Desire without History@@@Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative

Science by Poetry, Fiction by Geometry: Interdisciplinary Reading and Writing

Incoherent Intentions and the Need for Narrative

This essay investigates Narrative of the Sufferings of Lewis Clarke (1845) for its digressions. In studying Clarke’s resistance to the “back there” of slavery, this essay locates digression as a topos for enunciating the abstract self and the self-in-relation, which achieve legibility in Clarke’s narrative through rupture, postponement, and misdirection.

Digression, Slavery, and Failing to Return in the Narrative of the Sufferings of Lewis Clarke

and mathematical character. Historically, the interchangeability of space and the mechanical temporality of Greek romance have made it the genre of choice for the representation of an emerging capitalist order. Cervantes, in the early seventeenth century, appropriates Byzantine conventions in his Persiles and in the Captive's Tale and Ricote episode of Don Quijote in order to evoke a new economic system in which exchange and an abstract flow of cash prevail. El jinete polaco similarly evidences the connection between capitalism and the Byzantine chronotope. The ability to measure is associated here with international capitalism: it is significant, for example, that Lorencito, whose character and Cervantine surname suggest a parody of the hero of the realist novel, works in a store called "El Sistema M?trico." This modern Lucien de Rubempr?'s aspirations to success in a capitalist world are identified consequently with calculation and measurement. Other characters in M?gina, in contrast, do not even know how to measure: Leonor feels herself "tan definitivamente lejos de d?nde estaba [el abuelo Manuel] porque no sab?a calcular la distancia" (108). For them, measured time is equated with fear and capitalism: Manuel's mother dreads someone who comes "acerc?ndose con la fatalidad del mecanismo de un reloj" (51) and who later appears as "el m?dico jorobeta que viene por la peseta de la visita de ayer" (53). A similar contrast can be noted in the protagonist himself. On the one hand, during his period of travel, he hears "un cron?metro insomne en el interior de mi conciencia" (232) and kills time in the translation booth "calculando minutos" (395). Moreover, when he first arrives in Madrid and enters the Byzantine world of mechanical distances, he finds that "se hab?a modificado la escala del mundo" (382), and that the relativity of his perspective in M?gina has been corrected. On the other hand, however, once he begins to reflect again on his childhood in the village, he loses all sense of measure: what he narrates is situated in "un a?o que no s? calcular" (21), and he claims toward the end to be unable to gauge space and time: "no s? medir la distancia que me separa de ti ni calcular el tiempo que me falta para volver a verte ni el que he pasado contigo" (506). Manuel's profession as a translator during his Byzantine voyages could also be interpreted as a metaphor for a world where exchange value is alienated from use value. Converting words into other words, Manuel acts in much the same way as an international banker who exchanges dollars for yen, unconscious of the work and use value they represent. Byzantine temporality, with its abstract, mechanical and interchangeable dimensions, therefore, suits the sphere here described, a world ruled by "un c?lculo autom?tico, como el valor de la moneda, en Madrid son ahora las once de la noche, en Granada F?lix ya ha acostado a sus hijos y est? viendo con Lola una pel?cula de la televisi?n, en Bruselas llueve y no hay nadie por la calle" (407). In his study, The Ancient Romances (1967), Ben Edwin Perry associates the genre with the phenomenon of "open society" (29; see also Popper), a centrifugal This content downloaded from 207.46.13.114 on Thu, 26 May 2016 06:51:49 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms

Desire without History@@@Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative

Citations

Science by Poetry, Fiction by Geometry: Interdisciplinary Reading and Writing

Incoherent Intentions and the Need for Narrative

Digression, Slavery, and Failing to Return in the Narrative of the Sufferings of Lewis Clarke

Genres in Dialogue: Antonio Muñoz Molina's El jinete polaco

Never Better! : The Modern Jewish Picaresque