Once I Metablog on Metafiction

I am not writing this. This blog is writing me.

I did not want — nor was I able — to write this myself. I will create a persona as I go along, let’s call him Ronosaurus Rex, that will do the work for me (Ron Richardson), someone simpler, who does not get pimples nor have a crick in his neck (such things won’t be mentioned). Not only will I simplify, I will fictionalize myself and make myself seem smarter, wittier, and, while I am at it, better looking. But this is not a story about me, it is a story about stories. To tell it, I must invent a speaker, which I will call, for convenience, myself. The needs of the blog will determine the voice I use. If you know it is a lie and I know it is a lie, then I will be telling the truth.

Every piece of writing, fiction or non-, requires the invention of a speaker, who may (or may not) share certain characteristics in common with the writer, such as a name, a gender, a context. Nevertheless, this speaker is not the writer. Make no mistake. Even the most honest speaker must necessarily present themselves more simply or preface every utterance with a story as long as their lives.

Even if this were possible, a story as long as a life, the autobiographical portion alone, which would supposedly defictionalize the speaker before any true statement could be made, would necessarily be told from a certain perspective, with a certain agenda. No two people ever tell the same version of any event, however simple (unless they have picked up certain phrases and ways of telling a story from each other, which often happens). Even if we could produce a text from here to Jupiter, which recorded every detail of every event that happened in our lives with every person, place and thing from ten thousand perspectives, it would not be true, in the sense of “This is what happened,” because it would not be what happened. It would not be what happened, but a recreation of it in code, inert code, without life or meaning until it is picked up and then, dear reader, oh then . . .

A different story altogether is told as the reader reinterprets the letters on the page. Readers pick up the inert code and “play it” in their brains, in glorious Technicolor imagination! And nothing, I promise you,  nothing will look like it did when it first happened.

It is fiction. All of it.

At least that is how the story goes.

(To read about how other authors fictionalize themselves, read The Decameron With and Without a Frame Story, Chaucer: A Bad Poet and a Didactic Bore, and Who Wrote Don Quixote?).