_{The writer Victoria de Stefano Source}

Friends of @ADSactly, I share with you a literary study article on the short novel The place of the writer of Victoria de Stefano, whom I consider one of the most lucid and dense Venezuelan novelists of the last four decades. Grateful in advance for her reading.

The theorist Mikhail Bajtin has insisted on the open character of the novel, in its condition of gender in process of formation. These features are explained, as this author explains, because it is "the only genre produced and nurtured by the modern era of universal history, and therefore deeply related to it".

Indeed, modernity inaugurates a time and a culture marked by change, plurality and instability; even in its paradoxical expression, the so-called "postmodernity", this oscillation and mutability is manifested if we conceive this stage as the rebellion of the modern against itself, as Compagnon maintains. Since Descartes, modern man is understood as a thinking existence, he constitutes himself as an object of knowledge and reflection. The critical consciousness about his being and the world he has built, as Octavio Paz maintains, will be the constitutive mark of man in modern times.

This self-criticism achieves a singular revelation in art and, above all, in literature. It is what has been called autoreflexivity which, according to Breuer (in Watzlawick), "has its true home in contemporary narrative literature". Self-reflexivity supposes a phenomenon in which literature becomes an object of itself, which will make it possible to speak of selfreferentiality: literature constitutes its matter in its own referent; literary work speaks of its nature as fictitious creation; it analyzes itself, looks at itself in the mirror.

The condition of self-reflection will be one of the fundamental characteristics of the novel, especially of the novel production of the present century. In its self-reflective capacity, the novel will show the lucidity and criticality characteristic of modern man, through which it is looked at and, many times, unknown. For this reason, contemporary novels will increasingly incorporate commentary, explicit reflection and essays into their discourse, as Genette warns. Narrative entities will be defined by an insightful thought, until they are reasoned as creatures of fiction. In this operation of unfolding, the novel is fictionalised, transformed into metafiction - fiction that speaks of itself, its nature and its artifices.

_{Cubist portrait of a writer, by Diego Rivera (1916) Source}

In Victoria de Stefano's work The place of the writer (1992), we have an important example of how the Venezuelan novelism of the late 20th century assumes a self-reflexive and self-referential nature, that is, a relevant sample of the phenomenon of narrative metafictionality. This novel thematizes its own textual condition; it deals reflexively with the poetics of scriptural creation and reveals itself as a poetics. This will be manifested not only in the explicit discourse, but also in its paratextual marks (title, subtitles, epigraphs), in the configuration of its nuclear images and in the composition of its external and internal structure. Let's see.

The title of the novel opens up two initial, non-exclusive interpretative possibilities, which may emerge as hypotheses to be confirmed: the writer's place may allude to the physical space inhabited by the creator, but also to the textual space, read novel, which is the essential dwelling place of the writer. In this preliminary textual mark, the self-reflective dimension of the work will function germinally.

In the first instance, the novel is shown to us as the narration of Claudia, the main character of the story, who will embody the voice and the fundamental perspective of the story. Claudia is a writer, and tells the story of what happens to her one weekend: one Saturday night, at her friend Julio's birthday party; and the next day, in her apartment, when she wakes up trying to write, and while walking down the street. The actions narrated are elementary: meeting and dialogue with friends at the July party; returning home; waking up and getting out of bed; tidying up the apartment and sitting at the desk to start work.

Here we extract two elements to highlight. On the one hand, the identity of the narrator-protagonist: a writer. The knowledge of this capital factor places us before a complex consideration: first, the writer is an inventor of realities, a being with faculties to transpose - through the word - the established order and regularities; second, a literary production, or better, a novel, has as its enunciating subject a writer, which already introduces a sense of duplication and reflection. It should be noted that the narrative voice will generally be delivered as an immediate discourse, in which reflection on the act of writing will occupy a central place.

On the other side, the scarce preponderance of the action will allow to emphasize the substantivity of the word as the founder of reality in literature (we are in front of a "story of words", to say it with Genette's classification), aspect that corresponds with the fact that the narrator-protagonist of this novel is a writer. Both considerations contribute to the matafictional sense of the novel.

_Source

The external structure of The place of the writer seems to respond basically to the above. Three parts titled in the following order: "Today I will do nothing but listen", "The next day" and "At night, working". Such a linear and traditional structure is consistent with the regularity of the story we are told: a writer attends a party where - naturally - everyone talks, returns home at dawn, and, once recovered, begins her work. The process of formation and production of creation is put into play in this order. The writer opens up to the world, tries to apprehend it, confronts it, and listens. Thus we restore the self-reflective sense of the first part, initialled in its title and highlighted in its development. In this respect we read in the discourse of the narrator-protagonist: "(...) I become a victim of myself, a victim of my mania, passion to see, listen, record, preserve and then write" (my underlining).

The whole first part will be nourished by constant references to the scriptural process and its conditioning factors: the dialectic of speaking and keeping silent ("We are made of two halves: half that speaks and hides, half that keeps silent and reveals, among them the blade of a knife that separates between edge and edge"), the need for solitude and a place of one's own ("To separate oneself from the world, the perfect one, the never quite desired solitude!"My room is my life, everything is in there"), the fatigue of living and writing ("My novels in the background, if they deal with anything, it is all those works with which life erodes us: the worst of all, the work of being happy. All my characters are exhausted..."), creative unproductivity and discouragement ("Let's suppose I succeed in overcoming empty white, inertia, paralysis, discouragement. Let us suppose all this. Then I will type a line...").

(Continued in next post)

Bibliographic references

Bajtin, M. (1989). Theory and aesthetics of the novel. Spain: Edit. Taurus.
Compagnon, A. (1991). The Five Paradoxes of Modernity. Venezuela: Monte Ávila Editores.
Genette, G. (1989). Figures III. Spain: Edit. Lumen.
Lumen. Paz, O. (1985). The sons of the limo. Return. Colombia: Edit. The Black Sheep.
Stefano, Victoria de (1992). The place of the writer. Venezuela: Grupo Editor Alter Ego.
Watzlawick, P. and others (1993). The invented reality. Spain: Edit. Gedisa.

Written by @josemalavem