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The Reader in Luis Goytisolo's Antagonía Tetralogy: A Study in Narrative Communication

:	Kevin E. Teegarden
:	The Reader in Luis Goytisolo's Antagonía Tetralogy: A Study in Narrative Communication
:	Digitalia
:	9781882528288
:	1
:	CHF 63,00
:

:	Kunst, Literatur
:	English

:	221
:	DRM
:	PC/MAC/eReader/Tablet
:	PDF

This study of the four installments comprising Luis Goytisolo’s Antagonía tetralogy- Recuento (1973). Los verdes de mayo hasta el mar (1976), La cólera de Aquiles (1979), and Teoría del conocimiento (1981)- examines the means by which these works of fiction, despite their structurally and linguistically complex discourse, seek to make themselves intelligible to the traditional reader. This reader-response approach to Antagonía demonstrates how the work, notwithstanding its efforts to elaborate an innovative prose that would supersede the tenets of (neo)realism that characterized Spanish fiction from the 1940s to the 1960s, reaches out to the traditional reader and ultimately affirms the power of language and literature as vehicles for understanding oneself and the world.

READING «TEORIA DEL CONOCIMIENTO»: CREATING AND KNOWING IN A NOVEL OF WINDOWS AND MIRRORS (p. 127)

Teoria del conocimiento, like the other novels in the tetralogy, employs a metafictional discourse wherein selfconscious narrator-writers compose texts and comment frequently on the acts of reading and writing.

It stands out from previous installments because of its foregrounding of epistemological issues. Through its structure, story lines, characters, narratorial commentary, and leitmotifs, Teoria explicitly and implicitly raises questions regarding knowledge acquisition.

Gaining knowledge about the text or about the world, the discourse suggests, involves searching for an appropriate vantage point and applying creativity to what one perceives from that position.

According to this view, the wider the perspective one achieves and the more successfully one applies his/her creative faculties, the more understanding one may attain.

The journey toward fuller comprehension is an unending process, however, inasmuch as the ultimate perspective that would reveal all knowledge and truth always eludes us. In this chapter I study some of the reading strategies encoded in the novel`s discourse that induce the reader to assume the role of co-creator with the author and, in the process, to confront the epistemological questions I have just outlined.

To facilitate the discussion, I begin by commenting on the formal properties of the novel. Teoria exhibits a tripartite structure similar to the one found in the preceding volume in the tetralogy.

Unlike the single narrative voice that dominates La colera, however, three distinct first-person narrator-authors supposedly produce this novel.

Carlos Jr., a young and immature man, composes the diary entries with which the volume opens (chapters one and two). The diarist apparently writes in an effort to forge an identity for himself as an adult heterosexual male.

The more mature architect-turned-author Ricardo follows with a much longer work, one in which he recounts the progress of his investigation into the unexpected death of his cousin Margarita and explores memories from his own past (chapters three through six).

An anonymous elderly narrator-author, whom I will call"the Old Man," completes the novel with his selfproclaimed"legacy" of profound wisdom for future generations (chapters seven through twelve). On a second narrative level, Carlos Sr., the diarist`s father, transcribes the Old Man`s tape recordings and presumably ensures the publication of the latter`s account along with Carlo Jr.`s diary and Ricardo`s book.

Finally, on a third narrative level, a fictional author, Raul Ferrer Gaminde, acts. Raul`s name on the inner title page indicates that in this novel he continues the experimentation in fiction-writing that he began in Recuento and carried on throughout Los verdes.

The reader may infer, then, that Carlos Sr.`s efforts to join the three separate accounts mirror Raul`s own conduct as putative author of the completed novel, and that the three narrator-authors in Teoria ultimately mask or refract Raul`s voice, which in turn echoes Luis Goytisolo`s.

Enigma, Suspense, and Plot Construction

Each of the segments in Teoria emphasizes the hermeneutic code,"according to which a narrative or part thereof can be structured as a path leading from a question or an enigma to its (possible) solution" (Prince 40).

	Contents	9
	Introduction	11
	Luis Goytisolo's Antagonía Tetralogy	11
	A Reader-Response Approach to Antagonía	17
	1. Reading Recuento: A Writer is Born	23
	Temporal/Structural Dimensions	23
	Focalization and Narration	34
	Distinctive Discourses and Narrative Voices	39
	Metafiction and Literary Theory	56
	2. Reading Los verdes de mayo hasta el mar: Actualizing a Text under Construction/Constructed	66
	Temporal/Structural Dimensions	67
	Shifting Levels of Textuality	83
	Literary Theory	95
	3. Reading La cólera de Aquiles: (Re)Writing Lives	103
	Matilde's Story of Love and Betrayal	105
	El Edicto de Milán	112
	Literary Criticism and Theory	118
	4. Reading Teoría del conocimiento: Creating and Knowing in a Novel of Windows and Mirrors	137
	Enigma, Suspense, and Plot Construction	138
	Psychoanalytic Discourse and Character Construction	148
	Literary Theory and Epistemology	164
	Conclusion	192
	Notes	200
	Works Cited	215