Story-Bound

14/08/2026

Miscellaneous    Download PDF  
Let us propose three useful generalisations: a writer needn’t be clever; they shouldn’t assume a reader is as well-read as they are, and should never claim a reference passes for an insight. Has Ana Lydia Vega in ‘Story-Bound’ failed to act on these assumptions, and would the writing have been better if she had been fair to them? Writers do what they like, and the more formulae thrown at them, the more resistant they should be. But maybe our position is a posteriori: that the story appears a slight work, and less interesting than other Vega stories, and we might find the reason for its slightness in the three axioms we propose it eschews.
In ‘Story-Bound’, the first and second axioms are closely aligned, and we need to remember, of course, that the author is not the narrator, even if we can’t pretend that this first-person tale isn’t about someone who could be taken for a close approximation of the writer herself. One of the dangers of insisting that the writer has nothing to do with the writing, that we need to draw a clear distinction between the two, is that while this became an insistent theoretical position to dislodge the assumptions behind biographical criticism, it also became a sly post-modern device as writers started to insert themselves into the books they were producing. This wasn’t especially new, but it became more insistent, and one of its practitioners in the 1980s was Martin Amis in Money. “I’m almost certain that it was the introduction of a minor character called Martin Amis that caused my father to send the book windmilling through the air. Because I had broken the contract between writer and reader, which says no messing about, no fooling with the reality level.” (Paris Review) Other examples include Coetzee’s Summer Time, Philip Roth’s Zuckerman novels and Roberto Bolano’s alter-ego Arturo Belano in books like The Savage Detectives. These novels are very far from minor, and they also contain a great irony. As Roland Barthes announced the Death of the Author in the late 1960s, as books should be viewed as products or language and discourse, rather than from the creative loins of the individual artist, so the artist came increasingly into the text as an avatar for the author.
There are many ways a writer can impose themselves on a work without quite going so far as to name a character using their own, or create characters who clearly resemble they themselves. Often it just takes the form of a writer writing. Vega here offers a young Puerto Rican woman who visits a university friend, Vilma, now living in the Pyrenees. She intends to work on a novel about a woman murdered by her ex-lover after sleeping with his friend. But when she arrives in France, the narrator finds she has been invited for a reason, and it isn’t to write her book, but to listen to  Vilma, as she talks endlessly about the terrible relationship she is having with her French husband Paul. It doesn’t help that they are staying at Paul’s in-laws' either.
Throughout the story, Vega drops in cultural references that make the reader aware of the potential staleness of her story, as though Vega wants to enliven it with self-consciousness and self-reflexivity over trying to find a truth of her own. This notion of truth isn’t the story’s point, alas, and it is one of postmodernism’s potentially biggest failings, if it becomes a play of signs rather than an accumulation of a cultural unconscious. Jean-Francois Lyotard noted that the postmodern ought to be seen as a variation of Freud’s Durcharbeitung, operated on modernity itself. Lyotard reckoned “the idea of modernity is closely bound up with this principle that it is possible and necessary to break with tradition and to bring a new way of living and thinking.” ‘(The Postmodern Condition) He was right to distinguish between a postmodernism that would be little more than a game of signs, and one that would be closer to an articulation, one resembling a therapy session. Rather than a fully conscious writer who ‘knows’ what they are doing, the artist draws much more on association, bringing the work into consciousness unknowingly rather than knowingly. As Lyotard says: “just as the patient elaborates his present trouble by freely associating the more imaginary, immaterial, irrelevant bits with past situations, so discovering hidden meanings of his life, we can consider the work of Cezanne, Picasso, Delauney, Kandinsky, Klee, Mondrian, Malevitch and finally Duchamp as a working through…” the modern and not just toying with it. (The Postmodern Condition’) Lyotard is here speaking exclusively of artists, but this is no less pertinent to literature. Ostensibly two writers are drawing on past works, but they might not be doing so in the same way. The self-reflexive isn’t the same as the reflective, with the former often affirming cultural codes, while the latter creates out of the accumulated references a new cultural tissue. It is this we might see in the self-reflexivity in Coetzee, Roth and Bolano. As Lyotard says, “the ‘post’ of postmodernity does not mean a process of coming back of flashing back, feeding back, but of anal-ysing, ana-mnesing, of reflecting.” (The Postmodern Condition) One of the reasons Jorge Luis Borges is an important figure in modern writing rests on his numerous references to earlier texts, creating the opportunity to find some first principles of his own: to address paradoxes of time, identity, memory and so on.
In ‘Story-Bound’, Vega is more self-reflexive than reflective, constantly making us aware of the writing’s awareness of itself, and the references’ pertinence. She tells us that the way Vilma describes her stepmother “it sounded so strange, so conspiratorial, so Daphne du Maurier.” It is clearly a reference to Rebecca and gets another mention later, with a further cultural reference along the way, when the narrator speaks of Vilma “head wrapped in a big, knock-out Carmen Miranda towel turban”, possibly seeing her “brewing foul play with Mrs Danvers.” Later, the narrator speaks of Rouletabille’s implacable logic: an allusion to Gaston Leroux’s journalist and amateur sleuth. The mother-in-law is also referred to as Madam Jocasta, and Vilma presents her evil husband as so terrible that the narrator compares him to Gilles de Rais, the notorious serial killer of children in the Middle Ages.
If such references don’t leap off the page, and suggest they should be on another one altogether, what are we to make of the allusions to Bertrand Blier and Brian De Palma? When the narrator says that “only the impassive Monsieur Beret retains a semblance of psychological balance in this commune of free enterprise and open competition that Bertrand Blier would have given his life to film”, even those who know Blier’s films quite well may be wondering what this means. Perhaps the director’s interest in emotionally intricate triangles and paradoxical sexual desire? As for De Palma, the narrator says, “but as though in a Brian De Palma denouement, Vilma did not make her break. She stood there for a relatively long time, treating the stars to a monologue.” Why a De Palma denouement? It would only make much sense if almost all De Palma films had the same denouement, and the director happened to be famous for them. He may have false dream endings in Carrie and Dressed to Kill, for example, but it doesn’t quite define him.
If Thomas Colchie says in his introduction to the Penguin Book of Latin American Short Stories where ‘Story-Bound’ is included, “given the number of authors in the present anthology who have written for film or about film, or who have in one way or another acknowledged their debt to the cinema”, then anyone who says (as Emir Rodriguez Monegal proposed) that cinema defines modern Latin American literature has a point. But making references to filmmakers fashionable at the time of writing is a weak form of influence, if we keep in mind Lyotard’s claim. It is reflexive rather than reflective, a knowing nod that tells us the writer knows film, but doesn’t indicate any further engagement, the sort of influence that makes film part of our perceptual processes rather than a subject for dinner-table chat. Without this added aspect, such an approach is merely postmodern in the most predictable way. It hasn’t passed through the unconscious as a means of understanding the world.
To leave Vega aside for the moment, we can think of two examples that do exactly this, engaging with film profoundly:  J.G. Ballard’s ‘Memories of a Space Age’, and Bolano’s ‘Days of 1978’. In the first, Ballard looks at a world where time is slowing down intermittently and describes it as “like a film reel running through a faulty projector…one day soon it would stop, freeze forever on one frame.” In the Bolano story, B meets U, a quarrelsome character, at a party, then hears about U and occasionally sees him around after that. He hears that U is often unstable. One night, at a party, B finds himself telling the story of Tarkovsky’s Andrei Rublev. He speaks of the plot over three and a half pages in a story that is eighteen pages long, and at the end of the telling B sees that U is crying. He doesn’t see U again, but hears that he got off a train between Barcelona and Paris, and was found the next day by a farmer who discovered a man hanging from a tree.
Ballard, with the aid of film imagery, finds analogies to time slowing, and such imagery wouldn’t have been available to him without cinema. In the Bolano story, the narrator tells us at no point this is Tarkovsky’s Andrei Rublev; he just describes a film that can’t be other than this work about the Medieval artist by the great Russian director. What matters isn’t the reference, but the ability to use a film’s plot as an indeterminate space between two people who have nothing in common, and who find in B’s lengthy synopsis a denominator that no conversation about themselves would likely have revealed. Perhaps a text other than a film might have worked, but we can say that Bolano adopts the opposite approach to Vega in the context of cinematic referencing. He ignores the cultural capital of the film and attends to its emotional specifics, so specific that it allows U to cry. In both Ballard and Bolano, film becomes close to Lyotard’s notion of ana-lysing, ana-mnesing. “The film is scored into his memory”, the narrator says before B recounts the film. There is no such scoring in the references to Blier and De Palma. They are merely clever.
To conclude, and to give ‘Story-Bound’ the mildest of benefits of the doubt, we can see how someone wishing to defend Vega’s tales will take on criticisms like those to be found in American magazine Kirkus. Carol J. Wallace says, “One on-line review of Hurley's volume of translations blasts Vega's humor as "heavy-handed," "juvenile," "tacky," and "worthy of a seventh-grader's pranks." Wallace, in translating Vega, says that this isn’t fair to the writer, as the reader in translation may be missing out on subtleties in Vega’s wordplay. But we might wonder what greater benefit would come from the filmic and literary references if reading the story in the original Spanish. The problems in such instances seem those of a facile postmodernism, rather than resting on the intricacies of the language. Sure, Wallace gives an example of the difficulties in a passage from ‘Story-Bound’. In English, in the Colchie collection, the sentence reads, “Behold the rewards of the unvirtuous, declares the Condominated Wives club, while United Unscrewable Macho Pigs note the murderer’s heroic candor in turning himself  in the next day at the Hato Rey police headquarters.” Wallace says that translators have rendered the passage differently, retaining Condominated Wives club with its play on ‘condominio’ and ‘dominar’: combining to form a word that suggests these matrons are both well-sheltered in their condos and dominated, but translated United Unscrewable Macho Pigs differently. The second phrase is a reference to a well-known leftist chant: ‘El pueblo unido jamis sera vencido’ or ‘The people united will never be defeated’.
However, as Wallace says, this gets lost in both translations, with each sacrificing the “political allusion as well as the rhythm, although the hyperbolic character of the phrase is maintained.” (‘Translating Laughter: Humor as a Special Challenge in Translating the Stories of Ana Lydia Vega’) That may be so, but our purpose has only been to focus on one Vega story and see how it settles too often into an allusive easiness rather than a tangled referential complexity, an example of the postmodern as properly superficial rather than the profound postmodernism to be found in Borges, Ballard and Bolano. The difficulties in translation might not necessarily suggest a profound text; merely an intricately, reflexively erudite one. After all, if Bolano and Borges have survived translation from the Spanish, why shouldn’t Vega?
 

© Tony McKibbin

Tony McKibbin

Story-Bound

Let us propose three useful generalisations: a writer needn’t be clever; they shouldn’t assume a reader is as well-read as they are, and should never claim a reference passes for an insight. Has Ana Lydia Vega in ‘Story-Bound’ failed to act on these assumptions, and would the writing have been better if she had been fair to them? Writers do what they like, and the more formulae thrown at them, the more resistant they should be. But maybe our position is a posteriori: that the story appears a slight work, and less interesting than other Vega stories, and we might find the reason for its slightness in the three axioms we propose it eschews.
In ‘Story-Bound’, the first and second axioms are closely aligned, and we need to remember, of course, that the author is not the narrator, even if we can’t pretend that this first-person tale isn’t about someone who could be taken for a close approximation of the writer herself. One of the dangers of insisting that the writer has nothing to do with the writing, that we need to draw a clear distinction between the two, is that while this became an insistent theoretical position to dislodge the assumptions behind biographical criticism, it also became a sly post-modern device as writers started to insert themselves into the books they were producing. This wasn’t especially new, but it became more insistent, and one of its practitioners in the 1980s was Martin Amis in Money. “I’m almost certain that it was the introduction of a minor character called Martin Amis that caused my father to send the book windmilling through the air. Because I had broken the contract between writer and reader, which says no messing about, no fooling with the reality level.” (Paris Review) Other examples include Coetzee’s Summer Time, Philip Roth’s Zuckerman novels and Roberto Bolano’s alter-ego Arturo Belano in books like The Savage Detectives. These novels are very far from minor, and they also contain a great irony. As Roland Barthes announced the Death of the Author in the late 1960s, as books should be viewed as products or language and discourse, rather than from the creative loins of the individual artist, so the artist came increasingly into the text as an avatar for the author.
There are many ways a writer can impose themselves on a work without quite going so far as to name a character using their own, or create characters who clearly resemble they themselves. Often it just takes the form of a writer writing. Vega here offers a young Puerto Rican woman who visits a university friend, Vilma, now living in the Pyrenees. She intends to work on a novel about a woman murdered by her ex-lover after sleeping with his friend. But when she arrives in France, the narrator finds she has been invited for a reason, and it isn’t to write her book, but to listen to  Vilma, as she talks endlessly about the terrible relationship she is having with her French husband Paul. It doesn’t help that they are staying at Paul’s in-laws' either.
Throughout the story, Vega drops in cultural references that make the reader aware of the potential staleness of her story, as though Vega wants to enliven it with self-consciousness and self-reflexivity over trying to find a truth of her own. This notion of truth isn’t the story’s point, alas, and it is one of postmodernism’s potentially biggest failings, if it becomes a play of signs rather than an accumulation of a cultural unconscious. Jean-Francois Lyotard noted that the postmodern ought to be seen as a variation of Freud’s Durcharbeitung, operated on modernity itself. Lyotard reckoned “the idea of modernity is closely bound up with this principle that it is possible and necessary to break with tradition and to bring a new way of living and thinking.” ‘(The Postmodern Condition) He was right to distinguish between a postmodernism that would be little more than a game of signs, and one that would be closer to an articulation, one resembling a therapy session. Rather than a fully conscious writer who ‘knows’ what they are doing, the artist draws much more on association, bringing the work into consciousness unknowingly rather than knowingly. As Lyotard says: “just as the patient elaborates his present trouble by freely associating the more imaginary, immaterial, irrelevant bits with past situations, so discovering hidden meanings of his life, we can consider the work of Cezanne, Picasso, Delauney, Kandinsky, Klee, Mondrian, Malevitch and finally Duchamp as a working through…” the modern and not just toying with it. (The Postmodern Condition’) Lyotard is here speaking exclusively of artists, but this is no less pertinent to literature. Ostensibly two writers are drawing on past works, but they might not be doing so in the same way. The self-reflexive isn’t the same as the reflective, with the former often affirming cultural codes, while the latter creates out of the accumulated references a new cultural tissue. It is this we might see in the self-reflexivity in Coetzee, Roth and Bolano. As Lyotard says, “the ‘post’ of postmodernity does not mean a process of coming back of flashing back, feeding back, but of anal-ysing, ana-mnesing, of reflecting.” (The Postmodern Condition) One of the reasons Jorge Luis Borges is an important figure in modern writing rests on his numerous references to earlier texts, creating the opportunity to find some first principles of his own: to address paradoxes of time, identity, memory and so on.
In ‘Story-Bound’, Vega is more self-reflexive than reflective, constantly making us aware of the writing’s awareness of itself, and the references’ pertinence. She tells us that the way Vilma describes her stepmother “it sounded so strange, so conspiratorial, so Daphne du Maurier.” It is clearly a reference to Rebecca and gets another mention later, with a further cultural reference along the way, when the narrator speaks of Vilma “head wrapped in a big, knock-out Carmen Miranda towel turban”, possibly seeing her “brewing foul play with Mrs Danvers.” Later, the narrator speaks of Rouletabille’s implacable logic: an allusion to Gaston Leroux’s journalist and amateur sleuth. The mother-in-law is also referred to as Madam Jocasta, and Vilma presents her evil husband as so terrible that the narrator compares him to Gilles de Rais, the notorious serial killer of children in the Middle Ages.
If such references don’t leap off the page, and suggest they should be on another one altogether, what are we to make of the allusions to Bertrand Blier and Brian De Palma? When the narrator says that “only the impassive Monsieur Beret retains a semblance of psychological balance in this commune of free enterprise and open competition that Bertrand Blier would have given his life to film”, even those who know Blier’s films quite well may be wondering what this means. Perhaps the director’s interest in emotionally intricate triangles and paradoxical sexual desire? As for De Palma, the narrator says, “but as though in a Brian De Palma denouement, Vilma did not make her break. She stood there for a relatively long time, treating the stars to a monologue.” Why a De Palma denouement? It would only make much sense if almost all De Palma films had the same denouement, and the director happened to be famous for them. He may have false dream endings in Carrie and Dressed to Kill, for example, but it doesn’t quite define him.
If Thomas Colchie says in his introduction to the Penguin Book of Latin American Short Stories where ‘Story-Bound’ is included, “given the number of authors in the present anthology who have written for film or about film, or who have in one way or another acknowledged their debt to the cinema”, then anyone who says (as Emir Rodriguez Monegal proposed) that cinema defines modern Latin American literature has a point. But making references to filmmakers fashionable at the time of writing is a weak form of influence, if we keep in mind Lyotard’s claim. It is reflexive rather than reflective, a knowing nod that tells us the writer knows film, but doesn’t indicate any further engagement, the sort of influence that makes film part of our perceptual processes rather than a subject for dinner-table chat. Without this added aspect, such an approach is merely postmodern in the most predictable way. It hasn’t passed through the unconscious as a means of understanding the world.
To leave Vega aside for the moment, we can think of two examples that do exactly this, engaging with film profoundly:  J.G. Ballard’s ‘Memories of a Space Age’, and Bolano’s ‘Days of 1978’. In the first, Ballard looks at a world where time is slowing down intermittently and describes it as “like a film reel running through a faulty projector…one day soon it would stop, freeze forever on one frame.” In the Bolano story, B meets U, a quarrelsome character, at a party, then hears about U and occasionally sees him around after that. He hears that U is often unstable. One night, at a party, B finds himself telling the story of Tarkovsky’s Andrei Rublev. He speaks of the plot over three and a half pages in a story that is eighteen pages long, and at the end of the telling B sees that U is crying. He doesn’t see U again, but hears that he got off a train between Barcelona and Paris, and was found the next day by a farmer who discovered a man hanging from a tree.
Ballard, with the aid of film imagery, finds analogies to time slowing, and such imagery wouldn’t have been available to him without cinema. In the Bolano story, the narrator tells us at no point this is Tarkovsky’s Andrei Rublev; he just describes a film that can’t be other than this work about the Medieval artist by the great Russian director. What matters isn’t the reference, but the ability to use a film’s plot as an indeterminate space between two people who have nothing in common, and who find in B’s lengthy synopsis a denominator that no conversation about themselves would likely have revealed. Perhaps a text other than a film might have worked, but we can say that Bolano adopts the opposite approach to Vega in the context of cinematic referencing. He ignores the cultural capital of the film and attends to its emotional specifics, so specific that it allows U to cry. In both Ballard and Bolano, film becomes close to Lyotard’s notion of ana-lysing, ana-mnesing. “The film is scored into his memory”, the narrator says before B recounts the film. There is no such scoring in the references to Blier and De Palma. They are merely clever.
To conclude, and to give ‘Story-Bound’ the mildest of benefits of the doubt, we can see how someone wishing to defend Vega’s tales will take on criticisms like those to be found in American magazine Kirkus. Carol J. Wallace says, “One on-line review of Hurley's volume of translations blasts Vega's humor as "heavy-handed," "juvenile," "tacky," and "worthy of a seventh-grader's pranks." Wallace, in translating Vega, says that this isn’t fair to the writer, as the reader in translation may be missing out on subtleties in Vega’s wordplay. But we might wonder what greater benefit would come from the filmic and literary references if reading the story in the original Spanish. The problems in such instances seem those of a facile postmodernism, rather than resting on the intricacies of the language. Sure, Wallace gives an example of the difficulties in a passage from ‘Story-Bound’. In English, in the Colchie collection, the sentence reads, “Behold the rewards of the unvirtuous, declares the Condominated Wives club, while United Unscrewable Macho Pigs note the murderer’s heroic candor in turning himself  in the next day at the Hato Rey police headquarters.” Wallace says that translators have rendered the passage differently, retaining Condominated Wives club with its play on ‘condominio’ and ‘dominar’: combining to form a word that suggests these matrons are both well-sheltered in their condos and dominated, but translated United Unscrewable Macho Pigs differently. The second phrase is a reference to a well-known leftist chant: ‘El pueblo unido jamis sera vencido’ or ‘The people united will never be defeated’.
However, as Wallace says, this gets lost in both translations, with each sacrificing the “political allusion as well as the rhythm, although the hyperbolic character of the phrase is maintained.” (‘Translating Laughter: Humor as a Special Challenge in Translating the Stories of Ana Lydia Vega’) That may be so, but our purpose has only been to focus on one Vega story and see how it settles too often into an allusive easiness rather than a tangled referential complexity, an example of the postmodern as properly superficial rather than the profound postmodernism to be found in Borges, Ballard and Bolano. The difficulties in translation might not necessarily suggest a profound text; merely an intricately, reflexively erudite one. After all, if Bolano and Borges have survived translation from the Spanish, why shouldn’t Vega?
 

© Tony McKibbin