translation studies. retrospective and prospective views

emark that Nicholas is a selfish and narcissistic young man who plays
various inauthentic roles: the existentialist, the great poet, etc. He seems to
be the perfect choice for a metafictional work whose rules are closely
examined and turned into the focal point of analysis. Ironically, Nicholas
uses the word narcissistic when he talks about the ‘solitary heart’ game he
plays with women: “This sounds, and was, calculating, but it was caused
less by a true coldness than by my narcissistic belief in the importance of
the lifestyle.” (21)
The process of writing which fictionalises real persons and
transforms them into characters is foregrounded by Nicholas’s desire to
fictionalise real persons starting with himself. The quest for his true self
becomes more difficult because of this incapacity to discern reality from
fiction. He always imagines he is like a character in a story, like Robinson
Crusoe, Pip from Great Expectations, Ferdinand from The Tempest, Orpheus,
Theseus and so on. Through Nicholas as a character, the author brings
again under discussion the question of the omniscient narrator and calls
attention to the artificiality and the lack of freedom brought about by such
a stance:
[…] always I had acted as if a third person was watching and listening
and giving me marks for good or bad behaviour… a god like novelist, to
whom I turned, like a character with the power to please, the sensitivity
to feel slighted, the ability to adapt himself to whatever he believed the
novelist-god wanted. (538)
It is as if Nicholas became all of a sudden aware of the restrictions that a
god-like writer imposed on him and wants to get free.
Even the story created around his name ‘Urfe’ is indicative of his
desire to present a fictitious, more interesting self to the others and not the
real Nicholas:
Only once did he seem really surprised. He had asked me about my
unusual name.
‘French. My ancestors were Huguenots.’
‘Ah.’
‘There’s a writer called Honoré d’Urfé – ‘
He gave me a swift look. ‘He is an ancestor of yours?’
‘It just a family tradition. No one’s ever traced it. As far as I know.’
Poor old d’Urfé; I had used him before to suggest that centuries of
high culture lay in my blood. (91)
The way in which real people may become fictional, written
characters on a page, during the process of creation is also exposed when
Nicholas speaks about himself in the third person: “So we talked about
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