A Miscellany of Metafictional Modes

In memory, Robert Coover 1932-2024

The Self-Aware Fictional Character

In the wonderfully convoluted close of Felipe Alfau’s “A Character”, a doorbell interrupts the story our narrator has begun to write, one nested in the very story we are reading. Lunarito, the woman of the house he is staying at, is a “real” person, whom the story-within-the-story’s protagonist, a fictional character, has fallen in love with. As our narrator leaves his table to answer the door, Lunarito, “who had very bad manners,” picks up the paper he has been writing on. When he returns, he finds her “with a dreamy look in her eyes.” When asked if anything has happened in the meantime, she does not answer. In the next sentence, she is no longer there. “She was living in the future,” that is, in the rest of the story he has begun to write.

Alfau suggests for his characters, who may as well be ourselves, a kind of Invention of Morel-ian, flickering existence, half-in, half-out of fiction. But the idea seems to be that they cannot exist in both fiction and reality simultaneously, only fluctuate between the two states. A lost forerunner to postwar metafiction, published in 1936 and forgotten until Dalkey Achive reissued it in 1988, Locos teems with characters struggling between these states, while their author fails to corral them.

Time and space do not exist for these people, and that naturally ruins my work completely. […] [M]y characters are no longer a tool for my expression, but I am a helpless instrument of their whims and absurd contretemps.

This goes a bit beyond breaking the fourth wall. In fiction, when the characters become aware of themselves as such, they peer out at us from the page, as if the book too, which ideally had dissolved over the course of reading/dreaming, is brought back into reality along with them. This is what happens in the quintessential metafictional moment of Book 2 of Don Quixote, when Quixote and Sancho realize they are characters in a best-selling novel called Don Quixote; in that scene, Book 1 becomes subsumed into the world of Book 2, which presumably is our own. (This is also a trick.) The character speaking to us from inside the book is something like the mirror image of the Self-Reflexive Author, from our last post, who is in the process of weaving a frame-narrative around the narration of the story we are reading.

Is Christian TeBordo’s Ghost Engine metafiction, then? It does share certain impulses, while adding some new twists on old tricks. The most remarkable stories in the collection—the paired “One to No One” and “9/12 in Parts Unknown”, “Gordon Gartrelle Explains the Difference”, “Whose Bridesmaid?”, and “Hard Times in Galt’s Gluch”—are not exactly about fictional characters breaking out from the page, but they achieve their off-kilter quality by following second- and third-rate pop-culture celebrities in mundane moments; besides draining what reality remains to be had in “realism,” the effect is akin to having recognizably fictional characters waking to their existence in our world.

(In the case of “Galt’s Gluch”, the most “realist” story here, mundane characters, not to mention TeBordo himself, end up identifying with fictional ones, the result of starting an Ayn Rand Book Club, and pay the price for being dupes of the neoliberal world order—“They did what they were told, and they didn’t get what they were told they’d get.”)

“9/12 in Parts Unknown”, in particular, is as maddening a series of recursions between the kayfabe and the real as Alfau’s. (There is a kind of classical elegance to its form that makes me think it belongs in one of those Best American Short Stories anthologies, alongside, say, “Ethan Brand” and “A Good Man Is Hard to Find”.) Dwelling quite insanely on the retired life of 1980s pro wrestling legend The Ultimate Warrior on the day after 9/11, the story feeds on the ongoing joke of having the Ultimate Warrior, still in facepaint, hiking in the woods, checking his answering machine and internet, and making breakfast and coffee for his kids, all while confronting both the historical-real of 9/11 and his performed rivalry with Hulk Hogan.

Unfortunately, the last path, going Rambo on the terrorists or Arabs or whatever, wasn’t as easy as it would once have been. He assumed there were still a few little warriors whose first thought on seeing that first plane fly into that first tower, or at least the second—-tower and plane, not thought—-was how long will it be before the Ultimate Warrior brings his intense brand of punishment to the perpetrators? In truth, the Warrior was surprised that none of them had shown up on his webforum to ask exactly that the day before.

The scene where he sits down to review his old matches with Hogan on VHS rivals Lunarito’s reading herself into the story in “A Character”. It starts with droll observations of the Ultimate Warrior’s current earthbound, disorienting circumstances: “One of the problems with the old ways was all the rewinding and fast-forwarding you had to do to get where you wanted to go.” “He pointed the remote at the screen, though the receiver was actually behind him.” “The Warrior, the Warrior on September 12, 2001, was pressing stop, and then rewind again, because the rewind worked faster that way.” It telescopes into the impossible, where kayfabe, reality, and history are threaded into the mad revelation that his former “ ‘roid rage ranting” may have been responsible for the previous day’s events.

The Garden of Forking Paths

Using pop-cultural and historical figures to destabilize the border between fiction and reality was one of Robert Coover’s trademark moves, done most famously in The Public Burning. (Somewhere on Twitter TeBordo cites Coover as a model, which, when I read it, immediately made a lot of sense.) But Coover is probably even better known for his structural approaches to metafiction: the unspooling of multiple, parallel outcomes; techniques for textual randomization; jump-cuts in time and grammar. This interest in de-systematizing, or re-systematizing, fiction stemmed from “The Babysitter” and his second novel The Universal Baseball Association, Inc., J. Henry Waugh Prop. on through “Going for a Beer” and his last novel, Open House.

Robert Coover holding a copy of Open House. Photo taken by Diana Hancox with the author’s phone, October 2023.

In Coover’s telling, the “line” was narrative’s last stand: nested and recursive stories, self-reflexive authors, and self-aware fictional characters could trace antecedents as far back as the beginnings of storytelling, but outright indeterminacy, such as ceding authority to the reader to organize the narrative, is more recent phenomena, owing perhaps to technology and the onset of cinema.

Curiously, Borges’s story “The Garden of Forking Paths”, oft-cited as an influence, is not structured as one (the joke is that the whole thing is a decoy), but it does famously contain the formula for others to follow:

The book is an indeterminate heap of contradictory drafts. I examined it once: in the third chapter the hero dies, in the fourth he is alive. […] Ts’ui Pên must have said once: I am withdrawing to write a book. And another time: I am withdrawing to construct a labyrinth. Every one imagined two works; to no one did it occur that the book and the maze were one and the same thing. […] In all fictional works, each time a man is confronted with several alternatives, he chooses one and eliminates the others; in the the fiction of Ts’ui Pên, he chooses—-simultaneously-—all of them. 

"The Garden of Forking Paths", translated by Donald A. Yates

If it seems popular culture, informed by videogames and, well, the whole internet, has gotten better mileage from this idea, open form and simultaneity still hold the most radical possibilities for fiction on the edge of literature, post-Hopscotch and hypertext. Examples I can think of published in the past few years, quite different in their approaches, would include

• Ascher/Straus’s Headless World

• Nicholas Rombes’s The Rachel Condition

• [name of author]’s [title], written entirely, or should I say proposed, in an indescribable invitational/discursive mode

• the subject of the next entry in this series

From a member of the old guard, keeping up with the times, as it were, Open House makes this list too. (Three-fourths in: “They don’t like old guys like me to join in, scared by the baggy wrinkles maybe, something of a downer for me as well, but I have research to do.”)

Coover does not turn away from the line here, but knocks it off-course by repeatedly fracturing it, recalling the sentence-to-sentence jump cuts of “Going for a Beer”. Set in a rowdy party at a Manhattan penthouse, the narrative veers through the point-of-view and inner monologues of its attendees. The book’s shifting center-of-gravity is the disorienting transitions that occur without warning, mid-paragraph or even mid-sentence. This is a typical example, relatively early in the proceedings, when we are still getting our sea legs as to what is going on:

She reminds me of a chick who gave me head between sets, years ago, this one an older filled-out version, attractive in a beat-up way, a bit fat, but what the hell, I’m fat and beat-up, too. And feeling celebrative: tonight’s the night. I ask her if she can sing, maybe we can make a little music together. “You know,” I growl with a snarky sort of grin, black fish eggs staining his broken teeth, “a star is born and all that jazz.” I tell him I can carry a tune, if it doesn’t have more notes than “Mary Had a Little Lamb.” He says, “Hey, girl, let’s go find Mary’s flockin’ sheep!”

Sometimes the shift happens in a syntactical rupture (“There’s an unhappy old lady guarding the double doors but we push past me deplorable young women that they are”), but more often they’re cleverly camouflaged in the moments when point of view “floats”: dialogue, description, and the ping-ponging of multiple of characters acting out or crashing into one another, as often happens in this book. Remarkably this technique over the course of reading becomes something like a totalizing viewpoint, something even natural, but in the beginning we are constantly doubling back to figure out when a new character has taken up the torch.

In the above example, the shift happens mid-sentence, between “I growl” and “his broken teeth”, and is a bit left in the dust when the first narrator’s dialogue break is sutured back into place. The change doesn’t settle in until it seems the “I” is somebody else (“I tell him I can carry a tune”) and is confirmed in the next sentence, when it’s clear “He” is the previously speaking “I”.

While Open House may not seem on its surface as radically open as [title], or as infinite as Ts’ui Pên’s labyrinth—it is after all for all its zigzagging a linear construct, complete with an emotionally devastating ending (“perhaps thought itself is a criminal aberration”)—it does suggest, because the transitions are so arbitrary and triggered by the Brownian movement of the characters, that what we are reading can be reordered if not completely rewritten.

It is, in other words, contingent. One imagines a more adept hypertext version that randomizes or algorithmizes when the “handoffs” occur—each character’s point of view and digressive backstory floating in a kind of asynchronous space—generating, depending on the trigger, multiple, perhaps even infinite versions of this novel. Nothing stable or fixed. This one we have fortuitously received is just one of them.