The ABCs of Reality

"Metafiction is a term given to fictional writing which self-consciously and systematically draws attention to its status as an artefact in order to pose questions about the relationship between fiction and reality. In providing a critique of their own methods of construction, such writings not only examine the fundamental structures of narrative fiction, they also explore the possible fictionality of the world outside the literary fictional text."

(Patricia Waugh, Metafiction: The Theory and Practice of Self Conscious Fiction, p. 2)

Metafiction is the purification of fiction, or as Edward Said observes, "Fiction is viewed not as an intervention into reality, nor as an addition to it - as was the case with classic realist fiction - but rather as an intervention in other fiction, or in other writing." Fiction had drifted further away from fiction and nearer to historical imitation; it counterfeits the assumptions of reality and consequently, perhaps falsely, confirms its legitimacy. An objective of metafictional writers is to free fiction from the shackles of reality assumptions and interpretations.

Given the premise that fiction is ideas, that ideas go beyond familiar or presumed reality, and that material or conceptual invention is a by-product of ideas, then it follows that all invention derives from fiction. Once freed, fiction writers, and their readers, can explore and expand the boundaries of the imagination, and in doing so, they help increase the potential and the totality of human knowledge. Writing within the boundaries of literary conventions, realism, in its strictest sense, is imitation and interpretation of presumed reality. Although invention may appear to exist in realism, it is inflating the same balloon.

Metafiction is the needle that burst the balloon in the late 1960s. The critics, for the most part, attacked the credibility of the emerging works saying, "inflated and tiresome exercises in the art of trivia", or "celebrants of unreason, chaos, and inexorable decay... a horde of mini-Jeremiahs crying havoc in the Western world" (Klinkowitz 2,7). To this Jerome Klinkowitz replies, "The shock is not how far the disruptionists have gone, but how far we had let conventional fictionists desert the true ideals of artistic construction in favor of some wholly inappropriate documentation which was never really fiction at all."

Caesar condensed the structure of realism into three words: "Vini, vedi, vici". Of course there are variations of I came, I saw, I conquered: I saw, I conquered, I went home; I went home, I saw, I conquered; I came, I saw, I fell, I got back up. With the limited variations possible, convention still demands that the story have a beginning, a middle and an end; and a plot that steers characters through unavoidable conflicts toward a crisis action and finally, a resolution. There must be a cause for every effect, there are no coincidences or accidents without a pattern. Even a villain wears the scar or carries the event that made him bitter. Realism calls for a sequential ordering of events to bring meaning to chaos, this is usually done with a timeline. By the end of the story, the hero's destiny is known and the reader has a better understanding of the universe, or rather, as Levi-Strauss said, "the illusion that he can understand the universe and that he does understand the universe. It is, of course, only an illusion" (qtd. Roemer 44). What is the significance of this? Roland Barthes holds that we are under the influence of "bourgeois myths" that promote human helplessness:

"The end of myths is to immobilize the world; they must suggest and mimic a universal order that has fixated once and for all the hierarchy of possessions. ...Myths are nothing but this ceaseless, untiring solicitation, this insidious and inflexible demand that all men recognize themselves in this image, eternal yet bearing a date, which was built of them one day as if for all time. For the Nature, in which they are locked up under the pretext of being eternalized, is nothing but a Usage. And it is this Usage, however lofty, that they must take in hand and transform."

The fate of the hero is predetermined; compromise is not an option, yet "we go so far as to praise or blame them, as if their actions were freely elected; we forget that what they intend is already done and what they are trying to change has already happened" (4). To be an effective story, it must first suspend disbelief. Reality simulation is accomplished by incorporating implied cultural or universal "truths" with familiar or historical occurrences; the reader supplies the rest. It is time to re-evaluate what is going on behind our suspended disbelieves.

Metafiction exposes the conventions of realism, and in varying degrees, "realistic conventions supply the 'control in metafictional texts, the norm or background against which the experimental strategies can foreground themselves" (Waugh 18). One reason this is done, is to serve as a bridge between the conventional and the non conventional. In order for the reader to identify with the experimental work, the reader must find a grounding in convention. Like reading a Latin text, if the majority of the words are recognizable because of their similarity to English, it is possible to find some meaning. If the text is composed of words with no resemblance to English, the reader might, at best, be able to guess a few repetitive conjunctions. "In metafiction it is precisely the fulfillment as well as the non-fulfillment of generic expectations that provide both familiarity and the starting point for innovation" (Waugh 64).

Another reason for exposing the traditional conventions, and certainly the most important concern, is to show that the mechanics of fiction construction are similar, if not identical, to reality construction, in other words, the manipulation of realities to control the lives of characters/people. The chief characteristic of metafictional writing is its self-consciousness. When a writer, within the text, discusses his thought process or methods in writing the novel, or if the reader is spoken to by the author or one of his characters; self consciousness in writing is anything that draws attention to the fact that it is an invented reality: the conventions are exposed, laid bare. The classic example of this is John Barth's "Lost in the Funhouse". It is like a story annotated with remarks from a creative writing teacher. As the plot moves forward, it is interrupted with comments about the pace of the story, rising action, climax, resolution, the use of italics... "They should be used sparingly" (Barth 3005). Barth, a creative writing teacher himself, gives the reader a step by step guide of how the story was built within the framework of the story. The body of the story becomes transparent and the true skeleton is revealed like an x-ray.

Realism typically follows a timeline: a sequence of events that move forward to a conclusion. Although realism uses flashback scenes to explain motivation or cause for events and emotions in the story, it implies that the sequence of events, like a tumbling row of dominoes, is responsible for the conclusion. Writers such as Salmon Rushdie and Mario Vargas Llosa have pushed this logic to its illogical conclusion.

In Rushdie's Midnight's Children, Saleem tries to understand the purpose of his life by looking at the events that shaped his life. He constructs a multi-dimensional web of scattered influences that reach into the lives of present and past generations, each life influenced by historical events, each memory filtered and shaped by selective and unreliable memories. The events are too many and too complex to draw conclusions. Saleem also fails to find meaning by looking at the whole; he is too close to see it, like trying to see a film with your nose to the screen. The convention of cause and effect, and the assumption that the human mind can make sense of the world, life and all its relationships is exposed as a fallacy.

Vargas Llosa takes the confusion even further in Conversations in the Cathedral by sharing it with the reader. Although the book is not metafictional, because it lacks self-consciousness, it has metafictional qualities, or tendencies. The novel is several interconnected stories told with shuffled fragments of conversations. Chronological order is abandoned to emphasize the complexity involved in grasping meaning from a series of seemingly unrelated events. The reader, kept in suspense with conventional techniques, experiences an unconventional confusion. The timeline is completely shattered and the reader must work, like in a detective novel, to put the multitude of pieces together. In the end, the reader is able to understand the significance, or rather the relationships of events, but not necessarily the logic behind them.

Randomness, self-consciousness, intentional overkill and absurd metaphors, as in Richard Brautigan's collage, Trout Fishing in America, draw attention to the writing process. Overkill in itself is a sign of literary exhaustion, intentional overkill, as parody; adds poison to the process. When Richard Nixon's said, "I am not a crook", comic impressionists pounded the image of a shifty-eyed president into the minds of America. The image uncovered a layer of Nixon's personality and his credibility suffered because of it. Few could take him seriously anymore. The media may, or may not have been fair to the man, but the parody helped change the way people look at Nixon and politicians in general. Parody in literature has the same effect; the genre loses its credibility, it is no longer able to suspend disbelief on the same level. This is not to say that suspension of belief is lost, but that it enters through a wider realm of awareness; an additional level of perception. The conventions are exposed, the reader may even be told of the method used to suspend disbelief, but paradoxically, disbelief is suspended. It may be that generations of exposure to artificial realities conditioned this response, this is a question worthy of future inquiry. Italo Calvino's If on a winter's night a traveler is an example of the paradox. Calvino addresses the reader directly throughout the novel, the reader, "You", is the protagonist. Calvino anticipates the readers reaction with alarming accuracy, and though "You" is reminded of his, and sometimes her, participation in fiction, the suspension of disbelief still occurs. Because of the interaction with the reader, a new level of reality construction is exposed: the reader is also co-writer. Calvino illustrates this in the beginning of the novel. "The novel begins in the railway station, a locomotive huffs, steam from a piston covers the opening of the chapter, a cloud of smoke hides part of the first paragraph." On the following page he writes, "I am the man who comes and goes between the bar and the telephone booth, Or, rather: that man is called "I" and you know nothing else about him, just as the station is only "station" and beyond it there exists nothing except the unanswered signal of a telephone ringing in a dark room of a distant city." By the time the reader has come to this passage, an image has been formed. Calvino asks you to juxtapose your image with the stark bits of information he has actually given. Immediately, your position as co-writer is revealed. On the next page he reinforces the message midway through a paragraph:

"For a couple of pages now you have been reading on, and this would be the time to tell you clearly whether this station where I have got off is the station of the past or the station of today; instead the sentences continue to move in vagueness, grayness, in a kind of no man's land of experience reduced to the lowest common denominator. Watch out: it is surely a method of involving you gradually, capturing you in a story before you realize it - a trap. Or perhaps the author still has not made up his mind, just as you, reader, for that matter, are not sure what you would most like to read: whether it is the arrival at an old station, which gives you the sense of going back, a renewed concern with lost times and places, or else a flashing of lights and sounds, which would give you the sense of being alive today, in a world where people today believe it is a pleasure to be alive."

Calvino guides the reader through a series of frames, the beginnings of novels that end abruptly at the peak of suspense. Frames are the boundaries and content of reality constructs. "Frames are essential in all fiction. They become more perceptible as one moves from realist to modernist modes and are explicitly laid bare in metafiction" (Waugh 30). If on a winter's night a traveler includes ten unresolved frames, stories, within a larger frame, the novel itself. The larger frame is affected by the smaller frames, and the smaller, incomplete frames are affected by the larger frame. The incompleteness of the smaller frames is a result of the chaos taking place in the larger frame. Like Saleem in Midnight's Children, the reader is only allowed a partial, obstructed view of the fictional environment and to complete the story, the reader must pull from his or her own inventory of perceptions, memories and influences. The same reader participation takes place when reading conventional novels, but it is not acknowledged, the author is in complete control and the idea of human helplessness is inadvertently reinforced; "Frames in life operate like conventions in novels: they facilitate action and involvement in a situation" (30). Rather than controlling the events with conscious involvement, the reader is controlled by the events. Outside of the covers of the novel, it is the difference between people shaping history, and history shaping people. The lesson of metafiction is that reality has evolved into a combination of the two, and that our individual reality constructs have the ability to influence and improve the larger frames in which we live in.

In writing, rules are made to be broken; in metafiction, frames are made to be broken. This is demonstrated in If on a winter's night a traveler. Calvino builds conventional mystery stories, frames, up to the peak of suspense and then breaks out of the frame by drawing the reader into another frame. This pattern is not restricted to fictional constructions. Calvino was very familiar with the life of and works of Leonardo da Vince. Leonardo could not finish a project, not even the Mona Lisa. His pattern was to start something and then become overwhelmed by interconnected ideas. Each original idea he tried to pursue became the hub for further pursuits in other directions. He might start by studying the movement of a finger and through a long series of connected diversions, find himself researching the way light reflects from a pebble a dawn. His natural tendency was to avoid the constraints of frames he felt were incomplete, so he constantly moved from one frame to another. He had a reputation for being unpredictable and unreliable because he wouldn't stay in the frames, but because of this social fault, he was able to go far beyond his contemporaries in innovations. This ties into the value of fiction mentioned earlier. If fiction is restricted to the conventions of realism, then innovation becomes limited. It's no wonder Kurt Vonnegut and others cry. "The novel is dead!"

There are some, like Joseph Campbell, who believe there is only one story. For Campbell, it is the journey of the hero and his interactions with different combinations of archetypes. Christopher Vogler, a scriptwriter influenced by Campbell, has become a guru to other Hollywood writers with this philosophy. Vogler's dog eared manuscript, The Writer's Journey, was passed around for years among Hollywood insiders before he decided to publish it. Vogler turned Campbell's idea into a formula in which all conventional novels fall into. He exposed the essence of realism and turned it into a writer's guidebook. Calvino was able to do the same thing with a deck of tarot cards. He assigned each card a role or action in a story, and then arranged the sequence of cards to match plots constructed by Shakespeare and Dante. He placed the cards in rows and columns to form a square, so that some masterpieces could be read vertically, horizontally, upwards and downward; some stories had more cards than others. He even went as far as to extend the system to a three dimensional cube, adding forwards and backward readings. The message is that there is a limited number of archetypal components with a finite number of combinations to construct with. Calvino and a man who not only inspired

Bibliography and Works Cited

Barth, John. "Lost in the Funhouse", The Heath Anthology of American Literature. Vol.2, 2nd Ed. Lexington, Massachusetts: D. C. Heath and Company, 1994.

James, William. Pragmatism and Four Essays from the Meaning of Truth. Cleveland: World Publishing, 1968.

Klinkowitz, Jerome. Literary Disruptions. Urbana: University Of Illinois Press, 1975.

Klinkowitz, Jerome. The Self-Apparent Word. Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1984.

McCaffery, Larry. The Metafictional Muse. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1982.

Eco, Umberto. Six Walks In The Fictional Woods. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994.

Eco, Umberto. A Theory of Semiotics. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1976.

Roemer, Michael. Telling Stories: Postmodernism and the Invalidation of Traditional Narrative. Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 1995.

Schank, Roger. Reading and Understanding. Hillsdale, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1982.

Waugh, Patricia. Metafiction. London: Methuen, 1984.

Calvino, Italo. Six Memos For The Next Millennium. New York: Vintage International, 1993.

Barthes, Roland. The Responsibility of Forms. New York: Hill and Wang, 1985.

R.J. Hembree is the founder of Writers' Village University and President of Writopia Inc.

The ABCs of Reality Construction
©Copyright 1995 by R.J. Hembree,  All rights reserved.