Prof. Derek P. Royal
ENG
Self-Conscious
Fiction
John Barth, “The Literature
of Exhaustion” (
I want to discuss […] what I’m calling “the
literature of exhausted possibility” […]. By “exhaustion” I don’t mean anything
so tired as the subject of physical, moral, or
intellectual decadence, only the used-upness of
certain forms or the felt exhaustion of certain possibilities – by no means
necessarily a cause for despair. […]
The infinite library […] is an image particularly
pertinent to the literature of exhaustion: [It] houses every possible
combination of alphabetical characters and spaces, and thus every possible book
and statement, including your and my refutations and vindications, the history
of the actual future, the history of every possible future, and, […] of every
imaginable other world – since, […] the number of elements and so of
combinations is finite (though very large), and the number of instances of each
element and combination of elements is infinite, like the library itself.
Ronald Sukenick, The Death of the Novel (
Fiction constitutes a way of looking at the world.
Therefore I will begin by
considering how the world looks in what I think we may now begin
to call the contemporary post-realistic novel. Realistic fiction presupposed
chronological time as the medium of a plotted narrative, an irreducible
individual psyche as the subject of its characterization, and, above all, the
ultimate, concrete reality of things as the object and rationale of its
description. In the world of post-realism, however, all of these absolutes have
become absolutely problematic.
The contemporary writer – the writer who is acutely
in touch with the life of which he is part – is forced to start from scratch:
Reality doesn’t exist, time doesn’t exist, personality
doesn’t exist. God was the omniscient author, but he died; now no one knows the
plot, and since our reality lacks the sanction of a creator, there’s no
guarantee as to the authenticity of the received version. Time is reduced to
presence, the content of a series of discontinuous moments. Time is no longer
purposive, and so there is no destiny, only chance. […] In view of these
annihilations, it should be no surprise that literature, also, does not exist –
how could it?
Metafiction
[T]he metafictionist
focuses on literary forms, patterns, and conventions, and upon the language process
itself. This is not merely the expression of a perverse sense of selfconsciousness or narcissism, – instead, the metafictionist begins with the assumption that we are
forever locked within a world shaped by language and by subjective (i.e.,
fictional) forms developed to organize our relationship to the world in a
coherent fashion. The primary impulse behind metafiction
is therefore its awareness that our participation in the world
involves the projection of our deepest hopes, fears, and
needs onto reality in various fictionalized forms. These forms are embodied in
cultural and ideological discourse, which play a crucial role in shaping the
individual’s response to reality. By implication, every significant human act
carries with it a context of meaning which is directly a function of language
and of the rules of transformation established by the system itself and not by
any exterior, imposed meaning. The metafictionist,
then, attempts to examine many of the same issues as have traditional writers:
what is the meaning of personal identity and personal
knowledge? To what extent is man shaped by his environment and
by the systems he has devised to deal with reality? What is the nature of man’s
fears and needs and how do they find expression in a world which alternately
seems threatening or utterly trivial? But in examining these familiar issues,
the metafictionist implies that within the act of
creation, of fiction making, we can find the key to unlocking the complexities
of self-definition and the manner in which we project this definition through
language. […]
I will be using the term “metafiction”
to refer to two related fictional forms: first, that
type of fiction which either directly examines its own construction as it
proceeds or which comments or speculates about the forms and language of
previous fictions. […]
A second, more general category refers to books which
seek to examine how all fictional systems operate, their methodology, the
sources of their appeal, and the dangers of their being dogmatized.
- Larry McCaffery, The Metafictional Muse: The Works of Robert Coover,
Donald
Barthelme, and William H. Gass
(
Surfiction
This I call surfiction. However, not because it imitates reality, but because it exposes
the fictionality of reality. Just as the
Surrealists called that level of man’s experience that functions in the
subconscious SURREALITY, I call that level of man’s activity that reveals life
as a fiction SURFICTION. In this sense there is some truth in the cliché that
claims that “life imitates fiction,” or that “life is like fiction,” but not
because of what is happening in the streets of our cities, but because reality
as such does not exist, or rather exists only in its fictionalized version,
that is to say in the language that describes it. (
To write then, is to PRODUCE meaning, and not to
REPRODUCE a pre-existing meaning. (
Surfiction will not be a representation of something exterior
to it, it will be a selfrepresentation. Surfiction will be self-reflexive. That is to say, rather
than being the stable image of daily life, Surfiction will be in a perpetual state of redoubling upon
itself in order to disclose its own life––THE LIFE OF FICTION. (
[T]he surfictional story
will not have a beginning, middle, and end, it will
not lend itself to a continuous and totalizing form of reading. It will refuse
resolution and closure. It will always remain an open discourse––a discourse
open to multiple interpretations. Surfiction will not
only be the product of imagination, it will also activate imagination. For it will be through the collective efforts of all those who
participate in the fiction (author, narrator, fictitious being, reader) that a
meaning will be formulated. […] (
- Raymond Federman, Critifiction:
Postmodern Essays (
John Barth, “The Literature
of Replenishment” (
If the modernists […] taught us that linearity,
rationality, consciousness, cause and effect, naïve illusionism, transparent language,
innocent anecdote, and middle-class moral conventions are not the whole story,
then from the perspective of these closing decades of our century we may
appreciate that the contraries of those things are not the whole story either.
Disjunction, simultaneity, irrationalism, anti-illusionism, self-reflexiveness, medium-as-message, political olympianism, and a moral pluralism approaching moral
entropy – these are
not the whole story either.
A worthy program for postmodernist fiction, I
believe, is the synthesis or transcension of these
antitheses, which may be summed up as premodernist
and modernist modes of writing. My ideal postmodernist author neither merely
repudiates nor merely imitates either his twentieth-century modernist parents
or his nineteenth-century premodernist grandparents.
He has the first half of our century under his belt, but not on his back.
What my essay “The Literature of Exhaustion” was
really about, so it seems to me now, was the effective “exhaustion” not of
language or of literature, but of the aesthetic of high modernism: that
admirable, not-to be-repudiated, but essentially completed “program” of what
Hugh Kenner has dubbed “the Pound era.”