Consistent with Gass’s strictures on philosophical statements, Willie Masters’ Lonesome Wife does not content itself with merely saying how it is constructed. On the contrary, Gass uses a variety of techniques to achieve, in reality, the unity of matter and meaning that, according to his fiction, imaginative discourse seeks: fragmentation, disruptive juxtaposition, lyricism, mise-en-abyme, typographical variation, color, parody, iconic symbolism, photography, figuration, surface texture, etc. In other words, the stated aim of Willie Masters’ Lonesome Wife, to transcend the disjuncture of form and content, is not identical with its explicit self-description. It must do something, or become it, over and above what it can say. For McCaffery, what it must do is “never [allow] the reader to forget that literature is made of words and nothing else,” something ostensi-bly accomplished by emphasizing the words’ “sensuous qualities” (Curry 1995: 184).
But its success seems to depend, for McCaffery as for others, on Gass’s organizing meta-phor: that reading his fiction is having sex with a woman. In other words, unforgetting language does not occur merely through the accretion of sense data. It occurs through the eroticizing of that data, the transforming of words’ sensory qualities into “sensuous”
ones. What gives the early metafictionists’ pronouncements their peculiar mixture of zeal and emptiness is their confidence that what is most desired, immediate contact with reality, is in some sense right before everyone’s eyes, combined with their off-setting awareness that, if readers fail to experience it, no amount of direct statement will help. An under-discussed feature of metafictional and surfictional works is how often they are wholly lacking in any explicit commentary on themselves. In Coover’s
“The Baby Sitter” (1969), Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49 (1966), or Barthelme’s
“Marie, Marie, Hold on Tight” (1964), no pseudo-author intervenes to break the illu-sion and no narrator comments self-consciously on the formative conditions of his or her own narrating. Although the author or pseudo-author of Ishmael Reed’s Mumbo Jumbo (1972) editorializes continuously, the object of his critical commentary is west-ern culture and the art of high modwest-ernism, only indirectly or by implication his own work, and in Sorrentino’s Mulligan Stew, a fiction replete with discussions of fiction, not only is there no self-conscious narrator, there is no narrator. With the possible exception of Sorrentino’s letter to Barney Rosset in the front matter, the entirety of the text is comprised of documents written by characters.
Trying to adjudicate conflicts over the position of women in metafiction of the six-ties and sevensix-ties, specifically, over whether the male-centered perspective of a work
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like Gass’s is a necessary condition of its desire for transcendence, seems particularly uninviting, but a continuing value of such conflicts is that they locate the problem of metafiction at the right depth (see Friedman, this volume). Brian McHale’s pro-ductive insight that, despite their anti-representational pronouncements, these early metafictions were confronting ontological rather than epistemological questions, sug-gests that a verdict on metafiction’s sexual politics will prove inseparable from an assessment of what individual metafictions achieve over and above their representa-tions (McHale 1987: 3–25). In other words, if metafiction’s aim is to overcome fic-tion’s structural dividedness, its estrangement from its own reality, then the sexual necessities of its construction are part of what its writing and reading must themselves discover. Although it is difficult to imagine how, even allowing for critical distance, the phallocentrism of Willie Masters’ Lonesome Wife could prove inessential to it, other metafictions arouse a desire for words through less explicitly sexual means. In Barthelme’s “Marie, Marie, Hold on Tight” (Barthelme 1964: 115–22), the metaphor for reading the work is attending a demonstration, one in which our relation to the signs of protest, presented on Barthelme’s page, is as direct as that of the fictional spectators. What the signs say (“MAN DIES!” “THE SOUL IS NOT!” [119]) is that human being is limited, that our ontology is a finite construction, but their occurrence in the contexts of the story demonstrates something quite different. What it demon-strates is partly indicated in the fictional contexts by the spectators’ responses, two of which receive detailed treatment. The first is that of a church official who praises the
“Kierkegaardian spirit” of the protest but replies, not unreasonably, that “the human condition is the given,” that “you have to deal with what is” (116, 117, respectively).
The second is that of a youth gang who beat the demonstrators severely. Henry Mackie, spokesperson for the demonstrators, dismisses the church official’s response as exem-plifying the complacency they are demonstrating against, while he takes the gang’s violence to mean “they understand everything better than anybody” (121). If protest-ing against human finitude strikes us, too, as meanprotest-ingless, a mere refusal “to deal with what is,” what about the signs on the page has the youth gang experienced that we are missing?
IV. Poetics
To conceive of metafiction as an attempt to discover fiction’s own reality – i.e. its con-structive laws, rules, and principles; its linguistic materiality; its inherited or impro-vised forms; its erotic figuration; etc. – is to distance the term from its application in recent narratology (Fludernik 2003; Nunning 2005), and to align it more closely with what L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E writers have called “poetics.” As Lyn Hejin-ian has explained, the practice of poetics need not be understood as the issuing of theoretical statements about poetry for which poems function merely as illustrations.
It can also be a poem’s capacity “for speaking about itself” (Hejinian 2000: 1), initiating a philosophical inquiry through its on-going practice and avoiding logical regress through the coincidence of action and object: “Poetry . . . takes as its premise that
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language is a medium for experiencing experience” (3). In other words, instead of fore-grounding fiction’s artificiality and constructedness, the concept of metafiction would subsume narratology’s contrasting term “metanarrative,” applying broadly to formally experimental works or parts of works in which the action of narrating becomes its own object. Hejinian has described this kind of immanent theoretical practice: “One wants to ask how one gets going, how one keeps going, and how one knows what is going on. . . . But none of these questions is more or less basic than any of the others” (165).
Such an application of the concept has the double virtue of acknowledging what those works first called “metafictions” cared about and also of disclosing a genealogy for them in earlier fiction. Such moments as Lambert Strether’s entering his imagina-tion’s frame in the Lambernet scene of James’s The Ambassadors (Book Eleventh, III), where the represented action becomes the process of aesthetic construction, or Stein’s thematizing of Melanctha Herbert’s inability to “tell a story wholly” in Three Lives, or Jake Barnes’s linking of literariness to fakery in Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, or Matthew O’Connor’s wish for the end of writing in Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood, or Addie Bundren’s critique of words in Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying would all be proto-metafictions, places where epistemology shades into ontology, raising questions about the structure within which the epistemological issue achieves language and conscious-ness. At such points the problem in the work becomes the problem of the work, initiat-ing for both writer and reader a quest for self-knowledge that cannot achieve closure in self-representation. But, as Hejinian remarks, “this is not knowledge in the strictest sense; it is, rather, acknowledgment . . . a preservation of otherness” (2).
Focusing on novelists’ attempts in the sixties and subsequent decades to engage reality, not primarily by representing it but by acknowledging its immanence in their medium and practice, distances metafiction from the kind of self-consciousness that was already considered by Gass in 1970 a dead-end, “those drearily predictable pieces about writers who are writing about what they are writing” (Gass 1970: 25). The con-cept would apply to fictions disclosing the significance of their own activity, what
“Marie, Marie, Hold on Tight” characterizes as sign-making, which our normal prac-tices of reading and writing tend to repress. In other words, Barthelme’s fiction would remain as much a commentary on itself as, e.g., Gilbert Sorrentino’s comment in Imaginative Qualities of Actual Things (1971) that “everything [fiction] teaches is use-less insofar as structuring your life” (Sorrentino 1991: 215), the significance of which would no longer be its generalization about fiction’s uselessness. Although the ironic self-consciousness of sixties and seventies metafictions was probably a necessary regis-ter of their ontological problem, what has made them valuable, both at the time and since, is the relation of that self-consciousness – expressed in pseudo-autobiography, exposed illusion, authorial commentary, or metacriticism – to their innovative uses of form, language, and book art. For example, the caustic irony of Sorrentino’s Mul-ligan Stew seems far-removed from the politically engaged, often impassioned writ-ing of Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s DICTEE (Cha 1982), which, by contrast, seems to exemplify the conflation of literature and life that Sorrentino’s earlier quote, and any number of citable others, dogmatically rejects. However, the formal construction of
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these two works, published only three years apart, appears remarkably similar. Both are composed of documents written by others, and both treat these documents as visual objects whose differences of appearance are preserved on the page. In both works, the autonomy of the linguistic medium, along with being thematic, is acknowledged through passages that, while seeming naturally connected to the narrative, do not advance it: i.e. French dictation and translation exercises in Cha’s work and the inter-minable lists in Sorrentino’s. And in addition to the numerous thematic parallels – the recurrent topics of mimicry, voice, embodiment, etc. – Cha’s writing can be as acerbic in her lines of dictation (“Oh my God, I am heartily sorry for having offended Thee”
[Cha 2001: 14]) as Sorrentino’s can be earnest in his appreciation for characters who
“never yet have walked from off the page” (Sorrentino 1979: 445).
When metafictions of the sixties and seventies are placed alongside formally inno-vative fictions published in the U.S. during more recent decades – Paul Auster’s New York Trilogy (1985), Ronald Sukenick’s Blown Away (1985), Kathy Acker’s Don Quixote (1986), David Markson’s Wittgenstein’s Mistress (1988), Carole Maso’s AVA (1993), Ben Marcus’s The Age of Wire and String (1995), David Foster Wallace’s Infi-nite Jest (1996), Brian Evenson’s Contagion (2000), Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves (2000), Michael Martone’s The Blue Guide to Indiana (2001), Steve Tomasula’s VAS (2002), Lidia Yuknavitch’s Real to Reel (2003), or Leslie Scalapino’s Dahlia’s Iris: Secret Autobiography and Fiction (2003) – it becomes clearer that what fictional self-consciousness and formal experimentation share is a common acknowledgment of their medium’s autonomy. For the early metafictionists, what seems to have been most striking about the work of Beckett, Borges, and O’Brien was the way literature acquired an objectivity comparable to, not only its represented world, but even its writer and reader. Writing in 1964 Barthelme assigned the origin of this change to Joyce and Stein, characterizing it as a “mysterious shift” that occurs when “art is not about something but is something” (Barthelme 1997: 3) and praising Beckett’s crea-tion of fully realized objects that, by contrast, exposed the artificiality and mutilacrea-tion of their social surroundings. Even in novels that preserve the surface appearance of self-conscious narration, i.e. fictions in which one narrating self-consciousness takes another as its object or adversary, the aim never appears to be critical distance per se, but rather the work’s achievement. In Paul Auster’s City of Glass (1982), Clarence Major’s My Amputations (1986), and Lydia Davis’s The End of the Story (1995), all three of which literalize an author’s or reader’s critical relation to his or her own activity, the poten-tial for consciousness turning endlessly upon itself is merely part of the narrative pre-dicament, a threat of never-ending self-doubt or of an action’s interminable repeating.
Instead of progressing toward the identification of represented and representing selves, the direction of the narrative is toward displacement of both self and representation by the object in hand. Auster’s novel becomes the material realization of Quinn’s red notebook, neither of which is the other’s original, while Mason’s pursuit of his like-ness in Major’s novel brings the would-be author to an end, escaping imprisonment in the West’s two Atticas (the classical tradition and the New York State Correctional Facility) by submitting to “some unknown . . . event,” and the unnamed narrator
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of Davis’s work, having satisfactorily performed literary closure, concludes her affair’s interminable repetition. In all three, the irresolvable problem of dividedness and self-approximation is resolved, not by identification, but by the problem’s disappearance.
An object that can only be narrated as metaphysically incomplete, in the action of narrating becomes wholly material.