Moby Dick and Don Quixote as conscious novels , Robert Alter writes "the other great tradition", as he ironically suggests in the preface to his Partial Magic. Leavis introduces the criterion of “seriousness” into studies of the English novel, excluding from his history a whole line of novelists who do not meet the expectations proposed. Alter establishes a parallel genealogy of the novel, a "self-conscious novel", which "systematically displays its own condition of artifice and which, in doing so, probes the problematic relationship between seemingly real artifice and reality" (Alter x). This article examines two very different novels, Moby Dick and Don Quixote, through two passages that serve as conscious windows. As representatives of such a genre, regardless of their differences in production era, form or content, they both essentially do the same thing: they mix different levels of fiction and reality to question their own status of fiction and reality. One way to do this is to use real objects and the idea of language they imply. Moby Dick's first-person narrator, Ishmael, a sailor alienated from society, wanders around New Bedford, Massachusetts before signing up for a trip aboard a whaling ship. Pequod ship. In chapter 7, "The Chapel", he finds the Whaler's Chapel and inside it marble tablets. Looking more closely, he notices that these are commemorative plaques erected by the families and comrades of sailors lost at sea. They are cenotaphs, literally "empty tombs" in Greek, and they not only mark the loss but also absence. These are headstones without a tomb, offering... middle of paper ...... inside and outside the artifacts they incorporate can cross the language barrier. The cenotaphs that Ishmael stumbles upon look in some way like Flemish tapestries. Real objects are aesthetic objects but also truth claims, linked to the language that constitutes them. A memorial plaque in any language would still honor the memory of “Captain Ezekiel Hardy” and remain an aesthetic object in a novel – but would it remain a truth claim in a self-aware novel? On the other hand, the cenotaphs of Ishmael are not real objects; these are unreliable representations. It seems that the purpose and function of such objects lies less in their “reality” than in their inherent capacity to deepen and probe the dialectic they embody. Perhaps they are in fact double-sided tapestries, scrutinizing the two sides with their intertwined threads, as real as they are fictitious...

Essay / Moby Dick and Don Quixote as conscious novels , Robert Alter writes "the other great tradition", as he ironically suggests in the preface to his Partial Magic. Leavis introduces the criterion of “seriousness” into studies of the English novel, excluding from his history a whole line of novelists who do not meet the expectations proposed. Alter establishes a parallel genealogy of the novel, a "self-conscious novel", which "systematically displays its own condition of artifice and which, in doing so, probes the problematic relationship between seemingly real artifice and reality" (Alter x). This article examines two very different novels, Moby Dick and Don Quixote, through two passages that serve as conscious windows. As representatives of such a genre, regardless of their differences in production era, form or content, they both essentially do the same thing: they mix different levels of fiction and reality to question their own status of fiction and reality. One way to do this is to use real objects and the idea of language they imply. Moby Dick's first-person narrator, Ishmael, a sailor alienated from society, wanders around New Bedford, Massachusetts before signing up for a trip aboard a whaling ship. Pequod ship. In chapter 7, "The Chapel", he finds the Whaler's Chapel and inside it marble tablets. Looking more closely, he notices that these are commemorative plaques erected by the families and comrades of sailors lost at sea. They are cenotaphs, literally "empty tombs" in Greek, and they not only mark the loss but also absence. These are headstones without a tomb, offering... middle of paper ...... inside and outside the artifacts they incorporate can cross the language barrier. The cenotaphs that Ishmael stumbles upon look in some way like Flemish tapestries. Real objects are aesthetic objects but also truth claims, linked to the language that constitutes them. A memorial plaque in any language would still honor the memory of “Captain Ezekiel Hardy” and remain an aesthetic object in a novel – but would it remain a truth claim in a self-aware novel? On the other hand, the cenotaphs of Ishmael are not real objects; these are unreliable representations. It seems that the purpose and function of such objects lies less in their “reality” than in their inherent capacity to deepen and probe the dialectic they embody. Perhaps they are in fact double-sided tapestries, scrutinizing the two sides with their intertwined threads, as real as they are fictitious...

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