I got dem crazy sue denim blues on again

[Terrance]

It is not impossible to imagine ... a novel whose fiction would be
exciting enough so that the reader intensely felt the desire to know its
last word which precisely, at the last minute, would be denied to him,
the text pointing to itself and towards a rereading. The book would be
thus, a second time, given to the reader who could then while rereading
it, discover everything in it which in his first mad fever he had been
unable to find. 

     Benoît Peeters, "Agatha Christie: Une écriture de la lecture"
(177). 

Don't cry for me William Thompson, 
You are the one who mis-read the ending
I have the key, here
the magic eyes, now

	--Madonna & crying argentine tears down the dead lots chest



It is well known that the Nouveau Roman calls into question most of our
expectations of what a narrative should be--in terms of plot,
psychology, characters, logical and chronological series of sequences.
However, its "anti-representational" or "auto-representational" effects,
as Ricardou analyzed them at the time, are now fairly familiar to the
postmodern reader : what used to be ‘writable’ (scriptible) has since
become a little more lisible. Today, whether such narrative strategies
are called
"self-reflexive," "metatextual," "metafictional" or, preferably, 
meta-representational," post-Nouveau Roman detective novels use Nouveau
Roman textual devices while returning to what might appear to be a more
conventional way of story telling. They offer the pleasures of reading
(it is a clear return to the romanesque) and do not overtly subvert our
expectations. Beneath their innocent surface, however, what supports
these puzzles may be a very sophisticated network of infra-textual as
well as intertextual correspondences. Briefly, in these novels
metarepresentional strategies are no longer deliberately
anti-representational. Contemporary with the Nouveau Roman but distinct
from it, Georges Perec's versatile work--shifting constantly from
playful Oulipian mechanical exercises (along with Italo Calvino and
Jacques Roubaud among others) to autobiographical and extraordinarily
imaginative, often humorous, novels--has certainly anticipated this
significant evolution, one that blends intricate specific
textual constraints with a more representational narrative format. 





...it was becoming abundantly clear that all those identical detectives
in prismatic ally changing cars were figments of my persecution mania,
recurrent images based on coincidence and chance resemblance. 

		--Lolita


While living in Berlin, as a Russian émigré, Vladimir Nabokov published
several novels
in his native Russian between 1925 and 1940 under the
pseudonym "Vladimir Sirin" or "V. Sirin" (funnily misprinted in the
Pseudonyms and Nicknames Dictionary as "V. Siren," a superb
Nabokovian pun). "Sirin" is only the best-known of Nabokov's
Russian pseudonyms; he had others, among them "Vaseli
Shiskov" and "Vivian Calmbrood" (precursor of the author "Vivian
Darkbloom" of Lolita?), and in Nabokov's fiction generally there
is a virtuoso's delight in the willful shifting of identities: the
masquerade of Lolita's deadpan foreword, for instance, in which
"Humbert Humbert" is revealed as the pseudonymous creation of
one "John Ray, Jr., Ph.D." (John Ray was a seventeenth-century
English naturalist and taxonomist); the mad but inspired
commentary of "Charles Kinbote" on the long poem "Pale Fire"
by "John Francis Shade"; the eerie monologue of "Hugh Person"
("You Person") of Transparent Things.

Pseudonymous Selves
by Joyce Carol Oates



The clues he left did not reveal his identity 
but they reflected his personality, 
or at least a certain homogenous
and striking personality; 
his genre, his type of humor---at its best at least---the tone of his
brain, had affinities with my own. He mimed and mocked me. 
He planted insulting pseudonyms for my special benifit. 
His allusions were definitely highbrow. He was well read. He knew
Spanish and not French. He could converse with Brazilian waiters but he
would not be caught dead in a French restaurant. He was versed in
logodaedaly and logomancy. He was a student of sex lore. He could change
his name but he could not disguise, no matter how he slanted them, his
very peculiar t's, w's, and l's. He was a very pooir typist. He was a
first-rate reader. He read all of Shakespeare and most of the books in
his father's library by the time he was twelve. As such he could not
spell to save his life. He attained speed and fluidity in reading at the
age of six by neglecting the rudiment details of orthography and syntax.
Diego Garcia was his island of nightmare and the waves off Central
America his only refuge. His greatest hope against hope was that there
would be water nymphs on the river Styx. 

		--Lolita