Like any student who decides to take a break on his laptop,
I checked the internet.
But something was different about this break from writing my
thesis on postmodernist metafiction (via Flann O’Brien and Gilbert Sorrentino):
I came across a book review on npr.org of Percival L. Everett’s book Percival Everett by Virgil Russell. Mr.
Everett is a distinguished professor at the University of Southern California,
but it was the book review’s title that drew me in: “Lost In Everett’s Hall of
Metafictional Mirrors.” Yep, the word screamed to me. METAFICTION!! ON NPR!
From the get-go, it was obvious the author of the review,
Alan Cheuse, found metafiction unproductive and negatively destructive to a
novel. He called it “distracting,” going so far to say that the “metafictional
asides and intrusions clog the flow of the story and drag down what might have
been a fine novel about fathers and sons”—whoa, slow down. So metafictional
interruptions all of a sudden ruin a
book?
I disagree.
Just looking at Everett’s father-character’s view of
postmodernism (the main playing grounds of metafiction), which the article
provides, tells something of why metafiction enhances the experience of
reading:
At one point, the Everett character asks what thing in his
father's career irked him the most. "Son, it was being called a
postmodernist," the father answers. Elaborating, he maintains he doesn't
even know what that means. "Some asshole tried to explain it to me once, said
that my work was about itself and process and not about objective reality and
life in the world."
"What did you say to him?" the son asks. "I asked
him what he thought objective reality was," the father replies. "Then
I punched him."
Laughter. The father’s ending gesture is unexpected, but it’s also funny because punching someone, like
writing a “postmodernist” text, definitely can be one way to experience
“objective reality” (even that phrase is ironic, but I digress). (All right,
here goes my digression: The thing is, objective reality is a sham.
Always has been. As much as a psychological phenomenon or perception can be
statistically proven or approximate in a great many people said to represent
populations, subjectivity always has its place. Cultural collectivity is a
thing, but all cognitive understanding registers behind two eyes. No view’s
identical. This may be common sense, but hey, I was digressing.)
(And now, transitioning from the digression:)
Metafiction comes across to this reviewer as negatively destructive. Oh, there’s no doubt that it’s destructive.
But look at popular Youtube videos or modern blockbuster movies: the
hyper-shifting frames are destructive as well, aren’t they? Your attention is
destabilized momentarily. And you like that. Keeps you interested.
Sure, if you feel like criticizing my analogy, a
metafictional event causes an ontological leap from the book to the real-time
experience of the author writing or the reader reading, not a shifting frame within a narrative (big difference), but
again, isn’t that interesting? Fun?
But what isn’t fun is how the article ends:
If only this new novel had deployed more of that punch!
Yeah, the writer of this article ends with a “punchline,”
but he missed the joke. Metafiction is liberating, funny, even intimate. You
(yes, my reader, YOU) lift off with the author into a moment of reflection,
like in this NPR excerpt below when the father in the book says,
It's called fiction,
son. This is the story you would be writing if you were a fiction writer.
It's depressing.
You're damn right it's
depressing. You're not very bright, are you?
What am I supposed to do
with this?
Finish it.
The bottom line is this, metafiction (which I never really
defined, I’m sorry—it’s textual self-consciousness, or books that are
self-conscious) intentionally distracts us and puts us into a language game of
Wittgenstein’s or a dialogic carnival of Bakhtin’s.
It’s an intellectual text-game, and a reflective moment, that turns people either sour
or startled—or smiling.
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