THE KRAFT OF FICTION: NOMENCLATURAL VANDALISM IN
WHO IS TEDDY VILLANOVA?

Fiction writers and their admirers like to speak of craft. Instead of suggesting the manner in which a novel or story effects its affects, produces its drama or conviction, the word "craft" performs at least two flattering functions: it commends a text for its integrity and it stresses the dominance of the writer’s intentions and his mastery. The word is a key one, connoting the artisan, the workshop, the simple virtues of hard work and attentiveness, and a residual sense of a made "thing," not a symbolic rebus in a certain idiom. I would like to begin with a substitution that might open the question of why narrative satisfies the writer as well as the reader: for the virtuous "craft" I offer the German word "Kraft," meaning strength, force, or power. With this substitution the rhetoric of craft that writers and critics sometimes invoke may be redeployed as revelation of the Kraft or power that prompts and pervades any act of representation.

Craft, of course, does have the sense of cunning or deceit, but this sense has been subverted often enough by the familiar idea that ascribes to this cunning an essentially innocent (or esthetic) purpose. That is, the craft of Henry James persuades us to be drawn into fictions whose deceit is only a premise for the instruction that accompanies our ultimate emergence from the charade and our acquisition of the author’s privileged point of view. Kraft, as I use it, unsettles the redemptive feature of craft, and promotes the recognition of force, strength, power, might, and all the specific actions one associates with them. Robbery, revenge, murder, rape, masturbation, vandalism all employ a reserve of energy—to employ a deceptively neutral term—that is not exhausted by actions associated with bodies, actual spaces, objects (or sublimated as the humanist reading of this satisfaction of the drive has it). Such energy and its use are not transcended in the symbolic action of representation practiced in the actual Kraft of fiction. Instead it is subjected by the vigilant Kraftsman to an apparently masterful irony that would leave the impression that a text’s concerns are essentially circumspect and alienated from the writer’s or narrator’s sexual or aggressive drives. The Kraftsman as craftsman hopes to

promote the illusion of ironic detachment and amused distance from the almost palpable pleasures involved in writing about sex or violence. Such pleasures must be ritually neutralized by the craft of the knowing artisan who knows that his readers would recoil if it appeared that he was truly enjoying himself, just as they might recoil from their own interest in the text if its represented pleasures were unmarked by the redemptive signs of irony. The duplicity of this craft is one usually unrecognized by the redemptive craft; it is more correctly a Kraft that is pursuing whatever means it must to obtain pleasure for the reader and the writer.

In the case of Thomas Berger’s Who is Teddy Villanova? such duplicity permeates the registers of narrative and discourse. Its language is laden with the signs and symptoms of sexual and aggressive repressions that Berger makes it possible to attribute to its narrator. But authorship cannot be easily assigned to one’s own creation, and thus the work of the novel—to adapt Freud’s dreamwork, the labors of displacement and condensation that consciousness must expend in expressing the unconscious—is effected by language that is twisted, folded, layered, worked, probed, and played with, that occupies the reader while the innocent plot reproduces a series of events in the life of its narrator-sleuth Russel Wren.¹ The craft of detection offers itself to Russel Wren as a career after his few years of teaching English, but soon enough it reveals itself as a Kraft of detection:

Finally, before we make a flying cannon ball into the murky waters of this narrative, I should say I am a bachelor of thirty (but heterosexual, as some have said, to the threshold of satyriasis). I took a B.A. and M.A. amidst the thronged anonymity of State, thereafter served at the same institution, for a niggardly wage, as instructor in English; was released as redundant and tried to write a play; and after having been photographed in intimate conversation with someone else’s wife, was given employment by the private investigator, himself a grandfather, as cameraman as well as technical adviser on contemporary illicitness. Eventually he turned over to me the transom department of his business, going himself into the more lucrative assignments in the detection of shoplifting. I opened my own agency a year later.²

The purported satyr-bachelor Wren begins here a consistent pattern of affirming and denying his sexual conformity, while confirming and denying his aberrance. At the same time, the sexual and the verbal are aligned as Wren implicitly links writerly ambitions and his technical expertise in illicitness. His first employer is a

scopophile/detective who exculpates himself, like Wren, by assuming a normative pose, a "grandfather." Moving to shoplifting detection, the grandfather leaves Wren the "transom department," a voyeur’s legacy. Wren’s complaint of having been "anonymous" and "redundant" at State suggests an identification with words that form a medium suited to sexual deviance and sexual conformity—thus his affirmation and its denial are premised by words’ availability to both work and dalliance, just as detection can be voyeurism and analysis, Kraft and craft, deviance and conformity, and so forth. In the course of this perfunctory biographical note, Wren confounds these supposed opposites: student/teacher, playwright/actor, satyr/cameraman are offered as names for Wren. One might expect the work of narration to be also play, and so words become sexual while they are put to work. In this collapse of difference Berger’s pleasure and Wren’s are not distinct, just as Berger’s craft and his Kraft are sides of the same coin.

Given these dual purposes, it should be no surprise that Wren is a poor detective. There does not seem to be one example of his having detected anything in the novel—with the exception, ultimately, of his secretary’s sexual history. But before discussing his failures, one might consider some prominent inspectors like Poe’s Dupin and Doyle’s Holmes, both of whose success derives from a masterful repression of their own interest in anything but the end pleasure, as Freud calls the rationalized "purpose" of psychosexual activity, to be had in the solution, which is to say, the closure, totalization, or completion of what was threateningly incomplete.³ The mystery or crime to such master detectives remains overwhelmingly superficial simply because they refuse to interpret clues—they merely see them where others can’t. They can make this distinction between interpreting and seeing, of course, only by repressing whatever incidental pleasures are to be attained by devoting attention to parts for their own sake. Keeping themselves out of the picture, they can see it like no one else. Wren’s empathy with others, however, is so thorough as to be narcissistic; the world of Manhattan becomes a seductive labyrinth wherein Wren is happy to lose himself for the momentary satisfaction of taking one more turn or trope from the case at hand. It is for this reason that Wren will become confused with Villanova, the shadowy, non-existent "center" of the case and the world itself. Wren asks Who is Teddy Villanova? in the same spirit that Descartes asks Que sais-je? But here I fall to the lure

of Villanova or transcendental closure by allegorizing so indulgently. But the lure is there, for when he finally accepts Polidor’s plot as a solution, Wren also accepts the premise that a solution exists amid the world’s countless clues, regardless of his own failure to pursue the Cartesian question with anything other than an imaginary, Sadean methodology. That this solution offered by Polidor is literally a "play" is lost on Wren, who is still pursuing the illusory virginity of his secretary as his novel concludes.

Of course Wren is no better as a literary critic than as a detective or else his secretary’s name would not have remained unglossed. In a novel where almost all the names get attention as sounds and puns, Peggy Tumulty remains untumbled, doesn’t get pegged, and remains virgin. The narrative begins with Wren’s introduction only to shift to his secretary and then return, refreshed, to some Balzacian exercises with furniture:

Call me Russel Wren. A secretary named Peggy Tumulty was my unique employee, and at the moment I owed her a fortnight’s pay. In arrears on the rent for my apartment, on the door of which the churlish super had posted a notice that tended to humiliate (and which, ripped away, was soon reborn in more blatant advertisement), I had lately, stealthily, moved, auxiliary underwear and socks in an ex-Downy carton, into my office. (p. 1)

Wren’s first words are a double or triple theft. Melville’s narrator is vandalized, just as "Ishmael" or Melville vandalized Genesis’s figure of the dispossessed and nameless exile. The grandiosity of this opening is unnoticed if one simply writes it off as a parody, but given Wren’s tour of Manhattan (where Melville departed for his voyages), it reveals a thwarted ambition for vision. So much more ludicrous when Wren turns to Peggy, his finances, underwear, and the Downy box. But the prose is on safe (stolen) ground when it reverts to a foreign idiom: the "fortnight’s pay" he owes Peggy is, with luck, two weeks of foreplay—so easily do Wren’s words confuse sexual, literary, and monetary desire by a collision of idioms. Thus Peggy’s pay as play prompts a remark about "rears," ("In arrears on the rent") as Wren thinks of renting Peggy’s rear, as he has been doing all along without any satisfaction. His musing on Peggy’s refusal to enter his "inner office" leads him to conclude that she was a "Queens Irish spinster of the type I should call relentless, and unless she had lost her fleur while competing in the high hurdles as a parochial schoolgirl, she was yet in formidable possession of it" (p. 3). (Is she

"relentless" or is Wren rentless?) Virginity for him is a French word less than a flower, and considering the appearance of Proust in the novel, an allusion. To be in l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs makes Wren guess that his desire—complicated by Proust’s "inversion" and his own defensive heterosexuality—must be made objective: his failure to penetrate the flower requires him to believe it is intact, but also a word, an allusion.

Such erotic solipsism also characterizes his detective’s skill, and so his observation of Peggy’s "vulgarity" confirms his sense of her virginity: "though sexually a prude she was coarsely candid about truly impolite functions" (p. 4). He further comments, "In her sexual attitudes Peggy dated from a bygone age. Despite the public harangues of polymorphous perverts and their tracts on venereal liberation, she still looked first at a man’s third finger and not at the swell of his groin. My fancy could not cope with the image of Peggy at the act of darkness—" (p. 27). Wren’s style, pen, and sexuality date from a "bygone era," not Peggy’s skeptical regard for potential adulterers: just as Wren’s style works by alliteration ("polymorphous perverts"), epithet ("venereal liberation"), and imagery ("third finger," "swell of groin"), so his detection is (mis)guided by fortuity (alliteration), self-deception (epithet), and formalism (imagery). The satisfaction of narcissism marks the limits of his professional skills, and so Peggy is not pegged or tumbled until she has become his business "partner" and possesses half-rights to Polidor’s purchase of his lease. If pegging means "knowing" in both senses, it is Tumulty who lives up to her name, seeing as she knows the significant nature of her punny name; in the same way, she becomes his sexual "partner" once that word has become motivated by the real cash promised by becoming his business "partner." Wren fails to see the superficial sign and thus fails to see that she wanted to be his partner all along from the beginning of her play for him, wanted to share his part in the play and get paid. It is appropriate that his last (actually his first) insight in the novel’s last paragraph reverses his evaluation of Peggy:

I draw the curtain across the episode that followed—requiring neither the huzzahs nor the jeers of a bawdy audience—except, perhaps ungallantly, to lift the fringe and reveal the only absolute fact (as it was the most startling) yet established in the Villanova case: Peggy was not, as the pizza went to cinder, serving her novitiate in venery. (p. 247)

These theatrical curtains and fringes are lifted to compensate

for what cannot be lifted: Peggy’s hymen is long gone, but Wren’s style still manages to marry it to the nun’s folds, and so preserve it for his own chaste appreciation. Her Kraft is apparent here. as a craft and guile, while Wren "innocently" plies his style like a craft, never suspecting the Kraft that drives it.

Inevitably, then, his detection becomes a pretext for his production of gratifying symptoms. The giant Bakewell, who delivers the inaugural message, "you tell Teddy Villanova to lay off Junior Washburn" (p. 11), appears dead in three places. Not once does the detective consult the "corpse’s" vital signs: "I stayed in the hall and examined the body by eye, having a horror of corpses . . . no symptom was visible" (p. 20). Like Peggy’s fleur this death is a knowledge gotten out of desire. When the "corpse" turns up like a trope on his studio couch, it has been granted an ornamental "wound":

He seemed even deader than before: a small hole had been punctured between his eyes, and a filament of red ran from it. (p. 33)

When it appears in his apartment bathtub, his non-involvement as detective is resolute; his resigned adoration of this huge fleur as lover is resolute:

Surely the rigor had set in by now. I did not probe him to confirm this assumption. Nor did I entertain any plan to dispose of the body discreetly. (p. 74)

All the Bakewell symptoms are ignored by this poor lover, overwhelmed as he is by revulsion, yet concerned with "rigor" and the call to "probe" the body for confirmation. So Bakewell becomes Wren’s own symptom, which allows him to ignore it; thus the erratic appearances of the corpse, like Wren’s half-baked detection, mock and mime the appearance of his repressions’ symptoms. In the same way, Peggy becomes a symptom of his sexual indeterminacy, always disappearing when Bakewell appears.

As Wren would be the first to admit, one should not consent to idle wordplay (p. 170), and perhaps my exposition is becoming too concerned with paronomasia and wondering what words are lying with what other words. Stopping Berger’s craft or Kraft, refusing to chase Wren’s "symptoms" beyond a certain point would make me a policeman, a polite man, a civilized man, but it would also make me illiterate. So the process of reading this novel is one of sinning and bad examples, leading reader and critic to trust his own dirty mind. At best I can claim that I have marked

an extended sequence of "misunderstandings" that reveals through the narrative what Wren cannot understand or admit to himself as a conscious or knowing writer. He assumes, for example, that Ganymede Press is a homosexual publisher when it is a pressure cooker (p. 64) and so feels rebuked by a misleading name. But he never sees that the anecdote concerning the infant who said "give me meat" (Ganymede) and so inspired its name actually justifies his suspicions and suggests that mistakes are never just mistakes. But he can hardly admit that, in view of the wealth of errors that would then define his life. In another instance, he imagines Washburn’s "fragment of harmless beige shirt-tail" seen through his open trousers to be a "seemingly withered phallus" (p. 4-9). The "withered phallus" must be his own, and yet it is an insight into the charade that has surrounded him, where cloth can be flesh and cards identity. When Wren is asked by a bogus policeman for identification, he fans through the billfold that has been planted on him and comes up with, instead of a license, a dog license for a great Dane named Ophelia: "‘I do not now own a dog. I have never owned a dog—’" (p. 76). The dog is owned by "T. Villanova." Given the gap between Wren’s self-knowledge and his purported "identity," these are hardly forged papers, hardly less forged than his "license" to privately investigate, investigate privates (spot phalluses), in the name of a craft which is really the Kraft inspired, not by authority, but "license." He is, in his "girlfriend" Nathalie’s words (she may well be a lesbian), a dupe because of his "appetite for the legendary." Indeed the mixed metaphor suggests his hunger for reading, never seeing, as Mallarmé called that great Dane Hamlet, "the book of himself." All plots against Wren are grave and justified since they prompt "misunderstandings" that ground his narrative with the only writing we can read. And such would be the case with any first person narrative.

One of the misunderstandings that Wren is most anxious to correct is his "homosexuality." Following the initial disavowal of homosexuality I have already quoted and discussed, the theme sounds regularly throughout.⁴ A "policeman" asks Wren where a "piece" (gun) is and he asks in response, "Oh, you mean the gun that was used to kill him? Oh" (p. 35). The lost "piece" prompts Wren’s anxiety and so the policeman returns, "Oh, yes, fag, oh!" and knees him in his groin where his own "piece" presumably, is cowering and withered. Such an apparently simple instance of Freudian negation as Wren’s denials is also a clue

to the linguistic and literary discourses of sexuality. The provocation for Wren’s denials is his ostentatious style and the stylus or piece responsible for it. Style, Wren unconsciously fears, has homosexual or deviant devotees because like them it disavows the pretense of simple designation and accepts the pleasures of multiple indications and the bliss, as Barthes would have it, of pure text. (It’s important to remember that such attributions are Wren’s own motivated sense of homosexuality; he fears his own version of it is a version of himself.) Thus Proust, Gide, Lewis Carroll and Nabokov’s Humbert who are all alluded to as stylists (p. 189) were also perverts or inverts who wrote and loved through an act that had no reproductive rationalizations or "natural" authority behind it. There was no issue to their writing and style: homosexual or pedophilic sex is consequently style for Wren’s unconscious. He is moved to disavow pederasty while his style buggers and is buggered by these stylists:

The most culturally resplendent era in the history of man . . . was also the Golden Age of Pederasty. Far be it from me to find a message in this state of affairs. I am immune to the lure of catamites. In fact, I abhor children of either sex. (pp. 62–63)

Is he immune because he has been inoculated by style? Dare he find no "message" in this state of "affairs" precisely because such "affairs" as pederasty reject the convenient rationale that writing has purposes of education and communication? This denial asserts the link between style and sexuality and concludes by hoping to chuck Proust and Nabokov, two of the models of his style, by denying interest in children of either sex—which of course alienates him once again from one of the great orthodoxies, loving children and childhood. The link seems conclusively made midway in the novel:

though I have nothing against those professing to the persuasion of Marcel Proust, André Gide, and perhaps the great Will himself, I am not myself an invert, having, when it comes to intimacies, an absolute addiction to the other and not the same. (p. 124)

The female other is also the meaning, referent, or purpose of a style that justifies the absurdities of play for play’s sake, while the male same is nothing else: style is in arrears to a buggering past.

Sexuality and writing are otherwise linked (mated) as kinds of tropes, something that Wren comes to know implicitly. Indeed

the narrative would seem to offer a distinction: the favored tropes of deviance (literature) are the secluded ones of allusion and epithet; the dominant trope of conformity (heterosexual ideology) is the effaced metaphor or cliché. Wren learns quickly that cliché has a grasp of reality because it articulates reality for normals. When Bakewell appears alive in the first pages, he breaks the seclusion of Wren’s grotto with a message ("lay off Junior Washburn") and so it is no wonder that he will soon be a corpse: exactly what the message is for the stylist. But to prepare the way for this transubstantiation he makes a cliché come alive, which would appear to be the reverse: he hits Wren so hard that "he had knocked me out of my shoes" (p. 9). Cliché is real in a way metaphor never is in its necessary deviations; cliché is continually motivating itself by preceding perception and structuring its articulation. This scene of instruction by the muse of ideology leads Wren to employ cliché himself as a defense:

"‘You pack quite a wallop,’ said I, choosing the vernacular as the proper idiom for obsequiousness" (p. 10). Not only do real men like Bakewell live as cliché, real women like Peggy have learned to respond to it:

"I’ve taken my knocks before. I’m not down yet. I’ve only begun to fight." I realized I was speaking in the hackneyed idiom of Washburn’s letter, but it proved an effective one with Peggy, who looked at me with an admiration I had never before identified. For my part, on the instant I began to find her desirable. (p. 28)

Offering the effaced coins of ideological speech, Wren has a purchase on her and himself.

Money, in other words, forms another system of signification and exchange that is made problematic by questions of reference, justification, and authenticity. But it also works through sex and literature. Wren’s bond to Peggy is monetary; he owes her a "fortnight’s pay," while her ultimate "desire" is to be his "partner." Wherever there is a sign, there is a counterfeiting enterprise because it mocks (mimes) the reality of clichés the way a counterfeiter’s careful mimicry subverts the fiction of the equivalence of monetary notes to value for his own satisfaction. The representation is carefully done so that it can be carelessly disregarded in our pursuit of satisfactions, both as buyers and sellers, readers and writers:

What I am saying is that, for whatever motives, severally or in combination—greed, the summons of a swashbuckler’s superego, perhaps even a jingoism concerning Western

Civilization, which according to Nathalie was threatened by the faux-monnayeurs, and two semesters on the Literary Masterpieces of which I had taught at State (from Sappho to The Counterfeiters, the latter by Gide, Zeus to many a Ganymede); and despite my short title for the course, used as a classroom joke, seldom understood, "Great Movements in W.C."—I think I have demonstrated here that I am nothing but a loyal product of my cultural heritage. . . . (p. 191)

All the customary ambivalence is evident here, but it has assumed historic dimensions. If Western Civilization is a water closet, then all its products are shit, and so the faux-monnayeurs who pass up the procreative urge to engage in play instead, the Zeuses and Ganymedes, trade on both products: the false and the true, satisfaction and sublimation. Wren’s seldom understood joke is safely locked in the water closet of culture that disposes of remainders like puns, while his jingoism does not disguise the fact that he too is its product and waste.

What Nathalie has warned of as the counterfeiters’ threat to culture Wren has implicitly understood all along: all cultural signs are counterfeit because there is no guarantor for them, hence the pervasive ambivalence in his commitments to deviance and conformity. Nathalie, who may herself be a counterfeit heterosexual, claims:

"Counterfeiting debases the currency. A country whose money is not stable inevitably falls victim to mob rule. . . . There is reason to believe that all the currencies of both hemispheres, eye ee, the world, now in circulation are counterfeit." (p. 179)

We know that Wren understands how counterfeiting is the cultural production par excellence when he slips:

"Well then, Bakewell and Washburn are making their escape, no doubt having exchanged millions of their queer—excuse me, their superficially specious but actually spurious bills for the genuine. . . ." (p. 184)

Like his other slips, this one reveals the complexity of his understanding repressed by the affectations of style, mastery, and sophistication. What Nathalie suggests is doubtless true. In counterfeiting one has the analogy for art as Kraft and craft: the appearance of evident care with the motivation of pure satisfaction. Counterfeiting thus parallels all sign systems, even the gastrointestinal one that Wren substitutes for culture; in this sense, the plot is indistinguishable from culture itself, just as the subversion and the achievement of culture are indistinguishable.

Like someone who has been reading Derrida, Wren offers a languid comment that provides the premise of Berger’s subversion of the subversion of culture: "Names of course have no real referents in Manhattan" (p. 62).⁵ If this is so, the supposed link between them can lead to the confusions that come up constantly in the dialogue (e.g. "Teddy/Freddy," p. 52; "teutonic/too tonic," p. 53; "gull/girl," p. 50; "check/Czech," p. 128; et al.) to subvert our ordinary sense of a dependable or reliable language. Inevitably, then, the disposition of signs is toward the "charlatanism" (p. 58) that Polidor exploits. Identification cards are forged (pp. 77, 78), along with identity, and so all crafts of culture become driven by the Kraft of personal satisfaction—even Shakespeare, the archetype of the selfless creator, is linked by Wren to the tribe of counterfeiters and homosexuals and called "the great Will" (p. 124). Such Will or Kraft can go in two directions: "idle wordplay" (p. 170) or "nomenclatural vandalism" (p. 25). These "directions" are respectively the erotic and the aggressive; both interfere with our placid compliance with an "established" world. The interference is of course inevitable when it is related to the linguistic register, composition or style being both play and work, ordering and disordering—and so the stylus is phallic and aggressive, synthetic and analytic. For our concerns here, the important point is that the name it inscribes retains some vestige of satisfaction, that art itself is achieved because it satisfies.

"Villanova’s operations are worldwide. It would be no exaggeration to lay at his door most of the criminal phenomena of the past two decades." (p. 204)

Such crimes include the "corruption of most modern languages . . . the pseudo revolution. . . in sex" (p. 204). Villanova’s "door" must be the sign itself, all signs themselves, that form the new house of fiction. His crime is exactly what is required so that his polysemous clues can compensate for what is stolen or lost in the nature of things. This new house of fiction is then a knot in language functioning as a center in what would otherwise be an harmonious but inconsequential yarn.

Polidor’s Teddy Villanova comes from a police show on T.V., but Berger’s comes from etymology: Theodore (gift of God) Villanova (new house, redeemed house). We know this because the codes tell us that writers are inspired by words, not the ephemeral trash of consumer culture. But Berger can have both, and so T.V. and theology meet in the seedy and seamy sign that doesn’t know up from down, permanent from ephemeral,

art from trash. Landlord, author, narrator, and reader are implicated in this drama of the desire for closure, for the Word that will make all mere words speak their parts (not in so many words) in turn (by trope) and with circumspection (eyes rolling). Whether Polidor wants a fat check (Czech?), Berger a popular (money-making) novel, or Wren a stylistic blind in which to enjoy himself, the Kraft of Berger’s novel pursues its satisfactions (regardless of whoever would try to civilize or police or arrest them) through the constant demonstration and subversion of craft.

To make a new house or a Villanova, the novel—like the landlord—asks questions it can’t answer, except by its façade of a closure: Who is Teddy Villanova? Who or what can be converted, renewed, renamed—as the decaying Manhattan of its setting—that does not remain repetition? How do mass-produced consumer items, literature, money, sex, detection, or interpretation commend themselves to buyers who are always hoping that these artifacts are new? But even these questions are themselves pretentious pieces of urban renewal, because the Kraft of fiction is not redeemed in Berger’s energetic production of sexual and aggressive tropes. The landlord Sam Polidor appears at the novel’s conclusion as Berger’s impostor to turn the novel and its manifold discourses away from a mess that only gods or landlords (not "authors") can collect rent on.

Berger’s delineation of this mess assumes the fundamentally ironic form of a detective novel in which the narrator/detective is not only incompetent but the victim of the crime and case he is working on. This irony of course stems from Oedipus Rex, a central case upon which Western culture has organized its introspective or detective inquiries. The detective story then is always open to metaphysical allegories about the redemption of the disparate clues scattered through the world by the informing principle of a central or original deed. Such an allegory would confound this originary principle, however, with a crime, and thus the act of detection—whether one calls it science, metaphysics, or theology—is itself justified by a crime or violation that makes possible a sublime solution in interpretation. Thus Berger’s Wren appears as the farcical interpreter and detective facing the plot of a scurrilous landlord to sell his apartment house. He thinks, as Polidor wants him to, that he is facing a mobster named Villanova, but Berger seems to face the whole issue of closure— of fiction and meaning—in a similar way. What if, Berger’s novel seems to ask (with some prompting), the principle of totalization

were itself at fault? Then the big cheese would indeed be Villanova, who doesn’t exist except as an inviting labyrinth of multilingual puns posing as the imperial center of a world of vandalism, or as the desire for a new house to replace a decaying one.

CARNEGIE-MELLON UNIVERSITY

NOTES

    ¹Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, trans. James Strachey (New York: A Discus Book, 1965), pp. 311–344.
    ²Thomas Berger, Who Is Teddy Villanova? (New York: Delacorte Press, 1977), p. 2.
    ³Sigmund Freud, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality in On Sexuality, trans. James Strachey (New York: Penguin, 1977), pp. 61–63.
    ⁴My use of "misunderstanding" derives from Jacques Lacan’s sense of the "méconnaissance" that is always bound with any knowledge. See The Four Fundamentals of Psychoanalysis, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Norton, 1978), pp. 82–83 and elsewhere.
    ⁵Derrida’s major statement of "de-centering" is probably "Structure, Sign and Play in the Human Sciences," reprinted in Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1978).