THE AVATAR IN PANAMA - Theses - Flinders University

3.2 Double Whammy: Mixed Doubles The Avatar in Panamasimilar fashion, and so reality is fictional and can be understood throughan appropriate reading process (16).Modernism draws attention to the aesthetic construction of text;it does not flaunt it own artifice as does metafictional writing, and onlyoccasionally displays features typical of postmodernism: the visiblyinventing narrator; ostentatious and typographic experiment (“Nerieda”,“El buho que dejo de latir”, “El bulto” (FM)), explicit dramatization of thereader (“El lector”, “Escribiendo a máquina”, “Underwood”), Chinesebox structures (“Libro sin tapas”), total breakdown of temporal andspatial organisation of narrative (“Ofertorio”), infinite regress;dehumanisation of character (“Paseo del lago”), parodic doubles,obtrusive proper names; self reflexive images (mirrors, acrostics,mazes); critical discussions of the story within a story; continuousundermining of specific fictional conventions; use of popular genres;and explicit parody of previous texts, whether literary or non literary. Inall of these what is foregrounded is the writing of the text as the mostfundamentally problematic aspect of that text. Although metafiction isjust one form of postmodernism, nearly all experimental writing displayssome metafictional strategies. Any text that draws the reader’s attentionto its process of construction by frustrating the reader’s conventionalexpectations of meaning and closure problematises the ways in whichthe narration artificially constructs apparently real and imaginary worldsas natural (21-22).Whereas the loss of order for the modernist led to the belief inits recovery at a deeper level of the mind, and so cementing theinfluence of psychoanalysis, for metafictional writers the mostfundamental assumption is that composing a novel is no different fromconstructing one’s own reality. Writing itself rather than consciousnessbecomes the main object of attention (24). “Modernist texts begin byplunging in media res and end with the sense that nothing is finished,that life flows on. Metafictional novels often begin with an explicitdiscussion of the arbitrary nature of beginnings, of boundaries” (29).In fiction an object’s description brings that object into existenceas the fictional world is a wholly verbal construct. In reality however, it isthe object that determines its description. The use of names intraditional fiction is usually part of the aim to disguise the fact that thereis no difference between the name and the thing named; to disguise thispurely verbal existence. Metafiction on the other hand, aims to focusattention on the problem of reference. Here, proper names are oftenflaunted in their seeming arbitrariness or absurdity, omitted altogetheror placed in an overtly metaphorical or adjectival relationship with thething they name (94). Names are used to display the control of thewriter and relationships of language. In metafiction, such names remindus that in all fiction, names can describe as they refer, that what isreferred to, has been created anyway through a naming process.213