Sterne and Machado: Parodic and Intertextual Play in Tristram Shandy and Memórias

STERNE AND MACHADO: PARODIO AND INTERTEXTTJAL PLAY IN TRISTRAM SHANDY AND MEMORIAS Maria José Sometíate Barbosa The investigation of fictional systems and their interaction with "reality" is not a novelty ofpost-world-warliterature. The construction ofthe fictional illusion and its unmasking in the text is a tradition that postmodern fiction has inherited from previous literary periods. Thus, meta-language and meta-discourse are not foreign to other literary periods and certainly are not a privilege of postmodernist writers. In self-conscious narrative, the writer faces a crucial dilemma: he wants to represent the world, but he discovers that he cannot represent the world because actually all that one can do is "represent the discourses of that world" (Waugh 3). Therefore, in metaficion the representational nature of fiction is made explicit and the reader is forced to acknowledge the text's "reality" and the world's "fictionality." This creates a paradox because the literary work is at the same time concerned with its own creative process and directed toward the reader who is outside the text (Hutcheon, Narcissistic 7). The impossibility of finding a resolution for this predicament is closely associated with the nature of the novel as a genre. What constitutes the deconstructive method of self-conscious narrative is the shift between the creation of the frame and the frame-breaking, that is, "the construction of an illusion through the imperceptibility of the frame and the shattering of illusion through the constant exposure of the frame" (Waugh 31). Thus, metafiction shows that both life and novels are constructed by the process of creating frames and boundaries and crossing them. As Tanner points out, modern man faces the unavoidable paradox that "a book, a vision, a system, like a person, has to have an outline"; nevertheless , contours also mean arrest, for they restrain and approve boundaries (City 17). There are at least two approaches that are frequently encountered in the metafictional/postmodern narrative:4 one type investigates its own process of creation or questions and analyzes the forms, conventions , and models of the literary tradition; a second type attempts to discover "how all fictional systems operate, their methodology, the source ofappeal, and the dangers ofbeing dogmatized" (McCaffery 17). These approaches not only divert attention from the linear flow of the narrative, but they also direct the reader's awareness to a field of references outside of the story being told. Characters, narrators, authors mingle in the narrative, breaking the distance between one frame and the next. Taking as a basis the constitutive features displayed in selfconscious texts, the intertextual relationship comprises three major groups: the digressive, the parodie, and the allusive patterns. The digressive pattern is constituted mainly by embedded narratives which usually establish a thematic connection with the main narrative frame. The second group consists of the parodie pattern in which the entire text, or parte of it, can be a parody of another text, system, tradition, 24 THE COMPARATIST or conventions, or can be a self-parody. The third group, the intrusive pattern, also includes the intrusions ofthe author or the participation of the reader. Although allusions—literary and philosophical references , triggered by the narrative proper—are also forms of digression, they fit better into the intrusive pattern because they are intimately associated with the voices ofthe literary tradition and divert attention from the main story-line as well. Hence, metafictional devices point to the inexhaustible use of frame andframe-breaking, the interactionofLife and Art, "fiction" and "reality," author and reader. They also call attention to an entire literary tradition where each text appears as a sign that has been generated by other signs and will do so ad infinitum. This does not mean, however, that there is only an assemblage of devices, techniques, themes—i.e., a mere collage. This process also involves a critical evaluation of the material used. New possibilities arise, establishing not only a relation between one text and another, but also bringing into the text a whole literary tradition; that is, a text is no longer an individual artistic instance but rather it has become part of the inexhaustible movement in which every leap forward implies also a return to the past and...