My old friend and mentor Pío Baroja, who was not awarded the Nobel Prize, for the flame of fame does not always light up the right man's head, had a clock whose face displayed some wise words, a frightening maxim that referred to the passing of the hours: They all hurt, the last kills. Well, those hands that move only ahead have marked the tolling of many hours in my heart and soul, and today, with one foot in the considerable life I have left behind and the other in hope, I come before you to speak of words and, in good faith and perhaps with good luck, to discuss freedom and literature. I am not sure where the border checkpoint of old age is, but just in case I have already passed through, I will take refuge in something Francisco de Quevedo once said: we all want to live to a ripe old age, but we all deny we have gotten there. Since I am very well aware that we cannot ignore the evidence, and since I am also not unaware that the calendar is a relentless tool, I am ready to say all that I should without leaving anything up to inspiration or improvisation, two notions I despise.

In the Medamothi episode of Rabelais's 1552 Quart livre, the medieval tradition of storytelling represented by Gargantua encounters the classical tradition. This meditation on origins is enacted as a family drama: the son, Pantagruel, attempts to choose between his two “fathers.” Initially, the classical influences have priority. Pantagruel buys tapestries of the life of Achilles, an act representing the son's desire to break from his past with Gargantua by adopting the Greek hero's life. Pantagruel also purchases strange animals that describe the creation of a new and living logos. In the next chapter, Gargantua's envoy arrives to vindicate the native father's rights. Gifts and letters are traded between Gargantua and Pantagruel, an exchange charged with antagonism. The rivalry is resolved, however, for Pantagruel sends back home the classical things he purchased on Medamothi. Two literary pasts nurture Rabelais's books, but, in the end, the author privileges the native tradition.

Hammett's 1929 novel Red Harvest ranks as one of the first and one of the greatest examples of hard-boiled detective fiction, a category that broke sharply with the older, ratiocinative variety. Our reading of the novel (which is in part a reading of the genre of detective fiction itself) focuses on productive work and finds that the novel's narrative structure is based on several distinguishable forms of labor, each autonomous and yet complexly interrelated with the others. Our primary stress is on the linguistic or dialogic work of Hammett's protagonist, the Continental Op, who is in many ways a paradigmatic private detective. We conclude by considering not only the generic composition of the novel but also its political character as an unusually powerful and complex response to capitalist reification.

Some relatively obscure citations of Graham Greene's Brighton Rock that appear in a 1978 work by older bohemian cohorts of the Sex Pistols, the most prominent punk-rock band, help considerably in dissolving the conventional hierarchy of literature and mass culture. A decade earlier, these elders had learned the theory of textual appropriation espoused by the Situationist International, and their subversion of elitist evaluative standards has much in common with the original theorists of the avant-garde —especially Bakhtin and Benjamin—and, more recently, with the field of cultural studies, specifically British subcultural sociology. Thus out of one minor moment a longer, continuous avant-garde tradition can be reconstructed, consisting of artists and critics, including Greene himself, who have sought to challenge the formation of common sense in both “high culture” and the mass media. These anarchists share in particular a materialist orientation toward literary and mass texts—as well as toward the social outcomes that the affective qualities of those texts enable in everyday life, ultimately the most crucial arena of avant-garde activity.

Fernando de Herrera carefully crafts in his Anotaciones a version of literary history that redefines the position of Garcilaso de la Vega, who had been seen as the only national poet worthy of imitation and as an aristocrat who attained an exemplary combination of literary and military glory. Herrera directs the reader's intertextual location of Garcilaso's poetry for polemical purposes: the profusion of source citations stresses Garcilaso's imitations and undermines the perception that the poems are acts of sprezzatura. Herrera also inserts himself into the intertext through translations, quotations of his own poems, and the sheer quantity of annotations, which dwarfs the original texts. Furthermore, the overly learned citations have a countereffect, as the mass of contradictory information subverts the very notion of literary authority and thus of canonicity. Today the Anotaciones is read as promoting Garcilaso's canonization, but the responses of Herrera's earliest readers show they understood the work's subversive aims.

Gulliver's Travels is a battleground of interpretation, both within and outside the text. Acts of interpretation within Gulliver's Travels—acts of writing and reading texts, of inventing characters for one's fictions and in turn becoming characters in others' fictions—signal a central controversy in eighteenth-century culture, in the relations of language to truth and to power, and in readers' unceasing stratagems for mastering what a text means over and against the human subject it seeks to represent. The epistemological question is thus inescapably also the political question of the fate of human subjects in a public sphere in which they are made objects in others' interpretations and fictions. As “splendide mendax,” Gulliver exemplifies how human attempts to totalize truth are forms of lying as well as expressions of power and, in the absence of these insights, too readily become expressions of injustice and violence.

The Alpha Bravo Universe is reported to be the title of a massive fiction that Norman Mailer has in hand, a three-part novel of which Ancient Evenings is the first part. The title has its origin, however, in a chapter cut from the final draft of a 1970 book, Of a Fire on the Moon. The discarded chapter, 1 argue, not only sheds light on the composition of the moon book but also clarifies the dualistic psychology that surfaced first in Mailer's 1957 essay “The White Negro” and that underlies all his subsequent writing. Fire represents his ambitious attempt to pare down his own stylized romantic personality and come to terms with contemporary technology. In the drafts and published text, we can follow his efforts to present American society in its totality and can distinguish between possibilities available to the romantic ego and those that no longer seem to be.

In 1975 the Argentine writer Ricardo Piglia published a trasgressive appropriation of a short story from a prestigious European tradition to call into question the notion of literary private property. Using such postmodernist techniques as scholarly parody and metaplagiarism, Piglia succeeded in catching critics at their own game: few read carefully enough to decipher the elaborate literary crime he had constructed as a tribute to an important but undervalued Argentine writer, Roberto Arlt. The double codes of entrapment and disclosure in Piglia's narrative pose a special challenge to contemporary readers: in a noteworthy reversal of current critical fashion, the vanguard reader on whom Piglia's text depends must engage in a careful, formalist decoding in order to apprehend the text's larger theoretical concerns.

Historiography in Francoist Spain (1939-75) sought to affirm the morally and historically correct role of the regime within the flow of Spanish history. As an important vehicle of dissidence, the novel of memory stands in sharp contrast to Francoist history: it explores the past largely eschewed or appropriated by the regime and contests the so-called truths that Franco shaped through the discourse of myth. This essay examines the role of subjective memory as a challenge to historiography and discloses the narrative strategies novelists used to counter the government's myths. Unlike Francoist historiography, the novel of memory lays out history as a series of disruptions and undermines the referential illusion of truth and wholeness in our understanding of the past.