Archive for the ‘Metafiction’ Category
Hisstory Repleats Herself: James Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake
One of the most metafictional books: a story about a story that is repeated endlessly, the one story that is all stories at once, the cyclical story of the rise and fall of humanity.
Joyce essentially invented his own mishmash of languages, making the book notoriously difficult to read, but if you drink several glasses of Irish whiskey, smoke a few bowls and squint a lot the book becomes more readable . . . even funny! You should think of the novel as a great collection of puns.
Here is the first line: “riverrun, past Eve and Adam’s, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs.” Joyce packs in meaning by using puns and allusions (which are themselves a kind of pun). On a cursory count I find at least fourteen. “Past,” for example, is the preposition as in “the river flows past the church.” It also refers to the past, a central theme of the work. It can also be a homonym for the past tense of the verb “to pass”: passed. A Reader’s Guide to Finnegan’s Wake by William York Tindall explains some of the allusions: ”‘Riverrun,’ the first word is the central word of the book; for Anna Livia’s Liffey, the feminine creative principle, is the river of time and life. The Liffey flows past the church of Adam and Eve (reversed here to imply temptation, fall, and renewal) and into Dublin Bay, where . . . it circulates up to Howth, the northern extremity of the bay. ‘Eve and Adam’s’ unites Dublin with Eden and one time with another” (Tindall 30).
Watchmen: A Metacomic
Watchmen by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons is a metacomic in several ways. First of all, the book challenges our understanding of comics because it includes sections of straight text between every colorful chapter: excerpts from an autobiography, a police file, an article from an Ornithological journal, an editorial from a right-wing magazine, pages from a scrapbook, business correspondence, and so on. Watchmen is, in fact, a postmodern compendium of texts, yet it is still principally a comic (or a graphic novel if you prefer).
Understanding is Making Up Stories about Chaos
(From my upcoming book Narrative Madness, edited by Katie Fox. Look for it on a Kindle, iPad or Amazon near you.)
We, as language users, constantly name ourselves, others, settings, actions, and events in an order that makes sense to us, ignoring the rest of the universe. We may not always use Don Quixote’s romantic language or share his chivalric plot line, but he is only doing what all of us do: trying to make sense of the noise and confusion of life.
A Meta-Acrostic Poem
A poem
Crashing into
Rocks and
Ocean,
Sinking slowly
Toward the
Icy
Cold
Poetry
Of
Everyone's
Mind.
by Mark Sadeghian
In the Name of the Book, In the Name of Cervantes, Amen
(From my book Narrative Madness, edited by Kt Fox. Coming soon to a Kindle or iPad near you!)
The Name of the Book
When deciding to read a book, the first questions we ask are: “What is it called?” and “Who wrote it?” Easy, as the answers are printed on the fat novel to my right: Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes. Just two names and the preposition “by.” We can almost pass over without a thought. How much meaning could there be in so few words?
Message or Madness?: Thomas Pychon’s “The Crying of Lot 49″
Does Pynchon’s novel mean something or am I crazy?
The heroine, Oedipa Maas, has a similar question. A former lover, Pierce Inverarity named her the executor of his considerable estate. Rather than bequeathing her money or property, he has saddled her with a long, legal process that she does not understand. As she is not a lawyer and has had little contact with Inverarity for many years, the naming of her Executor is puzzling. Was Inverarity trying to tell her something, or was it just one of his bizarre whims? Was he playing a practical joke on her, or was he hinting at a secret society?
A Walking Assembly of Man: Many Voices Crying Lot 49
In the metafictional novel The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon, Oedipa Maas escapes from a shootout and hostage situation. Among the crowds, journalists, police and searchlights, she spots the mobile unit of her husband’s radio station, KCUF. Wendell “Mucho” Maas, whom she hasn’t seen for some time, is reporting on the event. She walks up to the van, sticks her head through the window, and says, “Hi.” He presses the cough button and smiles, which she thinks is strange since the listeners can’t hear a smile. Her reaction shows that she expects him to consider his audience before her, which he does.
She quietly climbs into the van and he pushes the microphone in her face and mumbles, “You’re on, just be yourself.” Then, more loudly for the mike, he states in his earnest broadcasting voice, “How do you feel about this terrible thing?” Not knowing what to say, she takes a cue from his question and says, “Terrible.” He answers, “Wonderful,” because he knows that this is what his listeners want to hear: how terrible the situation was.
She summarizes the event dispassionately, for how can her husband expect her to “be herself” on the air after such a traumatic experience, especially since he is playing the part of a radio broadcaster rather than a sympathetic husband? At the end he says, “Thank you, Mrs. Edna Mosh.” Something is not quite right. At the border of either insanity or a giant conspiracy, her identity is slipping. After he signs off, she asks, “Edna Mosh?” and he explains that he adjusted her name to allow for the distortion on the rig and tape, saying that it will come out the right way when broadcast.
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Trapped in Narrative Language
Our stories have driven us mad.
All of us. You, me and Don Quixote all suffer from narrative madness. Alas, I can not cure you, but I can treat the symptoms with a gloppy plaster of metafiction.
Like the ingenious man of La Mancha, we wander lost through clouds of story, never directly experiencing our surroundings, others, or events. On the day he sallied forth, the self-christened Don Quixote encountered an inn:
“And as whatever our adventurer thought, saw, or imagined, seemed to him to be done and transacted in the manner he had read of, immediately, at sight of the inn, he fancied it to be a castle, with four turrets and battlements of refulgent silver, together with its drawbridge, deep moat, and all the appurtenances with which such castles are usually described” (Cervantes 28).
Metafiction and Chaos Theory: Cory A. Reed’s “Chaotic Quijote”
While Miguel de Cervantes was writing a tale about a mad knight, scientists were discovering and describing a rational order to the cosmos. Between the publication of the first book of Don Quijote in 1605 and and the second in 1615, Johannes Kepler proposed the first two laws of planetary motion, and Galileo Galilei made telescopic observations that proved the heliocentric model of the solar system proposed by Copernicus sixty years earlier. To these scientists, the universe appeared to be an organized system, operating according to observable, objective laws.
In his article “Chaotic Quijote: Complexity, Nonlinearity and Perspectivism,” Cory A. Reed argues that Cervantes’ metafictional novel anticipates chaos theory: “Like chaos theory itself, Cervantes’ novel challenges the reliability of determinism, objectivity, and literalism that would soon be adopted by the Newtonian and Cartesian models of scientific investigation” (Reed 738). In contrast to the scientists of his day (and all others up until Albert Einstein and Werner Heisenberg), Cervantes represented reality as contradictory, random and subjective.
Even the Slightest, Most Trivial Thing: The Reading of Mystery and the Mystery of Reading
Where do these tracks lead?
The trail comes out from under the trees, onto open savannas, where first we stood and began to follow animal traces with our eyes, reading signs and reconstructing stories of our prey. The path winds around a method of examination and interpretation of detail, which we might, in retrospect, call the art of detecting, modeled in a folk tale first known in the west as “The Three Princes of Serendip.” Next the trail moves upward through the scientific methodology and logic of Voltaire’s Zadig and reaches a summit in the technique of ratiocination in Edgar Allan Poe’s definitive mysteries. Eventually, the tracks continue across the screen and lead all the way to–
