Transtocar, Three Fragments

Introduction: The Gender and Queer Politics of Translation: New Approaches

that poetry is a better path to truth than philosophy since it effectively mimics the act of formation of the world in all its complexity. The sixth chapter, “Distinctio: l’ordre des choses,” describes the innovations Du Bartas makes in the first three days, showing how the four elements provide the hermeneutic framework to organize the physical world. Chapter seven, “Oranatus: les langages de la science,” elaborates a new scientific and poetic language capable of representing the conflicting aspects of the liminal zone of Du Bartas’s Creation. Giacomotto-Charra concludes by pointing out that La Sepmaine unites sixteenth-century poetic and philosophical writings; like the elemental world which it describes, Du Bartas’s poetry is subject to circular generation and is constantly redefining itself. This reader would have liked a proposal for new nomenclature, but GiacomottoCharra merely restates the fact that the particularity of such poetry is that it escapes not only definition but also our systems of representation. Such ambivalence, combined with extensive quotation on mimesis from Tasso, make for a disappointing end to an otherwise thorough and well-researched work which focuses on Aristotle but relies on countless others to elucidate Du Bartas’s unique take on the Creation myth. University of Mary Washington (VA) Brooke Donaldson Di Lauro HOUPPERMANS, SJEF, et al., eds. Where Never Before: Beckett’s Poetics of Elsewhere/La poétique de l’ailleurs. Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd’hui 21. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2009. ISBN 978-90-420-2814-2. Pp. 256. 52 a. Volume twenty-one of Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd’hui takes its title from Beckett’s late poem “Brief Dream”: “Go where never before / no sooner there than there always.” As a whole, the essays comprising this volume can be said to serve, oftentimes beautifully, as a reflection on this enigmatic theme. Twenty years into its history, the review both returns to its origins and opens up exciting new pathways toward what might lie in its future. The editors begin with a note tracing the history of what has quickly become the essential international forum for Beckett studies, as it was launched by Sjef Houppermans and Matthijs Engelberts, both still acting editors, along with Marius Buning, who passed away in 2008. This issue, then, is in honor of Buning, whose tireless devotion to the journal is described by the editors with heartfelt grace and appreciation. Alongside his editorial work, Buning published two important essays in the journal (in volumes one and nine), in which he primarily approached Beckett through the themes of allegory and negative theology. The lasting contribution of Buning’s work is acknowledged by a few dedicatory essays here, notably those by Chris Ackerley and Mary Bryden, and his approach to Beckett is most thoroughly and lucidly explored by Anthony Uhlmann in the volume’s remarkable opening piece, “Negative Allegory.” Uhlmann deftly explicates the two themes originally undertaken by Buning and explores how they can be taken together as a single entity, one that might lead to a rich and as yet unexplored means of understanding Beckett’s work. Uhlmann borrows chiefly from Paul de Man’s now canonical conception of modern allegory, understood here as a rhetorical system “in which one system of signs doubles or reflects a second system” (19); it is a mode of signification that is “fragmented and subjective” (18), rather than reliant 950 FRENCH REVIEW 85.5 on the compulsive one-to-one correspondence with which many generations associated the form. Freed from the strictures of direct correspondence, modern allegory becomes “a form that allows literary texts to engage with abstract systems, or fragments of abstract systems, so as to generate meanings that bring us into contact with these systems” (23). Thus understood, allegory becomes structurally analogous to the method of the via negativa, in that both become productive means of expressing the unsayable, of finding meaning in what in itself remains, as it were, unnamable. While Uhlmann most explicitly tackles these two paths toward understanding Beckett, many of the volume’s remaining essays might be called implicit examples of what Uhlmann calls “negative allegory” (25), or the production of meaning out of the apparent sign of its absence. Uhlmann’s formulation is remarkable...

Becoming the MobMike Brookes and Mike Pearson's Coriolan/us Penelope Cole (bio) People milling about, chatting. Drizzly rain. The bang of port-o-potty doors. The rustle of paper. Smells of beer, wet earth, water. Huge blue doors. More people. Headphones? Laughter. Excitement. Disquiet. Wonder. Brrrr. And then, pushing from behind, WHAT? A horn honking, WHERE? Swiveling our heads to see . . . a Van?! driving through the assembled masses? OUT OF THE WAY! Blue doors sliding open, visions of a throng of people on movie screens football fields away. That's US! And then we're in. The "play" has begun. Hangar 858, RAF St. Athan, in the Vale of Glamorgan, Wales, was the site of Mike Brookes and Mike Pearson's 2012 production Coriolan/us, produce?d by the National Theatre Wales in association with the Royal Shakespeare Company, commissioned for the World Shakespeare Festival. A conflation of Shakespeare's Coriolanus and Brecht's adaptation titled Coriolan, the action of the play (both dramatic and physical) is located predominantly in public spaces replete with crowds of supporters and/or detractors. From the beginning, the principle concept driving the production was the mobs embedded in the architecture of the two texts, which informed the scale and scope of the site and, in turn, determined the use of multimedia within the production. In this article, I explore how the aircraft hangar and installed scenic elements as well as the collective movement through the space by the audience/viewers and the performers, combined with projected images and sound piped through headphones, invited us to reimagine our (the audience/viewers') place and identity in Pearson and Brookes's world of Coriolan/us.1 The crowds of people prominent in both Shakespeare's original text, appearing in twenty-five out of twenty-nine scenes, and Brecht's adaptation, wherein [End Page 104] "the people" are the focus of the action, spurred Brookes and Pearson's interest in the plays. In the Coriolan/us program, Mike Brookes explains how this central image of the masses influenced the production. "In our imaginings, from the inception of this work, Coriolan/us was always going to unfold amongst a crowd, as it moved and flowed around the open public space of this event."2 Mike Pearson, in his article "National Theatre of Wales's Coriolan/us: A 'Live Film,'" noted how crowded the world of Shakespeare's Coriolanus is and remarked on the multiplicity of generalized public locations (battlefields, streets, marketplaces, and the like) required by the text.3 Based on these and other features found in the texts of the plays, Pearson recounts that the "decision was made . . . to regard the audience from time to time and unwittingly perhaps, as citizens, army, bystanders, film extras, etc., and to achieve the production . . . with only two Citizens and two Tribunes . . . No massed supernumeraries, no rioters, no foot soldiers to hinder the momentum of the events."4 Thus, the audience/viewers were, from the first, cast in the role of the populace of Rome, the body politic, citizens, soldiers, and rioters, to occupy, inhabit, and define the public spaces within and upon which the action takes place. Additionally, the movement of these multitudes figured in the imagining of the production. In the program notes, Brookes articulates a dynamic movement flowing through an open space, "act following act, one then leading another, the rolling consequences of our choices and reactions accumulating as they ripple on through the body and structure of a social forum constituted by all those present" (emphasis mine).5 This social forum, the various peoples of ancient Rome, was to be created, in theory and in practice, in large part by the choices in movement the audience/viewers made as they negotiated the site, physically, mentally, and emotionally, in response to the production choices, the complex choreography of the performers, and the architecture of the aircraft hangar. To accommodate the flowing movement of the imagined crowds of Rome as well as the scope of the action of the play, Brookes and Pearson sought a large, wide-open space that could be easily traversed. Brookes states, "It was always going to happen to scale. A large open place...

This book re-reads a major theorist in terms of the current crisis in sovereignty and global capital. In this book, 13 experts revisit de Man's account of Rousseau and what he calls a 'Theotropic Allegory' (the second to last step before 'Political Allegory', on the road toward a general theory of Textual Allegory). They frame de Man's readings of Rousseau in a 'post-theoretical' landscape concerned with political theology, occupied with the transformation of the western model of sovereignty, and faced with the apparent collapse of the capitalist global contract. The volume is framed by an introduction by leading de Man scholar, Martin McQuillan, and concludes with an original and previously unpublished text by Paul de Man. It presents the first published responses to a recently published de Man manuscript. It relates de Man's work to key topics in contemporary Theory. It features an outstanding list of contributors. It includes an original unpublished text by Paul de Man on Nietzsche.

Mythological Indifference in Schelling and Nerval

The main objective of this edited volume is to explore the motivations, decision making processes, and consequences, when older people consider or accomplish return migration to their place of origin; and also to raise the public policy profile of this increasingly important subject. The book examines in detail a range of themes affecting return migrations, including: family ties, obligations and their emotive strengths; comparative quality, and cost, of health and welfare provision in host and home countries; older age transitions and cultural affinity with homeland; and psychological adjustment, belonging and attachment to place. The wide ranging collection covers refugee, political, heritage, life-style, or family-oriented return. There is varying emphasis on permanent return, non-permanent returns, and visits to place of origin, which reflects variety in strategic approaches to return migrations and mobilities in later life. The book is unique in bringing this breadth and depth of exploration to bear on older people’s return movements, providing a focused synthesis that allows a neglected subject to receive due attention in an era of ageing and more mobile societies. Chapters reflect a variety of quantitative, qualitative and ethnographic methods of enquiry, by researchers from different disciplines, including social gerontology, anthropology, migration and human geography perspectives. The book will be of use and interest to public service providers, government departments, agencies working with and for older people, policy developers, research bodies, and commercial organizations with interest and experience in travel and tourism.

The main objective of this edited volume is to explore the motivations, decision making processes, and consequences, when older people consider or accomplish return migration to their place of origin; and also to raise the public policy profile of this increasingly important subject. The book examines in detail a range of themes affecting return migrations, including: family ties, obligations and their emotive strengths; comparative quality, and cost, of health and welfare provision in host and home countries; older age transitions and cultural affinity with homeland; and psychological adjustment, belonging and attachment to place. The wide ranging collection covers refugee, political, heritage, life-style, or family-oriented return. There is varying emphasis on permanent return, non-permanent returns, and visits to place of origin, which reflects variety in strategic approaches to return migrations and mobilities in later life. The book is unique in bringing this breadth and depth of exploration to bear on older people’s return movements, providing a focused synthesis that allows a neglected subject to receive due attention in an era of ageing and more mobile societies. Chapters reflect a variety of quantitative, qualitative and ethnographic methods of enquiry, by researchers from different disciplines, including social gerontology, anthropology, migration and human geography perspectives. The book will be of use and interest to public service providers, government departments, agencies working with and for older people, policy developers, research bodies, and commercial organizations with interest and experience in travel and tourism.

Reviewed by: Arvo Pärt: Sounding the Sacred ed. by Peter C. Bouteneff, Jeffers Engelhardt, and Robert Saler Bissera Pentcheva Peter C. Bouteneff, Jeffers Engelhardt, and Robert Saler, eds. Arvo Pärt: Sounding the Sacred. New York: Fordham University Press, 2021. 256 pp. This rich collection of essays focuses on the music of celebrated Estonian composer Arvo Pärt and explores the phenomenology of the music’s sound in performance and its links with theology. The range of essays is broad, from the artistic climate in late socialism to medieval plainchant, psychoacoustics, and Sufi spiritual practices. In all of the essays, the center is the reverberation produced by [End Page 144] Pärt’s tintinnabuli music, a compositional technique based on a two-part structure: a melody M-voice accompanied by a T[intinnabuli]-voice of arpeggio triads built on the home note of the governing tonality. The effect of this music is to focus attention on the fragility of the sonic decay—the reverberation. Reverberation is dependent on the acoustics of the space, and it refocuses the attention of the listener on the aural decay rather than the individual pitch played. Sound studies, with its interdisciplinary methodology, offers an appropriate platform from which to examine and theorize the aural in its temporal and spiritual dimensions. As the editors write, “sound studies is concerned with the phenomenology and materiality of the auditory event that is sound” (3). The introduction explains the concept of translation as seen in many different manifestations of Pärt’s music—as medieval plainchant poured into a modern idiom, sacred text into music, and theology into sound. Walter Benjamin’s essay on translation, while not referred to by any of the editors or authors, could help flesh out the concept of translation and uncover its relationship to Scripture and the sacred (“The Task of the Translator,” Translation––Theory and Practice: A Historical Reader, 2006). A good translation is form, inviting the original to resound in it. Benjamin writes, “genuine translation is translucid: it does not veil the original text, nor shadow it. Rather it allows the radiance universal language, a radiance intensified by the particular idiom, to fall the more brightly on the original” (305). Translation as form is a reverberant space that amplifies and brightens the original, allowing the universal language––the divine––to resonate. Benjamin’s definition connects to the two major ideas of this volume: reverberation and the sacred. A more intensive engagement with these two concepts and a clearer recognition of the link between them in the introduction would have helped the reader understand this project better and follow the subsequent arguments. Bouteneff’s essay, which follows the introduction, continues with the concept of translation, arguing that “what we are hearing then is the sound of the composer’s faith made accessible through its translation into music” (19). Toomas Siitan, too, recognizes Pärt’s spiritual-driven tintinnabuli style, articulating its manifestation in some of Pärt’s Soviet-period film-music compositions and in his experimentation with text setting and medieval Flemish polyphony. The focus on Pärt’s Soviet-period production is maintained in the next two essays, by Christopher May and Kevin Karnes, respectively. May draws attention to Pärt’s film soundtracks as a creative laboratory of what eventually emerges as the tintinnabuli style. May’s findings challenge the established narrative, promoted by the composer himself, of the rupture between the tintinnabuli style and his other music compositions. Karnes explores alternative or underground venues, little known in the West, where Pärt sought to unveil his new compositions, such as Lediņš Student Discotheque club in Riga in the 1970s. Both May and Karnes reconstruct a much more complex and polyvalent late socialism, drawing on the work of anthropologist Alexei Yurchak and music historian Levon Hakobian. Both essays encourage research into Pärt’s film music, which, despite the current dominant narrative, shares in the artistic objectives of his concert music and developed below the radar of censorship (45). The next section, on phenomenology, opens with Bouteneff’s conversation with Paul Hillier about what it means to sing Pärt’s music of sparse scores, which require exacting purity...

The paper focuses on the challenge deconstructivist theory constitutes for translation via an analysis of Derrida’s theory that revised not only the «violent hierarchy» of the ‘original – translation’ but also the keystones of translatability: equivalency, adequacy, formal correlation, etc., arguing that translation, in the conventional use of the term, is impossible. From the perspective of deconstruction it is viewed only as a powerful tool in unveiling the plurality of the text’s meaning that makes invisible différance visible. Untranslatability in Derrida’s use of the term does not imply that translators should not translate. It simply implies that it is impossible to produce the plurality of the source text in a translation. Derrrida, Paul de Man, Foucault, Jonathan Culler, J. Hillis Miller et al. criticize the traditional views of translation by eliminating equivalence from the purpose of the translation. The focus is on the complex set of relations between the two texts. The article investigates the issue providing explanations for new approaches to translational phenomena through discussion of Derridian ideas on the variation of meanings advocated in his resonant article «Des Tours de Babel». Derrida redefines translation, calling into question any approach as «reproduction», suggesting that translation can be viewed only as deferring the original text without any possibility to grasp what the original text aimed to tell. He argues that deconstruction and translation are phenomena of the same order and one cannot talk about the reproduction of what does not exist. Rather, there is a reason to talk about «unrepresentability.» The deconstructivists gave a fundamentally different dimension to the old translation problem, casting doubt on traditional theories, demonstrating the illusory nature of any attempt to find the meaning of how to read, interpret or translate.

The Public Art in Berlin: selected projects chapter provides both an overview and research based on the Berlin works of different eminent artists. Examples of such works are Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen’s Houseball, a gigantic sculpture originally made for a performance of II Corso del Coltello for the Venice Biennale in 1985, John Chamberlain’s Turm von Klythie sculpture in the form of a tower of smashed car bodies situated on the lower-level floor of the atrium lobby of Quarter 205, and Stephan Balkenhol’s Big Man with Small Man (Balkenhol has developed a significant repertoire of public commissions worldwide, giving his figures a central role within contemporary art). One of the most influential modern artists from the second part of the twentieth century, Sol LeWitt, was commissioned to make his aluminum artwork Structure for Berlin in 1994. Frank Stella’s the Prince Frederick Arthur of Homburg, Keith Haring’s Boxers, and Otto Herbert Hajek’s Progression 73/3 (3 Multiple Elements) are some of the other projects featured in this chapter. This chapter incorporates interviews with Juan Garaizabal and Hubertus von der Goltz. Internationally renowned Spanish artist Juan Garaizabal talks in his interview about his Berlin work, Memoria Urbana Berlin, and explains that “originally it was a temporary project, an art installation with a large scale sculpture that recreates with steel and led lights the lines of the lost Bohemian Church in its original place and size. It was conceived as a symbol of tolerance and a memorial tribute to immigration. A huge space sketched on the traces of a lost heroic building.” Gate to Prenzlauer Berg, Encounters and Positions and Between Heaven and Earth at Tegel Airport by famous German artist Hubertus von der Goltz are two out of five of his projects featured in this book. The artist is interviewed about all five Berlin projects and reveals why the figures in his work are almost always balancing on beams positioned high in the air. The Bundestag Public Art Collection section within the Public Art in Berlin chapter includes a selection of several German government projects by eminent artists. This section introduction unveils the Reichstag, the symbol of German reunification, renovated by Norman Foster in 1999. Basic Law 49 by Dani Karavan is a wall of nineteen glass sheets along the Spree promenade containing the text of the nineteen fundamental rights (one per panel) from German Basic Law (in the original text from 1949) which is engraved on the glass sheets. BFD—Bundig Fluchtend Dicht (flush aligned impervious) by Berlin-based German artist Franka Hornschemeyer is composed of red and black iron lattice fences arranged in a spatial unity, appearing labyrinth-like. One of Germany’s most important postwar artists and the first German artist that depicted the history of National Socialism in his work, Gerhard Richter, was commissioned along with other artists to produce artwork for the renovated Reichstag building. His Black Red Gold monumental colored glass panel with six sheets at the entrance of the Reichstag building refers to the notion of the German national flag. Eduardo Chillida’s abstract sculpture Berlin symbolizes the union of East and West Germany, and it stands in the Court of Honour of the Federal Chancellery building near the River Spree. The Public Art at Potsdamer Platz section within the Public Art in Berlin chapter starts with Potsdamer Platz, a desolate place that resembled a wasteland during most of Berlin’s division period before it gained worldwide attention as the biggest building site in Europe in the 1990s. The main topic in introduction is the redevelopment of Potsdamer Platz. It features the Daimler Public Art collection at Potsdamer Platz, one of the most important German art institutions, and starts with the Daimler Art Collection’s objective and activities in Berlin. The public artworks featured here are Landed by Auke de Vries, The Boxers by Keith Haring, Galileo by Mark Di Suvero, Prince Frederick Arthur of Homburg (General of Cavalry) by Frank Stella, and The Riding Bikes by Robert Rauschenberg. The section entitled The City and the river—a renewed relationship depicts and analyzes three modern Berlin landmarks: Signalkugel by Berlin-based German artist Ulrike Mohr, a movable red sphere on a metal pillar which falls down every time a ship passes by; Molecule Man by American artist Jonathan Borofsky, a monumental installation composed of three gigantic aluminum figures situated where the River Spree is at its widest; and Badeschiff by Susanne Lorenz, a floating swimming pool located on the River Spree that became iconic soon after it was opened in the summer of 2004, situated on the border between the two Berlin districts of Treptow and Kreuzberg. This section incorporates an interview with Susanne Lorenz, in which she explains the Badeschiff project development.

Goethe Yearbook 429 Thus Pugh's claim throughout his book that he knows what was on Schiller's mind fails to convince. The author's main point with regard to the "Theosophie" is that it transmits a philosophy of love that further shapes the poetry and philosophy written during the first decade of Schiller's career. While this is certainly an important point, it is ironic that, given his thesis that Schiller was not a proponent of the Enlightenment, he would feel compelled to come to terms with the influences of several of Schiller's contemporaries while, to be sure, reaching back to Ficino and Renaissance Platonism. Ironically, when considering Schiller's "Theosophie des Julius" and openly discussing the themes of the immortality of the soul, love and gravity, love and friendship, and even self-sacrifice, Pugh fails to consult Plato's Phaedrus. Finally, the love of God and Julius's understanding of self-love is not simply "egoistic," as Pugh contends (179), since Julius attributes Creation to God and states explicitly that beings like himself are not equal to the Creator. Perhaps Schiller also had Goethe's Werther in mind when he wrote: "Egoismus errichtet seinen Mittelpunkt in sich selber; Liebe pflanzt ihn außerhalb ihrer in die Achse des ewigen Ganzen. Liebe zielt nach Einheit; Egoismus ist Einsamkeit. Liebe ist die mitherrschende Bürgerin eines blühenden Freistaats, Egoismus ein Despot in einer verwüsteten Schöpfung." In any case, the political analogies of the last comparison are well -worth noting. In sum, Pugh insists that Schiller was a Platonist (see also his article of 1991 on this very topic in Colloquia Germanica), even in the absence of explicit statements, which he admits time and again, and to the exclusion of other pressing considerations, such as the main current of Schiller scholarship today. Because the author exhibits an admirable command of the Platonic tradition, the Schiller expert will wish to come to terms with this book. University of Arizona Steven D. Martinson Novalis, Philosophical Writings. Translated and edited by Margaret Mahony Stoljar. Albany: SUNY Press, 1997. 194 pp. Theory as Practice: A Critical Anthology of Early German Romantic Writings. Edited and translated by Jochen Schulte-Sasse et al. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1997. 479 pp. In recent years several major English-language studies have underscored the importance of early German Romanticism and its for- 430 Book Reviews mative influence on modern literary theory. While a fair number of these early Romantic texts have been published in English translation in various fora, these two new translations make a wide selection of seminal Romantic writings available in a convenient, accessible form, and would make a welcome addition to any library . Stoljar's masterful translation, which provides the first extensive selection of Novalis's philosophical writings available in English, is exemplary in its precision, accuracy, and readability. Focusing on those manuscripts written between 1797 and 1799, Stoljar presents lucid, engaging translations of the Miscellaneous Observations [Blüthenstaub], Monologue, Faith and Love, and Christendom or Europe in their entirety, and extensive selections from the Logological Fragments, the Teplitz Fragments, the essay on Goethe as scientist, the General Draft [Das Allgemeine Brouillon], and the Last Fragments .Where she does not include complete translations of the original texts, Stoljar's choice of fragments is judicious . Her introduction and notes to the translation are clearly and intelligently written, succinctly outlining and analyzing major issues raised in Novalis's writings. The resultant volume provides a reasonably comprehensive picture of Novalis's wide-ranging interests and contributions to the critical discourse of his era. Throughout her flowing translation Stoljar remains faithful to the original German, and her English is a pleasure to read. To be sure, on occasion dimensions of the original text are lost in the English rendition, as is inevitably the case in any translation. For example, the first fragment of Blüthenstaub, "Wir suchen überall das Unbedingte, und finden immer nur Dinge" (emphasis mine), becomes "We seek the absolute everywhere, and only ever find things" (23), eliding the word play between das Unbedingte and Dinge that informs the original German. While the translation itself is otherwise impeccable, two shortcomings are evident...

The Re-imagining Inherent in Crime Fiction Translation

The article is devoted to the phenomenon of professional translator’s bilinguism from the point of view of sociolinguistics. The correlation between the types of translator’s mistakes and the degree of translator’s language skills, his/her professional experience and sociolect nature of the source text are analyzed. The article deals with a specific substandard fragment of the Russian language - Soviet prison speech, which is studied with the method of sociolinguistic analysis. The major results of our research are as follows: the evaluation of the degree of a translator’s professional bilingualism should take into account polysocilectal nature of the language of the source/target language. Furthermore, it requires from the translator mastering of the two types of “intralinguistic capacity”: excellent knowledge of both literary and substandard (sociolect) varieties of the source language, on the one hand, and on the other hand, the knowledge of the target language and skills in handling the specificity of the original sociolect text if there are no lexical means for its rendering into the target language.

Only Make-Believe? Lies, Fictions, and Metafictions in Geraldine McCaughrean’s A Pack of Lies and Philip Pullman’s Clockwork Dudley Jones (bio) Over the past decade, a number of critics 1 have highlighted the way children are introduced to sophisticated narrative techniques through the work of novelists (Peter Hunt, Aidan Chambers) and writers/illustrators (Anthony Browne, Alan Ahlberg, John Burningham). David Lewis, for example, begins his essay “The Constructedness of Texts: Picture Books and the Metafictive” (1988) by inviting his readers to imagine they are attending a dinner party: You overhear someone enthusiastically describing what they have recently read but you miss the titles and authors. You hear of a story where the main character is a compulsive tale-teller misleading the other characters and redescribing insignificant events in outrageous detail. Someone else recounts the astonishing exploits of a character who, when threatened adversaries can step out of his role as a fictional character and re-create his circumstances in authorial fashion so that his enemies are foiled. Staggering! A third voice chips in with the outline of a book where a young girl appears to be simultaneously a character within two stories. . . . (131) Lewis’s reader assumes the conversation is about “sophisticated avant-garde stuff” but eventually realizes that, in fact, it is about picture books and “good old favorites like Jill Murphy, Anthony Browne, and John Burningham.” The little anecdote provides a witty and intriguing introduction to Lewis’s thesis that picture books can help children become familiar with the kind of metafictive techniques employed by “avant-garde” writers like John Fowles, Thomas Pynchon, and Italo Calvino. [End Page 86] This article examines Geraldine McCaughrean’s A Pack of Lies (1988) and Philip Pullman’s Clockwork (1996) to show how they also familiarize young readers with narrative techniques more usually associated with experimental fiction for adult readers. In analyzing these novels, I will draw upon Patricia Waugh’s Metafiction: The Theory and Practice of Self-Conscious Fiction (1988) and Robyn McCallum’s survey, “Metafictions and Experimental Work” (1996). A Pack of Lies has sometimes been described as “a collection of short stories” rather than a novel. In some respects, the label is justified since most of the chapter headings have subtitles like “A Story of Superstition,” “A Story of Betrayal,” and so on. In other ways, though, it is a misleading description, for each story relates to the central theme of the book—the relationship between truth, fictions, and reality. These stories and their contextualizing frames raise such questions as: what do we mean by lies? What is the difference between telling stories and telling lies? (One of the chapter subtitles of Waugh’s Metafictions is “‘Truth and Fiction’: is telling stories telling lies?”) Are stories, in any sense, real? How may stories help us to live better lives and expose falseness and prejudice? The framing device for—and narrator of—McCaughrean’s “collection of stories” is a mysterious character who says his name is MCC Berkshire. Claiming to come from Reading, he secures a job in a secondhand shop selling furniture and books and quickly attracts potential customers by recounting fictional (or true?) stories that relate to particular objects in the shop. Both his name and alleged place of origin are clearly fictional—when Ailsa (whose mother, Mrs Povey, owns the secondhand shop) first meets him in a library, his face is superimposed on a microfiche machine that lists a series of yearbooks of Wisden Cricketer’s Almanack. Readers unfamiliar with the game of cricket may miss the joke: the initials MCC stand for the most famous club in England, the Marylebone Cricket Club. Reading is the largest town in the county of Berkshire and, of course, reflects not only MCC’s (and the author’s) interest in the act of reading but also the location of the opening scene, a library. The acerbic librarian who asks MCC where he comes from, and then corrects his pronunciation, directs the reader to the pun: “It is correctly pronounced Reading, to rhyme with ‘bedding’, not Reading to rhyme with ‘breeding’” (4). Representing the University of Reading (in Berkshire!) at a conference in the U.S.A. a few...

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