THE AVATAR IN PANAMA - Theses - Flinders University

3.2 Double Whammy: Mixed Doubles The Avatar in Panamatiempo gris falls into the same category, being both the collection and astory within it. Other instances include Cortázar’s Las armas secretas,Maupassant’s “Le horla”, and Chico Buarque’s Budapeste in which theinterior text appears on the cover of the novel. 81 In this sense, theseworks exhibit a degree of Genette’s paratextuality in that theirrelationship between the main text and all other aspects of the book issymbiotic. In the above examples the covers, titles and headings areduplicated as the main text is itself replicated in a protracted version in“Le horla”, and A Costa de Murmúrios. 82Jaramillo Levi’s stories are written in various different localesand span some forty years but to the careful reader there is a strikingcontinuity in all of his work. Constant revisions of short stories have nothelped in trying to maintain a consistence and uniformity in criticism.This is compounded by the fact there are various editions of bookswhich do not include titles contained in other editions and the samestory may have appeared in many different anthologies published indifferent years with alternative character names and the desultoryaddition of words and phrases. Textual doubling and multiplying existsin his body of fiction as Jaramillo Levi re-edits each story before it isreprinted; consequently there are different versions of many of hispublished works which evidently has ramifications for interpretation andcriticism as additions, deletions of words, phrases, punctuation, and insome cases paragraphs, may alter the story’s meaning thereforeaffecting what is written and what Jaramillo Levi himself says aboutthem.As nothing is duplicated exactly, each literary text has individualcharacteristics as well as common attributes it shares with otherliterature. However, although academic criticism attempts tocharacterise the author’s individuality and writing, it may only be done ingeneral terms as all evaluation is based on theory. So assessment itselfis paradoxically entwined in a double bind. 83 On one hand Jaramillo Levisays “[c]asi siempre sé exactamente cuando termina, o dónde debe81 “Duplicaciones”, “Las armas secretas,” “El fabricante de mascaras”, “Tocar fondo”,“Renuncia al tiempo”, and Anderson Imbert’s “El grimorio”.82 Genette’s subcategories of transtextuality include: intertextuality as quotation,plagiarism, allusion; paratextuality as relation between a text and its “paratext” (titles,headings, prefaces, epigraphs, dedications, acknowledgement, footnotes, illustrations,dustjackets, all of which surround the main body of text; architextuality whichdesignates the text as part of a genre either by the text itself or contextualising by thereader; and metatextuality which provides an explicit or implicit critical commentary ofone text on another. Gérard Gennette, Palimpsests: literature in the second degreetrans. Channa Newman and Claude Doubinsky. (Lincoln and London: U of NebraskaProtagonist, 1997) 1-5.83 René Wellek and Austin Warren, Theory of Literature (Harmondsworth: Penguin,1966) 19.207