Between Market and Myth by Vater Katie J.;

Author:Vater, Katie J.;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bucknell University Press

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El sueño de Venecia highlights the effects of the corporate university on scholarship; Las manos de Velázquez emphasizes its effects on the scholar himself. Ortiz gives greater weight to the campus novel’s typical dilemma—the “life of the mind” versus a life of desires—that Díaz-Mas’s final chapter merely implies. Teodoro has stagnated in his professional and personal life. Dalton-Brown notes that the scholar “stifling in his own environment” is a mainstay of the campus novel genre, whose authors often center plots on a “battle to stay in academe or escape.”67 Though in some ways Las manos de Velázquez is an unorthodox campus novel, in this respect, Ortiz stays true to the genre. For Teodoro, the battle between the mind and the flesh plays out at both institutional and domestic levels. His struggle at home is in the lack of time and quality of attention he has to invest in his relationships, particularly with his young wife, Mónica. The story of a student’s seduction by a professor (or vice versa) that characterizes many campus novels here serves only as background. The capitulation to desire occurred years ago when Teodoro met Mónica, then a graduate student in his department’s program, and left his first wife to marry her. It is Mónica’s desire for a richly lived life that creates tension for Teodoro, for while he recognizes her refusal to be a typical “faculty wife,” he does not know how to set the boundaries between his life and work that would allow them to build the partnership she wants.

The battle to stay in academia or to leave it is also waged at the level of scholarship, as Teodoro fights, first, with the paucity of the information the archive can offer for his investigative ends and, second, with what he considers to be the narrow limits of scholarship deemed acceptable by academe. Ortiz employs historiographic metafictional techniques, especially intertextuality and overt self-reflexivity about the process of writing history, to describe Teodoro’s struggle to write a definitive monograph about Velázquez, which emphasizes the limited parameters of acceptable scholarly work. The novel’s sophisticated oscillation between narrative points of view allows Ortiz to represent Teodoro’s perspective, seen from both within and without, as his own expectations for his work clash with his actual production. He finds the facts of Velázquez’s life a challenge to convey linguistically in his writing, but he also finds words are unable to accurately articulate his own feelings. Teodoro’s tortured reflections on the inadequacy of words mirror the insufficiency of the archival sources to present a complete picture of the painter. At the same time, they expose Teodoro’s insecurity about the effectiveness of his own writing. This frustration can be read as a consequence of the neoliberal emphasis on personal responsibility, which refuses to take into account the structural factors that define and complicate “success.”

The self-reflexivity of Las manos de Velázquez has the effect of making apparent certain conventions of fiction and, like all metafiction, reminds the reader of fiction’s constructedness. In

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