Authorship Of Authors, Authority Of The Subject

In his seminal 1967 article"The Literature of Exhaustion,"John Barth identifies Samuel Beckett, Jorge Luis Borges, and Vladimir Nabokov as the standard bearers of the new literary tradition. For Barth, Beckett, Borges, and Nabokov are artists who are technically up to date and yet able to speak to the human condition as few others. As novelistic scholar, they have their own theories. Metaphor and parody are their favorable literature methods. Although they created a reveries world, they are not the playing children of post modernism. Western humanistic tradition and their feelings of intellectual historical mission make their works both philosophical and critical. As scholastic novelists, they use their own theories consciously in their own works. Combining together they redefine the concept of novel. The central theme of this thesis is born out of an idea suggested by Jorge Luis Borges in one of his essays entitled"Partial Magic in the Quixote". He writes,"Why does it disturb us that Don Quixote be a reader of Quixote andHamlet a spectator of Hamlet? I believe I have found the reason: these inversions suggest that if the characters of a fictional work can be readers or spectators, we, its readers or spectators, can be fictitious."Many characters in the works of Borges and Nabokov feel humiliated and horrified at such a fate. Yet, this is not necessarily so, especially if one gets written in a good Sacred book. Moreover, this suggests the possibility that the working of the divine can be approximated. If God is seen in the image of an artist, the understanding of the artistic devices may lead to an understanding of the operation and pattern that shapes one's life. To approximate God ,Borges and Nabokov also erect artifices. However, the autonomy and authority of the authors'constructions are constantly molested. Saussure's shift from the mimetic view of language to a relational one undermines the authority of language. The irony which is at first directed at the characters for their failure to find the divine pattern finally falls back on the authors. The activity itself of creating any literary form is questioned. Their works are exposed as fictions, at best, Hans Vaihinger's kind of'fictions'. Moreover, they cannot lay claim to originality, not only because the divine origin is remotely unverifiable, but also because of what John Barth calls the exhausted state of literary creation. However, to stop writing is to give up all hope, for Borges still clings to the possibility of stumbling onto God's plan in one of his many fictions. The only road left is through re-writing or parody. The Russian Formalists moreover have demonstrated the important part parody plays in the evolution of literary form. Thus, their fictions, written in full consciousness of their futility, celebrate, with wonder, the human power to'create'and then to'create'again. It may be wrong to use the word'create'for only God can create, Borges and Nabokov are only readers/re-writers and their only consolation may just be the aesthetic bliss that Nabokov so values.