Parasites, plagiarists and "fictual" stories in Charles Palliser's "A Nice Touch" and "The Catch"

211 Brno Studies in English Volume 46, No. 2, 2020 ISSN 0524-6881 | e-ISSN 1805-0867 https://doi.org/10.5817/BSE2020-2-12 Parasites, Plagiarists and “Fictual” Stories in Charles Palliser’s “A Nice Touch” And “The Catch” María Jesús Martínez-Alfaro Abstract The present article focuses on Charles Palliser’s Betrayals (1994) and analyses two of its chapters, “A Nice Touch” and “The Catch”, in order to illustrate how the seemingly random collection of sections that make up the novel constitute variations on the same themes and strategies. By discussing the connections between these two chapters, I intend to throw light on the coherence that emerges from the novel’s undeniable fragmentariness. Central among its recurrent motifs is the theme of betrayal, which the article approaches through an analysis of plagiarism from the perspective of J. Hillis Miller’s logic of the parasite. Drawing on this deconstructionist critic, I show how the undecidability of roles (betrayer-betrayed, plagiariserplagiarised, host-parasite) in the chapters under consideration is echoed by the narrative’s play with ontological levels and the blurring of boundaries between reality and fiction. The analysis leads to a final reflection on fragmentary texts that often exploit intertextuality and metafictional techniques as best fitting the contemporary worldview, and it closes with the proposal to consider Betrayals as one of the harbingers of what has become a prolific trend in twentyfirst century literature. Key words Charles Palliser; Betrayals; J. Hillis Miller; plagiarism; parasite; fragmentariness; metafiction 1. Introduction “A Nice Touch” and “The Catch” constitute, respectively, Chapter 8 and Chapter 9 of Charles Palliser’s third novel, Betrayals (1994). The writing of this Americanborn, British-based novelist resists pigeonhole classification. He has been described as “a puzzle”, a bold experimental writer that always tries something different in every book (“Charles Palliser”, web). This is specially the case with his first three novels. His first, The Quincunx (1989), is a massive work, a postmodern rewriting of Victorian fiction that bears witness to Palliser’s love of Dickens and nineteenthcentury novels in general, his relish for storytelling, his skill in pastiche and parody, and his ability to devise intricate plots. In his fourth and fifth novels – The Unburied (1999) and Rustication (2013) – he returns to Victorian-era mysteries after his utterly different second and third works. The Sensationist (1991) was to Palliser an “antidote”, a reaction to all the process of writing The Quincunx (Menegaldo 1998: 278–279). The novel is short and its plot straightforward: a story of alienation in a contemporary setting told in a fragmented and oblique prose. Out of his five 212 María Jesús Martínez-Alfaro published novels, it is the third one, Betrayals, that is the most experimental. The experience of perusing the pages of this complex metafictional text is perhaps the closest one can get to losing one’s bearings in the interior of a (textual) labyrinth.1 This is how a reviewer described Betrayals shortly after its publication: If you think of an Escher print, with all those mad staircases going back to and front and inside out, mix it up with a page from Where’s Wally?, overlay it with one of Stephen Biesty’s Incredible Cross-sections, then situate it within a Piranesi prison, you may be getting towards a visual approximation of Charles Palliser’s new novel Betrayals. But it would be an oversimple one. Because this novel is also funny: a great send-up of all sorts of ways of writing. (Pavey 1994: 17) Betrayals begins with a conventional dedication followed by another, less conventional one, which is strangely placed after the contents page.2 The first chapter takes the form of an obituary and introduces a recurring scorpion motif, which connects the belief that the scorpion stings itself to death with the way in which many of the novel’s characters are caught in a trap of their own devising. The chapters that follow appear to be a random collection of arbitrarily ordered texts that differ in terms of genre, narrative voice, characters, setting and style. They can be read as independent stories but, when viewed together, they turn out to be linked and they constitute a whole, however fragmentary and misleading.3 It has been claimed that the fragmentation of many postmodernist works “challenge[s] the literary code that predisposes the reader to look for coherence” (Fokkema 1988: 44) but, as Gerald Graff points out when discussing the strategies of certain experimental fiction, the rejection of a straightforward plot makes a novel much more dependent “on the reader’s ability to locate thematic propositions capable of giving [its] disjunctive, fragmentary, and refractory details some […] meaning or coherence” (qtd in McHale 2007: 221). This is the case with Betrayals, which certainly challenges the reader to discover a master-narrative as s/he plots his/her way through the text. In the diegesis, plotting has to do with plot as conspiracy (out of envy or revenge) and also as the outline of events on which stories, told or written by the characters themselves, are based. In both cases the characters are presented as devising plots. Likewise, the reader also engages him/herself in another kind of plotting, one that relates to a different sense of the same word: the drawing of a line that shows some sort of order or evolution, as when one plots a graph or a chart. Only as a plotter, then, can the reader see Betrayals as something other than a series of unrelated texts. As an illustration of this dynamics, I will show in what follows the ways in which two specific chapters of the book are connected with each other and with the other sections of the novel. They go back to betrayal as a central theme and to other motifs that recur throughout the novel’s chapters, linking them in such a way that the reader can make fragments cohere, but without ceasing to feel how the work flaunts, and even celebrates, its own fragmentariness. Most of the characters in the novel are diversely connected with stories, which they tell, write (on), listen to, read, review, watch on TV, etc. Quite often, char- 213 Brno Studies in English 2020, 46 (2) acters betray themselves in the stories they tell or are novelists that use their writings to set a trap to their rivals or take revenge on their enemies, as happens with Drummond Gilchrist and Cyril Pattison in “A Nice Touch” (Chapter 8) or William Henry Ireland and Jeremy Prentice in “The Catch” (Chapter 9). Moreover, most of the conflicts and betrayals between writers involve a mature, well-known novelist (like Pattison and Prentice) and a young one (like Gilchrist and Ireland). The thread becomes more and more entangled as the anxieties of would-be novelists are paralleled by those of established authors, worried about how to maintain their fame and position in a dangerously unproductive phase of their careers. Plagiarism appears in this context as an easy way out for some, or as a means to revenge for others, a fact that ultimately presents the writing world as a battle-ground in which plotter and victim frequently change places and betray their intentions. This interchangeabiblity of roles between betrayer and betrayed explains why one of the main challenges posed by the novel consists in deciding who has actually been betrayed (taken in, plagiarised, murdered, etc.) by whom. In “A Nice Touch” Drummond Gilchrist writes to Cyril Pattison because he needs advice on the new turn that his career is taking. He has already published six war novels and, after some recent flops, he has made up his mind to try his hand at the whodunit. Thus, Gilchrist contacts Pattison, who has published several successful whodunits himself, and asks him for help with his work in progress: he sends Pattison the first chapter of his new novel and awaits for his opinion and advice on how to develop the narrative in the succeeding chapters, which are then sent to him as well. Pattison writes a letter to Gilchrist after reading each instalment and it is these letters that make up “A Nice Touch”. In “The Catch” William Henry Ireland, an amateur writer with no experience whatsoever in the field of publishing, gets in touch with Jeremy Prentice, a former right-wing politician who has become a best-selling novelist. In his letter, Ireland introduces himself as an admirer in need of advice to find a publisher for his first novel. He sends Prentice the manuscript, which he describes as a “respectful imitation” that, allowing for stylistic differences, could almost be mistaken for one of Prentice’s works (Palliser 1994: 252).4 Prentice agrees to help him but this decision will eventually lead to his downfall. “The Catch” consists of the final version of the briefing paper that Prentice has written for his defence team in an attempt to explain why he committed the crime for which he is now awaiting trial. His account of the events is accordingly told in the retrospect and presented as a novel of sorts since this is, he says, the only way he knows to tell a story (B 239). Like a host too proud of what he has got, too willing to show off, Pattison in one story and Prentice in the other are similarly carried away by their own vanity: they let their respective guests in, unaware of the fact that, as J. Hillis Miller points out in his analysis of the logic of the parasite, when an alien enters the close economy of the home s/he may perhaps do so in order to “kill the father of the family, in an act that does not look like parricide, but is” (1977: 440). Drawing on Miller, I will approach the events in “A Nice Touch” and “The Catch” from the perspective provided by this logic of the parasite. Miller discussed it when he answered the arguments of critics such as Wayne Booth and M. H. Abrams, who had questioned the methods used by deconstructionists on the basis that the 214 María Jesús Martínez-Alfaro readings they produce, however witty or provoking, are “plainly and simply parasitical” (Booth’s phrase) on “the obvious or univocal reading” (Abrams’ words) (qtd in Miller 1977: 439). Miller then tried to cast doubt on the relationship between deconstructionist and “obvious” readings by dissolving the opposition host/parasite. What he argues in “The Critic as Host” is that once the logic of the parasite is resorted to, it is practically impossible to decide which of the two elements in the pair is the host and which is the parasite, which is the primary, obvious reading, and which is the secondary one. The same sort of misleading oscillation and confusion of roles apply to the relationship between the two main characters in the narratives under consideration here. Initially presented as a relationship between a strong and a weak partner, a successful author and an unsuccessful or inexperienced one, this is also a relationship between writers that get involved in plagiarism. Plagiarism is, like parasitism, an activity whose dynamics is at least dialogic and that polarises the roles of the two parties involved —the plagiariser and the plagiarised— much in the same way (and on the same basis) as parasitism may be said to polarise the roles of parasite and host. Just as Miller problematizes the distinction between host and guest in parasitism, so the differences between the characters in “A Nice Touch” and “The Catch” turn out to be not so clear as they initially seemed. “Parasite” is, after all, one more of the para words of deconstruction, “para” being a double antithetical prefix in that it simultaneously suggests proximity and distance, interiority and exteriority. Opposites relate in such a way here that a thing in “para” not only contains the two poles of the antithesis but can also be regarded as the boundary itself, a permeable membrane that connects inside and outside (Miller 1977: 441). In this novel made of so many stories that examine self-reflectively the process and the tools of storytelling, metafictionality proves itself liminal, in line with Currie’s idea of metafiction as a discourse at the borderline between fiction and criticism, and also between reality and representation (1995: 2). With these ideas in mind, one can approach “A Nice Touch” and “The Catch” as illustrating the instability of apparent opposites that affects not only the notion of betrayal (betrayer versus betrayed) in the novel, but also the relationship between fragmentation and coherence, and between the fictional and the real. 2. Dangerous liaisons: The logic of the parasite As Miller (1977: 442) explains, “parasite” comes from the Greek parasitos: beside the grain. This means that the parasite was initially, according to its etymological origins, something positive, a fellow guest with whom the host shared the food, there with him beside the grain. And this is what the relationships Pattison-Gilchrist and Prentice-Ireland seem to be like at the beginning. Pattison is glad to be one of the people “beta-testing” Gilchrist’s novel; he promises to be sincere and not to mince words when it comes to telling him what he thinks of his work since “writing is too important for that” (B 207). Similarly, Prentice receives Ireland’s manuscript and reads it straightaway, despite, he says, his rather busy schedule (B 253). 215 Brno Studies in English 2020, 46 (2) The positive meaning of the word parasite was soon superseded by the negative one, as happens in the two stories. Thus, a “parasite” became a professional dinner guest, someone who cadged invitations but never entertained in return. From this developed the two main meanings the word has now: the biological and the social (Miller 1977: 442). The initial situation in “A Nice Touch” and “The Catch” may appear to be one of symbiotic mutualism,5 where the host provides resources and the symbiont also provides some service in return that benefits the host. From the very beginning Pattison and Prentice are described as not the type that gives without taking anything in exchange. Indeed, Gilchrist and Ireland give them a gift of sorts but, playing with the etymology of the word, the original proto-Germanic geftiz is also at the origin of the word meaning “poison” (in German, Danish and other languages). As is the case with well-intended gifts, poisoned gifts keep the chain of exchanges in endless motion. This being so, the events recounted in these two stories have both a before and an after that must be borne in mind: it is something that happened in the past that explains why Gilchrist and Ireland contact Pattison and Prentice, respectively, and, similarly, the latter suffering the consequences of the poisoned gifts they receive does not put an end to the interaction but, quite the contrary, keeps it going. In as far as Gilchrist is concerned, he offers Pattison a scheme to discredit Morag McCoo, Pattison’s former literary agent whom he replaced by Tarquin Bone. His career then took off while Morag’s went from bad to worse. She gave up agenting and began writing a column in The Daily Scot under the pen name Tabby Squeill. She uses this column to speak ill of Pattison, which she does, according to him, out of pure spite (B 214). Thus, as Pattison helps Gilchrist with the plot of his novel, Gilchrist provides him with another plot to help in his revenge on Morag. He suggests faking a story according to which Pattison would have plagiarised his first novel from him. Pattison should not deny it, that is, until Morag accuses him of plagiarism in The Daily Scot. Gilchrist will then write to the newspaper’s editor and confirm there is no truth whatsoever in the information published by Morag. Thus, Pattison’s reputation will not be damaged and he will at last be able to sue her for libel. The dynamics of “The Catch” goes in the same line, developing the theme of plagiarism to a further extent. Through the plot of his first (autobiographical) novel, we learn that Jeremy Prentice had to leave politics after a scandal concerning his involvement in fraudulent business (B 248). Yet he pulled himself together and turned the tables on his enemies of the Left by writing a novel as close to facts as it could be. For Richer, For Poorer became “the biggest-selling first novel since Gone With the Wind” (B 248). Two more novels followed, cold war spy thrillers not so different from Pattison’s, with whom Prentice also shares literary agent (Tarquin Bone). Prentice’s success earned him literary enemies to be added to his political rivals, writers like Auberon Sackville to whom Prentice admits he would “kill to have written one of your [Sackville’s] books. I’d kill to have written a book that got so-called highbrows in a flutter” (B 242). Prentice is in the middle of a writer’s block when he receives Ireland’s manuscript, The Twister, which deeply impresses him. What happens afterwards closely mirrors the events in The Twister, where an amateur writer – Thomas Chatterton6 – proposes a Cabinet 216 María Jesús Martínez-Alfaro Minister and successful novelist going through a writer’s block – Godfrey Bellamy – to publish his (Chatterton’s) first novel as if it were Bellamy’s. Bellamy could improve the manuscript’s weakest parts, the public would buy the Bellamy brand-name and they would share the profits. Similarly, Prentice proposes to make some changes in the manuscript and publish it as if he were its real author. Ireland agrees and leaves the whole business in Prentice’s hands. Yet this is nothing but Ireland’s poisoned gift to his host. As Pattison and Prentice rise to the bait, their role as hosts takes a new tinge. On the one hand, the host and the parasite share the food. On the other, the host is himself the food, the very substance consumed by the parasite. This fact relates the word to another sense of the term, which is yet unconnected etymologically: the host as (sacrificial) victim, therefrom the Host in the Eucharist (Miller 1977: 442). Pattison and Prentice respectively welcome Gilchrist and Ireland into their lives but, in doing so, they become the victims of their guests – the meaning of “guest” oscillating between a cherished presence/friend, on the one hand, and an alien invader/enemy, on the other (442). In the light of what happens afterwards, it is clear that Pattison and Prentice made a mistake when they underestimated his friends/enemies. It is not only that, contrary to appearances, the initially weaker party/the guest (Gilchrist, Ireland) may turn out to be stronger than the other/the host (Pattison, Prentice); it is also that it becomes more and more difficult to determine which character is the guest and which is the host in each story. This confusion of roles should not come as a surprise in the light of Miller’s contention that “the words ‘host’ and ‘guest’ go back in fact to the same etymological root: ghos-ti, stranger, guest, host, properly ‘someone with whom one has reciprocal duties of hospitality.’ [...] A host is a guest, and a guest is a host” (442). Thus, the conventional host-parasite (or host-guest) antithesis is based on a self-subverting rationale. An antithetical relation exists not only between the two words in the pair, but also within each word itself: the host is the sharer of the food and the food/the victim itself, the guest is a friendly presence and an alien invader. Each sense opposes the other and simultaneously subverts the apparently unequivocal relation of polarity on which the whole scheme is grounded. Thus, when it comes to “A Nice Touch” and “The Catch”, it is practically impossible to tell for sure who is the victim and who the parasite, which character feeds off the other, which one has the last word, when the exchange of poisoned gifts began, and how far it will go. One cannot tell, either, whether the stories at a certain diegetic level incorporate elements from the one above or it is the other way round, and, by extension, whether fiction mirrors reality or it is reality that feeds off fiction. 3. “A Nice Touch” Enough clues are dropped throughout “A Nice Touch” for the reader to realise that Pattison, the successful author apparently helping the less talented Gilchrist, the host entertaining the guest, is also a parasite of sorts himself. According to the Tabby column in The Daily Scot, this “smooth-talking Oxonian is notorious for 217 Brno Studies in English 2020, 46 (2) dropping people who have helped his career, and even going to humiliate and ridicule them”. As to his books, they are “flashy, clever-clever, and meretricious in the most literal sense of the word” (B 208). From what Pattison says in one of his letters, it can be inferred that Morag (his former agent and author of the Tabby column) helped him with his first three novels, but she “grossly overestimated her input” (B 219). But did she? Moreover, is there any truth in the story Pattison agrees to plant on Morag about him plagiarising from Gilchrist’s work? Pattison argues that nobody who knows them both as writers could believe that (B 234) but, as it turns out, the idea is not so preposterous as Pattison suggests. In all probability, Pattison used, parasite-like, Morag’s and Gilchrist’s ideas for his novels. Not only did he take all the merit for himself but he also abused them until they decided to give him a dose of his own medicine. Gilchrist’s working title is The Year of the Talkies, but he will change it to The Quintain when the final version is published. Pattison looks up quintain in the dictionary to find out that it “comes from the Middle Ages when it meant ‘the target in jousting-practice which the rider aimed at and which swung round and unseated him if he wasn’t clever enough to get out of the way” (B 236). Pattison cannot see what the title has to do with the novel, but the reader can guess that Gilchrist’s work is nothing but the weapon which is about to “unseat” the rider/ Pattison: The Quintain turns out to be a key piece in the plot devised by Gilchrist and Morag, partners in revenge but also in love. As Prentice’s letters succeed one another, Gilchrist’s narrative emerges as a kind of caterpillar that progressively takes different forms in the reader’s eyes. Like a caterpillar, it should be read as a promise of something else. One should decipher the story as one does with an indirect satire: the novel’s settings, characters and events should be interpreted as a cover that hides the real target. The cover is double, though: first, there is the version Pattison reads – The Year of the Talkies – set in Los Angeles Chinatown and dealing with the lives and intrigues of a series of characters connected with the world of Hollywood at the time of the first talkies. Then, there is The Quintain as a final version of the working manuscript, where the action is transferred to contemporary Glasgow to deal with novel writers, agents and literature, rather than script-writers, producers and cinema. The Daily Scot Tabby column announces the (still unpublished) novel as “a wonderfully readable and witty thriller with an extraordinary real-life story of malice and deceit behind it” (B 236, emphasis added). Thus, what the novel is actually about, the “real-life story”, is still to be found under the cover that The Quintain constitutes: unaware of it, Pattison is actually reading a story about himself and people known to him. Removing the layers of Gilchrist’s narrative is accordingly one of the challenges facing the reader, since most of what s/he has access to in this chapter relates to the outer cover – The Year of the Talkies – as referred to by Pattison in his letters. These are the main correspondences: 218 María Jesús Martínez-Alfaro The Year of the Talkies The Quintain “A Nice Touch” Los Angeles in the 1920s Contemporary Glasgow Contemporary Glasgow The Hollywood movie industry The Scottish literary scene The Scottish literary scene Chartres Pettifer (and Zadonsky, Mr Big, and Stetson) Chalmers Pettitson Cyril Pattison Blacker (and Jones, and Faquhar) Ringan Gilhaize Drummond Gilchrist Mo-Lak Moira Morag Taw-Kwee Torquil Tarquin Bone Table 1. Narratives and correspondences in “A Nice Touch” (Chapter 8 of Betrayals) This table is a simplification, firstly, because there are more characters in The Year of the Talkies than in “A Nice Touch”, even if they often represent different sides of the characters they actually stand for; secondly, the table has three columns but it could as well have four, since there are indeed further correspondences which expand the parallelisms to the world outside the text. It would be perhaps more appropriate to say “outside”, because what these correspondences ultimately do is problematize the distinction between inside and outside, thus turning the narrative into a hymeneal membrane like that inherent in all words in “para”. If it is difficult not to notice the resemblance between the names of Chartres Pettifer, Chalmers Pettitson and Cyril Pattison (all C. P.), it is equally difficult not to connect them, eventually, with that of the novel’s author: Charles Palliser (C. P., as well). Moreover, the titles of Pattison’s first three novels are The Quintessence, The Sensation-Seeker and The Finger Man. The first two, at least, are as close as they could be to Palliser’s The Quincunx and The Sensationist. Pattison published the three works with Cowgate, Palliser with Cannongate. Pattison’s success was followed by his decision to abandon his Scottish agent, Morag McCoo, and change her for the London-based Tarquin Bone. When The Quincunx became a best-seller Palliser also dropped his agent in Scotland and took up a new one in London. Pattison wrote The Quintessence while he was still teaching full-time (B 214), and Palliser wrote The Quincunx while working as a lecturer in Strathclyde University. After the novel’s success, he gave up teaching to become a fulltime writer, as Pattison seems to have done. Moreover, if the Oxonian Cyril Pattison is a version or a caricature, rather, of Palliser himself, who also studied at Oxford University, so can the Scottish literary mafia in The Quintain and in “A Nice Touch” be viewed as a caricature of the Scottish literary world that Palliser is presumably well-acquainted with. Thus, although there are some clues that caution the reader against assuming a real-life origin for the events/characters in this and other sections of Betrayals, so are there other clues that encourage him/her to do so. The effect of all these contradictory signals is to disorient the reader and, more specifically, to disorient him/her as to the relationship between fiction and reality. If “A Nice Touch” is an indirect satire, is it so only within the diegesis, its target being characters and events that belong to the (made-up) world 219 Brno Studies in English 2020, 46 (2) of Betrayals? Or rather, does the invective affect not one but two different (or perhaps not so different) ontological levels, namely, that of the fictional Cyril Pattison and that of the real Charles Palliser? This confusion on the reader’s part is related to a kind of discourse which Gary Saul Morson refers to as “metaparody” and whose dynamics he explains in the following terms: We reserved the term “parody” for those double-voiced texts or utterances that clearly indicate which of their conflicting voices is to be regarded as authoritative. The audience of a parody – that is, the readers who identify a text as a parody – knows for sure with which voice they are expected to agree. We may consider a class of texts that are designed so that readers do not know. In texts of this type, each voice may be taken to be parodic of the other; readers are invited to entertain each of the resulting contradictory interpretations in potentially endless succession. In this sense, such texts remain fundamentally open, and if readers should choose either interpretation as definitive, they are likely to discover that this choice has been anticipated and is itself the target of parody. Caught between contradictory hermeneutic directives [...] readers may witness the alternation of statement and counterstatement, interpretation and antithetical interpretation, up to a conclusion which fails, often ostentatiously, to resolve their hermeneutic perplexity. (Morson 1989: 81) Introducing this explanation with a quotation from Borges, Morson relates metaparody to the works written by the inhabitants of Tlön, in the sense that these books “invariably include both the thesis and the antithesis, the rigorous pro and con of a doctrine. A book which does not contain its counterbook is considered incomplete” (qtd in Morson 1989: 81). Readers of metaparody should accordingly approach the metaparodic work not as the compromise between book and counterbook, but “as their ultimately inconclusive dialogue” (81). In the light of Morson’s views, it could be argued that the undecidability affecting the reader’s (conflicting) interpretations of “A Nice Touch” actually stems from the fact that the chapter can be read as a metaparody of the mechanisms associated with indirect satire. The reader may feel impelled to trace the target to the outside of the text but, in keeping with the contradictory nature of metaparody, the impulse to find links which connect the fictional world with Palliser’s own is counterbalanced by the text’s warnings against taking such a course of action. There is no compromise between the two hermeneutic strategies, but only an inconclusive dialogue that places the reader in a quandary. None of the two possibilities can be excluded in favour the other, looked down as secondary to, or parasitical on the right, effective interpretation. This permeability and confusion between interpretations and realms eventually lead the reader to look into Pattison’s role beyond the events recounted in “A Nice Touch”. It can be inferred that the letters he wrote (and we are reading) have been included by Gilchrist in his book, which accounts for the last message Pattison leaves on Gilchrist’s answering machine: if there is anything worth reading in the latter’s work that is, Pattison says, what he himself has written. May it 226 María Jesús Martínez-Alfaro 5. Conclusion The word “betrayal” has two main meanings: treachery and revelation. One may betray somebody by being disloyal to him/her. The second meaning, however, refers to the action of making known, of unveiling something which was intended to remain hidden. It is in this sense that one can betray him/herself (and/or his/ her feelings, intentions, etc.). Yet it is not always easy to keep these two meanings apart: betraying oneself implies a kind of treachery in which subject and object coincide, while betraying somebody else also reveals (betrays) something about the betrayer. Betrayal, in both senses of the term, constitutes a recurrent motif in the novel, as illustrated by “A Nice Touch” and “The Catch”. The characters devise careful plots to deceive or take revenge on others, but they also betray themselves: more often than not, the character who sets the trap falls into it himself, and so, the plotters end up by being caught in their own machinations while the victims eventually victimise those that had initially plotted against them. Like the novel itself, the action referred to by the title echoes the winding structure of the labyrinth, moving now forwards now backwards as plotter and victim change places. In this complex game, which follows the logic of the parasite as explained by Miller, (apparently) polar notions cease to be mutually exclusive. As happens with the two sections analysed here once they are seen in connection, the others in the novel can also be said to constitute variations on the same themes. In “A Nice Touch” and “The Catch” the motif of betrayal is explicitly connected with treason/revenge between writers, or between writers and literary agents. Plagiarism emerges here as a suitable question in a novel that is highly concerned with writing, and with the exploration of some conflicting areas in the worlds of literature and the academy at the end of the twentieth century —a time marked by poststructuralist attitudes to language, literature and history. “The history of English literature,” Peter Ackroyd has said, “is really the history of plagiarism. I discovered that when I was doing [a biography of] T.S. Eliot. He was a great plagiarist […]. I see nothing wrong with it” (Smith 1987: 60). And yet, all contemporary suspicion regarding the “new” and “original” work of art coexists with both aesthetic and legal categories of plagiarism. Plagiarism in the novel works simultaneously as an excuse for laughter and an invitation to reflect on serious issues, an instrument for personal revenge based on the importance of originality and a means of producing stories out of stories, different but ultimately related to one another in the novel. As I hope to have convincingly argued, Betrayals’ fragmentary nature is counterbalanced by the many lines that connect the work’s sections and that make it a coherent, albeit fragmentary whole. Brian Richardson, among others, has referred to fragmentary fictions like Betrayals as “unnatural narratives”, texts that “contain significant antimimetic events, characters, settings, or frames” and that “violate mimetic expectations and practices of realism” (2015: 3). As we have seen, though, things can easily turn into what seemed to be their opposite, so it is worth considering whether the fragmentariness of Betrayals, its multiple layers of interrelatedness and its metafictional games illustrate, after all, a more realistic 227 Brno Studies in English 2020, 46 (2) way of depicting the world. As Struzziero explains, these ingredients sometimes have the effect of evoking “the polymorphous and chaotic essence of modern life, which, in its complexity, resists full comprehension and does not yield to a conventional narrative” (2019: 95). Does then Betrayals point to a fragmentary realism of sorts that has bloomed in the last years? I think so. Thus, even if postmodernism has been declared dead and “over” (Hutcheon 2002: 165), the kind of fragmented narrative that, like Betrayals, exploits sprawling but dexterously controlled metafictional and intertextual games has taken hold and proliferated in the 21st century. In “The Rise of the Fragmented Novel” (2013), Ted Goia discusses the resurgence of fragmentary literature, with works like Ian McEwan’s Atonement (2001), David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas (2004), Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad (2010), Hari Kunzu’s Gods Without Men (2011), and Zadie Smith’s NW (2012) cited by the author as examples of texts that develop, adapt and transcend their postmodernist predecessors’ experiments with fragmentary narratives as a means to telling about our contemporary world. Betrayals is certainly among those predecessors. Its complexity, dealt with here through the analysis of “A Nice Touch” and “The Catch”, may deter as much as attract readers but, given the increasing number and relevance of novels that build on similar techniques and strategies as best fitting our present (post-postmodern) times, Palliser’s work should be considered among the harbingers of what has started to be seen (Edwards 2019, Guignery and Drag 2019) as a distinct trend in twenty-first century literary fiction. Notes 1 For an approach to Betrayals as a labyrinthine novel that fits the features of the rhizome/the rhizomatic maze, see Martínez-Alfaro (2014). 2 The dedicatees here combine, in separate paragraphs, the names of people known to Palliser (in roman type) and the names of some of the novel’s characters (in italics). The latter are thanked for their “unwitting” help with this novel and are also warned to read their chapters “in the right order and then decide who has been betrayed by whom”. Thus, the same instance addresses both people and characters, which eventually suggests a figure that can be simultaneously related to Charles Palliser and to someone in the diegetic world. From the very beginning, then, the novel plays with ontological hesitation. 3 The obituary in Chapter 1 is followed by such diverse narratives as a mini-Decameron in which passengers on a snowbound train tell tales to kill time; a reader’s report on a manuscript that blends hospital romance with serial murder; a scholarly introduction to a book of critical theory; a collection of letters; a convict’s written account of the events that led him to commit the crime he has been charged with; a Moorish tale in the tradition of The Arabian Nights; a review published in a newspaper; a critical essay; etc. 4 Hereafter the abbreviation B will be used in parenthetical references for quotations from the novel. 5 “Mutualism” is one of several types of symbiosis. The term “symbiosis” has traditionally been used to describe mutually beneficial associations, but symbiotic interactions have proved to be more complex than this definition suggests. As Leung and Poulin point out, although mutualists and parasites “are from opposite lines 228 María Jesús Martínez-Alfaro of the spectrum in reality the lines are blurred” and associations can easily “switch between mutualism and parasitism” in a sort of ever-changing dynamics (2008: 107). 6 A significant name when it comes to literary fraud. 7 The plot of Archer’s Not a Penny More, Not a Penny Less is not very different from Prentice’s version of the story. The novel has often been read as a fictionalised revenge on the rogues who duped and bankrupted Archer in the Canadian company scam that ruined his (first) political career. Acknowledgements The research carried out for the writing of this article was financed by the Spanish Ministry of Economy, Industry and Competitiveness (MINECO) in collaboration with the European Regional Development Fund (DGI/ERDF) (code FFI2017-84258-P). The author is also thankful for the support of the Government of Aragón (code H03_20R). References Charles Palliser (2017) EditorEric.com, http://www.editoreric.com/greatlit/authors/Palliser.html. Accessed on December 9, 2019. Currie, Mark (ed. and intro.) (1995) Metafiction. New York: Longman. Derrida, Jacques (1976) Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorti Spivak. Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press. Edwards, Caroline (2019) The networked novel. In: O’Gorman, Daniel and Robert Eaglestone (eds.) The Routledge Companion to Twenty-First Century Literary Fiction. London: Routledge, 13–24. Fokkema, Douve W. (1984) Literary History, Modernism and Postmodernism. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. 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A Journal of Literary Studies and Linguistics IV (1), 53–69. McHale, Brian (2007) Postmodernist Fiction. London: Routledge. Miller, J. Hillis (1977) The critic as host. Critical Inquiry 3 (3), 439–448. Menegaldo, Gilles (1998) Entretien avec Charles Palliser, La Licorne (Poitiers) 44, 267–283. Morson, Gary Saul (1989) Parody, history, and metaparody. In: Morson, Gary Saul and Caryl Emerson (eds.) Rethinking Bakhtin. Extensions and Challenges. Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 63–86. Palliser, Charles (1994) Betrayals. London: Cape. Pavey, Ruth (1994) Pivk ‘n mix ‘n match: Betrayals by Charles Palliser. The Observer, March 27: 17. 229 Brno Studies in English 2020, 46 (2) Richardson, Brian (2015) Unnatural Narrative: Theory, History, and Practice. Columbus: Ohio State University Press. Smith, Amanda (1987) Peter Ackroyd. Interview with Amanda Smith. Publishers Weekly 232 (26): 59–60. Struzziero, Maria Antonietta (2019) “Make it New” to return as rupture and difference: A study of Jeanette Winterson’s The Gap of Time. In: O’Gorman, Daniel and Robert Eaglestone (eds.) The Routledge Companion to Twenty-First Century Literary Fiction. London: Routledge, 91–103. is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of English and German Philology at the University of Zaragoza (Spain), where she teaches English literature courses. She is one of the members of a research team that specialises in contemporary narrative in English and is currently working on ethics, trauma, memory, and transmodernity. Martínez-Alfaro’s research and publications deal with the above-mentioned fields, with a special interest in Holocaust literature. Address: María Jesús Martínez-Alfaro, Departamento de Filología Inglesa y Alemana, Facultad de Filosofía y Letras. Campus universitario s/n. Universidad de Zaragoza, 50009 Zaragoza, Spain.[[email protected]] This work can be used in accordance with the Creative Commons BY-NC-ND 4.0 International license terms and conditions (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/legalcode). This does not apply to works or elements (such as image or photographs) that are used in the work under acontractual license or exception or limitation to relevant rights.