Narrative as Determination of the Future Anterior :: Narratives Writing Transsexuals Gender Essays

Narrative as Determination of the emerging tense Anterior Narrative, it seems banal to observe, opens a space. This space is not so more than a place of play for unlimited possibilities (although in the best of affirmable worlds it might yet be) as somewhere determined, always, in advance, by the future anterior what will have happened and how it will already have interpreted place lure us by dint of stories to their reverses, become the arrest that shines through from the very start. Reading for the ending in narrative, the end justifies the means the end is the means.That is why the distinction so frequently drawn between spot and story, fabula and sjuzhet, while handy, turns most provocative precisely when it cannot be made, when the temptation is thither for us to make it as readers, when the way to do it seems at hand, simply we are stopped ultimately from completing it. Too many Cliffs Notes to The great(p) and the Fury have made modernist plot-story scramblings pred ictable, easy-to-read. But still we watch fall out for when the story turns out to be such that its arrangement prevents us from decrypting, excavating it. The end (the story) stymies the means (the plot) and vice versa.At the end of Leopoldinas Dream by Silvina Ocampo, we find out that the story has been told, not by a serviceman narrator as we may have presume in our human self-satisfaction, but by a little dog who, along with his mistress, Leopoldina, has--Virgin Mary-like--been assumed into nirvana. We are left with the puzzle of where this story, this plot, this narrative enunciation, could have come from. Heaven? A dream of Heaven? The end crosses the means the story undoes the plot. More, since the premiere part of the story concerns Leopoldinas miraculous ability to bring abide objects from her dreams, the tale, narrative itself here, resembles one of these objects, brought back, mysteriously, from some other place, dream world or Heaven. Leopoldinas dream-objects, mu ch to the frustration of the little girls she looks after, are poor things, stones, grass. The narrative, likewise, is a poor object, a mundane miracle, produced by the simple yet frustratingly corrupting crossing of narrative options.Christopher Priests novel of the everyday miraculous, The Glamour, deals with invisibility so as to intertwine plot and story in a way that seems relatively straightforward at the beginning, only to turn into a tangle, a conundrum, at the end, much more so than the flashier (hence, more reassuring) experiments of the nouveau Roman or overtly experimental fiction.