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I've been slow to join the conversation, since it coincided with the beginning of the semester. Kudos to all of you who are teachers and students yet still found time to join in the fray.

I was supposed to be finding articles about film theory for my course on Mexican directors in Hollywood so that we could talk about "Y Tu Mam Tambin" and "Great Expectations," both directed by Alfonso Cuarn. But I'm trained in lit, so I thought of both films as Bildungsroman, the novel of formation or socialization, where the Mexican movie is a failed Bildungsroman, in which the two Mexican teenagers are unable to grow up, or they grow up wrong. It bothered me that I kept telling the students, like those jokes about Hollywood movie pitches ("It's Sideways meets Gone With the Wind!"), that the movie was a sex comedy and a Bildungsroman and a road movie. But it is.

Some lit theory finds this to be completely unsurprising, indeed almost the definition of the novel. The strain of thinking in that direction is started really by Mikhail Bakhtin: he didn't like the Hegelian argument that the novel is an epic for the modern world, an (inevitably failed) attempt to totalize what had been naturally total and unified in a classical or mythical world. Rubbish, said Bakhtin, novels are supposed to criticize totalities, make fun of Don Quixotes who are out of touch with reality; especially they are supposed to bring in all kinds of language of the everyday and juggle them, making fun of Dickensian lawyers who treat their wives like juries or schoolteachers who treat their boyfriends like pupils.

The problem for me with Bakhtin has always been that he didn't seem to like story --that was one of my favorite parts of Greg's argument. I was reminded of E.M.Forster's friendly, wistful definition of the novel in 1927: "The novel, oh dear me yes, tells a story." He contrasts it with the blustery businessman, interrupted no doubt on the golf links, who says, "A novel tells a story, and I can't be bothered with the kind of people who say it doesn't. And my wife thinks the same way."

(The book I recommended to my students was a very smart and well-written sociological approach to the Bildungsroman by Franco Moretti at Stanford called The Way of the World, which certainly finds a way to talk about the story aspect of Goethe, Austen, Stendhal, Dickens, and others without trying to turn Bildungsroman into attempts to be epics.)

But Bakhtin can still be the patron saint of interstitial fiction, especially for the people who try to tell a story knowing that sometimes they want to sound like a fantasist, sometimes like a Western writer, sometimes like a philosophical fabulist, whatever. Some storytellers want to tell a story that's kind of a sex comedy, kind of a Bildungsroman, kind of a road movie; they want to invoke those generic traditions, often simultaneously, and critique some (Y Tu Mama is a critique of sex comedies), suggest that others are almost impossible (how can you grow up in Mexico in 1999 when Mexican masculinity and Mexican politics are so screwed up?), and are pure examples of others (it delivers what a road movie is supposed to deliver).

Viva la intersticialidad...