Restricciones de la conciencia metalingüística que afectan la producción textual en L

The great promoter of the white wall, the white collar criminal Dominick Flood under house arrest, quips to Delaney a subtly disturbing observation about uncertainty and nature: "To me, there's nothing more important than the environment – hey, where would we be without it, floating in space?" (187). In a moment of wordplay, Boyle concludes his book when the white wall called for by the white community's Flood meets a huge black flood from the natural crevasse. The artificial Arroyo Blanco is no match against this powerful black flood.

Annie Dillard, among others, is noted for designating streams of water as symbolizing never-spent life. When benign, even usually dry, streams become raging floods, the life force becomes ferociously ambivalent. At the moment of the novel's climax, Delaney confronts Cándido with his gun, but both are swept away by the black flood that also destroys much of Arroyo Blanco. It "hammered the walls flat and twisted the roofs from the houses" (353). Delaney, swept away, "was drawn so much closer to that cold black working heart of the world than he'd ever dreamed possible." (352). That

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heart of darkness reveals in a sublime moment the uncontrolled and uncertain nature of nature, the horror of struggle and survival. It shows him his own smallness in that whole scheme he had always so successfully repressed as unheimlich, living within the confines of the white community.

In all this, Boyle styles Cándido the savior of the final scene. Even though the Mexicans' baby, Succoro, their succor and hope for the future, is lost in the flood, Cándido, remains, as his name implies, faithful, tending to the naif of his Voltaire namesake. As such, he sees "the white face surge up out of the black swirl of the current and the white hand grasping at the tiles" and takes hold of it (355). That final gesture, much disputed in Boyle online chat, is highly problematic. Boyle provides the homiletic explanation, "The final gesture of the book, I think, shows that we are one species and we do have to understand and appreciate that fact despite ethnic and national differences."58 The book describes occasional small acts of selfless kindness, especially by whites toward Cándido, which offer a view of something opposed to Delaney's encounter with the cold, black working heart. However, they are rare and undependable. They happen spontaneously between individuals, just as chaotic and disorganized as the wilderness of nature Delaney and Cándido work so fervently to repress.

The perpetuation of borders, especially as the sign of the limit of nature at the edge of civilization, therefore, seems to repress not only the viciousness of nature but also, ironically, limits acts of selfless kindness that would counteract that viciousness. Borders strengthen the sense of Self and the sense of community which designates those whom one should aid and whom not. Arroyo Blanco houses the white community whose members, associating themselves with whiteness and thereby agree to a contract of mutual aid and protection, which they do provide each other in countless ways as a society and as individuals. This occurs at the exclusion of the non-white, in this case specifically the Mexican, which through repressive displacement comes to embody all the chaos the white community fears.

Delaney wants to be liberal, but "his" unheimlich Mexican reminds him how fragile that designation is and what kind of military and economic struggle it depends upon. Therefore, he feels impelled to perpetuate the horrors on the Mexican immigrant to preserve his own liberal self-image. It presents a different kind of paradox than that around which this study centers, the two are linked. The white male liberal as it is cast in

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American discourse is taken apart and critiqued in the novel as a founding principle of the American master narrative. The novel employs devices which expose the fallacy of a liberalness that forces Delaney to work to cover up that exposure. Like Pynchon's delineator Mason, Delaney must constantly repress and defer the fact that he is part of the white Commission, a member of the Homeowners Association. Boyle demonstrates that the acts of selflessness he calls for become precious and rare when the bordered white male Self is at stake. Borders encompass and give an historicized order to the white male Self and his included forms of Otherness. To transgress them is to proceed into the realm of the Self's doubled Other, the unheimlich, and all the horrors it contains.

4. Deceptive subversions: Passing, reverse-passing, and the appearance of transformation for Wally Lamb and Jay McInerney

Marcus was the only person who ever referred to me as a "nigga." Every time he applied the word to me I relished the sound of it, as I might savor an exotic delicacy. This word, more than any other cultural term of practice, continued to separate me from my neighbors back home.

- Dalton Conley, Honky1