Archive for the ‘Premodern Postmodernism’ Category
Hisstory Repleats Herself: James Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake
One of the most metafictional books of all time: a story about a story that is repeated endlessly, the one story that is all stories at once, which is the 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, squint a lot, occasionally refer to a guide, and think of the novel as a great collection of puns, the book becomes more readable . . . even funny!
Here is the first line: “riverrun, past Eve and Adam’s, from swerve or shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs.” From A Reader’s Guide to Finnegan’s Wake by William York Tindall: ”‘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).
Understanding is Making Up Stories about Chaos
(From Narrative Madness: The Quixotic Quest for Reality.)
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.
The Artificial “I”
(From Narrative Madness: The Quixotic Quest for Reality.)
All names are fictions, including the one that is closest to myself, that intimate name of names, my name for myself. For even the precious word “I” — which rises like a monolith above our heads, promising singularity and unity — is an invented word, rather than a natural concept.
Who is I? I is a letter. I is a word. Letters and words carry with them traces of their history in the shapes of the letters, in the roots, prefixes and suffixes of the words, tracks that lead back in time. Our letter comes from the Egyptian pictogram of an arm with a hand, which stood for the long A, later incorporated in the proto-Semitic language because their word for arm started with that sound (as ours does). A derivation of the letter can be found in most Semitic alphabets. The Phoenicians wrote the symbol diagonally, like a backwards drunken F; the Greeks righted the symbol and turned it into a solid, stable Doric column, the symbol we recognize today (information gleaned from Wikipedia).1
The Romans adopted the letter for the numeral 1 as well. The simple line, one unit is a symbol which goes all the way back to the beginnings of writing, the beginnings of what we now call “humanity,” used to mark out on prehistoric bones and cave walls the number of days or kills. The orthographic connection in English between “1” and “I” gives the pronoun the ancient, mystical meaning of 1, an individual who cannot be divided up into smaller parts.
In the Name of the Book, In the Name of Cervantes, Amen
(From Narrative Madness: The Quixitoic Quest for Reality)
Before deciding to read a book, an article or a thesis (and who would want to read a thesis?), the first two questions we as readers ask are: “What is it called?” and “Who wrote it?” Easy, as the answers are written on the fat book to my right: “Don Quixote” by “Miguel de Cervantes.” Just four names and a preposition. We can almost pass over them without a thought. How much meaning could there be in so few words?
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–
Acting Stereotypes Out: Herman Melville’s Benito Cereno and Charles Dicken’s Our Mutual Friend
When Al Jolson put on black face in the first talkie, he turned himself white, according to the article “Blackface, White Noise: The Jazz Singer Finds His Voice” by Michael Rogin. Wasn’t Al Jolson white to begin with? Well, he was Jewish. The plot of The Jazz Singer (1927) revolves around the young performer’s decision to become a cantor for the synagogue, like his father, or pursue a career in Vaudeville. Jakie Rabinowitz chooses Vaudeville and changes his name to Jack Robin, just as Asa Yoelson had changed his name to Al Jolson. The movie, like the play it was based on, was a thinly veiled biography of its star.
Dangerous Editors: Choderlos de Laclos’ “Les Liaisons dangereuses”
Les Liaisons Dangereuses by Choderlos de Laclos may not be what first comes to mind when you think of metafiction, but the the book is metafictional because it troubles the distinction between fiction and nonfiction. The book is told through a series of letters — the epistolary method — a device which gives a novel the illusion of being a collection of historical documents, as in Samuel Richardson’s Pamela (whose title page pronounces the book to be “A narrative which has its foundation in truth and nature”) and Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (“written by himself” — as with Pamela, the real author’s name is not included on the title page).
Eros and the Arabesque (Part VII)
Conclusion?
The Syrian manuscripts attempted to preserve and reproduce the “original” which stopped at two hundred and seventy-one nights but the Egyptian branch of manuscripts, Haddawy tells us in the introduction, “shows a proliferation that produced an abundance of poisonous fruits that proved almost fatal to the original” (Nights xv). Haddawy calls such additions “poisonous fruit” because he feels they destroyed its Arabic homogeneity. Besides deleting, modifying, adding, and borrowing from each other, “the copyist, driven to complete one thousand and one nights, kept adding folk tales, fables and anecdotes from Indian, Persian and Turkish, as well as indigenous sources, both from the oral and from the written traditions” (Nights xv). The tale of Sinbad is one such addition (the adventure is old, but its inclusion in The Arabian Nights is not). “The Story of Aladdin and the Magic Lamp” is actually a forgery written by a Frenchman named Galland and then translated into Arabic by a Syrian living in Paris to make it seem authentic, as evidenced by the French syntax and certain turns of phrase (Nights xvi).
