Moby Dick and Don Quixote as self-conscious novels: the question of language and artefacts Writing against FR Leavis' conception of the English novel, set out in The Great Tradition, Robert Alter writes “the other great tradition”, as he ironically suggests in the preface to his Partial Magic. Leavis introduces the criterion of "seriousness" into studies of the English novel, excluding from his account a whole host of novelists who do not meet the proposed expectations. Alter establishes a parallel genealogy of the novel, a “self-conscious novel,” which “systematically flaunts its condition as artifice and which in doing so probes the problematic relationship between apparently real artifice and reality” (Alter x). This article examines two very different novels, Moby Dick and Don Quixote, through two passages as self-aware windows. As representatives of this genre, regardless of their differences in production time, form, or content, they both essentially do the same thing: mix different levels of fiction and reality to question their own status as fiction and reality. One way to do this is through real objects and the idea of ​​language they imply. Moby Dick's self-conscious first-person narrator, Ishmael, a socially alienated sailor, wanders New Bedford, Massachusetts, before signing up for a whaling voyage. ship Pequod. In chapter 7, "The Chapel", find the Whaler's Chapel and marble tablets inside. Upon closer inspection, he notices that these are commemorative plaques erected by the families and shipmates of sailors lost at sea. They are cenotaphs, literally “empty tombs” in Greek, and mark not only loss but absence. They are tombstones without a grave, which provide...... in the center of the card......hin and on the outside the artifacts it incorporates can cross the language barrier. The cenotaphs Ishmael comes across are somewhat similar to Flemish tapestries. Real-objects are aesthetic objects but also claims to truth, linked to the language that constitutes them. A commemorative plaque in any language would still honor the memory of “Captain Ezekiel Hardy” and remain an aesthetic object in a novel – but would it remain a statement of truth in a conscious novel? On the other hand, Ishmael's cenotaphs are not real objects; they are unreliable representations. The purpose and function of such objects, it seems, lie less in their “reality” and more in their intrinsic ability to impact and probe the dialectic they embody. Perhaps they are more like double-sided tapestries, which scrutinize both sides with their intertwined threads, both real and imaginary.