Totality Without Signification

In the late 1990s, I took a college class called “Literary Models: Novel,” part of a sequence of eight such classes aimed to teach undergraduate students in the Literature program the workings of genre while enforcing the reading of canonical works. The professor, Pedro Ángel Palou, a prolific novelist, designed the class by assigning one novel a month. We began with Don Quixote, a mandatory reading for any Spanish-speaking literature student. The second novel was Gargantua and Pantagruel, written decades earlier, and essential given the fact that both Mikhail Bakhtin and Milan Kundera were read in other parts of the program’s curriculum. The third one was Tristram Shandy, an exceedingly rare choice for a class in Mexico, so much that we had to read it in a cheap photocopy of the translation by Javier Marías. The most striking thing about the class to my twenty-year-old self was to experience a form of the novel that I had never imagined before, one in which the limits of what I thought a novel meant were excitingly and mercilessly explored.