Evidence from other medieval texts suggests that the phrase “a mare” in the portrait of Chaucer’s Pardoner should be translated “a homosexual.” While the establishment of this gloss does not eliminate the alternative interpretation of the Pardoner as a “geldyng” or eunuch, it does obligate us to explore the implications of the Pardoner’s possible homosexuality. His pardons and relics provide a link between this sexually anomalous Christian and his church. Unable to confess his sin, the Pardoner seeks forgiveness vicariously through the sale of pardons; believing his body to be a vessel of sin, he seeks, through the display of relics, affirmation that his body is also a temple of God. Although Chaucer sees homosexual acts as sinful, he appears not to view them as uniquely detestable; the suggestion of homosexuality contributes not to the portrait of a damned soul but to the representation of the “sondriness” of humanity.

My field consists of those works of diary or epistolary fiction in which the author has limited the narrative voice to one diarist or letter writer. The strategy allows the author to focus on a drama of self-perception involving two main participants: the diarist and the text. The outcome of the drama basically depends on how the diarists write and how they read what they write. In the first part of my essay, I treat the drama of successful self-discovery through representative works by Tennyson, Mauriac, Bernanos, Sartre, and Gide. In the second part, I treat Werther, Lermontov’s Pechorin, and Mariane of the Lettres portugaises as writers who use their literary mode in essentially the opposite way: to maintain an existing idea of themselves.

The theater-dream metaphor raises fundamental ontological and epistemological questions and treats them in much the same way as phenomenological thought does. Both the metaphor and Edmund Husserl’s theory “reduce” the ontological problem to a play of experience—to activity and process—leaving the final question of what is “real” unresolved. Such activity necessarily involves Heideggerean “dimensions” that are not only open, mobile, temporal, “in play” but also structural, patterning. Examples ranging from Renaissance to modern drama, from the Russian to the American stage, show how dimensions are revealed both as the familiar structures of our thinking (stratifications, circles within circles, temporal delineations, subject-object categories, etc.) and as the structuring principles by which “real” and “imagined” worlds establish relationships. Thus we can move among such implicit structures to consider multiple stage-world relations—the interplay of subjects and objects of experience and concomitant audience-art-artist implications.

Criticism has difficulty reconciling a writer’s interest in death with the categories of literary analyses. Death interest is rejected as orgiastic or treated reductively. The Old Curiosity Shop is used to show how a novelist’s staging of death expresses desires for radical authenticity, in Bataille’s sense of death as an authenticating violation of human limits, and how those desires are legitimated—since death also horrifies—by fusing with positive cultural ideals. Dickens employs a Victorian trope, grounding culture in death: a reverence for death generates brotherhood. The apparent regression or death wish so common to the endings of Victorian novels can be seen, not as a wish for stasis, but as the projection of desires for an authenticity that might be fulfilled within culture. Though art may not always find a social solution, when it dramatizes conflicts of limitation and limitlessness, the negation of death is a central reference point.

In the two parallel stories that constitute Il castello, some suddenly mute travelers use tarot decks to communicate their horrific tales to one another. Ultimately, the ghostly kings, queens, knights, and other conventional or famous literary characters who inhabit these novellas delimit two “voices” that frequently overlap and even coincide: the narrator-author’s and the spectator-reader’s. The violent chivalric world of war, love, and magic that generates the narrative action also produces a metanarrative dimension that asserts the text’s subject as writing and reading, while simultaneously figuring Calvino’s own writerly persona. The Number One tarot, Il Bagatto (The Minstrel), often images Faust in the fiction but more importantly images the writer, a (Marlovian) Faustian conjurer destined to fail. The ever-changing sequences of the cards allegorize the making of a fiction, while the deck itself allegorizes the plenitude of the finished text, unattainable by its author.

Mystery and mystery texts dominate Terra nostra, Fuentes’ novel about absolute authority. Both El Señor, the protagonist who covets eternal power, and Fuentes, the author who appears to assert his privilege through the fiction, are betrayed by their own strategies. Failing to recognize his inability to exert absolute control over history, El Señor, trying to master a set of mysterious texts he believes hold the key to his power, attempts to mold reality to his own desires. Although Fuentes understands the impossibility of creating a truly simultaneous text, he nevertheless tries to realize his plan through the novel’s complex narrative network. That network, however, needs the support of a linear mystery fiction, which thwarts the reader’s desire for solutions but fails to triumph over the bounds of literature itself. Thus the assertions of absolute authority by El Señor and Fuentes reveal the very powerlessness they would disprove.