A Miscellany of Metafictional Modes

I seem to remember that by the time The Tunnel was finally published, the verdict on metafiction was already in: “Reality,” which postwar American fiction helped affix permanent quotes around, had now subsumed its defamiliarizing effects; what we had taken as a shattered mirror was just a reflection. I think this was David Foster Wallace’s position. (Didn’t he also believe, like Ascher/Straus—and in retrospect, a bit weirdly—that television was the primary culprit for this inversion?) The more scathing take was that metafiction (and postmodernist complications more broadly) had retreated into arid coteries:

I see an academy (and foresee a national literature, produced by academics) lost in fantasies of transgression and subversion that are only likely to confirm for young people, who have a keen sense of bullshit, the complete irrelevance of literature. [...] [A]n era of (critically privileged) formal innovation is coming to an end and [...] the time has come for form's dialectical counterparts, content and context, to return as the vectors of the new. 

Jonathan Franzen, “I’ll Be Doing More of Same”, The Review of Contemporary Fiction, Spring 1996

That was a while ago. But the perceptions, made by then-young writers eager to move beyond their models, seem hardly to have changed. If anything, the fictionalization of reality, by means more sophisticated than television, has become something of a more than tedious routine. And there would be little argument that metafiction, as any kind of vital practice, has long since been cast into literature’s outer darkness.

Still … I patrol that darkness. And is it just me, or do I detect some notes of old vines in my new reading? Maybe metafiction, long dead, has found new relevance in our algorithm-addled, optimization-occluded times? After all, now it’s not literature that’s grown self-aware and is thinking self-reflexively, by playing out every possibility at once.

My Substack-y précis:

• I’ll glance at the lineage of a few of our most commonly known metafictional modes: the Self-Relexive Author, the Self-Aware Fictional Character, and the Garden of Forking Paths.

• I’ll take a look at a more recent instance of each.

• Then I’ll turn to a novel from this past year that combines all three.

The Self-Reflexive Author

Something breathtaking happens near the end of the first volume of Ricardo Piglia’s The Diaries of Emilio Renzi. After a decade has passed in narrative time, what had seemed to be journal entries thinly veiled as fiction are revealed as somewhat less thinly veiled than previously thought:

Forced to translate his life into language, to select the words, the problem is no longer lived experience but rather the communication of that experience; the logic that structures the events is not that of sincerity, but that of language.

The Diaries of Emilio Renzi: Formative Years, translated by Robert Croll

Or, what we had taken to be journals disguised as fiction turns out to be just a novel, after all, one dictated from bad handwriting and mangled in the transcription, no less:

[S]he gathers my words and writes them as she feels them, so that, when I ask her after a while to read what we have written, she, in her clear Spanish, reads some pages in which what I’ve said is barely a gray shadow amid the pure and precise words with which she has improved my narration of things written by hand in my notebooks, from many years before. Where I say “poems,” she writes “problems,” where I say, referring to my Alfonsinist friends, “civics,” she very properly translates it as “cynics.”

Is that cringe? Self-satisfied, smart-alecky? Too ironic? Part of what makes it work for me is what has happened until now. Although it’s clear enough these are entries from Piglia’s journals from his university days, there remains throughout, across hundreds of pages, an uneasy sense what we’re reading isn’t quite what it seems. There’s the use of fake names for real ones (notably “Emilio Renzi,” an ongoing character in Piglia’s novels, for Ricardo Piglia); the doubt that Piglia kept up this level of narrative drive in a personal journal written over a span of decades; and the mysterious interleaving of asynchronous prose texts, including scarcely believable real-life encounters with Borges (“Generally, if someone confronted him in the street to say, ‘Borges, I am a writer,’ he would answer ‘Ah, so am I,’ and the conversant would sink into the void”) followed much later by a stunner of a Borgesian story (“The Greek Coin”).

This is autofiction in reverse: to bind much-resented fictional devices into any attempt at truthtelling, rather than to expose the locked room of fiction to the open air of personal experience. Restriction, then, not freedom.

Frame devices are respectably ancient (The Dream of the Rood, The Thousand and One Nights); the best of them bring to literature something of the purity of mathematical and musical, fugal forms. The novel itself is a form that meditates on the assembly of its constituent texts, as an acquaintance with seventeeth-, eighteenth-, and early nineteenth-century novels will show.

But bringing in the author themselves to expound on the composition process will still get you a lot of hate mail. Done unimaginatively, of course, it’s boring. (It’s like listening to somebody describing their dreams, except dreams are boring because they’re arbitrary, whereas a story-about-writing-a-story is proscribed: Little can occur beyond the writer sitting at a desk.) But even in the exemplar of the type, say, John Barth’s “Life-Story,” for all the smirking at how this too is a story, there is an underlying edge its critics seemed to have missed. It isn’t the facile revelation that what we’re reading is actually fiction that makes “Life-Story” compelling, but the nightmare of its recursion. It is precisely in the ouroborus of its irony—the circular ride the critics looking to move on to sincerity are trying to get off—that a reality is being generated, loop upon loop, not unlike the way machine learning models do now on their way to their singularity.

A relatively recent novel that does this is Gabriel Blackwell’s Madeleine E. (I realize it’s almost nine years old now, but I came to it just now. And Blackwell seems a writer well ahead of his time.) The first thing that happens upon encountering it is trying to figure out just what the heck it is. The cover copy calls it, “A commonplace book, arranging passages from critics considering Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo, along with fragments of memoir and fiction.” Huh? A dive in reveals something like a lower-ambition, Millennial version of The Arcades Project.

I had always been more of a reader than a writer. I copied out little snippets of interesting text, more notes than I ever would have read over, all without producing a single word of my own. In the margins, I wrote comments like this one, my lame attempts at the “personal” response my agent seemed to want but which never came together as a single story. […] It would be a kind of critic’s notebook, an assemblage, a commonplace book, but also an homage and an acknowledgement. My agent replied that editors would be unmoved. He told me to get back to work.

Going in deeper it’s pretty clear it’s a novel, in cumulative effect, if uncoventional in form, a novel about the writing of the novel we are reading. But then we find out the Gabriel Blackwell who is narrating the composition of this book is not quite the same as the Gabriel Blackwell we know from the “real” author bio and internet searches, something that puzzles the in-book Gabriel Blackwell as well:

Not that I did this often, but on those occasions when I wanted to see if anyone was selling a used copy of Critique of Pure Reason, the book I had spent my early thirties writing (intending to, I guess, inflate my ego if the price had climbed from $1.59 to $1.95; or, if the price had gone down instead, to feel sorry for myself, having passed into obscurity without ever really having climbed up out of it), that book was always the only thing listed under my name and was always alone on “Amazon’s Gabriel Blackwell Page.” But now the elevator on the right side of the browser’s window had shrunk to half its usual size and there was at least one more listing below the one for Critique. I scrolled down, expecting to find a copy of a journal I had appeared in but instead found two more entries, books, complete with listing pages of their own. The first was called Shadow Man and the second was called The Natural Dissolution of Fleeting-Improvised-Men. […] [T]he bio on the listing page for The Natural Dissolution of Fleeting-Improvised-Men, with its uncanny resemblance to my own bio, raised even more questions.

I suppose it’s self-referential games like this that Wallace and Franzen wanted to leave behind (did they?), but Madeleine E. transcends them not by going away, or reverting back, but by spiraling in, relentlessly. Maybe the most striking thing about the novel, of which there are many, is how its subject, Vertigo, becomes its form. The references and quotations (including ones from The Arcades Project) pile up, each one glinting off the others, as well as the “story,” philosophical ruminations, and critical writings on Hitchcock and the making of the film. The doubles in the pseudo-autofictional narration reflect the doubles in Hitchcock’s film; they multiply exponentially. Girlfriends and wives multiply.

If the chief complaint about metafiction was that its temperature ran too cold—too cerebral, no heart or drama—Madeleine E. in its formal obsession with obsession comes out the other side of the dialectic. Blackwell builds and sustains high Hitchcockian anxiety in a story that is largely taking place on a writer’s screen and in his head. In its formal games and fixation on Vertigo it transforms, in a novel that was published on the cusp of MeToo, into a damning reflection of male guilt and self-deception: content and context.

Next I’ll write about characters in search of an exit and the descent into the labyrinth.