. Shiftlet's, spirit, inside a rusty "1928

or '29 Ford" (173).

III. I often ask myself what makes a story work, and what makes it hold up as a story, and I have decided that it is probably some action, some gesture of a character that is unlike any other in the story, one which indicates where the real heart of the story lies. This would have to be an action or a gesture which was both totally right and totally unexpected; it would have to be one that was both in character and beyond character; it would have to suggest both the world and eternity. [...] It would be a gesture that transcended any neat allegory that might have been intended or any pat moral categories a reader could make. It would be a gesture which somehow made contact with mystery.

In his introduction to a collection of Kierkegaard's parables, Thomas C.

Oden reiterates the classical definition of parables as consisting of "spare

characterization," a "condensed plot," "easy memorability for oral transmission,"

and finally, an "unexpected" or "surprising reversal,"33 the last phrase coinciding

with what most other scholars of parables agree upon as an element of extravagance

- as discussed herein earlier. In this light, O'Connor proves a true parabolist indeed,

in that her writing mingles the products of her vision with that unlikely "gesture,"

that extraordinary word or deed that stands out against the ostensibly realistic

background. O'Connor locates this gesture beyond the grasps of both the writer and

the reader, and clearly characterizes it as paradoxical, something that forcefully

conflates contradictory terms and states. Perhaps the paradox posed by a gesture that

is simultaneously predictable and surprising, that both belongs to and transcends the

ordinary, is motivated by the same reasons for which O'Connor attempts to distort

and split her gaze; the paradox helps her depict a character within the plenitude,

33 See Parables of Kierkegaard (ed., with an introduction, by Thomas C. Oden. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1978), pp. viii-x. 181 rather than any section of time, for what she seeks is not only to "[show] us what we are, but what we have been and what we could become" (MM 118).

If such reflections lead to a natural question, as to how O'Connor could herself conceive of, and realize in her fiction, a gesture that transcends her conscious intentions, the answer lies in the story that has occasioned the public lecture where the above quotation occurs, "A Good Man Is Hard To Find."34 Here O'Connor identifies "the gesture that makes contact with mystery" in the grandmother's last words before being killed by the Misfit The grandmother, who, in O'Connor's view, is caught unprepared to face her death (MM 110), and who has just heard the gunshots announcing the slaughter of her only son, her two grandchildren and "the children's mother," frantically keeps repeating her conviction - or thinly veiled supplication - that the Misfit would not shoot a lady, until she is said to have her

"head cleared for an instant" (CW152):

She saw the man's face twisted close to her own as if he were going to cry and she murmured, 'Why you're one of my babies. You're one of my children!' She reached out and touched him on the shoulder. The Misfit sprang back as if a snake had bitten him and shot her three times through the chest. Then he put his gun down on the ground and took off his glasses and began to clean them.

O'Connor's own interpretation of this moment is that, by the action of grace, the grandmother is shocked into the enlightened discernment of the bond between the

Misfit and herself; that she finally realizes how she is "joined to him by ties of kinship which have their roots deep in the mystery she has been merely prattling about so far" {MM 112); that the Misfit too, however unperturbed he might seem for now, has been placed, by her contact, at the beginning of a transformative process:

34 The editors Sally and Robert Fitzgerald note that these views were expressed by O'Connor on October 14, 1963, before a reading of "A Good Man Is Hard To Find" at Hoilins College, Virginia (MM 107). 182

"... the old lady's gesture, like the mustard-seed,35 will grow to be a great crow-filled tree in the Misfit's heart..." (113); and indeed one might interpret the Misfit's cleaning of his glasses as being symbolic of the shift of vision that he has unwittingly undergone. Yet the scene supports no less effectively - and against

O'Connor's optimistic reading - the opposite conjecture as well, that the grandmother fails her final test utterly and completely, that she sinks far beneath the unapologetic and principled malice of the Misfit in her blind struggle, in her readiness to say and do just about anything in order to preserve her life, and that the

Misfit is swift in recognizing and punishing this ultimate decline. Indeed, what comes to pass remains unresolvable between the grandmother's "face smiling up at the cloudless sky" in the pool of her blood (152), and the Misfit's last remark, "It's no real pleasure in life" (153), which echoes yet diverges from what he has said just before killing the grandmother, "No pleasure but meanness."

If this terrifying encounter takes place within what purports to be a realistic setting, O'Connor is well aware of the peculiar nature of her own sense of realism:

"I am always having it pointed out to me that life in Georgia is not at all the way I picture it, that escaped criminals do not roam the roads exterminating families, nor

Bible salesmen prowl about looking for girls with wooden legs."36 What she seeks to portray has little to do with the accuracy of the political, sociological or pyschological data that the average reader, in O'Connor's view, expects the author of a conventional realistic novel to collect and combine. Her concerns rather lie in

33 Naturally, O'Connor knows well the parables of Jesus; in Mark 4:30-32, the parable of "The Mustard Seed" goes as follows: "And [Jesus] said, 'With what can we compare the Kingdom of God, or what parable shall we use for it? It is like a grain of mustard seed, which, when sown upon the ground, is the smallest of all the seeds on earth; and when it is sown it grows up and becomes the greatest of all shrubs, and puts forth large branches, so that the birds of the air can make nests in its shade'" (see also Matthew 13:31-32; Luke 13:18-19; and Thomas 20). 36 "The Grostesque in Southern Fiction," MA/38. 183 the achievement of "the deeper kinds of realism" (39), where the reader might intuit the traces of the mysteiy. It is precisely because it allows the character, and thereby also the reader, to commune with the mystery, that O'Connor's typical landscape turns out to be both realistic and extravagant. All these men and women who are

"afflicted in both mind and body,"37 this often blood-red sun and this intrusive moon, this sky ever-eloquent through its changing clouds and colors, these dark woods, lonely pastures and remote roads all manage to seem ordinary, and yet slightly off, as if they were the real people, the real mountains, woodlands and cities that one encounters in dreams. What O'Connor's realism depicts is an inner landscape, wherein the reader might, with many slow or sudden turnings, travel to the heart of the mystery, together with the author who herself, being far from possessing it, is ever occupied with its exploration: "This is not a piece of knowledge that I consciously put into my stories: it is a discovery that I get out of them" (118).

In fact, if one might speak of a parabolic event, complete with the text and the ones who deliver and receive it, all true parables constitute such a gesture that approaches and somehow allows contact with the mystery, including in its invitation all the parties involved. Often the one through whom the gesture emanates, the teller of the parable, is in no less need of a turning than the one who hears it, and the parable itself, as a dark saying, demands to be turned in a different direction so that it could be hit by another light, as noted in the introduction. Masterful parabolists like Kierkegaard recognize the challenges posed by getting engaged with any aspect of these possibilities for turning,38 which, it is to be emphasized, could never entail

37 "The Fiction Writer and His Country," MM 32. 38 To stop a man on the street and stand still while talking to him, is not so difficult as to say something to a passer-by in passing, without standing still and without delaying the other, without 184 a conversion into any specific paradigm of thought or experience without threatening their essence, the mystery alive in the parabolic core. In O'Connor's stories too one notices a nearly obsessive recurrence of the notion of turning, and it is significant that these turnings - alongside the earlier-mentioned notion of distorting one's vision - are almost always conceived of as physical gestures, things that people do, things that happen to their bodies; "We turned over twice," the grandmother exclaims referring to the car accident the family just has had, and

"Oncet," the Misfit corrects.39 In this respect O'Connor remains true to the letter to her principle of ensuring "the embodiment of mystery in manners."40 Her turnings, whether toward salvation (Tarwater walking back to the city) or otherwise (Mr.

Shiftlet racing to Mobile), prove first and foremost to be an alteration in the character's bodily orientation, which often functions as a preparation for the real task at hand, that of casting one's gaze, however indirectly, with absolute attention.

O'Connor is firm in her conviction that the object of such a gaze, whatever it might be, is certain to manifest the sacred. In this respect, it is worth invoking again

Eliade's views that the world is fully egalitarian when it comes to the distribution of hierophanies, that "[t]he cosmos in its entirety can become a hierophany" (1961;

12).41 One might conjecture, to go one step further, that if the sacred reveals itself as attempting to persuade him to go the same way, but giving him instead an impulse to go precisely his own way. Such is the relation between one existing individual and another, when the communication concerns the truth as existential inwardness" (Parables of Kierkegaard, xiii-xiv). 39 Before the accident, the grandmother's son Bailey sneers at his mother, saying "'This place had better turn up in a minute... or I'm going to turn around.'" And soon after their meeting, the Misfit narrates to the family his experience of imprisonment at the penitentiary as follows: "'Turn to the right, it was a wall,'... 'Turn to the left, it was a wall...'" (CW144; 146; 150). 40 As O'Connor discusses, for instance, in "The Fiction Writer and His Country," MM 28-31. See also Sallie McFague's comparison of biblical parables, particularly those of Jesus, with O'Connor's stories within the frame of the embodiment of the extraordinary within the ordinary, in The Parabolic in Faulkner, O'Connor, and Percy" (Notre Dame English Journal, Vol. IS, No. 2, Faith and Narrative (Spring, 1983): 49). 41 In Ritual Performance in the Fiction of Flanneiy O 'Connor, Cynthia L. Seel shows how O'Connor herself has been a careful reader of Eliade: "In her copy of Eliade's Patterns in Comparative Religion, O'Connor makes note of the following: 'But it is quite certain that anything man has ever 185 such in O'Connor's stories in the most insignificant of rocks or trees when someone concentrates on them, this would suggest that the onlooker must be somehow contributing to the manifestation of the sacred. Then the sacred object could indeed

not be thought of as something isolated from the onlooker, but rather as something that binds the traces of divinity lying hidden within and without the onlooker with

the fluidity of a Mobius strip. The reader is told, at the beginning of The Violent

Bear It Away, that Tarwater's dread of having such an immediate and intimate

contact with the sacred has led him into the habit of trying to regulate both the

direction and the intensity of his gaze (343):

He tried when possible... to keep his vision located on an even level, to see no more than what was in front of his face and to let his eyes stop at the surface of that. It was as if he were afraid that if he let his eye rest for an instant longer than was needed to place something - a spade, a hoe, the mule's hind quarters before his plow, the red furrow under him - that the thing would suddenly stand before him, strange and terrifying, demanding that he name it and name it justly and be judged for the name he gave it.

As to what happens when one does make contact with the sacred, when one

gets "an impression of the absolute," Kierkegaard has a parable to tell, about the

horse under the whip of the royal coachman, as opposed to the average cabman,

peasant or postilion.42 While the latter men use the whip to make the horse go,

Kierkegaard says, the former wields it mainly to make the horse stand still. And the

stillness of a horse driven by the King's coachman does not in the least compare to

that of an ordinary cab-horse, for it is not simply a lack of movement but rather an

absolute stillness, "the most strenuous effort, and also the horse's highest art...."

How is this achieved? Of course the answer lies, Kierkegaard observes, in the

handled, felt, or come in contact with or loved can become an hierophany.'" (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2001, p. 28). 42 '^The Lash of the Royal Coachman," Parables of Kierkegaard, 96-7. 186 attitude of the coachman at the moment of delivering the lash, in the way "he raises himself in his seat, concentrating all his physical force in the muscular arm which wields the whip...." After the lash a tremor overtakes the entire body of the horse, passing through every nerve and fibre, followed by a barely perceptible shudder, all of which, Kierkegaard emphasizes, is not caused by pain as much as by "the fact that the coachman - as only the King's coachman can - has wholly concentrated himself in giving emphasis to the lash...." What teaches the horse its highest art, therefore, is the concentration that it senses upon himself, and the only way in which it can respond to the intensity of this focus is by mimicking it, by paying absolute attention:43 "It got the impression of the absolute, hence it is absolutely still."

Kierkegaard's parable reverses yet confirms from another perspective what has been argued above in relation to O'Connor's characters contacting the sacred; it is not only true that one's absorbed attention might trigger a hierophany, but the ability to pay absolute attention is itself triggered by the sensation of the presence of the sacred, with absolute intensity. One looks for one is being looked into: "They

[the stars] seemed to be holes in his skull through which some distant unmoving light was watching him. It was as if he were alone in the presence of an immense silent eye" (CW 385).

Eliade notes that the manifestation of the sacred invariably entails the fixation of a center, thus the creation of an order, within the undifferentiated chaos, but this is not all; "it also effects a break in plane, that is, it opens communication between the cosmic planes (between earth and heaven) and makes possible ontological passage from one mode of being to another" (1961; 63). It is no

43 The implications of this mimetic element, it shall be recalled, have been studied in detail in the chapter on Kafka, within the frame of the pre-textual structure of parables. 187 accident, then, that Mrs. May should see spherically the moment the bull gores her heart, for this violent contact fixes her at the center, making her vision overlap with that other - superhuman - vision which is accessible only within the liminal sacred space.

Within such a frame, one might muse over the notion of concentration as to

be consisting of a double movement. The bull, which is the instrument of the sacred, can and does look directly at its target; it races toward Mrs. May in a clean linear trajectory and its concentration on her in this manner results in her getting fixed at one point, from which her own vision irradiates spherically in every direction; in

other words, when the absolute con-centrates upon anyone, it fixes him/her at what

turns out to be a center from where it then becomes possible to con-centrate (with

the aid of the spherical vision) on everything at the same time, which could indeed

be construed as a gift, since with such a vision the human being - though at the

moment of death - partakes of the divine.

And it is likewise a gift, that of "mercy growing out of agony," that washes

over the aged Mr. Head and his young grandson Nelson in "The Artificial Nigger,"

when they let their gaze be absorbed by the sight of a plaster figure, "a Negro sitting

bent over on a low yellow brick fence" (CfV229). The impression of ageless misery

that the figure imparts to both of these characters - the elder of whom has just denied

and betrayed the younger after the fashion of Peter with Jesus - exposes a shared

raw vulnerability underneath their differences, which, in fact, since the beginning of

the story have been suggested to be reversed mirror images of each other (230):

The two of them stood there with their necks forward at almost the same angle and their shoulders curved in almost exactly the same way.... Mr. Head looked like an ancient child and Nelson like a miniature old man. They stood gazing at the artificial Negro as if they were faced with some great mystery, some 188

monument to another's victory that brought them together in their common defeat. They could both feel it dissolving their differences like an action of mercy.

The strangest fact is that the story's steady humor, mainly triggered by and revolving around the fierce rivalry between the old man and the boy, suddenly returns to the scene, after its disappearance under the gloom of Mr. Head's frigthened refusal to recognize the boy as his own before a group of angry city women. Humor, O'Connor seems to imply, survives everywhere other than a place stripped of hope, the inferno that Mr. Head inhabits momentarily when he, in the grips of Nelson's unforgiving gaze, understands "what time would be like without seasons and what heat would be like without light..." (229). Whereas "the action of mercy" sensed by the two characters through the mediation of the plaster figure revives the humor instantaneously, perhaps thus including also the despairing reader in its healing circle. The old man attempts to show Nelson some wisdom, this time for the sake of the boy's comfort rather than his own unduly swollen pride, and this time Nelson too, contrary to his habitual defiance, seems to be begging his grandfather "to explain once and for all the mystery of existence" (230):

Mr. Head opened his lips to make a lofty statement and heard himself say, "They ain't got enough real ones here. They got to have an artificial one."

One might be tempted to begin the search for the explanation of the mystery of existence in the very abruptness of the transition from a profound spiritual experience to plain racism; or rather - and this would be more in line with the implications of the stoiy - that such a remark could, at an invisible level far beyond its petty vileness, still be capable of delivering to the boy the reassurance he seeks

("After a second, the boy nodded with a strange shivering about his mouth..."). The use of humor here - just as in the case of Borges, Kafka, and also Pynchon - is 189 certainly not accidental; it is merely another face of the ciystalline structure of paradoxes around which O'Connor's fiction unfolds. And to the doubleness of the vision that generates impossibly equivocal characters, situations and discourses, to the maddening conflation of blinking idiocy with godlike wisdom, to the simultaneity of shattering self-knowledge with slapstick comedy - in tender tears

Mrs. Turpin denies to herself that she is '"a wart hog. From hell'" (CW 647) - there

is one more paradox to add, that of the as if

The critic Edward Kessler qualifies the figural formula of as if as the defining stylistic trait of O'Connor's writing, which, the attentive reader shall confirm, indeed recurs with remarkable frequence. And a sound analysis of the

formula is indispensable for a better understanding of O'Connor's ever-present

concerns about vision and sacrality."... [T]o pay absolute attention," notes Kessler,

"without judgment or explanation, is... a form of prayer. The wonder (or miracle)

does not reside in the object but in the attention: to see as if, not simply to see" (47-

8).

In Kessler's view, the formula serves as one of the principal instruments

which enable O'Connor to effectuate in her writing what Kessler, quoting from T.S.

Eliot, calls "raids on the inarticulate" (7), that sphere outside the reach of language,

which nevertheless constitutes the core of every untamed parable, the sphere that the

parable itself longs to reach by abandoning language. "They stood gazing ... as if

they were faced with some great mystery" (CW 230); "She was looking at her as if

she had known and disliked her all her life" (640); "It was as if a blind boy had been

turned so gently in a different direction that he did not know his destination had

been changed" (6S8); "She... could just catch in the distance a few wild high shrieks

of joy as if the prophets were dancing in the fiery furnace, in the circle the angel had 190 cleared for them" (251). To see as if is something quite far and distinct from seeing as; for, while the latter is a relatively simple metaphorical vision, the former conjoins the factual and the conditional within the same impossible ground through a metaphorical bridge that provides a puzzling simultaneity rather than a transition.

With this quick double stroke of language the factual does not quite lose its ground,

nor the conditional lets itself be brushed away, and the metaphor anchors the two in a peculiar place - a paradoxical circle wherein Mary Grace has and has not known

Mrs. Turpin all of both their lives. The one who thinks, sees and does as if... stands

upon neither of two lines drawn, caught instead in a ceaseless coming-and-going in

between, being here and also there, neither here nor there.

Eliade maintains that every hierophany, even of the simplest kind, presents a

paradox, since "[b]y manifesting the sacred, any object becomes something else, yet

it continues to remain itself, for it continues to participate in its surrounding cosmic

milieu" (1961;12). The place where the sacred manifests is also paradoxical in the

sense that, while it is considered to be the true center of the world, each and every

other consecrated place too establishes itself thus as another and yet another center.

This is possible, Eliade explains, because what is at stake is not a geometrical, but

rather "an existential and sacred space that has an entirely different structure, that

admits of an infinite number of breaks and hence is capable of an infinite number of

communications with the transcendent (57).

And if sacred space is not geometrical, sacred time too is certainly not

chronological. In Eliade's terms, it is "indefinitely repeatable:" "Eveiy religious

festival, any liturgical time, represents the reactualization of a sacred event that took

place in a mythical past, 'in the beginning.'" (68). What begins anew at eveiy cycle

of such festivals is not only the gods' creation of the world, but of course also of 191 time itself, which cannot exist before creation. Within the sacred sphere time does not flow; it is full, "it always remains equal to itself, it neither changes nor is exhausted" (69). Since such a time is always in the beginning..., no matter how

periodically it may be repeated, one cannot even properly speak of a repetition; whatever unfolds within the sacred time does so, as it were, for the very first time - just like the never-ending efforts of Kafka's philosopher with the spinning top.

If O'Connor does indeed attempt, as she professes, to bring herself and the

reader into contact with the mysterious reality that dwells within such a space, and

such a time, she does it not only by narrating how a grandfather kills his beloved

granddaughter (in "A View of the Woods"), but also, and far more effectively, by

projecting into her language any number of such liminal spaces. It does not suffice

to let Mr. Fortune drop onto the ground with a heart attack soon after he kills Mary

Fortune; he remains on the ground, and yet, with his heart growing larger by the

minute, he feels "as if he were running as fast as he could with the ugly pines toward

the lake" (CW 546; emphasis mine); and he or some part of him is running surely

enough in a final vision - while at the same time lying contorted on the ground - to

reach the lake shore and see how "the gaunt trees had thickened into mysterious dark

files that were marching across the water and away into the distance," leaving him

alone at the shore. It is the formula as if... which establishes within language the

kind of space where all the paradoxes inherent to a hierophany exist. Such a space

does not represent or refer to an external sacrality; this is how language itself is

capable of bearing sacrality, and perhaps also the reason why language itself, the

word, has so often been proclaimed sacred around the world.

O'Connor's practice of distorting her vision, unhinging, as it were, her eyes

from each other, stems from a desire to see as if, to see both here and there, yet 192 neither here nor there; this is the gaze of the parabolist par excellence, the gaze that keeps oscillating in between the lines placed side by side in every direction to no end. If O'Connor invokes Maritain's definition of art as a deep-seated "habit of the artist," where "habit" is to be understood as "a quality or virtue of the mind,"44 hers markedly veers in the direction of the parabolic, which is perhaps why she professes to have chronic difficulty in ending her stories; why she admits to have been influenced by Kafka in certain aspects of her writing without having been able to finish reading any of his three novels45 (which, of course, Kafka himself had been unable to finish writing); why she has to open up the conclusion of her essay "The

Fiction Writer and His Country" with an nth line about St. Cyril of Jerusalem and his dragon;46 and why she treats any story, whether her own or otherwise, as if it were a ritual wherein everything down to the minutest detail is essential and irreducible, so that the only way in which one can understand it is by repeating the ritual:

A story is a way to say something that can't be said any other way, and it takes every word in the story to say what the meaning is. You tell a story because a statement would be inadequate. When anybody asks what a story is about, the only proper thing is to tell him to read the story {MM 96).

IV. In Le citta imisibili Calvino presents an emperor ruled by the desire to know all the vast lands he has conquered, so that he might truly possess them, and

44 "The Nature and Aim of Fiction," A/M64-5; she refers to Maritain's definition also in her public lecture about "Writing Short Stories" (MM 101). 45 She makes this confession in two separate letters, one to Ben Griffith dated February 13, 1954 and the other to "A" dated August 28, 1955 (See The Habit of Being, ed. Sally Fitzgerald, New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1979, pp. 68 & 98-9). 46 "St Cyril of Jerusalem, in instructing catechumens, wrote: 'The dragon sits by the side of the road, watching those who pass. Beware lest he devour you. We go to the Father of Souls, but it is necessary to pass by the dragon.' No matter what form the dragon may take, it is of this mysterious passage past him, or into his jaws, that stories of any depth will always be concerned to tell, and this being the case, it requires considerable courage at any time, in any country, not to turn away from the storyteller" (MM 35; emphasis mine, to reflect once again the deep implications of "turning" in O'Connor's writing). 193 an empire that implacably draws away from his grasp, pulverizing into uncountable luminous flecks that are simply too rich and complex to be known. Pynchon's cold

Pavlovians and engineers likewise endevor to take charge of the flow of lived experience by freezing it into frames, and not even the Rocket, the emblem and crown jewel of all the countless structures of control and oppression, turns out to be something predictable, something fully fathomable. Borges produces one detective after another, an actual one or someone disguised as a librarian, a bookdealer, an immortal or Borges himself, all set to chase after this or that phantom of knowledge that remains, through and through, ungraspable. Kafka, meanwhile, sits at his window in the evening and dreams of something incomprehensible that is incomprehensible. There should be little surprise, then, that this selfsame opposition be discernible also in O'Connor's writings, between an attempt at stripping the world of all mystery, as epitomized in the figure of Rayber, the schoolteacher in The

Violent Bear It Away, and the world that - not always laughingly - shrugs away such tenacious hands;

The old man had not known when he went there to live that every living thing that passed through the nephew's [Rayber's] eyes into his head was turned by his brain into a book or a paper or a chart. The schoolteacher had appeared to have a great interest in his being a prophet, chosen by the Lord.... The old man had thought this interest in his forebears would bear fruit, but what it bore, what it bore, stench and shame, were dead words. What it bore was a dry and seedless fruit, incapable even of rotting, dead from the beginning. (CW 341)

A little early on in the novel, O'Connor has the old man scorn the products of

Raybei's mind, all those "dead words," simply as "information" - thus echoing

Benjamin's views about lifeless journalistic information as opposed to storytelling understood as an exchange of experiences, in his earlier-mentioned essay on 194

Leskov.47 From old Tarwater*s perspective, Rayber's reason is some sort of a relentless trap where anything, even a whole man such as himself or his great- nephew might get caught: '"If you were living with him, you'd be information right now, you'd be inside his head, and what's furthermore,' he said, 'you'd be going to school.' The boy grimaced" (339). The humorous touch at the end of old Tarwater's remark, whereby the young one is urged to and does indeed feel the deepest gratitude for his lack of formal education, does not diminish, but rather increases the validity of his judgment about Rayber's mentality, as it is revealed in the long run; whatever else it may be, the old man's mind is the farthest thing from being dead, uncannily multilayered and teeming with contradictions, including the present one between insight and ignorance; and even Rayber's life, beyond his cold observations and explanations, is savagely animated by the love he feels for his son Bishop, much to his own terror -"... rushing from some inexplicable part of himself, he would experience a love for the child so outrageous that he would be left shocked and depressed for days, and trembling for his sanity" (401).

Whenever conceived of as a gift, what parabolic writing has to offer is first and foremost a reminder: that the kind of knowledge that ensnares, dissects and drains the life out of the world, is not all that there is. Calvino, in his aforementioned

Six Memos, praises another kind that dissolves it, or rather, stands witness as the world reveals itself to be defiant of the former kind of knowledge, scattering into infinitesimal pieces in every direction; among the masterful practitioners of this other way of knowing, Calvino cites figures as varied as Cyrano de Bergerac, Ovid,

Guido Cavalcanti and, last but not least, Lucretius in De Rerum Natura, whose atomistic vision, Calvino says, creates a poetry that sings of both the visible and the

47 "The Storyteller," Selected Writings, V. 3, pp. 147-8. 195 invisible aspects of the world in their "infinite unexpected possibilities" (9); Calvino lists with evident affection a few of the utterly ungraspable multiplicities that

Lucretius discovers in the familiar corners of one's home, in "the little motes of dust swirling in a shaft of sunlightin "the miniscule shells, all similar but each one different...", or "in the spiderwebs that wrap themselves around us without our noticing them as we walk along" (9). And in O'Connor's treatment, what makes the two Tarwaters into the diametric opposite of Rayber - as he forcefully fashioned himself into being - is their hereditary incapacity to experience knowledge as anything other than an encounter with the unknowable, hiding in the most familiar places and "biding its time until it should reveal itself and demand to be named"

(CW 385).

All the above-mentioned instances of these two opposing forms of knowledge are implicit in the parabolic mode, which, as discussed in the introduction, does not involve solely the parabolic, but rather thrives on the dynamic tension established between parabolic and non-parabolic lines. In fact, framed within a poetics of the ineffable, what a parable does is the perpetual negotiation of these two ways of covering the distance between the mundane and the mysterious existence, through parabolic and non-parabolic lines; and what has been called herein the taming or the domestication of the parable, by the agency of whichever authority, involves a flattening of the tension by adding an explanatory line that, just like in the pictorial game of connecting the dots, suddenly produces an all too familiar figure out of what was - and at some depth remains - an irreducible and unfathomable form. The biblical parable of "The Hidden Treasure" (Matthew 13:44;

Thomas 109) goes as follows: "The kingdom of heaven is like treasure hidden in a field, which a man found and covered up; then in his joy he goes and sells all that he 196 has and buys that field." The critic J. D. Crossan takes it up in his book Raid on the

Articulate, which draws a comparison between "the two great parablers[,] Jesus and

Borges" (9).** Crossan undertakes a detailed exposition of the perplexity of the tradition of biblical hermeneutics in face of such a "short but devastating parable"

(153), and all the extended troubles that it went into - by cutting, adding, or rewriting - in order to smooth out the tension lying at the heart of, not only "The

"Hidden Treasure," but many other similar parables, such as "The Sower" (128-9),

"The Vineyard Workers" (161-2), "The Prodigal Son" (110) or "The Pearl

Merchant" (158). Acts of buying and selling objects are common to (most of) the human world, but why would anyone sell everything he owns in order to buy something that he has already found and hidden, to no other person's knowledge?

To better underline the puzzling nature of this question, Crossan compares Jesus' story to two other versions of it taken from rabbinical literature (154-5). In both cases, an unworthy man inherits a seemingly useless land and sells it for a trifling sum; the buyer of the land, a diligent fellow, digs it up and discovers a great treasure, to his joy and the former owner's bitter regret. The first version, Crossan notes, serves as a "moral example" about the evils of laziness, a very similar version of which is also found in Thomas 109, while the second, which is appended by a reference to the Exodus, thereby turns into a "historical allegory." Whereas the parable told by Jesus veers neither in the direction of an example nor that of an allegory. It simply tells how someone secretly finds something of great value, and in order to possess it, sells off everything he possesses. Crossan furthermore observes how in both of the rabbinical stories the buyer follows the commonsensical

48 John Dominic Crossan, Raid on the Articulate: Comic Eschatology in Jesus and Borges (New York: Harper & Row, 1976). The lines from Eliot's East Coker, which Crossan uses as an epigraph to his book, and which are also invoked in Kessler's earlier-mentioned work on O'Connor, go as follows: "And so each venture / Is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate." 197 sequence: "Buys, Acts (ploughs), Finds" whereas in Jesus' version there is a reversed sequence offinding, acting (selling), and then buying. Yet, in Crossan's view, if the parable appears to be breaking free from linear time, this is not to replace it instead with a circular time, but rather to reassess the relationships between past, present and future - which, needless to add, has been a shared tendency of all the authors studied herein: "It bespeaks... the ascendancy of the future as advent over a past which it can reverse and reinterpret at any moment and on which a present which means also a gift can now be built" (156). Here as well as

in the cases of countless other biblical stories and sayings, Crossan shows how the

raw parable stands out against, and resists the evangelical tradition's systematic

attempts at turning it into a "reassuring truism" (128); and, interestingly enough, it is

precisely by virtue of that resistance, that odd indigestibility, that such stories are

now, with an acceptable degree of certainty, thought to be coming from Jesus

himself, rather than the evangelists and later interpreters.

Such as the apocryphal "Assassin," which, as Crossan explains (163), might

have been considered too shocking to be included in the canon: "The Kingdom of

the Father is like a man who wishes to kill a powerfiil man. He drew the sword in his

house, he stuck it into the wall, in order to know whether his hand would carry

through; then he slew the powerful man" (Thomas 98). As far as a broad working

definition of parables are concerned, Crossan professes to follow in Politzer's

footsteps, in that he understands a parable, whether biblical or otherwise, as a

"paradox formed into story" (93), and claims that every interpretive attempt at

approaching it would be acceptable as long as its "core paradox is constantly

affirmed" (130); and indeed in the present study too various kinds and levels of

paradox have frequently been noted in the parabolic mode. The frequency of its 198 manifestation, however, still does not make paradox into the defining trait of all parables, the one to be invariably discovered in each and every parable. In this respect Crossan too, like Politzer, is sometimes too eager to call a paradox any sort of opposition or reversal. In fact, at the conclusion of his reading of the book of

Jonah, he argues that biblical parables are often marked by, not one single paradox, but "a paradoxical double or polar reversal" (97), hence equalizing the terms paradox and reversal-, that these terms are very different and certainly not interchangeable should be clear by reference to the examples invoked by Crossan

himself: when Jonah does the opposite of what is expected of him as a prophet,

which is to submit to the divine call, and when the people of Nineveh too, who are

supposed to be wicked and irreverent of the word of God, surprise the expectations

by immediately obeying the prophet, it is indeed true that the stoiy yields two

reversals "of the audience's most profound expectations" (98), but such reversals or

plot twists are nowhere close to a true paradox, within the strained sphere of which

two opposing realities that would normally cancel each other out, somehow coexist,

at the extreme point or in defiance of logic. There is no paradox in "The Assassin,"

nor in Brecht's parable "The Stone Fisherman," which Crossan quotes in full (131),

nor in Kafka's "Leopards in the Temple;" there are several in "My Destination,"

again by Kafka. In parables, there are forces at stake, forces in tension with each

other, forces that at times also sharpen into a paradox, but never to the point of

predictability; and even in those cases where the parable does unfold around a

paradox, what matters is not that there is a paradox at stake, as much as the zone of

silence that the parable's reader, this time due to the strain of the paradox, other

times by other means, soon reaches - alongside the parable that always keeps

moving, even if only in a vibration between here and there. Like the tortoise that 199 defeats Achilles, parables inexorably shuffle one step and then another ahead and out of the horizon of expectations. If there must be one, the defining trait of parables

- the untamed ones, the other parables - is that they all impart an aftertaste of silence. 200

Conclusion

I gave orders for my horse to be brought roundfrom the stable. The servant did not understand me. I myself went to the stable, saddled my horse and mounted In the distance I heard a bugle call, I asked him what this meant. He knew nothing and had heard nothing. At the gate he stopped me, asking: "Where are you riding to, master?" "I don't know," I stud, "only away from here, away from here. Always away from here, only by doing so can I reach my destination." "And so you know your destination? " he asked "Yes," I answered "didn't I say so? Away-From-Here, that is my destination." "You have no provisions with you," he said "I need none," I scud "the journey is so long that I must die of hunger if I don't get anything on the way. No provisions can save me. For it is, fortunately, a truly immense journey.

L At the precise moment of my decision to leave for elsewhere, away-from- here, something of me seems to have left already, in that, I am already speaking the language of elsewhere, which the servant cannot understand. Nor is he even able to perceive the sensory stimuli originating from over there: he cannot even hear the

"bugle call." Yet, precisely the moment I reach the gate and am about to start my journey toward elsewhere, I am pulled back in here, as if tied by an elastic band at the waist which has let me move only this far, so that a communication between me and my servant is once again, somewhat to my annoyance, possible. He asks me if I know my destination, and I clarify it: where I am going is anywhere that is not here.

And here indeed I am caught in a paradox, which is why I am already gone when deciding to leave, and already returned when actually leaving. Even without departing at all, 1 dwell on a plane completely far and apart from that of the servant: for him, one would either know his destination or not, one either has got enough provisions for a journey or has not got them; whereas I do and do not know my destination, and of provisions I need none, for I need an incalculable and uncarriable amount. But this does not even begin to cover my predicament. If I could understand away-from-here with reference to a fixed geometric point* where I am currently standing on (the way the floor plans of large malls and city maps say, next to a red

1 "My Destination" / "Das Ziel," in Parables and Paradoxes, pp. 188-9. 201

X, "You are here"), then it would take no more than a step or two to fulfill my desire to get away-from-here; a half-hour walk, and I am already elsewhere beyond my wildest longings. Yet I speak of the immensity of my journey and the futility of thinking about provisions, which together confirm my anxiety that here cannot be a place detached from me. Here is anywhere that I am standing, since it is my standing on it that makes it into a diegetic here. And yet again my desire, and the frustration that results from it, are not of the kind that could be readily cured with a self-aid book - or a suicide; it is not away-from-me that I am trying to get, I am rather longing to break up the connection between experience and presence, I am trying to get to move without experiencing it as my movement within a certain space, covering a certain distance; I want to become a movement, pure movement, only then could I reach my destination. And I can do it, I can just be a movement moving, thus get away-from-here - so, fortunately, not all is bad - but only for a split-second, only in a flash, and then I fall back into registering my movement by reference to here and there.

In that span of a split-second is where parables thrive, just as Kierkegaard envisions, with his image of the peripatetic teller of the parable on the street speaking to a man without himself halting nor causing the other man to stop - how much could be said in that span, for how long? Just a flash of words, and an afterglow. It is in that split-second span that even the most familiar things and acts with and by which one knows the world, even the familiarity of saying here I am, come off as strange. Agamben invokes Kafka's Odradek as the epitomy of the strangeness, the unfathomableness concealed in the most ordinary objects that 202 surround us in our daily life.2 And yet parables do not weigh us down by sentencing us to a bitter lifelong awareness of the multitude of things we shall never know, as a harsh lesson of humility. If anything, they teach about the lightness of unknowing, and the quickness of thought that knows only to enjoy itself - "mental speed,"

Calvino says, "is valuable for its own sake, for the pleasure it gives to anyone who is sensitive to such a thing..." (Six Memos 45).

Hermes/Mercury rules the parabolic mode with his two hero figures - who might variously or simultaneously pose as the teller, the listener and the text of the parable: on the one hand, the merchant Marco Polo, who moves on a horizontal spatiotemporal plane while exchanging commodities, and on every other possible plane, in the fullness of time, during the gift-exchange of parables. On the other,

Perseus, who is capable of actual flight - along the airy paths of swallows - thanks to the winged sandals that Hermes gave him as a gift. In an even more etherealized vision that flows from Rilke to Pynchon, and as observed again by Agamben, the two figures merge into one, that of the angel.

Speed, the ability to move quickly one's things and one's self, is indeed of great import for the former two, as well as for the third figure. For there is barely enough time to shout or whisper a few words to the passer by, the listener. With a good parable, the listener too, after or together with the teller, should turn, turn into a becoming, alongside the parable that is ever-becoming; that is why Kafka was no vague thinker when he spoke of the necessity of becoming parable. However, as discussed earlier, the selfsame Kafka is also a consistent practitioner of the art of procrastination, which, thriving on the parabolic mode at multiple levels, succeeds in

2 In Stanzas, Agamben mentions a tale by Poe, translated by Baudelaire as "L'ange du bizarre," which presents "the ancestor of the Odradek bobbin of Kafka," a nightmarish animated creature made of common household items such as bottles, funnels and tobacco cases (SI). 203 slowing down time in the very absence of time, when it is invariably too late.

Slowness and speed, therefore, join forces in the parabolic mode without being the

antonym of one another.

II. From one of Rilke's letters to Witold von Hulewicz, Agamben quotes the

following (36): "Even for our grandparents a 'house,' a 'well,' a familiar tower, their

very clothes, their coat: were infinitely more, infinitely more intimate; almost

everything a vessel in which they found the human and added to the store of the

human." In a past that is sadly not even too remote, Rilke muses, ordinary things

surrounding us used to be impregnated with a life of their own, they were objects

that somehow spoke to us. Whereas now either there no longer are such things, or

we are no longer capable of relating to objects in this peculiar manner that animates

them: "Live things, things lived and conscient of us, are running out and can no

longer be replaced" (36). However, Rilke discerns one alley of hope where this

universal deadening of things could be resisted (38-9):

The earth has no way out other than to become invisible: in us who with a part of our natures partake of the invisible, have (at least) stock in it, and can increase our holdings in the invisible during our sojourn here .... The angel of the Elegies is that creature in whom the transformation of the visible into the invisible, which we are accomplishing, appears already consummated.

The process whereby the visible bits of the world become invisible in us, as Rilke

himself emphasizes, entails the creation and steady nourishment of an inner world,

which, one might well argue, contains and is contained within the mysterious

existence that O'Connor so often speaks of, and which is destined to grow larger and

richer in the span of a life, "during our sojourn here;" an inner world where all the

deadened things could once again be animated and speak to us intimately. Rilke's

angel would then be a creature which has nothing but an inner world, or an inner 204 world that has grown so large and intricate as to overlap and become one with the world outside. In Agamben's reading, "the visible" that Rilke seeks to restore to an animated life by converting it into "the invisible" is the commodified object, which simultaneously presents a use-value and an exchange-value; Rilke's angel symbolizes, in Agamben's words, the transcendence of such objects into that invisible order, and therefore it is "the metaphysical figure that succeeds the merchant" (39). However, within the frame of the present study Rilke's reflections

have much wider implications.

There is a strong and clear resonance between the "live things" invoked by

Rilke and the gift as studied by Mauss, which is an invariably impregnated object,

exercising a certain power over those who exchange it - and it has been contended

herein that a parable too could be thought of as such a gift, animated by a spirit of

incomprehension that it transmits through space and time. Another clear affinity

exists between Rilke and O'Connor: those ostensibly trivial yet animated objects of

the past that Rilke reminisces about, things like one's house or coat, are of the same

order as the "spade," the "hoe," or "the mule's hind quarters"3 that spring up and

manifest the sacred concealed within, before the frightened eyes of an unwilling

prophet like Tarwater. It has also been argued in the last chapter that O'Connor's

parabolic vision results in the depiction of an inner landscape, which once again

bears echoes from Rilke's idea of the conversion of the visible into the invisible in

us.

Readers of Kafka shall note how often he dives into the details of those daily

encounters with objects that, however inanimate they are or might seem, claim a life

of their own, starting with the earlier-mentioned Odradek in "The Cares of a Family

3 The Violent Bear It Away in O'Connor's earlier-cited Collected Works, 343. 205

Man," or the two small strange balls that pester the bachelor Blumfeld in the privacy of his apartment: "They are undoubtedly ordinary balls, they probably contain several smaller balls.... Blumfeld gropes in the air to find out whether they are

hanging from some threads - no, they are moving entirely on their own."4 Such objects also abound in Borges' imagination, ranging from a common-looking coin

that vampirically clings on to one's mind and drives out every memory other than

that of itself, to a pair of knives, which, long after the death of their original owners,

complete the unfinished duel between them in the hands of other men.5 Pynchon too,

it shall be recalled, is well-versed in narrating the complex history and the many

plights of such unassuming objects as light bulbs. And Calvino, last but not least,

presents the very figure of a merchant who elevates himself into a higher - perhaps

angelic - order, by converting the Khan's vast empire into a phantasmic inner

landscape to be contemplated. In fact, Calvino not only plays with the possibilities

entailed in the idea of converting the visible into the invisible, but, as it has been

noted in the previous chapter, he conceives of literary language, the word, as

something capable of connecting "the visible trace with the invisible thing" (Six

Memos 77), as a threshold between the two. To put it succinctly, there are two

reasons to justify these converging lines in the thoughts of the said authors who,

each in his and her unique way, writes in the parabolic mode. As can be seen from

the examples above, parables often shed light on such objects and such experiences

of altered vision, on a thematic level; but this is most likely because they themselves

constitute such odd objects, palpitating with a life that one does not suspect them to

be capable of at first, and longing to abandon language so that they might commune

4 "Blumfeld, an Elderly Bachelor," in Kafka's Complete Stories, p. 185. 5 These stories are, respectively, "The Zahir," found in The Aleph (1949), and The Encounter" in Brodie 's Report (1970). 206 with the phantasmic core, as an inarticulate experience that one nevertheless knows in the blood.

To get into a little detour here, the strangest part of the experience of gazing at an immense waterfall is when one focuses on its very edge, on that line along which the horizontal current turns into a free fall. There where the current is at its wildest speed, the water seems so flat and peaceful as to let one wonder about the

possibility of a leisurely stroll along that edge, with rolled-up hems; and while that is the dangerous illusion with which the waterfall attracts the onlooker ever closer to

itself, the water is different at the very edge of the horizontal and the vertical planes,

flowing fast and slow at the same time.

Among all the common patterns that may be detected in the authors studied

herein, one plainly stands out: this would be the fact that Pynchon, Kafka, Borges,

Calvino and O'Connor, each in his or her own way, discover a certain strategy of

resistance and/or escape in writing parabolically. This is not all too surprising,

considering that throughout centuries parables have been frequently wielded as

disarming weapons in debate, as much as being manipulated as items of exchange.6

The parabolic mode could be and has been used as an instrument for ideological

control and indoctrination, on the one hand, and a means for revolt, change and

liberation, on the other. The lightness of unknowing is often not to be acquired

without a fight, and there is more than a terminological coincidence between the

gravity that Pynchon's Rocket tries and fails to break free from, in a book which

6 "In its most characteristic use," A. T. Cadoux (13) observes, "the parable is a weapon of controversy, not shaped like a sonnet in undisturbed concentration, but improvised in conflict [hence the necessity of speed] to meet an unpremeditated situation. And with this handicap it has at its best a delicacy and complexity of aptitudes showing a range of mind and genius of association beyond that required for the similes and metaphors of other poetic compositions." To invoke a particular case, Kierkegaard's practice of his renowned "story-telling method" is a deliberate choice to place "his philosophical intentions in stark contrast to the stilted, non-experiential Hegelian logic against which he is struggling" (see T. C. Oden's introductory notes to Parables of Kierkegaard, pp. x-xi). 207 tirelessly resists the gravity of every form of totalitarian thinking, despair and mourning, and the "spirit of gravity" that Nietzsche's Zarathustra declares his "arch­ enemy," saying: "God's advocate before the devil am I; but the devil is the spirit of gravity. How could I be hostile toward godlike dancing, you light ones?"7 Thus, in the background of the Rocket's disastrous fall and blast, the light nimble feet of

Ursula the lemming trace a path along which one like Slothrop may learn to become

invisible; a path that resonates with the hidden parabolic trajectory traced not only

by the "screaming" of the Rocket, which has detached itself from the Rocket, but by

every fleeting barely-written other parable of Gravity's Rainbow. Kafka resists

through procrastination, which, both in his work as well as that of Borges, reaches

its zenith in endless repetition by way of rewriting. Calvino seeks strategies for

lightening his vision, which, ever-cast in an indirect fashion, lets him discern and

nurture in the middle of an infernal existence everything that is not infernal; while

O'Connor cultivates the ability to distort and split hers, so as to begin to see as if...,

to achieve a simultaneous perception of the sacred and the profane, of man at a

specific spatiotemporal junction and the same man in the totality of everything that

he was, is and will become. Each of these authors present, as if balanced at the very

edge of the waterfall, a way of speaking about how passage into Rilke's invisible

order is possible, while the text itself does not - yet - change planes, by abandoning

language.

III. And the nth...

A thorough study of the multifarious aspects and operations of language in the

parabolic mode is particularly relevant to the discipline and the practice of

7 "The Dance Song," Thus Spake Zarathustra (trans. Walter Kaufman. New York: Penguin Books, 1978) p. 83; see also p. 252. 208 comparative literature. In a poetics of the ineffable, as constituted by the parabolic mode, comparison serves as a primary instrument both for reading and writing.

Accordingly, there is an organic connection between the attitude of the comparatist, one like Caivino before the story of Perseus, who chooses to approach its wealth and

beauty by juxtaposing it with lines from Montale, and that of the parabolist

reader/writer, who can only respond to the lines revolving around the parabolic core

by producing more lines of rewriting. The placement of such lines side by side, the

common task of the parabolist and the comparatist, depends on none other than the

ability to unhinge one's vision, so as to begin to see as if...; as if Montale's lines

were produced by, and speaking of, the same spirit of lightness emblematized in the

figure of Perseus, but not quite; as if one could catch a better view of one through

the lens of the other, but not for too long; as if a conclusion might be drawn from the

space of resonance between the two, but only to be succeeded by another.

...il tenue bagliore strofinato /laggiu non era quello d'un fiammifero. (... the thin glimmer striking down there /wasn 7 that of a match)8

8 From Eugenio Montale's poem "Piccolo testamento" ("Little Testament"), quoted by Caivino (Six Memos 7) with the translation by Jonathan Galassi. 209

GeneranJibliograjjh^

Primary Sources:

Borges, Jorge Luis. Artificios. 1944. Ficciones. Buenos Aires: Emec6 Editores, S.A., 1956.

A Universal History of Infamy. Trans. Norman Thomas di Giovanni. New York: E. P. Dutton & Co., Inc., 1972.

Borges on Writing. Eds. Norman Thomas di Giovanni, Daniel Halpern, and Frank MacShane. New York: E. P. Dutton & Co., Inc., 1973.

Collected Fictions. Trans. Andrew Hurley. New York: Viking, 1998.

Discusion. Buenos Aires: Emec6 Editores, 1964.

El Aleph. 1949. Buenos Aires: Emec6 Editores, S. A., 1971.

El Hacedor. Buenos Aires: Emec6 Editores, S. A., 1960.

El informe de Brodie. Buenos Aires: Emec6 Editores, S. A., 1970.

Eljardin de senderos que se bifurcan. 1941. Ficciones. Buenos Aires: Emec£ Editores, S. A., 1956.

El libro de arena. Buenos Aires: Emec6 Editores, S. A., 1975.

Historia universal de la infamia. Buenos Aires: Emec6 Editores, S. A., 1954.

Otras inquisiciones. Buenos Aires: Emec£ Editores, S.A., 1960.

The Book of Sand Trans. Norman Thomas di Giovanni. New York: E. P. Dutton, 1977.

Buber, Martin. Tales of the Hasidim: The Early Masters. Trans. Olga Marx. New York: Schocken Books, 1947. 210

Calvino, Italo. II castello dei destini incrociati. Torino: Einaudi, 1973.

I nostri antenati: II visconte dimezzato, il barone rampante, il cavaliere inesistente. Torino: Einaudi, 1974. Invisible Cities. Trans. William Weaver. London: Vintage, 1997.

Le citta invisibili. Torino: Einaudi, 1972.

Se una notte d'inverno un viaggiatore. Torino: Einaudi, 1979.

Six Memos for the Next Millennium. Trans. Patrick Creagh. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988.

The Castle of Crossed Destinies. Trans. William Weaver. San Diego: Harcourt, 1979.

The Literature Machine. Trans. Patrick Creagh. London: Seeker and Warburg, 1987.

Hawthorne, Nathaniel. "The Minister's Black Veil." In Selected Tales and Sketches. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1950.

James, Henry. Eight Tales from The Major Phase: In The Cage & Others. Ed. Morton Dauwen Zabel. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1958.

Kafka, Franz. Amerika. Trans. Willa and Edwin Muir. New York: Schocken Books Inc., 1962.

Dearest Father. Trans. Ernst Kaiser and Eithne Wilkins, New York: Schocken, 1954.

Franz Kafka: Parables and Paradoxes. Ed. Nahum N. Glatzer. Trans. Willa and Edwin Muir, and others. New York: Schocken Books, 1971.

The Castle. Trans. Willa and Edwin Muir. New York: Schocken Books, 1974.

The Complete Stories. Ed. by Nahum N. Glatzer. New York: Shocken Books, 1971.

The Diaries of Franz Kafka, 1910-1913. Ed. Max Brod. Trans. Joseph Kresh. New York: Schocken, 1948. 211

The Trial. Trans, by Willa and Edwin Muir. New York: Modern Library, 1956.

The Ziirau Aphorisms of Franz Kafka. Trans. Geoffrey Brock and Michael Hofinann, commentary by Roberto Calasso. New York: Schocken Books, 2006.

Kierkegaard, Seren. Parables of Kierkegaard. Ed., with an introduction by, Thomas C. Oden. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1978.

Repetition: An Essay in Experimental Psychology. Trans, with introduction and notes by Walter Lowrie. New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1964.

McCarthy, Cormac. The Crossing. 1994. New York: Vintage Books, 1995.

Melville, Herman. The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade. 1857. Ed. Stephen Matterson. New York: Penguin Books, 1990.

Nietzsche, Friedrich. Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future. Trans. R. J. Hollingdale. New York: Penguin, 1973.

Thus Spake Zarathustra: A Book for All and None. Trans. Walter Kaufman. New York: Penguin Books, 1978.

O'Connor, Flannery. Collected Works. Ed. Sally Fitzgerald. New York, NY: Library of America, 1988.

Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose. Eds. Sally and Robert Fitzgerald. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1969.

The Complete Stories. 1946. New York: The Noonday Press, 1972.

The Habit of Being. Ed., with an introduction by Sally Fitzgerald. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1979.

Poe, Edgar Allan. Forty-Two Tales. London: Octopus Books Limited, 1979.

Pynchon, Thomas. Gravity's Rainbow. New York: Viking, 1973. 212

Secondary Sources:

Agamben, Giorgio. Stanzas: Word and Phantasm in Western Culture. Trans. Ronald L. Martinez. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1993.

Anders, Gtinther. "Not Symbols but Metaphors." In Critical Essays on Franz Kafka. Ed. Ruth V. Gross. Boston: G.K. Hall & Co., 1990.

Auerbach, Erich. Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature. Trans. Willard Trask. Garden City, New York: Doubleday Anchor Books, 1953.

Bataille, Georges. Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927-1939. Trans. Allan Stoekl with Carl R. Lovitt and Donald M. Leslie Jr. Ed. with an introduction by Allan Stoekl. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985.

Benjamin, Walter. Selected Writings. Trans. Rodney Livingstone and others. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999.

Bernheimer, Charles. "Crossing over: Kafka's Metatextual Parable." In Critical Essays on Franz Kafka. Ed. Ruth V. Gross. Boston: G.K. Hall & Co., 1990.

Bersani, Leo. "Pynchon, Paranoia, and Literature." Representations, No. 25 (Winter, 1989): 99-118.

Block de Behar, Lisa. Borges: The Passion of an Endless Quotation. Trans, by William Egginton. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2003.

Bloom, Harold, ed. Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow. New York: Chelsea House Publishers, 1986.

Blumenberg, Hans. The Legitimacy of the Modern Age. Trans, by Robert M. Wallace. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1983.

Brown, Raymond. E. "Parable and Allegory Reconsidered," Novum Testamentum, Vol. 5, Fasc. 1 (January, 1962): 36-45.

Bruns, Gerald L. "Midrash and Allegory: The Beginnings of Scriptural Interpretation." In The Literary Guide to the Bible. Eds. Robert Alter and Frank Kermode. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1987. 213

Cadoux, A. T. The Parables of Jesus: Their Art and Use. London: James Clarke, 1930.

Calligaris, Contardo. Italo Calvino. Milano: U. Mursia, 1973.

Carlston, Charles. "Changing Fashions in Interpreting the Parables." Andover Newton Quarterly 14 (1974): 227-33.

The Parables of the Triple Tradition. Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1975.

Carruthers, Mary J. The Book ofMemory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990. Chevalier, Jean and Alain Gheerbrant. A Dictionary of Symbols. Trans. John Buchanan Brown. London: Penguin Books, 1996.

Clifford, Gay. The Transformations of Allegory. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1974.

Corngold, Stanley. Franz Kafka: The Necessity of Form. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988.

"Freud as Literature?" In Critical Essays on Franz Kafka. Ed. Ruth V. Gross. Boston: G.K. Hall & Co, 1990.

Couliano, loan P. Eros and Magic in the Renaissance. Trans. Margaret Cook. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1987.

Coulthard, A. R. "From Sermon to Parable: Four Conversion Stories by Flanneiy O'Connor," American Literature, Vol. 55, No. 1 (Mar., 1983): 55-71.

Cowart, David. Thomas Pynchon: The Art of Allusion. Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1980.

Crossan, John Dominic. In Parables. New York: Harper, 1973.

Raid on the Articulate: Comic Eschatology in Jesus and Borges. New York: Harper & Row, 1976.

Daube, D. "Public Retort and Private Explanation." In The New Testament and Rabbinical Judaism, London (1956): 141-150. 214

De Costa, Rend. Humor in Borges. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2000.

De Lauretis, Teresa. ''Narrative Discourse in Calvino: Praxis or Poiesis?" PMLA, Vol. 90, No. 3 (May, 1975): 414 - 425.

De Man, Paul. Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism. New York: Oxford University Press, 1971.

Critical Writings, 1953-1978. Ed. and with an introduction by Lindsay Waters. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989.

E)eleuze, Gilles. "Bartleby; Or, The Formula." Essays Critical and Clinical. Trans. Daniel W. Smith and Michael A. Greco. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997.

Difference and Repetition. Trans. Paul Patton. New York: Columbia University Press, 1994.

The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque. Trans. Tom Conley. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993.

Deleuze, Gilles and F61ix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Trans. Brian Massumi. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1987.

Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature. Trans. Dana Polan. Theory and History of Literature, Volume 30. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986.

Dodd, C.H. The Parables of the Kingdom. London: Nisbet & Co. Ltd, 1935.

Dugdale, John. Thomas Pynchon: Allusive Parables of Power. London: MacMillan, 1990.

Eddins, Dwight. The Gnostic Pynchon. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990.

Eliade, Mircea. The Myth of the Eternal Return. Trans. Willard R. Trask. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 1971. 215

The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion. Trans. Willard R. Trask. New York: Harper & Row, 1961.

Fletcher, Angus. Allegory: The Theory of a Symbolic Mode. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1964.

Funk, Robert. Language, Hermeneutic, and the Word of God. New York: Harper & Row, 1966.

"The Looking-Glass Tree Is for the Birds." Interpretation 27 (1973): 3-9.

Gross, Ruth V., ed. Critical Essays on Franz Kafka. Boston: G.K. Hall & Co., 1990.

Hite, Molly. Ideas of Order in the Novels of Thomas Pynchon. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1983.

Hohmann, Charles. Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow: A Study of Its Conceptual Structure and of Rilke's Influence. New York: Peter Lang, 1986.

Honig, Edwin. Dark Conceit: The Making of Allegory. New York: Oxford University Press, 1966.

Huggett, Nick. "Zeno's Paradoxes." The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2008 Edition). Ed. Edward N. Zalta. Online. Internet. 12 November 2009.

Hume, Kathryn. "Views from Above, Views from Below: The Perspectival Subtext in Gravity's Rainbow." American Literature, Vol. 60, No.4. (December, 1988): 625-642.

Hunter, A. M. Interpreting the Parables. Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1960.

James, Carol P. "Seriality and Narrativity in Calvino's Le citta invisibili." MLN, Vol. 97, No. 1, Italian Issue (Jan., 1982): 144-161.

Jeremias, Joachim. The Parables of Jesus. Translated by S. H. Hooke. 3rd ed. London: SCM Press; New York: Scribner, 1972.

JQlicher, Adolf. Die Gleichnisreden Jesu. 2 vols. Tttbingen: J. C. B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck), vol. 1 1888,2d ed. 1899; vol. 2 1899,2d ed. 1910. 216

Kermode, Frank. The Genesis of Secrecy: On the Interpretation of Narrative. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1979.

Kessler, Edward. Flannery O'Connor and the Language of Apocalypse. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1986.

Kundera, Milan. " 'Somewhere Behind'." In Critical Essays on Franz Kafka. Ed. Ruth V. Gross. Boston: G.K. Hall & Co., 1990.

Mackey, Louis. "Paranoia, Pynchon, and Pretention." In Thomas Pynchon 's Gravity's Rainbow. Ed. and with an introduction by Harold Bloom. New York: Chelsea House Publishers, 1986. Madsen, Deborah L. Allegory in America: From Puritanism to Postmodernism. Great Britain: Macmillan Press Ltd., 1996.

The Postmodernist Allegories of Thomas Pynchon. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1991.

Mauss, Marcel. The Gift: Forms and Functions of Exchange in Archaic Societies. Trans. Ian Cunnison with an introduction by E. E. Evans-Pritchard. New York: The Norton Library, 1967.

McFague, Sallie. "The Parabolic in Faulkner, O'Connor, and Percy," Notre Dame English Journal, Vol. 15, No. 2, Faith and Narrative (Spring, 1983): 49-66.

Miller, J. Hillis. Hawthorne and History: Defacing It. Cambridge: Basil Blackwell, Inc., 1991.

"Parable and Performative in the Gospels and in Modern Literature." In Humanizing America's Iconic Book. Eds. Gene M. Tucker and Douglas Knight. Chico, California: Scholar's Press, 1982.

Moore, Thomas. The Style of Connectedness: Gravity's Rainbow and Thomas Pynchon. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1987.

Murrin, Michael. The Veil of Allegory. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969.

Patte, Daniel, ed. Semiology and the Parables. Pittsburgh: The Pickwick Press, 1976. 217

Perrin, Norman. Jesus and the Language of the Kingdom. Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1976.

Petersen, Norman. Literary Criticism for New Testament Critics. Philadelphia: Fortress, 1978.

Poirier, Richard. "Rocket Power." In Thomas Pynchon 's Gravity's Rainbow. Edited and with an introduction by Harold Bloom. New York: Chelsea House Publishers, 1986.

Politzer, Heinz. Franz Kafka: Parable and Paradox. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1962.

Richards, I. A. The Philosphy of Rhetoric. London: Oxford University Press, 1936.

Ricoeur, Paul. "Biblical Hermeneutics." Semeia, 4 (1975): 29-148.

Rubin, Louis D., Jr., ed. The Comic Imagination in American Literature. New Brunswick, New Jersey: Ruthers University Press, 1973.

Ryan, Marie-Laure. "Stacks, Frames and Boundaries, or Narrative as Computer Language." Poetics Today, Vol. 11, No. 4, Narratology Revisited II (Winter, 1990): 873-899.

Sanders, Scott. "Pynchon's Paranoid History." Twentieth Century Literature, Vol. 21, No. 2, Essays on Thomas Pynchon. (May, 1975): 177-192.

Seel, Cynthia L. Ritual Performance in the Fiction ofFlannery O'Connor. Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2001.

Springer, Carolyn. "Textual Geography: The Role of the Reader in 'Invisible Cities'." Modern Language Studies, Vol. 15, No. 4, Fifteenth Anniversary Issue (Autumn, 1985): 289-299.

Stabb, M. S. Borges Revisited, Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1991.

Starobinski, Jean. "Le Combat avec Legion." In Trois fureurs. Paris: Gallimard, 1974.

Tolbert, Mary Ann. Perspectives on the Parables: An Approach to Multiple Interpretations. Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1979.

Updike, John. "The Author as Librarian." In Critical Essays on Jorge Luis Borges. Ed. Jaime Alazraki. Boston, Massachusetts: G.K. Hall & Co., 1987. 218

Via, Dan Otto, Jr. The Parables: Their Literary and Existential Dimensions. Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1967.

Waisman, Sergio Gabriel. Borges and Translation: The Irreverence of the Periphery. Cranbury, NJ: Associated University Presses, 2005.

Weinstein, Arnold. "Kafka's Writing Machine: Metamorphosis in the Penal Colony." In Critical Essays on Franz Kafka. Ed. Ruth V. Gross. Boston: G.K. Hall & Co., 1990.

Weisenburger, Steven. A Gravity's Rainbow Companion: Sources and Contexts for Pynchon's Navel. Athens, Georgia: The University of Georgia Press, 1988.

"The End of History? Thomas Pynchon and the Uses of the Past." Twentieth Century Literature, Vol. 25, No.l. (Spring, 1979): 54-72.

Werner, Craig Hansen. "Recognizing Reality, Realizing Responsibility." In Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow. Ed. and with an introduction by Harold Bloom. New York: Chelsea House Publishers, 1986.

Wheelock, Carter. "Borges and the 'Death' of the Text." Hispanic Review, Vol. 53, No.2 (Spring, 1985): 151-161.

"Borges' New Prose." TriQuarterly 25, Prose for Borges (Fall 1972): 403-40.

Wheelwright, Philip. Metaphor and Reality. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1962.

The Burning Fountain. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1968.

Wilder, Amos. Early Christian Rhetoric: The Language of the Gospel, 1964. Rev. ed. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1971.

Wittig, Susan. "A Theory of Multiple Meanings." Semeia 9 (1977): 75-103.

Yates, Frances A. The Art of Memory. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1966. 219

Vita

Name: Duru GtlngOr Place of Birth: Ankara, Turkey Year of Birth: 1978

Post-secondary Education and Degrees:

2004-2011 Ph.D. Comparative Literature, The University of Western Ontario, London, Canada

2001- 2004 M.A. Comparative Literature, The University of Western Ontario, London, Canada

1997 - 2001 B.A. English Language Teaching, University of Istanbul, Istanbul, Turkey

Teaching Experience:

2002-2010 Instructor for Intensive Italian for Beginners course, The University of Western Ontario

2001 - 2002 Teaching Assistant, The University of Western Ontario

2000 - 2001 Practicum at the Private I§ik LycSe, Istanbul, Turkey, in partial fulfilment of the requirements for a B.A. at The University of Istanbul

Scholarships and Awards

2004 - 2010 University Students' Council Teaching Honour Roll Award of Excellence, The University of Western Ontario

2004 - 2008 Western Graduate Scholarship (WGRS), The University of Western Ontario

2004-2008 Graduate Teaching Assistantship, The University of Western Ontario

2001-2003 International Graduate Student Scholarship, The University of Western Ontario

2001-2003 Special University Scholarship, The University of Western Ontario

2001-2003 Graduate Teaching Assistantship, The University of Western Ontario 220

August 2004 Research Assistantship on the history of Gli improwisatori, translation into English of Pietro Giordani's article "Dello Sgricci e Degl'Improwisatori in Italia," under the supervision of Dr. Angela Esterhammer, The University of Western Ontario

Summer 2003 Research Assistantship on the history of Gli improwisatori, under the supervision of Dr. Angela Esterhammer, The University of Western Ontario

April 2003 Dean's Award for Excellence in Research, for the Presentation of "'The Handwriting of the God:' The Reading of a Jaguar in the Borgesthetics of Incarceration" at Western Research Forum, The University of Western Ontario

Summer 2002 Research Assistantship for the preparation of multi­ media Italian Practice material for the CAN-8 program at the Language Learning Centre, The University of Western Ontario

2002 Nominated for The University of Western Ontario Teaching Award

Translation :

Fall 2002 "Poetico-Political Audiovisions: Experimentations with Language and Social Activism in Italian Production." Translation of "Audiovisioni Poetiche-politiche: Sperimentazioni di linguaggio e impegno sociale nella produzione italiana" by Sandra Lischi. PUBLIC: Art, Culture, Ideas 25 (2002): 65 - 73.

Conference Papers:

2009 "Clumsy Whip, Silly Top, Failed Philosopher: Problems of Rhythm, Repetition and Mimetic Production in 'The Top' by Kafka" presented in the Graduate Conference, Artfulness of Play, of the Centre for the Study of Theory and Criticism at the University of Western Ontario, September 2009.

"Kafka and Borges: Rewriting in the Parabolic Mode" presented at the Comparative Literature Forum, of the Graduate Programme in Comparative Literature at the University of Western Ontario, November 2009. 221

2007 "The Slothropian Cortex, Pavlovian Cocks, and City Paranoiacs: On Such Things and More in Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow" presented in the 9th Annual Graduate Conference, Drawing a Blank, of the Graduate Programmes in Comparative Literature and Spanish, and the Centre for the Study of Theory and Criticism at the University of Western Ontario, March 2007.

2006 "Emanation of Landscape from Figure in the Nomadic Art of Siyah Kalem, a Central Asian Painter" presented in the Annual Conference of The Canadian Comparative Literature Association, The City, Comparatively, held in conjunction with the Congress 2006 of the Humanities and Social Sciences at York University, May 2006.

"The Dark Matter in Aubrey Beardsley" presented in the 8th Annual Graduate Conference, Dark Matters: Obscured Thinking and Shadowed Language, of the Graduate Programmes in Comparative Literature and Spanish, and the Centre for the Study of Theory and Criticism at the University of Western Ontario, April 2006.

2005 "Paul Klee, Untitled" presented in the Annual Conference of the Canadian Comparative Literature Association held in conjunction with the Congress 2005 of the Humanities and Social Sciences, Paradoxes of Citizenship: Environments, Exclusions, Equity, at the University of Western Ontario, May 2005.

"Style in Sade's Les Cent vingt joumees de Sodome: In Piece and Quiet" presented in the 7th Annual Graduate Conference, Pornography's Not About, of the Graduate Programmes in Comparative Literature and Spanish, and the Centre for the Study of Theory and Criticism at the University of Western Ontario, April 2005.

2003 "'The Handwriting of the God:' The Reading of a Jaguar in the Borgesthetics of Incarceration" presented at Western Research Forum, The University of Western Ontario, April 2003.

"Imago, The Fairest of Them All: 'Red' by Somerset Maugham as a Game of Mirror Anamorphosis" presented in the 5th Annual Graduate Conference, On Distortion, of the Graduate Programmes in Comparative Literature and Spanish, and the Centre for the Study of Theory and Criticism at The University of Western Ontario, April 2003.