E. LA RESOLUCIÓN CONTRACTUAL EN EL DERECHO
3.5. LA RESOLUCIÓN EN LA CONTRATACIÓN PÚBLICA PERUANA
3.5.5. EFECTOS DE LA RESOLUCIÓN CONTRACTUAL
As Jones points out in his chapters in The Oxford History of New Zealand Literature,
by 1991 the country’s literature was saturated with novels that were “explicitly concerned
with their own narrativity and fictionality, as well as sometimes with their intertextuality
and their blending of fact and fiction into ‘faction’” (1998, p. 230). While he draws
examples from work produced in the 1980s and early 1990s, fitting the metafictional
mode into the broader categorization of post-modernism, I hope to show that it is
possible to trace the mode back further: to the 1970s in Stead’s fiction, the 1960s in
Duggan, and further still to the 1950s in Janet Frame, which will complicate Jones’
historicisation to some extent, and render Morrissey’s claim to represent the avant-garde in The New Fiction largely redundant.
Jones’ outline of reflexive writers (up to 1998) includes Maurice Shadbolt, Craig
Harrison, C.K. Stead, Ian Wedde, Michael Jackson, Russell Haley, Stevan Eldred-
Grigg, Anne Kennedy and Janet Frame. To revise and update the list, M.K. Joseph,
Maurice Duggan, Elizabeth Knox, Bill Manhire, Albert Wendt, Charlotte Randall and
Jack Ross could be added, as well as writers who have used the mode in short fiction, such
as Keri Hulme and Witi Ihimaera. But for many of these authors, the metafictional
mode is limited to a single work or overshadowed by other more dominant modes. M.K.
Joseph’s tall story A Soldier’s Tale (1976) pushes realism towards self-reflexivity in places,
but ultimately pulls up short of constituent metafictionality. The narrator’s occasional
forays into the meta-regions of narrativity are - for good reason - rather shallow: his
elements of the narrative altogether if the reader were to be convinced of the unreliability
of the narrator. While he admits that the story is “not strictly realistic” (p. 10), he
nevertheless urges the reader to accept it as fact: “try to imagine him telling this story,
squatting on a ration-box staring with his cold eyes over the rim of his mug into the thin,
blue flame, seeing in it the pictures he was describing to me” (pp. 10-11).
Similarly, some of Maurice Gee’s work shows hints of reflexivity, but for the most
part settles back into a more conventional mode of (autobiographical) social-realism.
Going West (1992), perhaps Gee’s most reflective novel, is narrated by the
autobiographically-based character Jack Skeat, a writer writing about another writer, but
he generally ignores the technical and fictive issues of the account he is creating, and
focuses his account on the character’s lives and relationships. He writes not to discover but to order and invent: “Why do I do this? Why start? I have no need of discovery. Isn’t
that what I’m leading to?” (Gee, 1992, p. 5). To a large extent the questions raised in
Gee’s novels turn on the motivations of characters - their need to explain a series of causes
and effects in the diegesis - rather than in self-questioning the nature of narrative and
representations of reality. That some of Gee’s protagonists are writers and artists seems
more to be inspired by his locality and encoded biography (in Henderson/Loomis) than in
his desire to explore matters of fictiveness.
A similar philosophy appears to be at work in Maurice Shadbolt’s novels. As Jones
points out, Shadbolt uses reflexive procedures “without necessarily embracing the post-
modern attitudes often used to justify them” (Jones, 1998, p. 230). To take an example
from his most playful foray into reflexivity, The Lovelock Version (1980), the constituent
narrator occasionally calls the ontological status of his characters into question (“the
Lovelocks, then, do they live?”) only to write off the uncertainty: “Never, mercifully, this
narrator’s problem […] this life, this unfinished fable, this scriptless dream, and too
untidy by far, is also too short for elegant sport with the spurious; and too intricate for
truth” (Shadbolt, 1980, p. 27). If the “truth” of the story is at all brought into question,
the question is immediately discarded as being of little relevance, and conventional realism
resumes its place centre stage.2
Other New Zealand writers have tried to incorporate reflexive analysis into their
fiction with limited success. Historian Stevan Eldred-Grigg’s otherwise interesting foray
into metafictional-memoir, My History I Think (1994), raises a number of cryptic
questions and makes a series of abstract claims relating life to his narrative (“The hidden history is the history of the historian” (p. 189), or “Writers can hide very nicely behind
their characters. I have hidden myself all my life. I like to hide” (p. 12), but they are not
given tangible illustration in the story. By the end of the book the reader has little insight
into the underlying tension between autobiography and fiction that the writer seemed to
promise. In fact, the end of the novel unwittingly sums up its own problems with
metafictional mode. “The interesting part of the story is always concealed,” the narrator
says in the last few pages. Likewise, Geoff Palmer’s reflective case of esprit d’escalier in
Telling Stories (1996), while an entertaining piece of fiction, ends up making some fairly
pedestrian statements - “All sorts of strange things happen when you start to write things
down. Things like maintaining a narrative flow and stuff” (p. 63).
As Shadbolt intimated in an article on his ‘Beginnings’, the processes behind writing did not have a place in narrative, or even in general discussion: “The better the writer, the less there is left over for literary conversation. Writers who talk shop often have empty shelves” (Shadbolt, 1981, p. 97).
On the other hand, a number of writers have incorporated metafictional gestures in
intelligent and illuminating ways, but they have been overshadowed by a more dominant
mode. In the case of Mike Johnson’s Antibody Positive (1987), the narrator describes his
obstacles in scripting the book, but these “great many time, motion, character and plot
problems” as Ireland puts it (1989, p. 189), become lost in the more perplexing science-
fictional aspects of the novel. Likewise, in Craig Harrison’s Grievous Bodily (1991) the
moments of metafictionality are literally and metaphorically buried by farcical or
carnivalesque comedy. In the final part of the book, the literary-minded Dr Mottle
realises that he might be a character in a novel, and the house in which he is standing
collapses:
This only seized his mind briefly but it flipped his entire environment from realist mode to conscious fictional mode and back again. And this was fatal for the
Prannock house, because a self-conscious house could not remain standing after what
Wesley had done to it, any more than a realistic narrative could remain intact if its
characters showed awareness of their fictionality. It would collapse. (Harrison, 1991,
p. 250)
The house does collapse, ending the story, and Dr. Mottle puts it down to the post-
modern problem of “deconstruction”, making Harrison’s ending more of a literary in-joke
or one-liner than a useful addition to theme, plot, character or the narrative framework.
Other authors such as Ian Wedde, Jack Ross and Anne Kennedy have written dense
and erudite (anti)novels which combine self-reflexive approaches with experimental DQG
“post-modern” fiction if the mantle at all concerned them (see Wedde 1986a, 2006, 2008;
Ross 2005, 2006, 2010; Kennedy 1988, 1993).
One of the writers who took the concept of post-modernism seriously was Auckland-
based Michael Morrissey, who frequently used the term in the mid-1980s to describe his
own work and that of the writers he collected and published under the title The New
Fiction. Morrissey’s early work was clearly influenced by Sargeson, and although it later
became dominated by agonised self-conscious stories about personal and sexual
relationships it could still quite easily be described as social-realism with an overcoat of
urban chic – a mode of realism which he eventually returned to in Paradise to Come
(1997). Mid-way through his career he made an extended foray into an eclectic mode of
consciously avante-garde fictions in which he imported a variety of experimental devices from America, Britain and Australia. The Fat Lady & the Astronomer, and Octavio’s Last
Invention are avowedly post-modernist, and have a plurality of influences from writers
such as Joyce, Beckett, Barthelme, and Borges to populist sci-fi writers such as Alfred
Bester.
What most defines Morrissey’s work, or what defined his most frequently
anthologised stories in the 1980s, was his use of faction, what is now commonly known
as RPF or real person fiction: the device of taking real and often famous historical figures
and importing them into a fictional setting together with fictitious allegations. While
faction or RPF has been popularised since the 1990s with internet story boards, fanzines
and role-playing boards, it is most likely that Morrissey first encountered the idea in the
short stories of Christchurch-born Australian-based writer Gary Langford. Langford’s
to invade Russia, thereby losing him the second world war” and “Humphrey Bogart Got
More Than An Oscar For the African Queen’”, “Barth’s Dream”, “The Death of James
Dean”, and “The Girl Who Waited Too Long for Godot”) were being published in The
Listener and Landfall from the early 1970s.3
Morrissey picks up on Langford’s technique in his collection The Fat Lady & the
Astronomer (1981) creating narratives with historically-based characters such as Charles
Fort, Franz Kafka, Jesus and Andy Warhol. The most successful from this series of
stories is Morrissey’s oft-anthologised “Jack Kerouac Sat Down by the Wanganui River
and Wept” (first published in Islands in 1980), a story which, as the title suggests, imports
Langford’s model into a New Zealand context and extends Kerouac’s famous road-trip
beyond the West Coast of America across the Pacific, to the grave of James K Baxter in Wanganui. Like Langford’s characters, the character of “Kerouac” in Morrissey’s story
makes no exact reference to the historical figure of Jack Kerouac, but uses self-consciously
fictional motifs and references from On the Road (1957) and combines them with real-
world references to Jerusalem and Baxter’s burial place. As a result, the story creates a
fissure between language and reality while questioning the necessity of logical or “realistic”
narrative progression.
As has been mentioned, another culturally interesting element of Morrissey’s body of
work is his anthology The New Fiction. While the collection itself shows an interesting
range of experimental work, it suffered at the time from a framing introduction that
A full list of Langford’s publications is available at the University of Waikato database of New Zealand
short stories: http://www.waikato.ac.nz/library/resources/nzc/stories/ssauthorl1.shtml
attempted, through a false-dichotomy, to pit its “young” metafictionalists against realism
and an older generation of established writers – a move that drew highly critical reviews,
most notably from Patrick Evans, C.K. Stead, and David Dowling. One of the
immediate problems with the 30,000 word critical introduction to the anthology was that
the obligatory methodological explanation for inclusions and omissions was unusually
short – 8 lines long – and Morrissey’s reasons for not including work by authors (Duggan,
Frame and Stead, as well as Vincent O’Sullivan, Michael Henderson and Steven Eldred-
Grigg) that might have otherwise brought into question the disjuncture established in the
essay between the old and new generations and between realism and post-modernism,
were inexplicably brief and vague. Ostensibly Morrissey had conceived of the anthology
to showcase work that had remained unpublished, because of what he claimed was the realist-dominated climate of New Zealand literature. But there were problems with his
explanation. He was taken to task by Stead for not including Frame, little known writer
B.F. Babington, and Duggan (and by extension – Stead himself) who had legitimately
been working in the “new” mode at least 15 years earlier – 30 years for Frame. “Michael
Henderson, and even more, Michael Gifkins,” Stead adds, “seem so pre-eminently to lie
within its scope I find their exclusion incomprehensible [...] either Morrissey is confused,
or he is not giving his reasons for his exclusions.” (1989, p. 236). On the other hand,
David Dowling (1986) invalidated Morrissey’s claim that his selection of writers had
suffered from a lack of attention by pointing out that, of the 40 pieces in The New Fiction,
33 had been previously published (and five of those in the allegedly conservative pages of
In sum, Morrissey’s new fiction was neither very new, nor very fictional: many of its
works - pieces by Ted Jenner, Wystan Curnow, Francis Pound, Alexandria Chalmers and
Markman Ellis - drew on the methods of autobiographically-based concrete poetry for
their impact, and failed to resemble even prose, much less anything marketable as fiction.
Without giving any sensible justification for the reader to change their understanding of
some longstanding and useful nomenclature, the otherwise successful pieces of “new
fiction” rattled around like round pegs in a square hole - the term fiction being too boxlike
to accommodate them comfortably, and the various influences (open form, concrete
poetry, bricolage, and so forth) giving the collection a sense of shapelessness.
Despite, or perhaps because of, its large scope of influence on New Zealand writers,
the metafictional mode’s origins are multiplicitous and difficult to trace. It is clear, though, that some of the most important and widely read international twentieth-century
metafictionalists in the local literary circles wrote, or were popularised, in America. C.K.
Stead references Nabokov’s use of “pale fire” in “A Quality of Life” and plays on his use of
providing revisionary insights into an earlier manuscript (Stead, 1981c, p. 113). Earlier
still, Maurice Duggan’s “Along Rideout Road that Summer” (1961) shows the influence
of Vladimir Nabokov ‘s Lolita (1955) of which, according to Stead (1991, p. 135), he
borrowed an illegal copy from friend Erich Geiringer in 1960: like Nabokov’s Humbert,
Duggan’s narrator shows great delight in displaying his broad literary tastes, and recounts
his version of events to an imagined jury. Duggan also references Jorge Luis Borges in
“The Magsman Miscellany” (1975) likening his own prose to the Borgesian maze. And
Borges is elsewhere referenced or drawn on by Albert Wendt in Black Rainbow (1992)
an influential figure. As I have already mentioned, Morrissey’s attempt to introduce
metafiction and its related modes in his introduction to The New Fiction draws extensively
on the fiction and criticism of Gass, Barth and Borges.
If the metafictional eruptions in America did in fact cause a wave of reflexivity to roll
across the Pacific in the late 1960s, its first port of call was probably Auckland. Certainly
Sargeson’s protégés, those “alarmingly dedicated and embattled” writers who, according to
Maurice Shadbolt, crafted “prose and poetry from pure literary motives” (Shadbolt, 1981,
p. 97) were amongst the first in the country writing concomitantly reflexive and,
eventually, constituently metafictional work. Three of these writers: Maurice Duggan,
Janet Frame and C.K. Stead were experimenting in short fiction, Duggan exclusively,
while Frame and Stead were also writing poetry and planning novels.
To some extent Frame was already beginning to use the reflexive mode before she
met Sargeson, and before the metafictional renaissance even began to take place in
American literature. The short stories in her first book The Lagoon and Other Stories
(1951) make Frame appear well ahead of even her international contemporaries, especially
considering the book took six years to be published: as Pamela Gordon has pointed out,
the stories were “written in 1946 while the aspiring author was working as a live-in
housemaid/waitress/nurse at a boarding house in Playfair Street, Caversham, Dunedin”
(Gordon, 2009). Although a kind of juvenilia, some of the stories in the collection hint at
the metafictional preoccupations with language and reality that would become the staples
of Frame’s later work. The final piece - accurately enough titled “My Last Story” - is the
most prophetically narrative-focussed. The piece is very short, two pages long, narrated
story” (see 1951[1990], p. 97) yet feels she must name the topic she is not going to write
about - her family - and thus produces a sort of double-negative sketch. The story
certainly disrupts conventional modes of storytelling: it breaks the fourth wall to directly
address an implied audience and draws attention to its own use of language – particularly
in its reiteration of clichés and chestnut sayings (“earning a living”, “every cloud has a
silver lining”, “it must be love”, “a heart of gold”) but also by referring to its own
punctuation: “I’m going to put three dots with my typewriter, impressively, and then I’m
going to begin…” (pp. 97-98). While rather slight as a whole, it is clear a gesture toward
the metafictional mode that Frame would develop later in her novels, and it also dates
Frame’s use of self-reflexive play to over 20 years before Duggan and Stead made use of
the mode, and makes Michael Morrissey’s 1985 anthology of reflexive “new fiction” appear to dawdle 50 years behind the avant-garde. In fact, Morrissey’s “paradox” – that
“the new fiction has been present in New Zealand for some time” (1985, p. 14) is less a
paradox than a truism, given the presence of the mode in Frame, Stead, Duggan and, to a
lesser extent, Shadbolt.
Probably the most accomplished and substantial early metafiction belongs to the first
occupant of Sargeson’s army hut at Esmonde Rd, Maurice Duggan - although this work
would not be written until a decade after his stay with Sargeson. “Along Rideout Road
That Summer”, the first draft of which was written at the end of his Burns fellowship in
1960 (see Richards, 1997, pp. 269-70), is one of New Zealand’s most anthologised
stories, and aside from Frame’s gestures in The Lagoon, the first evidence that the
conventional grounds of fiction was beginning to be seriously examined within the