Archive for the ‘metafiction’ tag
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.
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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Relevance of Metafiction in the Age of Information
We are flooded with narrative, drowning in astronomical numbers of stories from paperbacks, movies, newspapers, television, magazines, fan fictions, computer games, and, most of all, the Internet. How can we cope with these stories? What do we do with them?
Meta-awareness is more important more than ever, if we are to understand our storied universe. Yet how can we know what is real with reality TV on every channel? Most of us are smart enough to know that the presence of a camera always causes people to act differently than they would otherwise. Although reality TV is realer than a sit com, we recognize that it is not as real as a news broadcast.
Purpose: To Rehabilitate Reality through Metafiction
It might seem that I am trying to demonstrate the unreality of reality. Many others have done so, including Taoists, Hindus and Buddhists. Jews, Christians and Muslims, following Plato’s lead, think God’s ideal realm is realer than this world. Religious people are not the only ones to call reality an illusion. Ludwig Wittgenstein said, “The limits of my language mean the limits of my world,” and Jacques Derrida suggested, “There is nothing outside the text.”
Instead, my purpose is to show that the distinction between fiction and reality is artificial, created by language. Fiction and reality both exist as concepts within the same linguistic structure; symbols and stories are essential parts of our reality system. Everything we talk and write about is fiction, yet fiction has material existence, therefore it is real. Separating fiction from reality only drives us, like Don Quixote, to narrative madness.
Recognizing how fiction is our reality will not cure our insanity, but the realization will give us more freedom to reconstruct reality. The purpose of speech and writing is after all is not to record or comment on the world, as the Greeks suggested, but to act upon the world, to shape it and make sense of it. On the other hand, most of our actions are symbolic, referencing linguistic roles. When I stand before a class, I am saying, “I am the teacher. Listen to me.” A whole scene is suggested by the placement of my body. Speech is action and action is language. To understand what we are doing and saying, we must recognize that language and action are part of the same symbolic system.
Fiction Precedes and Defines Non-Fiction
Yet even fiction is a fiction, a word which developed out of the Latin fingere, “to fashion or form.” In the Oxford English Dictionary, the first definition of “fiction,” now obsolete, is “the action of fashioning or imitating,” and is related to the verb “to feign.” The word first referred to all kinds of art, “The . . . Art of Painting . . . surpassing by so many Degrees . . . all other Human Fiction, or imitative Art” (Lord Shaftesbury in his Characteristicks).
To Understand, We Must Produce Narrative
Like language, narrative refers to concept rather than reality. The structuralist description of the sign can be extended to narrative, since both words and stories are symbols played out across time. A word occurs as a sequence, as when we say or read “T – U – N – D – R – A.” Similarly, a narrative may be defined as signs in a series. The story then can be considered a sign itself, an arbitrary signifier, referring not to events in the real world, but to a subjective concept of what happened, is happening and will happen.
Extending the Linguistic “Concept” to Include “Narrative Function”
At the beginning of the last century, Ferdinand de Saussure severed language from reality. In his Course in General Linguistics, he explained that a sign is made up of two parts: the signifier and the signified. The signifier is a word, a set of sounds, sometimes represented by letters. The signified is what the signifier arbitrarily refers to. Unfortunately for those who want language to be a transparent window on the world, the signified is not an external object, but a subjective concept.
A sidewalk (another word for ground) is not a thing, but an idea. After all, we do not experience the rough pavement as a snail or a starling might, who cannot know that the sidewalk is for walking. How could they when they lack the word?
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).
