Beginnings, Ends—and the Stuff in the Middle

Jack Chambers, hero of my uncompleted novel, RAQUEL [or] The Visiting Professor, is Writer in Residence at Portland State. He is ‘in over his head’ both in his job and his love life. He doesn’t pretend to understand Reality, but he thinks he understands Fiction, which he calls the Template of Reality.

Without Aristotle’s boundaries, he says, Reality would be too large, too random, too diffuse for human understanding. It is the cosmic noise upon which we impose Aristotle’s elements of narrative: Beginning, Middle and End. Without them Reality remains Unreal.

Well, it might not sell in the Ivy League, but the young lady writers at Portland State find him interesting. They gossip about him and his hapless affair with Rachel, a hot-shot Portland trial attorney.

Jack’s confusion in love and literature is compounded by the arrival of Professor Raquel Balabuena. She is from Buenos Aires and has complex literary theories of her own. We need not go into them here. Of more immediate concern are the diabolical fellows trailing behind her.

Her adoptive father runs Argentina’s mysterious Bureau 37. These evil fellows might be her father's agents, sent along to protect her, but more likely they belong to his enemies, the Archbishop, or possibly to an angry female politician. Neither of them like the prospect of Raquel loose in Portland, so far beyond their control.

Gosh. No wonder she’s nervous. Jack dubs her The Professor of Ambiguity and Uncertainty, and begins a novel in which she is the scarcely disguised main character—the very same meta-fictional masterpiece which I once thought was finished, but which I now realize I am unlikely ever to finish, and which (alas for you, dear reader) you are unlikely ever to read, because, after eight years in the making, it still lacks a pleasing Middle.

It occurs to me, however, that if I furnish a beginning and an end, you might fill in that blank to your own satisfaction—an expedient preferable to slogging through a tale told by a remote, provincial, and uncertain novelist.

Just for the heck of it, here is the 'Front matter' I am thinking of using, once I finish writing the middle, if ever. 

RAQUEL

Anyone who has ever been told that her toes were ‘piggies’ should understand the difference between Reality and Fiction. As tiny as they may have been, the Reality of her toes was assured by mama’s pinch. The charming creatures who go shopping and eat roast beef exist only to beguile the innocent.   

It seems ridiculous to have to assure the reader that this story is also Fiction, concocted for the amusement of the author, and to beguile any readers willing to be beguiled. And yet, my lawyer, Ms. Abigail Flinch (not the model for ‘Rachel’, the wholly fictional lawyer you are about to meet) assures me that this is so. 

Well then:

All rights are reserved. Without limiting the foregoing, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced to a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form, or by any means (whether electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without the express written permission of the author and copyright owner.

The author has undertaken to ease the transition from  scepticism to suspended disbelief, by tying the story to a few locations in the City of Portland, including the State University, the South Park Blocks, some of the city’s nicer restaurants and cafės, as well as to its goddess ‘Portlandia’.  Although real, these places (and the goddess herself—embodied in Raymond Kaskey’s  handsome statue, ‘Portlandia’) have been used fictionally.

The looseness of these ties to Reality will be apparent to anyone looking for a corner office in Neuberger Hall. There are none.

From sheer laziness, the author has set the story in the known Universe. Do not be fooled. All the characters and the events depicted, are, at best, passing fragments of plausibility dipped from the dimension of imagination.

Notwithstanding the implications of Everett’s Theory, none of the characters bear any intentional resemblance to any real persons now living or who have ever lived, and their stories have no relation to any real event, whether in the Portland or elsewhere.

This is, in part, a story about story-tellers, so all of the foregoing is but a boring substitute for the magical invocation,

“Once upon a time...”