From the sixties to the present, the achievement of metafiction, and the source of its continuing attraction, is this eclipse of mimesis by acknowledgment of the work.
In David Markson’s Vanishing Point, as in so many metafictions, it is the obstacle to acknowledgment, not the action of overcoming it, that comprises the representation.
This obstacle appears in the second of Markson’s roughly two thousand “notes,” where we learn that a seascape by Matisse was hung upside down in MOMA for over a month (Markson 2004: 1), while a hundred and sixteen thousand viewers passed without com-plaint (3). As the ensuing assemblage of anecdotes, gossip, facts, names, and quotes makes clear, this inversion of aesthetic values does not result merely from popular incomprehension. Artists and critics are equally undiscerning. Aaron Copland com-pared Ralph Vaughan Williams’ music to “staring at a cow for forty-five minutes” (3);
“Victor Hugo found Le Rouge et le Noir” unreadable (13); Heraclitus thought Homer should have been beaten (69); “Schoolboy drivel” was Edith Wharton’s judgment of Ulysses (156), and Auden thought Brecht deserved capital punishment (174). The his-tory of literature and art in Author’s notes encompasses all the stupidity, dogmatism, and blindness of humans generally. Given such disorder, how can we take seriously the statement, “Author is pretty sure that most of [the notes] are basically in the sequence he wants” (8)? If there is any basis for their order, that is not apparent from the his-tory represented in the notes. And yet, where but in hishis-tory could literature and art’s
METAFICTION
basis be? Although saying that metafiction attempts to transcend the “laws of fiction”
merely projects a critic’s own presumption onto novelists, Markson’s work certainly attempts to transcend the randomness he inherits. If Gass is right that metafiction establishes a philosophical relation to its own laws, rules, and principles, then it should be added with Sukenick, Calvino, and even Henry James, that prior to the work before us fiction’s laws remain in doubt.
A familiar effect of reflexivity, acknowledged in some metafictions by direct autho-rial address, is the establishment of reading and writing as collaboration. In Markson’s fiction this dependence on his reader is literalized in Author’s acknowledgments of all that he does not himself know: where the book is headed (Markson 2004: 11), what he thinks (22), why he writes on a typewriter (27), where he found his information (59), what makes him suspicious of some quotes (68), why he introduces something he knows in the form of a question (70), what the purpose of his experiment is (96), etc.
Although Author’s gradual demise in Vanishing Point is a fictional representation, it accurately reflects a limit on what Markson’s own action can achieve. From Beckett to the present, the metafictional recognition that experience and observation no longer connect art with life has coincided with calls to unrepress fiction’s medium – variously its language, inherited forms, principles of construction, materiality, erotic figuration, etc. In praising Beckett’s fully realized objects, Barthelme sought to conceptualize fic-tion as other than either a naturally occurring object or a merely idiosyncratic one.
Fiction was as lawful as justice or language, but its formative principles, immanent in past examples, became real only in present applications. In other words, if the reader discovers in Author’s notes only what Markson himself put there, Vanishing Point does not qualify as a novel at all. For it to be something, not merely about something, the reader must see what Author sees: the significance of this arrangement. Needless to say, this demand for acknowledgement may feel intolerably self-conscious. To any-one asking Henry Mackie’s question, “Why does it have to be that way?” (Barthelme 1964: 117), the reply of Barthelme’s church official – “You have to deal with what is.
With reality.” – will sound patently false. Every day humans refuse to deal with what is, with reality. In the context of Barthelme‘s protest, what the signs demonstrate is that humans are free, that no reader can be forced to acknowledge them. And to those living under material constraint, such a demonstration can seem like an outrage. Most learn to repress it, but the occasional gang of youth understands.
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