Response to Ortese

The Iguana features multiple levels of duality.  This concept is much too complex to be reduced to an examination of imagination or memory, dream or reality.  Instead these elements should be examined as relationships within the novel.  In The Iguana, the relationship between imagination and memory is stimulated by Ortese’s distortion of time and space.  Holding firmly to the belief that “imagination cannot be separated wholly from observation and experience,” The Iguana, even at its points of highest fantastical significance, contains components drawn from the previous experiences of its characters.  Though introduced as an imaginative absurdity, the prospect of “the confessions of a madman…the story of a madman in love with an iguana” resurfaces, perhaps coincidentally, but more likely from Daddo’s memory (Ortese 3).  The young publisher, Adelchi, relies on the imagination of Daddo to create “something really new, something extraordinary,” (Ortese 3).  The novel generates meaning through its recombination of recognizable elements just as “imagination is a matter of syntax rather than lexis,” (Wood 358).  Ortese reduces the divide between imagination and memory as a way to distort the novel’s concepts of time and space.  Daddo observes the Iguana’s fascination with stones by assuming her ignorant of the concept of wealth, which he himself is obsessed with.