Joyce essentially invented his own mishmash of languages, making the book notoriously difficult to read, but if you drink several glasses of Irish whiskey, smoke a few bowls, squint a lot, occasionally refer to a guide, and think of the novel as a great collection of puns, the book becomes more readable . . . even funny!

Here is the first line: “riverrun, past Eve and Adam’s, from swerve or shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs.” From A Reader’s Guide to Finnegan’s Wake by William York Tindall: ”‘Riverrun,’ the first word is the central word of the book; for Anna Livia’s Liffey, the feminine creative principle, is the river of time and life. The Liffey flows past the church of Adam and Eve (reversed here to imply temptation, fall, and renewal) and into Dublin Bay, where . . . it circulates up to Howth, the northern extremity of the bay. ‘Eve and Adam’s’ unites Dublin with Eden and one time with another” (Tindall 30).

“Vicus” refers to Giambattista Vico, “the philosopher of ‘recirculation,” the main proponent of the idea that history repeats itself. (Hasn’t this all been said before? Do I hear an echo in here?) The first line of the novel is the second half of the last line, which reads, “A way a lone a last a loved a long the”, causing the novel to loop back onto itself, echoing the main idea of the book, which is that all stories repeat themselves. Putting the two halves together, you get, “A way a lone a last a loved a long the riverrun, past Eve and Adam’s, from swerve or shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs.” Now, doesn’t that make much — strike that — a little more sense?

If you know that most of the jokes are sexual, you will have an easier time understanding them. For example, the second line “Sir Tristram, violer d’amores, had passencore rearrived from North Armorica . . . to wielderfight his penisolate war” (Joyce 3). Thinking about amor and penises, we can understand “while they went doublin their mumper all the time,” which at once references Dublin and masturbation (and about twelve other things).

In the middle of the book, we get a chapter with margin notes and footnotes, but these notes are as enigmatic as the text they supposedly explicate, a common convention in metafiction (and maybe the first of its kind). One note says, “Menly about peebles,” which we can understand as “mainly about people, especially men.” Another note is a bar of music with rising and falling notes that echo the theme of rising and falling stories.

I have only read 140 pages out of 628, but I am quite proud of having made it that far. I stopped when I felt I had gotten the joke and the joke, repeated and repeated and repeated, was starting to get old. I decided instead to doublin my mumper. That was a few years ago. I may pick up the novel where I left off and let history repeat itself.

Joyce, James. Finnegan’s Wake. New York: Penguin Books, 1975.

Tindall, William York. A Reader’s Guide to Finnegans Wake. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1969.

In 1931, Diego Rivera (actually Diego María de la Concepción Juan Nepomuceno Estanislao de la Rivera y Barrientos Acosta y Rodríguez — whew, what a name!) painted The Making of a Fresco Showing the Building of a City at the San Francisco Art Institute. The mural is a meta-mural because it is a mural about murals and because it represents its creators in the act of creating the fresco itself.

Rivera produced three murals in San Francisco (the first city outside of Mexico City in which he would paint frescoes, an art form he revived). Architect Timothy L. Pfleuger (who designed the glorious Castro Theater) invited Rivera to San Francisco to paint a mural for the City Club in the San Francisco Stock Exchange. Allegory of California “shows the Amazon deity Califa (our state’s namesake) dwarfing a tableau of workers from the region’s industries” (sfweekly.com).

At City College of San Francisco, Rivera painted Pan American Unity, depicting workers from South, Central and North America. As we have seen, workers were Rivera’s primary subject. Why? Rivera was a communist. You can see a picture of Josef Stalin in the City College mural, holding a bloody ax, appearing side by side with Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini, a trio of tyrants. Rivera, a Trotskyist, blamed Stalin for the assassination of Leon Trotsky and the derailing of the revolution in the Soviet Union. Trotsky lived with Rivera — and even had an affair with his wife, the soon-to-be famous painter Frida Kahlo, after he had fled Russia. When commissioned to paint a mural for the Chrysler building, Rivera included a portrait of Vladimir Lenin. Naturally, this upset the ultra-capitalist John D. Rockefeller, who ordered Rivera to remove the portrait of Lenin. When Rivera refused, Rockefeller had the mural painted over and now the Chrysler mural can only be seen in photographs.

In the City College mural Pan American Unity, Rivera included a portrait of the worker he knew best: himself. Rivera wanted to connect art, often seen as an elitist profession, with the labor of the common worker, so he depicted himself as “one of the people,” a blue collar worker, fighting for the rights of the worker with a paintbrush. You can see this self-reflective element in the detail on the right.

Thanks to Rivera’s influence, San Francisco is full of murals. You can find many colorful portraits of workers in Coit Tower and in the Beach Chalet restaurant, both locations showing their debt to Rivera in terms of form (the fresco), style, color, and subject. Rivera’s work with murals between 1922 and 1953 in Mexico City, San Francisco, New York, Chapingo, Cuernavaca and Detroit inspired the Mexican Mural movement. Naturally, many of San Francisco’s best murals may be found in the Mission District, the predominantly Latino neighborhood, especially in Balmy Alley and Clarion Alley. (Read about one of these murals in my post A Meta-Mural on Clarion Alley: Jet Martinez’s Meta-Mural Lo Llevas por Dentro.)

Rivera took the self-reference in Pan American Unity to new heights in his mural The Making of a Fresco Showing the Building of a City. Again, Rivera shows himself working on a mural, but this time we see the mural through the trompe l’oeil scaffolding, portraying the very process of creation. The painting then has two levels: one showing the building a city and another showing the creation of the fresco.  In early sketches, the levels were clearly separated, but in the final version, one world blends into the other:  ”In the upper right section showing the steelworkers, the wood scaffold structure continues in the fresco-within-the fresco as steel girders, and, although the workers in the foreground are the same size as the figures on the wood scaffold, the scene depicted is clearly not within the gallery space. The three architect/engineer figures in the lower right panel are ambiguous—are they painted or working on site in a very confined space? Is the blue rectangle behind them an open window or a blueprint? Most likely it is a blueprint, since other rolled prints are leaned against the wall nearby” (From the San Francisco Art Institute website). This blending of levels of reality is another meta-element common in metafiction and meta-paintings.

Rivera also depicted his team of plasterers and painters (a fresco is not a solo project), as well as other artists and patrons of the arts: ”At the center of the upper central panel is Rivera, who has painted himself sitting on the scaffold with his back to the viewer, holding a paintbrush and a palette. He watches his assistants working above him: Clifford Wight again, wearing corduroy pants and a white shirt, upper left, holding one end of a vertical chalk line, and, on the upper right, holding the end of another, diagonal chalk line, which passes directly behind Rivera’s head; and Mathew Barnes, the plasterer, to Rivera’s right—applying the wet plaster ground around the largest figure in the fresco, a worker operating the control levers of a machine. Below and to the left of Rivera, Wight appears again holding the other ends of the two chalk lines. On the scaffold below Rivera stand three men wearing suits and hats, looking at a large piece of paper: (from left to right) architect Timothy Pfleuger, who designed the San Francisco Stock Exchange, the location of another Rivera mural; William Gerstle, president of the San Francisco Art Association, who commissioned The Making of a Fresco; and Arthur Brown, Jr., architect of the school’s new building, Coit Tower, City Hall, and many other San Francisco landmarks. . . .In the lower right panel architect and painter Michael Goodman, who worked with Pfleuger, stands at the side of a drafting table, holding a scale ruler; Geraldine Colby Frickie, an architect and designer, stands behind the table, holding measuring calipers; and Albert Barrows, an engineer who turned Rivera’s sketches into full-scale cartoon stencils for the mural, bends over the table” (San Franicsco Art Institute). Again, Rivera was attempting to show himself and his fellow artists as workers engaged in the struggle for economic equality.

During the great depression, there was a great deal of sympathy and respect for the worker, as can be seen in the art, architecture and music of the period, thanks in large part to Rivera’s influence. The common focus on workers essentially vanished from North American art during the cold war and red scare of the 50s and 60s. Now, as we are struggling against growing economic inequality, it is time to bring the worker — and the artist as worker — back into our art.

(For more about meta-painting, see my posts Halfway: A Meta-Painting by Tofu St. John, “Abstract Paintings are Meta-Paintings,” “Las Meninas: A Meta-Painting, ”If  Not a Pipe, Then What?,” and The Lack of Blank Spaces: John Cage’s 4’33″ and Robert Rauschenberg’s White Paintings.)

One mural, called El Misísimo Diablo, said, “The life of any street art is short,” but begged visitors to respect the murals. This very same devil has, alas, been painted over and recently many of the best murals in Clarion Alley have been covered over by sloppy graffiti. For many years, graffiti artists had respected the paintings, yet a wave of tagging has wiped out many works of art. Still, one of my favorites has survived, a meta-painting, or we should say a meta-mural: Lo Llevas por Dentro by Jet Martinez.

The mural is a colorful landscape, with vegetation that includes cacti,  calla lillies, evergreen trees, a flowering deciduous tree, and rolling hills of dried grass, probably an amalgamation of California flora. The geometric patterns on the two evergreen trees and the deciduous tree, as well as patterns in the sky (perhaps part of a larger mandala centered on the sun) give the landscape a surreal, fantasy-like, peaceful look. Definitely, the place would be a pleasure to visit.

In the middle foreground stands the silhouette of figure, gazing out of the picture towards the viewer. Rather than a shadow, we see a painted alley, in fact Clarion Alley itself, the alley in which the mural appears. The painting is a meta-mural because it is a mural that represents murals, as well as representing its own surroundings and neighboring art work.

The title “Lo Llevas por Dentro” means “You carry it inside yourself.” What do you carry inside yourself? The art of Clarion Alley, the color and culture, the political commentary. When we look at art, we tend to impose our own knowledge, analysis and opinions to the piece. When I was standing in front of the mural, however, I felt the painting was asking me to step aside, emptying my mind, as the figure had done, and let the murals of Clarion Alley speak for themselves.

You might want to carry the surreal landscape away with you, but Clarion Alley, a real place, is what is represented inside the figure, rather than the fantastic vegetation. Nevertheless, the title suggests that we, the viewers, take the murals of Clarion Alley away with us when we go. Although Martinez did not represent his own mural in his painting, his mural is also implied. Considering that so many of my favorite paintings on this street have been lost, I am glad that I am able to carry Martinez’s mural and the humor, color, art, culture and social critique of Clarion Alley away with me. Now you too carry it inside yourself.

(Make sure to read the comment below from the artist himself! To read about another meta-mural see my post: The Making of a Fresco Showing the Building of a City: A Meta-Mural by Diego Rivera. For more about meta-painting, see my posts Halfway: A Meta-Painting by Tofu St. John, “Abstract Paintings are Meta-Paintings,” “Las Meninas: A Meta-Painting, ”If  Not a Pipe, Then What?,” and The Lack of Blank Spaces: John Cage’s 4’33″ and Robert Rauschenberg’s White Paintings.)

Watchmen

Most importantly, Watchmen is a comic about comics. In an extract from the autobiography Under the Hood, Hollis Mason  (the first Nite Owl), gives a brief history of superhero comics, tracing their lineage back to the pulp adventure fiction of Doc Savage and The Shadow. “The world of Doc Savage and The Shadow,” Mason writes, “was one of absolute values, where what was good was never in the slightest doubt and where what was evil inevitably suffered some fitting punishment.” Mason speaks of the simple morality of those pulp fiction tales with longing, for the morality of his world, the morality of Watchmen, is messy and confusing. (For example, the Silk Spectre loves the Comedian, a man who tried to rape her, breaking several ribs.) “For my part, all those brilliant and resourceful sleuths and heroes offered a glimpse of a perfect world where morality worked the way it was meant to,” Mason says, and then challenges his readers, “Which world would you rather live in, if you had the choice?”

Mason goes on to explain that in 1938 the first issue of Action Comics came out. The magazine was a collection of “detective yarns and stories about magicians whose names I can’t remember,” Mason tells us, “but from the moment I set eyes on it I only had eyes for the Superman story.” The first superhero’s world was a world of simple morality: “Here was something that presented the basic morality of the pulps without all their darkness and ambiguity. The atmosphere of the horrific and faintly sinister that hung around the Shadow was nowhere to be seen in the bright primary colors of Superman’s world, and there was no hint of the repressed sex-urge which had sometimes been apparent in the pulps.”

So far, the history that Mason is sharing is an accurate account of the development of superhero comics, but at this point Watchmen veers away into alternative history, for masked adventurers begin to step out into the real world. Someone with a black hood over his head and a noose around his neck performing vigilante activities begins to appear in the news. The press soon dub him Hooded Justice. Mason realizes that he too can become masked adventurer: “I dressed up as an owl and fought crime because it was fun and because it needed doing and because I goddam felt like it.” Soon, heroes start popping up all over the place and masked vigilantism becomes all the rage.

What happens when real people play out superhero fantasies? Ironically, the sloppy morality of these real world vigilantes undermines the popularity of superhero comics. Comics about pirates become more popular than superhero comics.
Throughout Watchmen, we read sections of a pirate comic over the shoulder of a black boy who sits at a newsstand. This comic within a comic is an example of a mise en abyme. The term, coined by Andre Gide, refers to a book within a book, or a painting in a painting, a photo in a photo. The mise en abyme is the best means of understanding the larger work. ”Nothing,” Gide argues “sheds more light on the work or displays the proportions of the whole work more accurately.” (Read more about mise en abyme in my post “The Mirror in the Text Part II: Mise en Abyme.”)

In fact, the comic within the comic echoes the language, images and events taking place in the real world. The first excerpt we read from Tales of the Black Freighter says, “Delirious, I saw the hell-bound ship’s black sails against the yellow indies sky, and knew again the stench of powder, and men’s brains, and war.” The excerpt appears without explanation over a closeup of a black and yellow fallout shelter sign (matching the black sail and the yellow sky of the comic within the comic). The news vendor says to the reading boy (who is not paying attention), “We oughta nuke Russia and let God sort it out.” The threat of war is as central to Watchmen as it is to Tales of the Black Freighter. The comic within the comic informs and comments on the events taking place in Watchmen.

In fact, the comic within the comic helps the reader to make sense of the enigmatic ending of Watchmen. In Tales of the Black Freighter, the shipwrecked hero builds a raft but must buoy it up with corpses with bloated stomachs, he eats gulls raw, and resorts to murder as he races home to save his family from the Black Freighter. As time passes, he realizes he will arrive too late and his family will be dead and his home occupied. When he finally enters his house in the dark, he attacks a usurper, bludgeoning the person to death. Two children appear in the doorway and he realizes they are his children and he has just killed his wife. Rather than appearing too late to save his family, he has arrived before the black freighter. He has in fact become the villain that he wanted to protect his family from. He flees his home and murdered wife and makes his way to the dark shore, asking himself, “How had I reached this appalling position, with love, only love, as my guide?” He sees the black freighter coming towards him across the water. “The world I’d tried to save was lost beyond recall. I was a horror: amongst horrors must I dwell. A rope snaked down, muttering, I grabbed it.”

(Spoiler warning) Like the hero of Tales of the Black Freighter, Watchmen ends in a mess of moral complications. Adrian Veidt, known as Ozymandias, has pulled the world back from the brink of nuclear war, by letting loose a giant, genetically engineered monster on New York, killing millions. In the face of this common enemy (a simple, easy to understand, comic-book monster), the world unites and enters a period of peace, but in the process Ozymandias has become the threat he was protecting the world from. The hero has become the villain. People very rarely do evil with the intention of doing evil. The great crimes of humanity have been committed in the name of heroism, with the intention of doing good. Think of Hitler, Stalin, and Pol Pot.

No wonder then that we close the book with a twinge of dissatisfaction. Nothing is resolved as it should have been. Veidt is not punished. War is averted, but millions lie dead in New York. Where, we wonder, have the bright primary colors and simple of morality of superman comics gone? Thinking of superman’s world and the world of Watchmen, we may ask like the Nite Owl, ”Which world would you rather live in, if you had the choice?” Well, we may want to live in Superman’s clean and colorful world, but we do not. We live, in a messy world of jumbled texts and muddy morality. And the feeling of dissatisfaction with which we close the graphic novel grudgingly becomes one of admiration. Watchmen, a metacomic, is a masterpiece of literature.

In her attempts to steer us away from the metaphysical and romantic views of language and ground literary theory and discussion in the relatively more scientific and pragmatic language of structuralism, she inadvertently convinced me that words were magical. For a table did appear.

Like my professor, I consider myself a structuralist. I agree that words consist of a sign and a signified — a set of sounds (or letters) that represent a concept. The concept is not the thing itself. A table is only a table if you have the word for it. If you are a termite or an elephant, such the thing is dinner or an obstacle. The concept of “table” as a place where humans sit and eat is a human concept that is only shared by some animals who know our habits well, like cats and dogs and pigeons.

If a table is a concept and not an object, then “table” did materialize when she said the word. In fact, many tables appeared. Everyone in the room imagined a table. Mine was heavy carved oak. Words are magic.

Consider the power of words like “faggot,” “fucker,” and “friend.” These words not only comment on social interactions; they alter and establish social role. Think of the power a word like “feminist” can have, especially when used by a man (like me) to refer to himself. The word “freedom” has mobilized colonies to fight for independence and inspired vast social movements, but the word has also been used to hide its loss. When George W. Bush used the word to justify wiretaps, invasive searches at airports, and an illegal prison in Guatanamo Bay, he was utilizing the word to make citizens feel they were gaining freedom. Relatively few people objected. The word mattered more than the reality.

When we change words like “fireman” to “fire fighter,” we acknowledge the power of the word. When a woman goes to apply for the job of “fireman,” she will not fit the description and so it will be much harder to get the job than if the word is “firefighter.” As I wrote in the post, “Penetrate the Power of Words: Defining Sex,” a word like “penetration” makes sex something a man does and a woman passively receives. If the word were “engulfment,” women could be one top in bed, pick up men in bars, and more easily rise to the top levels of business and government.

I would not go to a doctor who did not believe in the power of words. If one pointed at my belly and said, “There is something wrong with your gut,” I would find another doctor. How do you handle “something wrong with your gut”? Do you wrap hot rocks in a wet towel and hold them to your belly, swallow a laxative, or cut something out? Better if the doctor said, “You have pancreatic cancer,” however bad the news might be, for then the course of treatment would be clear. The most important step in medical treatment is the naming of the disease. If the doctor gets the name wrong — as sometimes happens — the treatment will fail.

Face to face with a service operator, we can point to the thing in the center of the washing machine and say, “That thingy’s broken,” but if we are writing an email to the company about the warranty, it is much easier to know it is called “an agitator.” We can even order a replacement.

What do you call the object on the right? Teaching a class about specific wording, I pointed it out and asked students, “What is it?” “A desk chair,” they said, but if you Google “desk chair,” you will find ergonomical office chairs. A “student desk” may seem to be a good alternative, but it also has many meanings, one of which would be a separate desk that would open on top, like the ones I had in elementary school. What is this familiar object called? It doesn’t matter much if you just have to use one, but if you have to order them or sell them, then the name matters a great deal. Money can be lost and business can fail to materialize.

Students naturally expected me to tell them the right name after I asked the question. I confessed that I had trapped myself. I didn’t know what it was called, but I promised to do some research. I found much confusion online, but the best description seemed, “A student chair with a one-arm writing tablet.” Not very catchy maybe, but easier to sell if you are a business person and easier to buy if you are a school administrator.

To know a person’s name is to have power over them: you can friend them on Facebook, ask them out for a date, or turn them in to the police. Nicknames and pen-names have the same power. Much easier for the police to find someone known as “Twitch,” than a guy with a squint and shaky hands. Much simpler to deride a writer for falsehood known as “J.T. Leroy,” than someone known as “Anonymous.”

Ludwig Wittgenstein said, “The limits of my language mean the limits of my world,” meaning that language allows us to know about certain things and to think about them. When we lack a word for something, it may not even exist as part of consciousness. When we learn a new word, such as “serendipity,” then serendipity serendipitously appears.

As a child, I was told to use the magic word. While “please” may not always get you what you want, it does help. As a teacher, I am much more likely to accept a late paper if a student tells me, ”Please give me an extra day,” rather than, ”Just let me turn the thing next week.”

Words are magic. Words are powerful. So use them carefully . . . please!

(Some parts of this post have appeared in somewhat different form in my thesis Narrative Madness: The Quixotic Quest for Reality. The rest comes from my notes for a class I gave today.)

Halfway by Tofu St. John is a meta-painting because it is a painting about painting. The picture is a self-portrait of the painter doing what a painter does. However, the figure is not holding an artist’s brush, as you might expect, but a decorator’s roller. Painting a wall with a solid color  – in this case sky blue — is not usually considered artistic, so this piece creates a tension between painting as art and painting as decoration.

The artist (or decorator) in the picture, with one hand casually tucked into his pocket, has covered up about half of a white stucco wall from the bottom up, reminding us of the title of the piece: Halfway. The work also marks the halfway point in Tofu’s project, whose aim is to produce one 4″ by 4″ painting everyday in 2011. Many of the pictures in the series refer to historical events that happened on that day, current events, personal events, or holidays; in this case, the work was painted on July 2nd, the 183rd day, the middle of the year.

The project is called A Map of the Year in 365 Pieces, and a map appears under the broken stucco in the upper left-hand corner. The symbolic meaning of the map is revealed in the title: “A Map of the Year.” A map, like a painting, is a symbolic record of a larger world. Instead of recording space, Tofu’s project is a map of time, a record of a year.

Tofu often uses images from maps in his artwork. Maps, which normally help people find their way, are often sliced up and rearranged in his work, so the map’s usefulness as a physical guide to the planet is destroyed, although the new map, the artwork, may still guide us in an artistic sense. In this painting, the map will be twice hidden: once under stucco and again under blue paint.

The map in the painting should be completely covered over once the year-long project is completed. Thus, following the symbolism of Tofu’s metapainting, Tofu erases the map of the year as the project continues. Perhaps he is saying that we can never find our way back to the day each piece represents; that day disappears as it is painted. Art cannot lead us back to a day in our past — art remakes time, symbolizes it, defines it, and freezes it.

If we flip Tofu’s painting upside down, the map becomes ground, the stucco turns into clouds, and the blue changes into sky. God-like, Tofu casually reaches down from heaven (one hand tucked in his pocket), painting over the map of the year as he creates it, thereby unmapping time.

(For more about metapainting, see my posts “Abstract Paintings are Meta-Paintings,” “Las Meninas: A Meta-Painting, ”If  Not a Pipe, Then What?,” and The Lack of Blank Spaces: John Cage’s 4’33″ and Robert Rauschenberg’s White Paintings.)

We, as language users, constantly name ourselves, others, settings, actions, and events in an order that makes sense to us, ignoring the rest of the universe. We may not always use Don Quixote’s romantic language or share his chivalric plot line, but he is only doing what all of us do: trying to make sense of the noise and confusion of life.

And so is his squire. Although Sancho is illiterate, his perception of the world is influenced by narrative as much as Don Quixote’s, only his narratives are folk sayings, pragmatic advice on how to live, rather than chivalric romances. Since there are so many adages and maxims, Sancho has little problem recalling, adapting, or even inventing a saying to fit any situation. Complaining about their last misadventure (Sancho was tossed in a blanket because neither he nor the knight could pay for the lodging or food at an inn), Sancho says to Don Quixote, “So that, in my opinion the better and surer way would be to return to our village, now that it is reaping-time, and look after our business, and not run rambling from Ceca to Mecca, leaping out of the frying pan into the fire” (Cervantes 126). However sound this advice may be, Sancho is not quick to follow it and is soon caught up in the next adventure.

Don Quixote observes a cloud of dust coming over a hill and interprets it to be a “prodigious army of divers and innumerable nations” (Cervantes 127). Sancho, who is wary of Don Quixote’s interpretations (they have already fought the windmills), says cautiously that there must be two armies, for another cloud of dust is coming over the opposite hill. Don Quixote turns to look, and, “seeing it was so,” rejoices. We know Don Quixote perceives things in certain ways because of his chivalric role and narrative language, but what about Sancho? How does the earthy squire, who relies on his senses and folk sayings, understand the event?

As Don Quixote describes the armies and their history at great length, Sancho begins to believe. Since the squire does not have another explanation for the dust and commotion, he accepts the one Don Quixote provides, fooled, like all of us are, by the extent of detail. If a writer is specific and adds enough detail, readers are easily fooled into thinking the event happened as described: “On April 7th, Jennifer O’Donnell, a third-grader with dyslexia, won the regional spelling bee at Twin Peaks Elementary school in Murray, Utah, by spelling the word ‘baccalaureate’ correctly.” This trick is used by novelists, scholars, scientists and journalists alike.

Briefly, very, very briefly, Sancho considers fighting: “By my beard, Pentapolin is in the right, and I am resolved to assist him to the utmost of my power” (Cervantes 128). For just a moment, perhaps the only time in the novel, Sancho is caught up in the language of chivalry and uses the language of Don Quixote: “resolved to assist him to the utmost of my power.” Not even an empiricist can “make sense out of too much noise” (Reed 742), points out Cory A. Reed in “Chaotic Quijote: Complexity, Nonlinearity and Perspectivism.” As Reed uses the word, “noise” means any sensation, any sensual input, that cannot be interpreted or that we deliberately overlook. When there is too much confusion and clamor, we all have a hard time understanding what is going on. We try to select and arrange impressions in a series that makes sense. If we can’t, we are, like Sancho, very open to suggestion.

Why does Don Quixote look for meaning in dust? The question is like asking why scientists look for patterns in chaos. Reed argues that scientists “perceive order in chaos because they are trained to do so.” If scientists are trained to do so, no wonder that they describe the same patterns again and again. A biologist sees life everywhere, a geologist rocks, a chemist chemicals, an astronomer stars. Scientists rarely describe a new pattern, and if so, the hypothesis is invariably a remix or revision of old theories (more about our compulsive plagiarism in the next chapter called “The Stories I Borrow are Uniquely My Own”). Don Quixote sees chivalry in clouds because he has been trained by his books to do so.

Reed extends his observation from scientists to all humans: “both human perception itself and the scientific method are exercises in understanding nature’s complexity by identifying meaningful patterns and structures” (Reed 745). He is suggesting that the only way to understand anything, whether as a scientist or a knight-errant, is to identify patterns and then describe them in an order that makes sense: in other words, to produce narrative.

Readers must also make sense of the scene with the dust clouds. Cervantes leaves the description of the dust clouds sufficiently vague so that the readers are in the same situation as the characters: “Cervantes makes it necessary for all to attempt to organize information from noise, to discern order in the chaotic cloud of dust.”2 Since reading is making sense of long rows of symbols, interpreting signs and finding meaning, Reed defines the reading process as “one of making order out of noise” (Reed 742). This implies that reading itself is also the production of narrative (as we will see in the last chapter under the heading “The Birth of the Reader”).

The principal job of a writer, as a producer of narrative, is to make sense of the confusion of life for self and reader, to find meaning in the apparent chaos of experience. In “The Chaos of Metafiction” (1991), Peter Stoicheff, professor of English, says that a text “contains many strategies for metamorphosing the apparent chaos or randomness of phenomenal reality into an order comprehensible to its reader” (Stoicheff 85). I would argue not only that a text “contains many strategies” to organize “the apparent chaos or randomness of phenomenal reality,” a text is itself that strategy.

When we produce narrative that makes sense of reality, we act upon that reality; we reshape it in a way that is understandable. Says cognitive scientist Frederick C. Bartlett in Remembering: A Study in Experimental and Social Psychology (1995), we can “speak of every human cognitive reaction — perceiving, imagining, remembering, thinking, and reasoning — as an effort after meaning” (Bartlett 44). Whether you are seeing it and speaking it, writing it or reading it, narrative is the construction of meaning.

No wonder, then, that Don Quixote sees romance everywhere. Our erring knight would be truly insane if his words and actions made no sense at all, if they followed no pattern. Without narrative, there is nothing but chaos.

Works Cited

Bartlett, Frederic C. Remembering: A Study in Experimental and Social Psychology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. Print.

Cervantes, Miguel de. Don Quixote de la Mancha. Trans. Charles Jarvis. Ed. E. C. Riley. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992. Print.

Reed, Cory A. “Chaotic Quijote: Complexity, Nonlinearity and Perspectivism.” Hispania 77.4 (1994): 738-749. Print.

Stoicheff, Peter. “The Chaos of Metafiction.” Chaos and Order: Complex Dynamics in Literature and Science. Ed. N. Katherine Hayles. Chicago and London: Chicago UP, 1991. 85-99. Print.

All names are fictions, including the one that is closest to myself, that intimate name of names, my name for myself. For even the precious word “I” — which rises like a monolith above our heads, promising singularity and unity — is an invented word, rather than a natural concept.

Who is I? I is a letter. I is a word. Letters and words carry with them traces of their history in the shapes of the letters, in the roots, prefixes and suffixes of the words, tracks that lead back in time. Our letter comes from the Egyptian pictogram of an arm with a hand, which stood for the long A, later incorporated in the proto-Semitic language because their word for arm started with that sound (as ours does). A derivation of the letter can be found in most Semitic alphabets. The Phoenicians wrote the symbol diagonally, like a backwards drunken F; the Greeks righted the symbol and turned it into a solid, stable Doric column, the symbol we recognize today (information gleaned from Wikipedia).¹

The Romans adopted the letter for the numeral 1 as well. The simple line, one unit is a symbol which goes all the way back to the beginnings of writing, the beginnings of what we now call “humanity,” used to mark out on prehistoric bones and cave walls the number of days or kills. The orthographic connection in English between “1” and “I” gives the pronoun the ancient, mystical meaning of 1, an individual who cannot be divided up into smaller parts.

In English, the symbol is now used for the first person singular pronoun. As for who that is, nobody can agree. I told Omar (I will leave his role ambiguous),“I am the first person. You are the second person.” Omar shook his head and said, “No, I am the first person. You are the second person.” “No,” I answered, rather peevishly, “I have always been the first person. You are, by definition, the second person. And everyone else is the third person, at best.” Such an argument is impossible to resolve; suffice it to say that everyone is wrong except for me.

According to the Oxford English Dictionary (a much more respectable source than Wikipedia, wouldn’t you say?), “I” is “used by the speaker or writer to refer to himself or herself.” Admirable prose, quite clear, worthy of a world-famous dictionary, but let’s puzzle this out. The dictionary says that “I” is “used by the speaker or writer”; since I is something that can be used by a speaker or writer, “I” and “the speaker or writer” cannot be the same thing. How can this be? Well, one is a person and the other is a word, as proven by the fact that it appears in the dictionary. Okay, so? The sticky point is that we confuse ourselves with that word. I think I am the “I,” but as French poet Arthur Rimbaud (1854-1891) said, “I is other.”

The Random House Dictionary defines the “I” as “someone possessing and aware of possessing a distinct and personal individuality.” This apparently solid definition opens vaguely with “someone,” a word which I never use for myself. The assertion “possessing and aware of possessing a distinct and personal individuality” is highly questionable. Normally, the word “I” is thrown out without much meta-awareness. Also, the concept of a “distinct and personal individuality” is highly doubtful, as we have seen , since names and labels imply cultural heritage, family, race, gender roles, professions, and so on. In such a case, what is a “distinct and personal individuality”? If we accept the Random House definition, I is no one.

A similar paradox is encoded in the word “identity,” which refers to “individuality,” but is derived from the same root as “identical.” How can we be both identical and individual? (I will try to answer that question in the last chapter, “The Stories I Borrow are Uniquely My Own.”)

Of course, symbols represent something, so “I” can represent the speaker or writer behind the word, right? But a speaker or writer is never a whole person. I is not my amoeba self or my fish self or my amphibian self (if you believe, loosely, that a fetus’s development recapitulates evolution). I is not the baby without words that I once was. I cannot remember or imagine that time without language, without narrative. I is not a toddler, a dreamy child, a righteous teenager, a rebellious hippie, a party animal, a boyfriend, a teacher, or any of my many selves.

Nor is I my whole self at this particular time. I does not represent the side of me that sometimes gets irritable or doubts himself. I is not the one who shits or has a crick in his neck. (Such things won’t even be mentioned.) The “I” I am typing here is a wise and witty scholar. (Since “I” is a fiction, I can create the character I want or need. As Don Quixote’s new name explains what he would like to be, rather than who he was, pretending to be a wise and witty scholar, I may actually become one. No one is born a scholar. You must first act like one before you become one. The lie makes the truth.)

In order to use an “I” that does not simplify, I would have to describe every role, every aspect of my personality, every event of my life — an impossible task that would produce a manuscript from here to the moon — and you would still not know me. For the massive volume would not be myself, but a manuscript about myself. Writing is never the event it describes, so no symbolic representation can ever be “what really happened.” The whole self is not something that can ever be written or spoken. I is not a person, but a symbolic representation of a fragment of a person at a particular time playing a particular role. From the vantage point of this slim fiction, I experience the universe. I cannot step outside of language because I is language.

I don’t speak with my whole body either. I don’t speak for my mitochondria (which have their own DNA), nor the bacteria in my stomach, which I depend on for life although I do not consider them “me.” I do not write from my pancreas or gallbladder, although I sometimes write from the liver. Romantics say a writer should speak from the heart, but that organ has little or nothing to do with emotion, which is controlled by the limbic system in the brain. I once read an interesting thought experiment. If you cut off a leg, you would say, “My leg and I.” (Granted, you probably would not say it so calmly.) Cut off an arm and it is “Me and my arm,” keep cutting until you get to the “I.” The “I” has been located in various parts of the body throughout history, including the heart (which is just a muscle after all), but the “I” is now located in the brain. We can imagine a brain in a wired tank of yellowish water calling himself “I.”

Let’s take the experiment further. Destroy sections of Donovan’s brain until the I is silenced. It doesn’t take a brain surgeon to know, I is located in the part of the brain that says “I.” I then is the language maker, the neocortex, the one who speaks and writes. Once the word is lost, then so is the “I.”

You think Don Quixote is crazy because he doesn’t know reality from fiction, yet all of us are playing out roles suggested by our names, labels, and pronouns, living out fictions that precede and define us. You and I are nothing but words pretending to be people.

1 On the one hand, I found much of this information in the Enyclopedia Britannica, and intended to replace my reference with a more respectable one, but is that academically honest? On the other hand, Wikipedia is not an academically acceptable source. So I can either quote a questionable source or lie about my source. Since truth is the higher goal in this most truthful of theses, I have let the reference to the Wicked Wikipedia of the West remain.

Before deciding to read a book, an article or a thesis (and who would want to read a thesis?), the first two questions we as readers ask are: “What is it called?” and “Who wrote it?” Easy, as the answers are written on the fat book to my right: “Don Quixote” by “Miguel de Cervantes.” Just four names and a preposition. We can almost pass over them without a thought. How much meaning could there be in so few words?

Unfortunately, even the simplest of questions can get knotty: the big red book underneath is a Spanish edition entitled Don Quijote de la Mancha. Oh well, does it really matter where he was from? Bend back the cover and flip past all that prefatory crap (go ahead, I won’t tell anybody), and you’ll find: El Ingenioso Hidalgo Don Quijote de la Mancha. Apparently, neither the Spanish nor English editors thought the title character was so much ingenious, as just plain crazy. As for “hidalgo,” who cares what his job was before he became a knight? Thus, the editors left his title out of the title.

Whatever the title, it is charged with meaning. We know the work is a classic, probably the first modern novel, although we may not be sure why it is modern, since it is more than four hundred years old (published in two parts in 1605 and 1615), and we may not even know what “modern” means, except that it once referred to present times and now describes the past. The modern started either in the renaissance or the late 1800s and came to an end sometime after World War II.

Even the post-modern, some say, has come and gone, leaving us sometime after the after of now. Where can we possibly go in an age twice removed from the present? The only direction that has ever been open to us: into the past, back to a time when “modern” meant “now.” For only through the past can we understand the present.

Along with a reputation, we have an image: an old, gaunt knight charging across the dry, flat plain to battle windmills. Most of us are familiar with the expression “tilting at windmills,” which means fighting an imaginary enemy or engaging in a hopeless battle. Some may know the adjective “quixotic,” which the Oxford English Dictionary defines as “naively idealistic; unrealistic, impracticable.” So, when I say that I am engaged in “The Quixotic Quest for Reality,” I admit that I am tilting at windmills, hopelessly battling an imaginary enemy: reality.

More important than the name of the book is the name of the author: Miguel de Cervantes (1547-1616). Actually, Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, as Spanish speakers get family names from both parents. Since readers of English don’t know quite what to do with this extra surname, editors simplify it for us, fitting his name into a recognizable pattern.

The name Cervantes is also loaded with signification. He is important. As the writer of one of the great works of literature, his name carries tremendous cultural weight. Often compared favorably with his contemporary William Shakespeare (1564-1616), the legend is that they died on the same day: April 23rd. Not important that the date is from two different calendars, the Julian and the Gregorian, the story suggests that the greatest writers of the English and Spanish languages are mythically connected. So important is the writer that Spanish is sometimes called la lengua de Cervantes. The heaviness of his name (well, and the heaviness of the book) is as likely to keep some readers away as it is to attract others, like me. What potential readers may not know is that Cervantes was also a very funny and entertaining writer.

The importance attached to an author’s name is his or her “author function,” as named by Michel Foucault, French philosopher, social theorist, and leatherman. (Although this latter role may not carry much weight with academia, to me it makes him more interesting. It’s easier to pay attention to a philosopher with a whip.) In “What’s an Author?” (1984), that an author’s name marks a work as special:

the fact that the discourse has an author’s name, that one can say ‘this was written by so-and-so’ or ‘so-and-so’ is its author,’ shows that this discourse is not ordinary everyday speech that merely comes and goes, not something that is immediately consumable. On the contrary, it is speech that must be received in a certain mode and that, in a given culture, must receive a certain status (Foucault 107).

Foucault is saying that the name on the cover sets the work apart from a contract, a private letter, or a thesis — all of which may have writers, but do not have authors.

The emphasis on the author’s name marks a cultural shift from the hero of the story to the author as hero. Hero myths, passed down from generation to generation, were shared cultural properties, written by the community. Who wrote Gilgamesh? Who wrote “Genesis”? Who cares? (More about such stories in the part of the second chapter called “The Myth of Myths.”) At some point though, the name of the author began to matter.

The search for the author of the text, Foucault argues, can be traced back to the way that “Christian tradition authenticated (or rejected) the texts at its disposal” (Foucault 110). Demonstrating an author’s saintliness established the value of a text. Modern criticism uses methods similar to Christian exegesis, or religious explications of holy writ.

This implies that my secular study of a secular text by a secular humanist is essentially a religious task, a search for the saint in the work. These days, still under the influence of the romantics, we are more likely to call Cervantes a genius than a saint. The word “genius,” which shares a semantic root with “genie,” a being with supernatural powers, is essentially the same as a saint, one who receives divine inspiration. Either word reinforces the mystical name of the author.

The concept of private ownership of a text solidified, according to Foucault, at the end of the seventeenth and beginning of the eighteenth century, when the author became subject to litigation and punishment. (Didn’t I tell you Foucault was into sadomasochism?) An opposing trend began a little later, when scientific discourses began to hide the author’s name, giving the impression that no one wrote the work. If a text exists outside of authorship, it seems to be definitely and permanently true. Dictionaries, like the Oxford English Dictionary, are especially guilty of this artifice, this “nobody speaker,” but we, as writers and readers, will be listening very carefully to the definitions we come across in this thesis to see if we can catch someone speaking behind the curtain.

Out to undermine capitalist notions of ownership, Foucault imagines a day when we will take a work for itself and communally share it as we once did in the mythic past. A quixotic wish, not only because it is hopelessly idealistic, but also because it creates a paradox. Cancel author function and the authority drains out of Foucault’s text. When his critique of author function loses its power, authorship pops back into being.

In his efforts to destabilize the concept of the author, Foucault asks, “What difference does it make who is speaking?” (Foucault 120). Well, all the difference in the world. Writing about the elusive Bob Dylan, Paul Williams (called by some the “father of rock criticism”) writes, “if we found out tomorrow that Bob Dylan was a 64-year-old woman who’d changed her sex, and a proven Communist agent, we might be surprised, but the words to ‘Mr. Tambourine Man’ would not change in the slightest. It would still be the same song” (Williams 15). Maybe the words would not change, but the meaning would be drastically altered, argues literary critic and Dylan scholar Lee Marshall. Using the language of mass media, he refers to Foucault’s “author function” as “star image,” and says, “Ultimately, it is the star that shapes the meaning of the song, not the words” (Marshall 43), which is to say that we listen to a song through the star’s name.

Borges makes much of this in his short story “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote” (1944). Menard wants to rewrite Don Quixote, but not as a new version: he wants to reproduce it word for word. To do so, he considered this approach: “Learn Spanish, return to Catholicism, fight against the Moor or Turk, forget the history of Europe from 1602 to 1918 — be Miguel de Cervantes” (Borges 91), but ultimately he discards this approach as too easy! Being a seventeenth century novelist in the twentieth was less challenging and less interesting than “continuing to be Pierre Menard and coming to the Quixote through the experiences of Pierre Menard” (Borges 91).

It is startling to compare the Don Quixote of Cervantes with that of Menard. To illustrate, the narrator of Borges’ story, a literary critic, quotes a line from Cervantes “truth, whose mother is history, rival of time, depository of deeds, witness of the past, exemplar and adviser to the present, and the future’s counselor” (Borges 94). The narrator calls this “mere rhetorical praise of history,” familiar cliches about history and truth.

Menard, in contrast, writes, “truth, whose mother is history, rival of time, depository of deeds, witness of the past, exemplar and adviser to the present, and the future’s counselor” (Borges 94). In this version the narrator is staggered by the concept of history as the mother of truth: “Menard, a contemporary of William James, defines history not as delving into reality but as the very fount of reality. Historical truth, for Menard, is not ‘what happened’; it is what we believe happened” (Borges 94). Borges (or his narrator) so deftly proves that the change of authors is a change of meaning, that I had to compare the two versions of the line in order to assure myself that they were word for word, comma for comma, the same. What the narrator of Borges’ story misses, however, is that it is not Cervantes saying the line. As the narrator of Borges’ story is not Borges, the speaker of the line is a narrator who lacks Cervantes’ irony.

For that matter, not even Borges is Borges. In the short story “Borges and I” (1960) by Argentinian author Jorge Luis Borges, the writer (or narrator) discusses Borges as a distinct persona, his author function, created by the media and academia: “news of Borges reaches me by mail, or I see his name on a list of academics or in some biographical dictionary.” The author Borges likes various things, such as hourglasses and maps, but he copies these tastes from the real person “in a vain sort of way that turns them into the accouterments of an actor” (Borges 324). Borges, the writer, in other words, is pretending to be the real person.

Borges refuses to be limited to the meaning of his name and so he reinvents himself whenever his author function becomes too confining. The rebellion, however, just gets incorporated into his image. So, he calls his life a point-counterpoint between the author and himself, a fugue, “and everything winds up being lost to me, and everything falls into oblivion, or into the hands of the other man.” The short piece ends in the midst of an identity crisis: “I am not sure which of us it is that’s writing this page” (Borges 324). Who is saying that he doesn’t know who is writing? The author Borges, the real Borges, or the narrator who is neither? Roland Barthes, structuralist and post-structuralist, and Lionel Duisit, professor of French, state in “An Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narrative” (1966) that “The one who speaks (in the narrative) is not the one who writes (in real life) and the one who writes is not the one who is” (Barthes and Duisit 261).

The New Critics (who held sway over academia during the 1940s to 60s) labeled the search for meaning in the name, reputation and biography of the author “the biographical fallacy,” saying that it was a mistake to look for the meaning of a text outside of that text. Influenced by the Russian Formalists, the New Critics turned our attention to the actual words of a literary work, asking us to get our fingers greasy in the bolts and wires of the text itself. The influence of the New Critics is still felt today, demonstrated by the prevalence of the phrase “close reading.” While this redirection to the text is admirable, the New Critics could not explain why we as readers, students, teachers and literary critics should spend more time reading plays by William Shakespeare than shopping lists by Samuel B. Drakey if the name, biography and intentions of the author don’t matter. Meaning is found wherever meaning is found and the meaning of an author’s name cannot be ignored or erased.

We can comprise with Foucault and the New Critics and say that we don’t need to delve too deeply into Cervantes’ biography, but it would help to articulate his “author function.” The story goes that Cervantes was himself a Don Quixote, an idealist who floundered against the hard rocks of reality. Possibly forced to flee Castile because of wounding someone in a duel, he went to Italy and served as a rich priest’s valet. This disillusioning experience may explain in part why he eventually became a humanist and a realist. “The course of his career can be seen as a moral overcoming of a previous blindness,” an effort to compensate for the “anxiety of idealism” (Graf 74), writes E. C. Graf, professor of Spanish and comparative literature, in “Escritor / Excretor: Cervantes’s ‘Humanism’ on Philip II’s Tomb” (1999).

Cervantes then enlisted as a saldado in the navy infantry. (What does the “naval infantry” do? Walk around the boat?) Throughout his life, he was clearly very proud of his participation in the famous battle of Lepanto (1571), in which Phillip II defeated the Ottoman fleet, changing the course of European history. Even though Cervantes was feverish, he insisted on fighting on-board and took three bullets, two to the chest and one in his left arm. In the poetical work Journey to Parnassus (1614 ), he wrote that his left arm “lost the active power it once possessed, for the glory of the right!” (Cervantes “Parnassus”).

Later, he was captured and ransomed by Algerian corsairs. Being captured by pirates sounds exciting, but he spent five years as a slave in Algeria, tried to escape unsuccessfully four times, and was finally ransomed by his parents. This episode is fictionalized in “The Captive’s Tale,” one of the interpolated stories in Don Quixote, Then he returned to the mundane reality of Castile and began to write.

We read Cervantes’ history, in fact, in terms of his novel, as we read his novel in terms of his history. It is impossible to separate them. He even looks like his title character. How can you distinguish them? Don Quixote is usually with Sancho, but the author is always alone.

Over time, the meaning of the author’s name has changed. When Cervantes published the first parts of volume one, he was a little-known, but respected writer. In the second volume (really a sequel), you can sense his excitement at the unexpected success.

Sampson Carrasco, a reader of the first book, enters the novel as a character and gives some publication facts: “there are, this very day, above twelve thousand books published of that history.” The book has been printed in “Portugal, Barcelona, and Valencia,” he says, “and there is a rumor that it is now printing at Antwerp and I foresee that no nation will be without a translation” (Cervantes 485). The character’s prediction (written by Cervantes) turns out to be fairly accurate. Don Quixote has now been translated into at least 48 languages and is regarded as the most translated book after the bible, surpassing even Shakespeare. Since then, his reputation has kept growing and expanding. Literary criticism like this participates in the continuing reinforcement and alteration (“funny guy”) of Cervantes’ author function.

We may prefer to find meaning in a text rather than in the name of the author, but that name inevitably carries meaning. We “force ourselves to do things like find more wisdom or profundity or even readability than is actually in a text,” adds my friend Michelle Okafo (who was proof-reading this thesis and offering suggestions), “because of who the author is and what their individual myth brings to the table.” We read the novel through the author’s name.

(The first part of a thesis called Narrative Madness: The Quixotic Quest for Reality.)

Works Cited