The question of authority addressed by John Fowles in his widely acclaimed metafictional novel implies, not the disappearance of authorial control in contemporary fiction, but rather a shift toward its blatant exposure. Instead of reverting solely to pretense in order to create the «illusion of reality», contemporary novelists are increasingly «exposing themselves» by acknowledging their artifice, their constructive practices as both actor and agent in their writing of fiction. Their self-conscious emphasis upon the text as artifice falls under the rubric of what is commonly known today as metafiction. Metafictional writers thus operate and function with a freedom of exposing illusion for what it is -a device used to mask narrative as a construct and a figment of one's imagination. In demystifying «illusion», these writers strive to avoid «delusion». They opt for undisguised invention, against the duplicitous «suspension of disbelief» because they perceive the need to face the fictionality so apparent in literature but not always so apparent in our daily lives.

As in fiction from other countries, contemporary Brazilian literature evidences a number of metafictional writers whose self-conscious narratives also reveal a need to confront the process of fictionality in life as well as in literature. In other words, Brazilian metafictional writers admit self-consciously to their imaginative or inventive ways, not negatively as self-indulgent narcissists, but above all as self-reflective, self-revealing, «free» artists acutely conscious of fiction's authoritarian proclivities. From this stance, questioning or challenging the issue of authority in literary discourse becomes a starting point for discussing those dominant discourses that dictate the value systems, rigid institutions and power structures of Brazil's everyday life. Democratization may represent the effacement of military regimes but not necessarily the obliteration of hegemonic socio-political behavior patterns or discourses of power. In exercising their freedom to demystify illusion's multifarious manifestations in the arenas of literature, society, politics and culture, those Brazilian novelists who practice metafiction or acute textual self-consciousness are, for all purposes, hoping to reduce the distance between art and life by deliberately inciting their readers to be suspicious and aware of those established codes, discourses and patterns, exuding power, control and authority. These writers begin to alert their readers to the pervasiveness of authority by signalling and dismantling the insidious control behind a narrator's or an author's author-itarian stance.

To illustrate this subversive impulse in metanarratives from Brazil, our study will treat the aesthetics of metafiction in conjunction with this socio-political and literary focus upon the thematics of authority. References will be made to metafictional expression among a diverse group of Brazilian writers; however, for compelling examples of metafiction and its challenge to authority, special attention will be paid to two provocative novels-Sérgio Sant'Anna's Confissões de Ralfo (1975) and Rubem Fonseca's Bufo & Spallanzani (1985). Furthermore, metafiction will be discussed within the context of postmodernist writing⁸⁴ because the latter's challenge to universal truths, singular meaning and stable points of view complements the propensity within textual self-consciousness toward demystification, alterity and inquiry. According to Linda Hutcheon in A Poetics of Postmodernism, postmodernist fiction projects a mixture of   —585→   the self-reflexive and the ideological, underscoring the need to acknowledge critically the very act of discourse and its subtle reins of power. While alluding to the connections between discourse, power and ideology, Hutcheon specifically points to postmodernism's relationship to self-consciousness and, by extension, to metafiction:

Hutcheon's initial comments for theorizing the postmodern in the same study emphasize the contemporary climate's need to «problematize» by channelling the aesthetic with the ideological:

Because the ideological subtext is and has been predominantly political in Brazil, several Brazilian novelists have discovered metafiction as an avenue for exposing that subtext. Among contemporary Brazilian writers, the most prominent who draw upon metafiction are Ivan Ângelo (in A Festa, 1976 and A Face Horrível, 1986); Silviano Santiago (in Em Liberdade, 1981 and Stella Manhattan, 1985); Sérgio Sant'Anna (in Confissões de Ralfo, 1975 and A Tragédia Brasileira, 1987); and Rubem Fonseca (in Bufo & Spallanzani, 1985 and Vastas Emoções e Pensamentos Imperfeitos, 1988). Recognizing the different manifestations that metafiction may assume in order to expose the fictionality outside the text, these Brazilian writers challenge all forms of authority via such meta-literary devices as textual self-consciousness, memorialist fiction, self-referential narrators, self-reflexive irony, meta-language, and intertextuality.

In her critical study, Metafiction: The Theory and Practice of Self-Conscious Fiction (1984), Patricia Waugh states: «such writings not only examine the fundamental structures of narrative fiction, they also explore the possible fictionality of the world outside the literary fictional text».(2)⁸⁵ The fictionality in the discourses of the outside world, considered today by postmodernists and poststructuralists to be a relative, constructed reality frequently invented by conventional linguistic and social systems, applies most dynamically to hierarchical and nationalistic voices in Brazil. Within the contemporary Brazilian novel, the metanarratives mentioned above do express, emphatically or subtly, their self-conscious resistance to the diverse forms of authority lurking within the nation's cultural, social, political, and literary discourses.

Metafiction, a practice almost as old as the novel itself, having emerged forcefully in Don Quijote (1605, 1615) and rather ostentatiously in the masterful Tristram Shandy (1760-67), has resurfaced boldly in contemporary world literature, suggesting the presence of a cultural climate receptive to its aesthetics. In Surfiction: Fiction Now... and Tomorrow (1975), Ronald Sukenick alludes to Sterne in terms most appropriate to modern-day fiction:

In this vein, we see metafiction rising intrepidly in contemporary Brazilian literature primarily as a vehicle for relating to the «shape» of the nation's sense of entropy, its frustration with the paradoxical and chaotic rhythms of power, repression and supposed liberalism in everyday life. As in other literatures, Brazilian metafictional expression has increased from the fifties and sixties to the present in such diverse writers as João Guimarães Rosa, Clarice Lispector, Ivan Ângelo, Silviano Santiago, Sérgio Sant'Anna, and Rubem Fonseca. However, not all of these writers were motivated to use metafiction primarily as an overt challenge to political authority. For example, this century's literary giants, João Guimarães Rosa and Clarice Lispector, explored, via metalinguistics and metaliterature, respectively, metaphysical issues that challenged traditional views about language and ontology. Defying views of language as a static system, Clarice Lispector evokes language's productive and heterogeneous potentials, thereby manifesting what Julia Kristeva calls «studying language as a discourse enunciated by a speaking subject».⁸⁶ With her self-conscious, introspective, and questing first-person «speaking-subjects», Lispector leads her readers to new creative depths in language against the homogeneous law of single meaning. Furthermore, with the very self-conscious voices of her narrators speaking via the very unstructured narratives of such works as   —586→   Água Viva (1973) and Um Sopro de Vida (1978), Clarice Lispector defies genre classification and, in doing so, also challenges thematically traditional conceptions about patriarchal, religious and even narrational authority. On the other hand, as a younger generation of novelists, Ângelo, Santiago, Sant' Anna, and Fonseca decidedly manifest an ideologically political persuasion in their metafiction. Nonetheless, all these writers question forms of authority within the canon of power and literature, be they conventional conceptions about literary form or culturally specific issues such as nationalism, ethnicity, race, sexuality, or gender. However, prior to exploring the ways metafiction, authority and postmodernism surface in the contemporary Brazilian novel, it is important to note that the connection between textual self-consciousness and metafiction in Brazilian literature did not begin with these writers.

Even the self-conscious narratives of Machado de Assis, albeit covertly, harbor metafictional elements which, on one level, may partially explain the contemporary appeal of his novels and, on another, why one cannot rigidly categorize him within the nineteenth-century realist school. Although not thematically or overtly metafictional, Machado's novels, via their ironically self-reflexive, writer/memorialist narrators, nonetheless call suspicious attention to the highly subjective, yet unstable viewpoints of his fictional voices and, in addition, to the dynamic relativity of subjectiveness in everyday life and in fiction. As a novelist heralding, for Brazilian literature, the focus on subjective consciousness and the mind, a predominant characteristic of modernist writing, Machado has also served as the model for many postmodern Brazilian writers who draw upon his spectrum of the Mind in order to delve overtly and self-consciously into the actual process of writing itself, one that becomes an ontological and political exploration, «combining» instead of separating textual and political consciousness into different camps.

In opposition to illusionist realism with its hegemonic perspective of omniscience and aestheticist modernism which, according to Andreas Huyssen,⁸⁷ privileged authority with its dichotomy of the «high» and the «low», the postmodernist joining of these two in its exploration of the textual with the political points to the important roles of mass culture and technology vis-à-vis literature, particularly in their contribution to heightened modes of perception and consciousness, accentuating alterity and a conscious awareness of the «other». While «mapping the postmodern», Huyssen states:

Through historiographic and/or intertextual metafiction,⁸⁸ the conscious sense of «otherness» speaks out against established forms and discourses of authority. Metafiction's primary concern with the arbitrary nature of language, discourse and experience, as manifestations of the implied chaos, instability and the unorderedness of the outside world, joins postmodernism in its rejection of teleological views. In societies with tendentious authoritarianism, not all writers and readers will seek the solace emanating from the comforting sense of closure that novels have traditionally provided.

By attempting to re-create within fiction the shape of disordered experience, metafictional novelists are ultimately challenging the artificial construction of certain ordered discourses, unified «texts» and seemingly «real» worlds which profess predeterministic ideologies taken to be «natural» and «eternal» in the real world as well as in narrative fiction, but which in fact are dictated or decreed by some controlling order, be it metaphysical, linguistic, aesthetic, literary, or political. Certainly this position is suggestive of Roberto Schwarz's criticism of elite thinking in Brazil, articulated in his essay «Nacional por Subtração» from Que Horas São?, where he questions nationalist proclivities in Brazil based upon imitation and homogeneity.

In his seminal book, Partial Magic: The Novel as a Self-Conscious Genre (1975), Robert Alter explains self-conscious narratives in terms synonymous with the current definitions of metafiction:

Paralleling Alter's definition of metafiction, Patricia Waugh also sees self-conscious writing as one that «systematically draws attention to its status as an artefact» (2), In addition, Waugh   —587→   conceptualizes a theoretical framework for metafiction as a mediating form of expression, consciously creative as well as critical. Increasingly oriented toward questioning traditional forms of representation, the mediating quality of metafiction is, as stated earlier, more in concert with the twentieth-century's broad preoccupation with alienation and oppression -Modernism's epistemological consciousness and Postmodernism's ontological queries.⁸⁹ As heightened modes of perception, mediation engages, through metafiction, another consciousness, an alterity, an «other», frequently one's «other» self.

Also providing an insightful interpretation is Linda Hutcheon's Narcissistic Narrative: The Metafictional Paradox (1980), alluding to metafiction as «fiction about fiction» (1) but underscoring, via the allegorical myth of Narcissus, the self-conscious as well as the self-reflecting process where the self is aware of its own ontological status -in this case the very narrative itself. Hutcheon's ontological emphasis upon storytelling as well as the story told -process and product- also affords para mount importance to the reader as a co-creator because in self-conscious writing the actual narrative becomes, for the reader, part of the action. Hutcheon defines this perspective as a «mimesis of process»

in which she favors the term «diegesis» over the commonly used «narrative». But no matter how theoreticians and critics may differ in their terminology, they all address the metafictional writer's basic need to acknowledge the «make-believe» nature of fiction. This open admission also serves as a liberating force for the reader as well as the writer, thereby bestowing upon the former a more active role, one of processor and interpreter, instead of a mere passive recipient of plot and content. In Surfiction, Raymond Federman emphasizes this liberating role for the reader, one that contemporary Brazilian novelists struggle to inspire in the Brazilian reading public:

From the viewpoint of the contemporary Brazilian novelists mentioned above, metafiction is the means through which readers may consciously avoid being trapped in someone else's order. By «baring it all», the metafictional stance ultimately serves as a stage for the critical analysis of all aspects of narrative discourse, the openly «make-believe», its covert counterparts, and those other illusionist forms that «appear» to be natural and real.

In a later study, Motives for Fiction (1984), Robert Alter offers another insightful paradigm for classifying all novels, one that recognizes the necessary two-way pull inherent in metafiction -the creation of illusion and the shattering of that illusion. For his novelistic classification, Alter suggests that these two modes of fiction could well be described as «consistently illusionist» and «intermittently illusionist» (13), the former more representative of realist fiction. Nevertheless, with these rubrics, Alter reiterates what John Fowles implies in his work, that all fiction cannot escape the mimetic, because, after all, narrative is a verbally ordered construct and the identities of characters, no matter how real they may seem to be, are «really» fictional. In this sense, they are also basically paradoxical -not real but appearing to be. On the other hand, not to confront this paradox is to succumb without question to illusion and to the possible seduction of single-minded, controlled meaning set up by the illusionist. For example, the memorialist/diarist mirror set up by Cyro dos Anjos in his 1937 O Amanuense Belmiro invites the reader, via a dialogical form of double perspective, to be critical of the self-reflexive process itself which binds Belmiro, despite his insights, to a stagnant way of life, reminiscent of an oligarchic order that imprisons him in his own mind where he unwittingly becomes «trapped within someone else's order». In this way, Cyro dos Anjos' otherwise mimetic novel provokes the reader into confronting Belmiro's paradox via the very contradictory words of his diary. A critical approach to the process of self-indulgent reflexivity may demonstrate how, in an indirect fashion, an early narrative such as O Amanuense Belmiro can be interpreted, on one level, to be metafictional or «intermittently illusionist».

For Brazil, the metafictional or the subjective and self-conscious mode -the «intermittently illusionist» stance- serves as an attractive perspective for imparting the complex and insidious nature of Brazil's socio-political reality, a reality decidedly diverse and consciously distrustful or suspicious of illusion wherein national myths and ideologies, depicting an 'official', univocal national ethos, frequently mask diverging or contradictory views of the Brazilian cosmos. In documenting the rebellious role vis-à-vis authoritarianism that autobiographical fiction played in the novels of 1960s and 1970s, the Brazilian critic and novelist, Silviano Santiago in   —588→   Vale Quanto Pesa (1982) articulated the importance of the individualism and directness radiating from writers via the self-conscious, first-person narratives of their memorialist or autobiographical fiction:

With its subjective and self-conscious nature, metafiction works in a similar fashion, striving via conscious analysis to understand the function of its construct -its fictional discourse- vis-à-vis the constructive affinities of the social world. According to Patricia Waugh:

Few Brazilian theorists have addressed directly the theoretical study of narrative through the metafictional mode. Sparse or indirect applications of this mode can be found in Haroldo de Campos, Metalinguagem: Ensaios de Teoria e Crítica Literária (1976); in José Guilherme Merquior and Sérgio Paulo Rouanet's essays in Revista do Brasil (1986); Silviano Santiago in Nas Malhas da Letra (1989); and Antônio Cândido in A Educação pela Noite e Outros Ensaios (1987).⁹¹ Although he does not address metafiction per se, Merquior in «Em Buscado Pós-Moderno», O Fantasma Romântico e Outros Ensaios (9-41),⁹² does see Postmodernism in the Brazilian context as very slowly diminishing the high/low barrier, and moreover, points to Rubem Fonseca as one of its principal proponents (Merquior, 38-41). Interestingly, we see Fonseca's use of metafiction as a postmodernist vehicle for audaciously joining popular and mass culture with elite or erudite art.

In his essay «Metacommentary», PMLA (January 1971), Fredric Jameson explains metacommentary in terms that have direct application to the Brazilian experience. Jameson discusses the double impulse of Experience itself -firstly, its direct contact with life and, secondly, the mechanisms which «forestall any conscious realization on the part of the subject of his own impoverishment» (17). Seeing the latter as a force of censorship, Jameson states:

It is the object forbidden, often shut out by the doors of convention or systems of closure, literary or otherwise, that concerns the metafictional artist, struggling to lay bare the important relationship between moral and aesthetic responsibility, as many postmodernist writers in Brazil and elsewhere reveal in their acknowledgment of the undeniable bond between «ethics and aesthetics», a relationship which suggests the late modernist stance of reaffirming the reciprocity between the theories and practices of human behavior and artistic representation. This way of thinking views art and literature as not avoiding the contingencies of the world, by refusing to represent these as existing within a safe artistic arena of unified, theological (Author as God) and teleological meaning.

The self-conscious perspective manifested in metafictional and postmodernist narratives possesses profound implications for Brazil and its literature, especially in light of the repressive military regime (1964-85) and the post-military struggle for implementing democratization. Therefore, it is within the socio-political and cultural context of ethics and aesthetics (behavior and representation) that the two novels, Confissões de Ralfo (1975) and Bufo & Spallanzani (1985) will be considered here as examples of Brazilian metafiction in practice one novel published during the military regime and the other at the outset of civilian rule. Moreover, the attention in these novels to modes of being, the «ontological dominant» so characteristic of postmodernist fiction, has strong metafictional implications in its direct or indirect inquiry into the ontology of the literary text itself as well as of the world it projects, repeatedly manifested in the ontological quests of its fictional beings.

In terms of metafiction's subtleties, it is important to recognize the overt or «thematized» mode of presenting metacommentary and the covert or «actualized» mode of implying their meta-stance via representation.⁹³ While the covert mode draws heavily upon such models as the detective story (Rubem Fonseca serving as Brazil's parodic popularizer of this genre), this mode also relies upon fantasy, games, and the erotic. On the other hand, one also discovers some of these models prevalent in the overt, unabashed mode that openly thematizes metafiction as one of the novel's subjects. For example, the overt mode may present the novel   —589→   as a blatant fantasy, a written script, or a fantasmagorical voyage taken by a modern-day pícaro, these all being the case in Sant'Anna's Confissões de Ralfo.

For purposes of illustrating the variety in Brazilian metafiction, the overtly metafictional Confissões de Ralfo will be contrasted with Fonseca's intermittently covert meta-narrative, Bufo & Spallanzani. Both are metafictional in their self-conscious attention to the process of writing artifice or inventing fiction, where literature, narrative and fiction are thematized subjects within the novels themselves. However, in Ralfo, the very parodic narrative itself is thematized as artifice,⁹⁴ while in Bufo the writer/narrator of romance novels, Gustavo Flávio, a parody of Gustave Flaubert, talks about writing a historical novel on frogs and science, entitled Bufo & Spallanzani. However, out of desperation with the murders in his uncontrollable life, Flávio never manages to finish his intended novel; instead he autocratically trashes it on his Trash-80 computer near the close of the narrative. In this sense, Rubem Fonseca's Bufo & Spallanzani is, on the one hand, mimetic or illusionist due to its use of the detective story frame with a developed, though digressive, plot and, on the other, metafictional in its parodic treatment of this otherwise neatly ordered but somewhat threadbare frame, parody itself serving as a springboard for pointing to artifice, literary conventions or frames and the process of writing fiction. As a frame-breaker, parody defamiliarizes conventions by shattering illusion, by exposing the frame, frequently via inversion, but always unmasking the provisional nature of literary forms, and of course, by extension, the shape of life or history.

According to Hutcheon: «Parodic art both is a deviation from the norm and includes that norm within itself as background material. Forms and conventions become energizing and freedom-inducing in light of the parody» (NN, 50). In so doing, both novels exhibit a freedom emerging from the parody of such literary conventions as verisimilitude and omniscience and, in turn, lead to a parody of restricting socio-political conventions. While both novels use parody as well as a substantial dosage of political allegory, in Sant'Anna's Ralfo, subtitled «Uma Autobiografia Imaginária», the outlandish element of fantasy and the open and consistent references to the narrative's own fragmented construction make this novel highly metafictional, evident in such overt statements as the following: «resolvi transformar-me em outro homem, tornar-me personagem» (2); or «Porque sou Ralfo, o personagem, à procura de seus acontecimentos» (13). Also, the metafictional stance serves simultaneously to reduce and augment the distance between reality and fiction via the novel's acknowledged playful fantasy, articulated in the declared make-believe tone of the narrative's prologue: «digamos que este livro trata da vida real de um homem imaginário ou da vida imaginária de um homem real» (2). In addition, Sant'Anna appears as a fictitious novelist in the italicized prologue and epilogue and openly as himself in a «nota final» where he invites readers to fragment the novel even more by literally tearing it up.

Since both narrators are preoccupied with the writing of the narratives -Ralfo in the unconventional form of a forward-moving, non-retrospective, autobiographical novel, and Gus as a selective memorialist with an analeptic bent- their narratives voice an exploration of literature wherein the themes of literary freedom and authority are juxtaposed allegorically alongside the socio-political dimensions of these themes. For example, when Ralfo is judged before a literary tribunal, not unlike members of the pompous Brazilian Academy of Letters, dressed as vultures in their black capes, this scene also evokes other ominous figures of authority such as the police or the military generals: «O que eu queria era apenas divertir-me um pouco, sem que senhores vestidos de urubu ficassem a me dizer o tempo todo que isso é isso e aquilo é aquilo» (228). Or in an earlier interrogation, when asked to define arbitrariness, Ralfo states: «Despotismo e capricho daqueles que se julgam com direito a árbitro» (124). There also exist similar allegorical moments in Fonseca's novel.

Bufo & Spallanzani, a puzzling bestseller about bufo marinus frogs, whose sex lives were once studied by the eighteenth-century scientist Spallanzani, is a compelling tale with metafictional overtones about an over-sexed, frog-like romance novelist involved with black magic, a murderous authoritarian elite, and a scrubby but perspicacious detective. For example, even Gustavo Flávio's «unreal» name harbors metafictional implications via its parodic and intertextual subversion, especially given Gustavo 's own abuse of authorial authority as when he incriminates himself with the reader by defending his own God-like attitude to his omniscience:

Ultimately, Gustavo is mocked on the metafictional level, first as a parody of Flaubert and then as a camouflaged target for Fonseca's own attack upon Brazilian canonical language and literature. Also, for the reader, Gustavo's insidiously autocratic nature as a narrator and his single-mindedness as a womanizer/sex fiend are the acts that eventually incriminate him.

Another metafictional comment on narrative authority and the underlying unfixed nature of discourse emerges near the end of the novel when Gustavo, revealed as a successful but personally insecure novelist, is kidnapped and drugged by the thugs of the powerful and corrupt husband of his dead mistress, Delfina Delamare. At this point, in a clipped moment of self-perception during one of his dreams, his subconscious imagines an unpunished white-collar criminal of an unsolved crime from his dark past, this figure looming over him with a piercing truism about art and himself: «A pior forma de autoridade, ... a mais arrogante e dissimulada, é a do artista: ele julga, de forma implacável, quem pensa diferente dele, sempre fingindo-se de justo e imparcial» (324). As a comment on (author)itarian thinking as well as traditionally omniscient or unreliable narrators (not unlike Gustavo) who strive to «deceive» readers (and who in turn can be self-deceivers justifying their own immoral acts), these words in Gustavo's dream undermine the presumed or illusory stability of meaning or discourse, pointing by extension to the transitory or provisional nature of life and history -the thematic prevalent among poststructuralists and postmodernists. Ultimately, the «floating signifier effect»⁹⁵ even undermines the surface meaning of the narrative entitled Bufo & Spallanzani, a pseudo-detective novel whose outcome is purposely elusive and unresolved, especially in view of the lower-class but honorable detective who never catches his man. For this reason, the authoritative final meaning or 'solution' identified with detective novels never takes place in Fonseca's narrative. In fact, this is an «antidetective» novel, as Stefano Tani refers to the new wave of such parodic narratives where the detective not only fails, but frequently occupies a secondary role, as he does here. The real detection takes place dialogically between the reader and a text narrated by a possible killer or censor, masking some other hidden or forbidden reality. Here, we have a parody of the «solved crime» in the standard detective novel where order and rationality, once established by the positivistic and calculating mind of the detective, no longer triumph. With the narrative's outcome left in the hands of the reader, Fonseca relinquishes some of his own authority (which also occurs in Sant'Anna's novel) and even mocks his own position further with his frequent and ironic intertextual nods to the authority implied in his literary references, these being couched in parenthetical asides such as (see Tolstoy, see Fonseca).

All forms of authority in Sérgio Sant'Anna's Confissões de Ralfo are undermined via a fragmented, multi-voiced and chaotic narrative underscoring a plurality of perspectives. Sant'Anna's and Ralfo's choice to shift his protean «I» from first to third person and to other voices (such as in diaries) within a non-retrospective autobiography ultimately subverts the implied authority and control emanating from the traditional first-person stance. Moreover, by inviting the reader at the end to tear up the novel, he is diffusing his authoritarian control, suggesting that the reader symbolically cut off the author's authoritarian hold on his own text. Striving for new ways to convey content, Sant'Anna exploits form via a metafictional inventiveness apparent in the emphatically libertarian and anarchical structure of the novel's nine mini-books. Here, Ralfo's confessions, in their irreverent, bawdy, anti-spiritual tone, are a clear parody of St. Augustine's and Rousseau's Confessions as well as other canonized texts. If, on the one hand, St. Augustine's narrative follows the journey of the soul toward spiritual grace and an understanding of Creation as in Genesis, on the other, Ralfo's lusty adventures explore his many earthy «selves» toward more ontological and aesthetic questions. This quest is evident in the latter part of the novel dedicated to theatre and literature, metaphors for understanding the creation of artistic fiction and ultimately how we «create» our own lives. A passage midway through the novel suggests this narrative's leitmotif of literature, here in the form of theater, and its link to life: «como se a vida fosse um teatro onde as pessoas pudessem arvorar-se um papel e representá-lo enquanto lhes desse vontade» (149).

The novel's fragmented structure and undisguised fantasy enable Ralfo's protean selves to manifest an ontological freedom from ceremonial and established behavior and prose. For   —591→   example, the virulent accusations of a prosecuting attorney in a literary tribunal, designed to judge the merits of Ralfo's novel, reveal just how anti-authority, unconventional, freewheeling, and threatening his narrative is seen to be:

Sant'Anna's self-conscious novel thus takes an open stand against traditional literature. Furthermore, in his off-beat, openly paradoxical yet lyrical fashion, Ralfo imparts new insights, contexts and images with his literary freedom by a «pulling-out-the-stops» process of creativity, exemplified at one point with his seemingly irrational, yet suggestive, and unexpected dislocation of certain verbs in relation to certain nouns: «Fazer uma árvore, escrever um filho, plantar um livro» (143). As a member of a generation of writers, who in the face of censorship and repression were forced to invent new ways to denounce political authoritarianism, Sant'Anna places self-conscious emphasis upon the metafictional form and therein demonstrates how content can be transmitted in new ways.

As a result, Ralfo's metafictional confessions abound in social, artistic, political and occult meanings that challenge all oppressive orders and duplicitous methods. In this vein, Sant'Anna challenges his own «authorial» position when he invites the reader to tear the book apart, thereby suggesting a «cutting off» of the author's authoritarian hold on the text and his own sense of a conclusive ending. In the process, Ralfo never loses sight of literature's primary role of creating, via fiction, a new or alternative arena where the artist, man and society can achieve a double vision or a measure of self-awareness, as evidenced most clearly near the end of the novel, when he responds to that staid literary tribunal's inquisitorial inquiries about his artistic motivations: «Estórias que atiçassem a imaginação do povo e o fizessem compreender os demônios que devem expulsar para que o corpo e a alma se tornem transparentes» (228). This transparency translates into the vision that the metafictional artist relentlessly seeks and affirms. In other words, that self-conscious look with its double perspective on the construction and function of literature which may lead to a more lucid understanding of the how and the why of man's irrational acts, especially those surfacing in a country during times of socio-political strife. As Ralfo's narrative points out: «neste nosso país de tendências autoritárias e monarquistas» (154). If literature cannot prevent oppression, it can at least alert one to unfamiliar, unexpected and unconventional positions. In short, the self-conscious optic aims to reorient via a metamorphosis of the mind's eye-view. Italo Calvino hints at this change in his essay, «Myth in the Narrative» from Surfiction:

This metamorphosis can be seen in fiction's creation of alternative worlds, in Sant'Anna via Ralfo's metafictional vision ultimately seeking to change the public's vision through fantasy, and Fonseca via the subversion of the positivistic detective novel and other formula-types of discourses. For example, in another parodic metamorphosis, this time of New World, Latin American political ideologies and governments, as he ordains himself ruler of the phantasmagorical El Dorado, an island somewhat evocative of Castro's Cuba, Ralfo's protean «I» evokes the potential power of fiction's alternative worlds:

Interestingly, in discussing the various techniques and characteristics of metafiction, Patricia Waugh (90) refers to John Fowles and his categorization of fiction as an alternative world: «worlds as real as, but other than the world that is. Or was» (The French Lieutenant's Woman, 81).

In conclusion, it is more than coincidental that Brazilian metaliterature also evokes «alternative worlds», such as Ralfo's fantasy trip or Fonseca's dark underworld, especially if one invokes the much-bandied Brazilian expression «cultura alternativa», a concept very much in tune with the global, countercultural and alternative lifestyles of the 60s. Manifested in Brazil as the «cultura, arte, cinema, e imprensa alternativas» of the 60s and 70s, the alternative optic served as both the vanguard and watchdog for cultural and political resistance in opposition to established, official and rigid authority as expressed in Brazilian society and politics, as well   —592→   as in art. Fiction as an alternative world finds in Brazilian metafiction an alternative pathway toward new and freer vistas away from authority's inflexible parameters. As a renewal of self-conscious mediation but within the context of Postmodernism's rejection of limitations and hegemonies, especially those dictating restricted behavior in ethics and rigid representation in aesthetics, Brazilian metafiction strives to dismantle supposedly implacable obstacles and boundaries by challenging forms of authority that may infiltrate and inhibit the vibrant worlds of the socio-political and the literary.

Alter, Robert. Motives for Fiction. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984.

_____. Partial Magic: The Novel as a Self-Conscious Genre. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975.

Anjos, Cyro dos. O Amanuense Belmiro. 8a ed. Rio de Janeiro: Livraria José Olympio Editora, 1975.

Calvino, Italo. «Myth in Narrative» in Raymond Federman, ed. Surfiction: Fiction Now... and Tomorrow. Chicago: The Swallow Press, 1975. 75-81.

Cândido, Antônio. A Educaçâo pela Noite e Outros Ensaios. São Paulo: Editora Ática, 1987.

Campos, Haroldo. Metalinguagem: Ensaios de Teoria e Crítica Literária. São Paulo: Cultrix, 1976.

Federman, Raymond. «Surfiction -Four Propositions in Form of an Introduction». In Raymond Federman, ed. Surfiction: Fiction Now... and Tomorrow. Chicago: The Swallow Press, 1975. 5-15.

Fonseca, Rubem. Bufo & Spallanzani. 6a ed. Rio de Janeiro: Livraria Francisco Alves Editora, S. A., 1985.

Fowles, John. The French Lieutenant's Woman. New York: Signet/New American Library, 1970.

Hollanda, Heloísa Buarque, ed. Revista do Brasil: Literatura Anos 80. Ano 2.5: 1986.

Hutcheon, Linda. Narcissistic Narrative: The Metafictional Paradox. New York: Methuen, 1980. [Abbreviated in the text as NN]

_____. A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction. New York: Routledge, 1988.

Huyssen, Andreas. After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986.

Jameson, Fredric. «Metacommentary». PMLA 86.1 (January 1971): 9-17.

Kristeva, Julia. The Kristeva Reader, ed. Toril Moi. New York: Columbia University Press, 1986.

Laclau, Ernesto. «Politics and the Limits of Modernity». In   —593→   Andrew Ross, ed. Universal Abandon: The Politics of Postmodernism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988. 63-82.

Lispector, Clarice. Água Viva. 3a ed. Rio de Janeiro: Editora Nova Fronteira, 1978.

_____. Um Sopro de Vida (Pulsações). 7a ed. Rio de Janeiro: Editora Nova Fronteira, 1978.

McHale, Brian. Postmodernist Fiction. New York: Methuen, 1987.

Merquior, José Guilherme. «Aranha e Abelha: Para uma Crítica da Ideologia Pós-Moderna». Revista do Brasil Ano 2.5 (1986): 22-28.

_____. O Fantasma Romântico e Outros Ensaios. Petrópolis: Vozes, 1980.

Merrill, Robert, ed. Ethics/Aesthetics: Post-Modern Positions. Washington, DC: Maisonneuve Press, 1988.

Revista do Brasil: Literatura Anos 80. Ed. Heloísa Buarque de Hollanda. Ano 2.5 (1986).

Rouanet, Sérgio Paulo. «A Verdade e a Ilusão do Pós-Moderno». Revista do Brasil Ano 2.5 (1986): 28-53.

Sant'Anna, Sérgio. Confissões de Ralfo: Uma Autobiografia Imaginária. Rio de Janeiro: Civilização Brasileira, 1975.

Santiago, Silviano. Nas Malhas da Letra: Ensaios. São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 1989.

_____. Vale Quanto Pesa: Ensaios sobre Questões Politico-Culturais. Rio de Janeiro: Paz e Terra, 1982.

Scholes, Robert. Fabulation and Metafiction. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1979.

Schwarz, Roberto. Que Horas São?: Ensaios. São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 1987.

Spires, Robert C. Beyond the Metafictional Mode: Directions in the Modern Spanish Novel. Lexington: University of Kentuckey Press, 1984.

Stonehill, Brian. The Self-Conscious Novel: Artifice in Fiction from Joyce to Pynchon. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1988.

Sukenick, Ronald. «The New Tradition in Fiction» in Raymond Federman, ed. Surfiction: Fiction Now... and Tomorrow. Chicago: The Swallow Press, 1975. 35-45.

Tani, Stefano. The Doomed Detective: The Contribution of the Detective Novel to Postmodern American Fiction. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1984.

Valente, Luiz Fernando. «Beyond Narcissism: Ralfo's Parodic Confessions». Portuguese Studies 5 (1989): 178-87.

Waugh, Patricia. Metafiction: The Theory and Practice of Self-Conscious Fiction. London: Methuen, 1984.

Hispania [Publicaciones periódicas]. Volume 74, Number 3, September 1991