The Art of Artifice: Barth, Barthelme and the Metafictional Tradition.

BY THOMAS HEGINBOTHAM

(Robert Rauschenberg - Canyon, 1959)

The Art of Artifice: Barth, Barthelme and the Metafictional Tradition.

BY

THOMAS HEGINBOTHAM

WORD COUNT: 9,427

CONTENTS I. Contextualizing Contemporary Metafiction i. Introduction ii. Preliminaries iii. Beyond Modernism II. Two Forms of Contemporary of Metafiction i. Visionary Metafiction: Representing (Un)reality ii. Formalist Metafiction: Creating Autonomous Realities iii. Prefatory Note on Selected Readings III. Thematizing Narrative Artifice i. John Barths Lost in the Funhouse (1968) ii. Donald Barthelmes Snow White (1968) iii. Kurt Vonneguts Slaughterhouse Five (1969) Conclusion Bibliography

I. CONTEXTUALIZING CONTEMPORARY METAFICTION

When we sing the father hymn, we notice that he was not very interesting. The words of the hymn notice it. It is explicitly commented upon, in the text. - Donald Barthelme, Snow White, (1967) p.25

Introduction John Barth and Donald Barthelme are often cited, amongst others (such as William Gass, Robert Coover, Ronald Sukenick and Raymond Federman), as writers representative of a certain type of fiction, which became prominent in America during the 1960s and early 70s. This type of fiction has, in the past, been labeled surfiction (Federman), disruptivist fiction (Klinkowitz), parafiction (Rother) and midfiction (Wilde), and has for better or for worse often been grouped, more broadly, under the term metafiction. In this dissertation, I look closely at how the kind of self-reflexivity both Barth and Barthelme demonstrate in their fiction may have been influenced by the literary and theoretical climate in which it developed. Through a discussion of Linda Hutcheons notion of historiogaphic metafiction and Gerald Graffs distinction between visionary and formalist forms of metafiction, I aim to identify two distinctly motivated forms of contemporary metafiction and assess to what extent each might warrant the label postmodern. In the words of John Barth, on with the story. Preliminaries Metafiction is not new, nor is it more advanced than other forms of narrative. As Linda Hutcheon reminds us, it is part of a long novelistic tradition, and it is only its degree of internalized self-consciousness about what are, in fact, realities of reading all literature that makes it both different and perhaps especially worth studying today.1 The term metafiction was first used by William Gass in the late 1960s in describing recent works of fiction that were somehow about fiction itself. Yet, as

Linda Hutcheon, Narcissistic Narrative, (London, New York: Methuen, 1980) p.xvii

Patricia Waugh points out, though the term metafiction might be new, the practice is as old (if not older) than the novel itself.2 If metafictions defining characteristic is its internalization of the relationship between authors and readers, fiction and criticism, or between art and life, we find its antecedents throughout literary history: Chaucers elaborate framings of The Cantebury Tales; Shakespeares plays within plays; the extensive use of epistolary forms in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century poetry and fiction;3 the list goes on. Hence, to trace historically the presence of metafiction as a formal technique is an impossible task, one which I have no intention of undertaking. The aim of this section, rather, will be simply to place the contemporary American metafiction of John Barth and Donald Barthelme within a literary and critical context, and thereby begin to elaborate its concerns. As I suggested above, metafiction is by no means a wholly contemporary phenomenon, yet attempts have been made to render early instances of metafiction (such as Laurence Sternes Tristram Shandy) postmodern in spirit. However, Mark Currie argues:
When postmodern retrospect discovers proto-postmodernism in this way it produces a spurious self-historicising teleology which confirms that critical texts construe their literary objects according to their own interests and purposes: postmodern discourses are seen as the endpoint of history and all prior discourses are construed as leading inexorably towards the postmodern.
4

Characterizing metafiction, then, as the defining characteristic of postmodernism is not with out its hazards. That said, the ongoing development of postmodern thought (not only within literature, but also the non-fictional fields of philosophy, linguistics, politics and cultural criticism) has, I believe, given metafiction, as a formal technique, newfound impetus. In this dissertation, I will attempt to argue that while some instances of contemporary metafiction may be identifiable as postmodern other instances may be better characterized as an extreme form of modernist self-reflection. In establishing such distinction, I hope to illuminate several critical approaches the works of both Barth and Barthelme.

2 3

Patricia Waugh, Metafiction (London, New York: Routledge, 1984) p.5 Mark Currie, Introduction, Metafiction, ed. Currie (London, New York: Longman, 1995) p.5 4 Ibid.

Beyond Modernism Narrative self-consciousness can be seen as finding its first extended expression in literary modernism, though, as Mark Currie points out, it soon flowed outwards into the more demotic realms of film, television, comic strips and advertising. If we were at any point tempted to situate such critical selfawareness solely within the logic of artifice found in the arts, it is evident that such insights also held influence within the domains of historical and scientific explanation, as well as representation and language in general.5 As Currie reminds us
Self-consciousness must in a sense arise from within each specific discourse; but such ubiquity makes it impossible to see Metafictional self-consciousness as an isolated and introspective obsession within literature.
6

The gradual development of this narrative self-consciousness within the fields of both early to mid twentieth-century literature and critical theory in particular (as well as increasing epistemological skepticism within philosophy) had and undeniable effect on the fictional narrative forms of the era, which increasingly built upon psychological/subjective foundations. Currie pinpoints both literary modernism and Saussurean linguistics in particular, as the primary sources of this self-consciousness within the twentieth century; both are places where the self-referentiality of language was emphasized alongside its ability [or inability] to refer to an external world.7 He goes on to describe how both sought to foreground the hidden conditions structural principles, the process of production, the conventions and the artifice which permitted the production of literary meaning.8 Currie sketches a characterization of modernism which helps establish the many of the features which may have informed the metafiction which would come to the fore later in the century, particularly in America (as well as the nouveau roman, slightly earlier, in France):

5 6

Ibid. p.2 Ibid. 7 Ibid. p.6 8 Ibid.

The self-referential dimension of literary modernism consisted partly in rejecting the conventions of realism, traditional narrative forms, principles of unity and transparent representational language in preference for techniques of alienation, obtrusive intertextual reference, multiple viewpoints, principles of unity borrowed from myth and music, and a more demanding, opaque, poeticized language.
9

In its distinct move away from the conventions of realism, emphasizing instead the inadequacies of existing conventions and of language itself, modernist literature led critics towards formalist or language-based analyses. Under the influence of prolific writer-critics of the early modernist period like Eliot and Pound, argues Currie, the new critical attitude in the Anglo-American tradition was one in which the representational content of literary work was categorically inseparable from or identical with its formal and verbal structure.10 On both fronts (literary and critical) traditional realism was increasingly rendered an outdated, if not wholly inadequate, novelistic form. Linda Hutcheon describes how nineteenth-century realism had come to dominate or tyrannize the definition of the novelistic form, rather than being seen, rightfully, as merely as stage in the novels development.11 Turning to the history of novel criticism, she notes that while the novel form developed further, its theories froze in time somewhere in the last century.
From this point on, any form which revealed a moving beyond that stage could only be dealt with in negative terms (as not really a novel, or at best a new novel, or as a metafiction), rather than being treated in terms of a natural, dialectical development of the genre, as the background traditions parodied in such forms themselves proposed.
12

Though modernism was accompanied by arrival of structuralism within critical and linguistic theory, these contemporaneous developments would not be seen to meet until the 1960s. In 1953, Roland Barthes argued from a Saussurean point of view that the signifier which did not declare its own systemic conditions was an unhealthy signifier language that pretends not to be language, to be uncomplicatedly transparent a naturalization of language

Ibid. Ibid. p.7 11 Linda Hutcheon, Narcissistic Narrative (London, New York: Methuen, 1980) pp.37-39 12 Ibid. p.38 quoting Roland Barthes, Writing: Degree Zero (1953)
10

as a referential medium.13 It is clear to see how structuralist thought subverted the notion of realism, in the words of David Lodge, exposing it as an art of bad faith, because it seeks to disguise or deny its own conventionality, and how, as he states, it was capable of being co-opted, in the revolutionary atmosphere of the 1960s, to a radical intellectual critique of traditional humanistic ideas about literature and culture.14 In establishing the critical context of contemporary metafiction, one further development needs to be outlined, that is the transition from structural to poststructural critical thought. As Currie states:
If structuralist poetics operated initially with the belief that literary structure was a property of the object-text, Barthes conflation of reading and writing processes pointed toward the idea that literary structure was a function of reading, or that critical metalanguage projected its own structure onto the object text in exactly the same way that language in general projected its structure onto the world.
15

The realization was that fiction and criticism shared a condition, that the role of the critical text was to articulate the self-consciousness that either the realist text lacked or that was immanent in the modernist text, and that at the same time the critical text must acknowledge reflexively its own structuration or literariness.16 As we shall go on to see, the empowered reader (characterized as meaning-maker), and reduced power (or death) of the author, as well as the increasingly object-like status of the text are issues continually thematized within the work of Barth and Barthelme. Other critics, however, do not so readily link the rise of structuralism to those metafictive tendencies that began to develop during the same era. For Hutcheon, as we began to see above, the rise of metafiction was primarily due to a tradition traceable within fiction itself; as she states in Narcissistic Narrative (1980), critical theory may influence art, but in this case the literary tradition of novelistic development seems the more likely general force.17 She argues,

13

Mark Currie, Introduction, Metafiction, ed. Currie (London, New York: Longman, 1995) p.7 14 David Lodge, The Novel Now, Metafcition, ed. Currie (London, New York: Longman, 1995) p.148 15 Mark Currie, Introduction, Metafiction, ed. Currie (London, New York: Longman, 1995) p.8 16 Ibid. 17 Linda Hutcheon, Narcissistic Narrative (London, New York: Methuen, 1980) p.30

instead, that contemporary metafiction should be seen as a logical extension of modernist convictions. It is clear to see how increasingly self-conscious modernist developments within the novelistic form may have given rise to metafictional experimentation, however, the developments within literary and cultural theory outlined by Currie, I would argue, give contemporary metafictionality reason; that is, in bearing its own conventionality metafiction guards itself against accusations of realist pretense and, too, enables the demystification of other naturalistic societal narrative structures/fictions exposed by poststructural theory metafiction that is aware of its construction and convention coheres with a world that is aware of its construction and convention. Between writing Narcissistic Narrative and A Poetics of Postmodernism (1988), Hutcheon too came to adopt a similar point of view, discarding her prior formalist persuasion. In the latter, she identifies historiographic metafiction (i.e. that which reveals the constructed/fictional nature of historic narrative via a reordering and questioning its own historic tenets) as a branch of metafiction particularly theoretically informed, and postmodern in motivation profoundly aware of that which the traditional realist historical novel took for granted, and which modernism served to expose, e.g. the transparency of language, unmediated access to historical referents themselves. Thus, while some instances of metafiction may represent a continuation of novelistic development and extension of modernism, other instances draw directly upon the surrounding theoretical/critical developments of poststructural thought (the New Historicism of Foucault in particular). Whether or not both forms of contemporary metafiction warrant the label postmodern, however, is an important debate that Hutcheon highlights and to which I will later return. If the critical development outlined above is permitted, we can see how the self-consciousness of the modern period differs from that prevalent in the contemporary period. The difference has often been characterized as a shift from mere epistemological, to ontological skepticism (McHale, 1992); in the wake of poststructural thought, the unilinear causality of narrative and its teleological orientation towards revelation and closure were seen as operating principles which projected structure onto otherwise structureless experience.18 Hence, the kind of revelation elucidated by poststructural thought, offers an
18

Mark Currie, Introduction, Metafiction, ed. Currie (London, New York: Longman, 1995) p.13

extended scope in which self-conscious fiction can operate (scope which was unavailable to the modern or pre-modern writer), thus providing metafiction as a formal technique with renewed impetus. The power to explore not only the conditions of its own production, but the implications of narrative explanation and historical construction in general.19

19

Ibid p.14

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II. TWO FORMS OF CONTEMPORARY METAFICTION Visionary Metafiction: Representing (Un)reality

Art is as natural an artifice as nature; the truth of Fiction is that Fact is fantasy; the made up story is a model of the world. - John Barth, Bellerophoniad, Chimera, (1972)

Before we can adequately approach the work of Barth and Barthelme, it would serve us well to discuss briefly the notion of mimesis in relation to contemporary metafiction; that is, we must establish in what manner, and to what extent (if at all) contemporary metafiction purports to represent reality. As we saw in the previous section, the traditional notion of realism was revealed by modernist and structuralist thought to be problematic by virtue of languages inherent inability to represent or refer to the external world accurately. The subsequent advent of poststructural and postmodern theory to demonstrated not only the difficulty of representing the world, but the fictionality or constructedness of that world itself. Jean-Franois Lyotard later expressed his discontent with modernity in the essay La condition postmoderne (1979) namely, that science, reason, and the singular yet contingent goal of progress, had managed to maintain an aura of transcendence, an aura which no form of legitimation warrants, be it emancipatory or otherwise. Simplifying to the extreme, Lyotard defines the postmodern as an incredulity towards metanarratives20 the supposedly transcendent, universal truths which form the foundations of western civilization and function to give that civilization objective legitimization.21 Later surveying the critical landscape, Christopher Norris identifies what he called a distinct narrative turn within theory: as the idea gains ground that all theory is a species of sublimated narrative, so doubts emerge about the very possibility of knowledge as distinct from the various forms of narrative gratification.22

20

Jean-Franois Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press 1984) xxiv 21 Hans Bertens, The Idea of the Postmodern: A History, (London: Routledge, 1995) p124 22 Christopher Norris The Contest of Faculties: Philosophy and Theory after Deconstruction, (London, New York: Methuen, 1985) p.23

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Returning to the corresponding repercussions within literature, Patricia Waugh, in the introduction to her book Metafiction (1984), argues that
Contemporary metafiction is both a response and a contribution to the even more thoroughgoing sense that reality or history are provisional: no longer a world of eternal verities but a series of constructions, artifices, impermanent structures. The materialist, positivist and empiricist world-view on which realistic fiction is premised no longer exists.
23

Waugh goes on to show how, as such, conventional narrative features associated with the traditional understanding of ordered reality are increasingly rejected (i.e. plot, chronology, coherent characters/selves). However, this commonplace rendering of contemporary fictions relation to the external world seems to some extent paradoxical. It posits that contemporary metafiction recognizes the unrealities present in the external world, and thus sets about portraying worlds in which these fictional elements (i.e. plot, chronology etc.) are either problematized or altogether absent. In doing so, it attempts to express something real, that is, the unreality of reality. Ironically, then, contemporary metafiction, which seeks to reveal the fictionality present within the external world, appears to retain some mimetic or realistic capacity. As Gerald Graff describes:
Where reality has become unreal, literature qualifies as our guide to reality by derealizing itselfIn a paradoxical and fugitive way, mimetic theory remains alive. Literature holds the mirror up to unrealityits conventions of reflexivity and antirealism are themselves mimetic of the kind of unreal reality that modern reality has become.
24

Graff identifies two predominant literary reactions to the postmodern loss of reality, which he labels formalist and visionary. This is a distinction I wish to retain and utilize in my examination of contemporary metafiction, and as such it warrants clear exposition:
The formalist view separates the literary work from objective reality, science, and the world of practical, utilitarian communication and defines it as an autonomous, self-

23 24

Patricia Waugh, Metafiction (London, New York: Routledge, 1984) p.44 Gerald Graff, Literature Against Itself (London, New York: Routledge, 1988) pp.179-180

12

sufficient world or law unto itself, independent of the external world In [the visionary] view, literature does not withdraw from objective reality but appropriates it, calling into question the entire opposition between the imaginative and the real.
25

Thus, Hutcheons notion of postmodern fiction, namely historiographic metafiction, is equivalent to that which Graff labels visionary. As Hutcheon states, Historiographic metafictions openly assert that there are only truths in the plural, and never one Truth; and there is rarely falseness per se, just others truths.
26

Hence, while we see that postmodern fiction does abandon

nineteenth-century realism (that is, the expressing of eternal truths which pertain to humanity and the world) it adopts a new kind of realism, and still retains a connection to the external world, attempting to reveal as fact, the fictionality of that world and its narrative structures. Examples of this kind of work Hutcheon gives include Salman Rushdies Midnights Children, Robert Coovers The Public Burning and E.L. Doctorows Ragtime, as well as Kurt Vonneguts Slaughterhouse Five (which I shall later look at in comparison to the works of Barth and Barthelme). The relation contemporary metafiction of the visionary kind holds to the world is neither one of realism (in the nineteeth-century sense of the word) nor anti-realism (that is, avoiding representation of the world altogether); the term suggested by Susan Strehle for this kind of relation is actualism. As she states, appropriately sensing the differences between the worlds of postmodern fiction and realism, critics inappropriately term recent novels anti-realistic and deny them any relation to external reality, more productively, she argues, we can suppose that postmodern fiction does express external reality, developing seemingly anti-realistic techniques as part of a new mimetic mode.27 She thus situates the work of Thomas Pynchon and Vladimir Nabakov as emblematic of this kind of mimetic relation, held between fiction and a world whose truths are recognized as to a large extent contingent; dependent on, or constructed through narrative structures. With this in mind, we may better understand Waughs claim that while metafiction explicitly lays bare the conventions of realism, it does not ignore or
25 26

Ibid. pp.14-15 Linda Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism (London, New York: Routledge, 1988) pp.109110 27 Susan Strehle, Actualism: Pynchons Debt to Nabakov, Contemporary Literature, Vol.24, No.1, (Spring, 1983), p.31

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abandon them. As she states, the visionary or historiographic metafiction (though she does not use those terms), does not abandon the real world for the narcissistic pleasures of the imagination. What it does is to re-examine the conventions of realism in order to discover through its own self-reflection a fictional form that is culturally relevant and comprehensible to contemporary readers.28 This clarification of terms, though no doubt useful, does not circumnavigate the paradox highlighted by Graff, to which visionary or historiographic metafiction falls prey; namely, how this kind of fiction might seek to express a truth about a world whose historic, ideological, humanist realities are recognized as largely contingent, fictional or constructed? As he states, there seems to be no getting away from the fact that literature must have an ideology, even if this ideology is one that calls all ideologies into question. The very act of denying all nave realisms presupposes an objective standpoint.29 In Poetics, Hutcheon argues that in both fiction and history writing today, our confidence in empiricist and positivist epistemologies have been shaken shaken, but perhaps not yet destroyed. And this is what accounts for the skepticism rather than any real denunciation; it also accounts for the defining paradoxes of postmodern discourses, Hutcheon thus makes the case that postmodern fiction (in her account, historiographic metafiction) is by its very nature paradoxical; Postmodernism is a contradictory cultural enterprise, one that is heavily implicated in what it seeks to contest. It uses and abuses the very structures and values it takes to task.30 Thus, Brian McHale argues that to escape the general postmodernist incredulity toward metanarratives it is only necessary that we regard our own metanarrative incredulously, in a certain sense, proffering it tentatively or provisionally, as no more (but no less) than a strategically useful and satisfying fiction.31 Hence, if visionary metafiction is to be coherent, then, it too must subject itself to the same skepticism it expounds.

28 29

Patricia Waugh, Metafiction (London, New York: Routledge, 1984) p.18 Gerald Graff, Literature Against Itself (London, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1979) p.11 30 Linda Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism (London, New York: Routledge, 1988) p.106 31 Brian McHale, Telling Postmodernist Stories, Poetics Today, Vol.9, No.3, Aspects of Literary Theory (1988), p.551

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Formalist Metafiction: Constructing Autonomous Realities

The aim of literature [] is the creation of a strange object covered with fur which breaks your heart - Donald Barthelme, Florence Green is 81, Come Back, Dr.Caligari (1964) p.14

As I suggested above, two predominant literary responses to the perceived unrealty of reality in postmodern society can be identified: those which recoil into the formal realities of the fiction-making process, and those which retain a connection with the world, representing or exploring it in its unreality. Like Graff, Hutcheon sets apart these two forms of metafiction, characterizing the formalist branch of contemporary metafiction as a form of extreme of modernist autotelic self-reflexion, whose theorists admit, no longer attempts to mirror reality or tell any truth about it.32 She thus sets metafiction of this type apart from the strictly postmodern, visionary or historiographic form. As she states, Surfiction and the New Novel are like abstract art: they do not so much transgress codes of representation as leave them alone. Postmodern novels problematize narrative representation, even as they invoke it.33 Significant critical proponents of this formalist branch of metafiction include Raymond Federman, Ronald Sukenick, Italo Calvino and Barth himself. In the collected papers titled Surfiction: Fiction Now and Tomorrow, Federman outlines the key propositions of this form. In light of the realization that reality as such does not exist, or rather exists only in its fictionalized version, he argues, fiction can no longer be a representation of reality, or an imitation or even a recreation of reality; it can only be A REALITY.34 As he goes on to state,
Fiction will no longer be regarded as a mirror of life, as a pseudorealistic document that informs us about life, nor will it be judged on the basis of its social, moralvaluebut on the basis of what it is and what it does as an autonomous art form in its own right.
35

32 33

Linda Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism (London, New York: Routledge, 1988) p.40 Ibid. 34 Raymond Federman, Introduction, Surfiction ed. Federman (Chicago: Shallow Press, 1975) p.8 35 Ibid. p.9

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Hence, fiction that is aware of its limits will no longer hold the pretense to represent or express a reality; the words will be treated as ends in themselves. Sukenick extends these sentiments, stating that the experience exists in and for itself. It is opaque in the way that abstract painting is opaque in that it cannot be explained as representing some other kind of experience.36 He identifies this as the most distinct and praiseworthy quality of some of Barthelmes works, describing them as opaque (though without negative connotations): opacity implies that we should direct our attention to the surface of a work.37 Thus, surfiction revels in the subversion of fictional conventions, in what Hutcheon would argue, appears to be an extended expression of modernist selfconsciousness, and formal experimentation. Larry McCaffrey outlines two possible ways of approaching the work of Barthelme and metafiction in general, offering a distinction that is useful at this stage of our discussion. The first of these approaches he labels the Theory of Meanings Approach. This approach is akin to the way in which I suggested visionary or historiographic metafictions are often read; the fragmentation, self-conscious play and subversion of convention found in New Fiction is taken to express something about the world, thematizing the manner in which we construct or impose meaning from the disparate events in our lives. The second approach he labels the Theory of Non-Meaning or Art as Object approach, which essentially concurs with the critical approach outlined in Federmans Surfiction. He describes how much of the new fiction produced during the late sixties and early seventies tries to sever its obvious connections with the real world and instead present the process of the imagination engaged with and transforming its materials into new aesthetic objects.38 In light of this new conception of literary creation, the writer's main obligations do not lie in mirroring reality or expressing something, rather, the writer sees his role as adding new objects to the world; interesting, even beautiful, new objects made, in this case, out of words.39 Similarly, in his essay After Joyce, Barthelme describes the mysterious shift that takes place as soon as one says that art is not about

36

Ronald Sukenick, The New Tradition in Fiction, Surfiction ed. Federman (Chicago: Shallow Press, 1975) p45 37 Ibid. 38 Larry McCaffrey, Meaning and Non-Meaning in Barthelmes Fictions, Journal of Aesthetic Education, Vol. 13, No.1, (Jan, 1979), p.74 39 Ibid. p.75

16

something but is something.40 This is an idea that held significant influence within the realms of painting and sculpture earlier in the century for example in the Pop Art of the 1950s and Dadaism before that. McCaffery suggests that the reason such a realization has been resisted within the literary arts (by critics and authors alike) probably has to do with the very nature of language as a medium. As he states,
Words seems always to be "pointing" somewhere, to have a referential quality about them that, say, lines and colors, or sounds and rhythms, don't possess. Many contemporary writers, however, are seeking new means and strategies to focus the reader's attention on the book as object, as an artificial construction - a program which emphasizes process at the expense of meaning, and which usually involves forcing the reader to consider the object before him not as a "mirror of" or "window to" reality, but as a made-up, invented thing.
41

Thus, we see how formalist metafiction, in foregrounding its artificiality and methods of construction, encourages an Art as Object receptive approach, distancing it from any mimetic pretense. Faced with the unreal nature of reality, or transitory aspect of the world, of life, as Federman puts it, literature confronts its own impossibility.42 In the wake of the modernist deconstruction of literary conventionality and attack on nineteenth-century realism, literature nonetheless continues to search for possibilities it searches within itself for its subject because the subject I no longer outside the work of art, it is no longer reality or man.43 Thus many of the works of Barth and Barthelme can be seen as explorations into the very possibilities of fiction itself, as distinct from (or as another object within) the world. While the receptive approaches McCaffery outlines are useful, they are not without hazard. With regards to the Theory of Meanings Approach, critics must exercise discretion in distinguishing between seemingly meaningless and fragmented fictions, which actively seek to represent a similarly meaningless and fragmented world, and those which, in their meaninglessness and fragmentation, happen merely to resemble the world, though would rather avoid,
40 41

Donald Barthelme, After Joyce, Location 1, no.1 (Summer 1964), p.14 Larry McCaffrey, Meaning and Non-Meaning in Barthelmes Fictions, Journal of Aesthetic Education, Vol. 13, No.1, (Jan, 1979), p.76 42 Raymond Federman, Fiction Today or the Pursuit of Non-Knowledge, Surfiction, ed. Federman (Chicago: Shallow Press, 1975) p.301 43 Ibid. p.301

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all together, the task of representation (no longer perceived as a possibility). Graff helps clarify such hazards, pointing out how critics have often gone wrong in their treatment of metafictive texts:
Fantastic or nonrealistic methods may serve the end of illustrating aspects of reality as well as conventionally realistic methods, and even radically anti-realistic methods are sometimes defensible as legitimate means of representing unreal reality. Knowing just where to draw the line is the problem.
44

He highlights the example of Lucien Goldmanns reading of Allain RobbeGrillets Le Gommes and Le Voyeur, the theme of which Goldmann posits as the disappearance of any importance and any meaning from individual action. Goldmann argues that in their lack of meaningfulness, these represent two of the most realistic works of contemporary fiction.45 This demonstrates Graffs crucial point, such a justification could be given for virtually any piece of nonsense-writing.46 The critical problem, he argues, is to discriminate between anti-realistic works which provide some true understanding of non-reality and those which are mere symptoms of it47; between those which seek to represent through anti-realist methods, and those which revert to anti-realism in order to avoid representation.

44

Gerald Graff, Literature Against Itself, Graff, Gerald Literature Against Itself (London, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1979) p.12 45 Lucien Goldmann, Towards a Sociology of the Novel, trans. Alan Sheridan (London: Travistock Publications, 1975), p.145 46 Gerald Graff, Literature Against Itself, Graff, Gerald Literature Against Itself (London, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1979) p.12 47 Ibid.

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Prefatory Note on Selected Readings Having outlined two of the fundamental critical approaches one might take with regards to works of contemporary metafiction (as well as several problems associated with each), I shall now attempt to engage with some of the key texts within the metafictional canon. The texts I have chosen serve to demonstrate the distinct ways in which narrative artifice is, to use Hutcheons terms, thematized either through overt theorization, or covert actualization in order to either problematize representation, or simply to avoid it (thus seeking autonomy).

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III. THEMATIZING NARRATIVE ARTIFICE John Barths Lost in the Funhouse (1968) Of my selected readings, John Barths short story collection, Lost in the Funhouse (1968), is, without a doubt, the most extreme in terms of its metafictional self-reflection. In Seven Additional Authors Notes, added to the collection in 1969, Barth describes the regnant idea linking the stories as one of turning as many aspects of the fiction as possible the structure, the narrative viewpoint, the means of presentation, in some instances the process of composition [] into dramatically relevant emblems of the theme.48 The fictions conventional or artificial elements are to a large extent the focus of its content; Barth thematizes the processes involved in the construction of fiction through overt theorization within the text itself. Before we consider the effect and possible motivations for such theorization, let us look at several examples. In the collections title piece, Lost in the Funhouse, Barth repeatedly directs the readers attention to the conventions of traditional realism. For instance, verisimilitude or fictions connection to the real world is theorized: Initials, blanks, or both were often substituted for proper names in nineteenthcentury to enhance the illusion of reality (LF, p.73); Is there really such a person as Ambrose, or is he a figment of the authors imagination? (LF, p.88). We see, too, traditional narrative form discussed: The action of conventional dramatic narrative may be represented by a diagram called Freitags Triangle (LF, p.95), a diagram of which is included. We are even made aware of the conventions involved with printing: A straight underline is the manuscript mark for italic type, which in turn is the printed equivalent to oral emphasis (LF, p.72). An exhaustive list is not necessary, since these examples adequately demonstrate the type of metafictionality at work. However, this is by no means the only metafictional element. The funhouse through which Ambrose travels and in which he eventually becomes lost forms an allegory for both the writing process and the reading of the text itself that is, of Lost in the Funhouse. At the end of the story, Ambrose is left telling stories to himself in the dark (LF, p.95), and though he wishes he had
48

John Barth, Seven Additional Authors Notes, Lost in the Funhouse, (Anchor Books Edition, 1988) p.203 Further references within text LF.

20

never entered the funhouse, he resolves to construct funhouses for others and be their secret operator though he would rather be among the lovers for whom funhouses are designed (LF, p.97). Hence, Ambrose becomes the writer of the fiction we have just read, the operator of the funhouse (with all its self-reflexive mirrors) through which we lovers (readers) have just walked. In what he describes as one of Borges favourite fictional devices, Barth turns the artists mode or form into a metaphor for his concernsnot just the form of the story but the fact of the story is symbolic; the medium is the message.49 Barth, like Ambrose, is off the track, in some new or old part of the place thats not supposed to be used (LF, p.83); Barths fiction foregrounds that which, conventionally, remains implicit. As with many instances of metafiction, it is the process (the story-telling) which forms Barths thematic content, rather than the product (the story that is told).50 His stories thus constitute an attempt to represent not life directly but a representation of life, as he puts it similarly describing his earlier novels (The Sot-Weed Factor and Giles Goat-Boy) as novels which imitate the form of the Novel, by an author who imitates the role of Author.51 Even Ambrose, one might argue, represents an imitation of a character and is to some extent aware of his shortcomings. We hear how he wishes to Not act; be (LF, p.83), how throughout his childhood encounter with Magda in the toolshed what hed really feltwas an odd sense of detatchmenthe heard his mind take notes on the scene: This is what the call passion. I am experiencing it (LF, p.84), and how in the movies hed meet a beautiful girl in the funhouse; theyd have hairs-breadth escapes from real dangers; hed do and say the right things, but that ultimately what had happened in the toolshed was nothing (LF, p.91). At the end of the story, Ambrose wonders whether he will become a real person (LF, p.91); he laments his status as a character whose life falls short of fictional convention, and how his self-consciousness (or the texts self-consciousness) prevents his being real. In Life-Story, also contained within the collection, we encounter a writercharacter who is similarly confronted by the difficulty of writing in a

49

John Barth, The Literature of Exhaustion (1967), in Metafiction ed. Currie (London, New York: Longman, 1995) p.167 50 Linda Hutcheon, Narcissistic Narrative (London, New York: Methuen, 1980) p.3 51 John Barth, The Literature of Exhaustion (1967), in Metafiction ed. Currie (London, New York: Longman, 1995) pp.168-169

21

conservative, realistic, unself-conscious way (LF, p.117). The writer-character comes to suspect that he is a character in a fiction, and subsequently sets about writing a story in which the protagonist comes to suspect that the world is a novel, himself a fictional personage (LF, p.117), thus replicating what he takes to be his own situation. The protagonist of the writer-characters story is also a writer-character (a fictionalized version of himself), and is thus said to be writing a similar account of his situation. Hence, Barths story takes on a Chinese Box structure one of mise en abyme, extending ad infinitum in both ontological directions. After beginning his story, the initial writer-character complains that his story is fashionably solipsistic, unoriginal in fact a convention of twentieth-century literature. Another story about a writer writing a story! he goes on to ask, Who doesnt prefer art that at least overtly imitates something or other than its own process? That doesnt continually proclaim Dont forget that I am artifice? (LF, p.117). The answer, it seems, is John Barth. But the crucial difference between the writer-characters story and Barths Life-Story is that while the former is another story about a writer writing a story, the latter is a story about a writer who is aware of the conventionality and unoriginality of a story about a writer writing a story. Barths is a story about the exhaustion or triteness of a certain type of self-consciousness; it is fiction about modernist self-reflexion. As Deborah Woolley similarly suggests, Lost in The Funhouse is a narrative about the failure of self-reflexive narrative.52 Later in Life-Story, a writer-character (at one of the ontological levels) declares I want passion and bravura in my plot, heroes I can admire [] It doesnt matter how naively linear the anecdote is; never mind modernity! (LF, 119). For Barth, while such a nave return to the conventions of realism is impossible, so too is a continuation of modernist self-reflexivity. As Lost in the Funhouse collection demonstrates, fiction inevitably involves artifice, yet as Barth claims, a different way to come to terms with the discrepancy between art and the Real Thing, is to affirm the artificial element in art (you can't get rid of it anyhow), and to make the artifice part of your point.53 As one of the Barth-like narrators of Title similarly states, the final possibility is
52

Deborah Woolley, Empty Text, Fecund Voice: Self-Reflexivity in Barths Lost in the Funhouse, Contemporary Literature, Vol.26, No.4 (Winter, 1985), p.128 53 Comment quoted by Campbell Tatham, John Barth and the Aesthetics of Artifice, Contemporary Literature, Vol. 12, No. 1, (Winter, 1971) p.64

22

toturn ultimacy against itself to make something new and valid, the essence whereof would be the impossibility of making something new (LF, p.109). While Barths work partakes in the rejection of realism through the use of alienation, multiple viewpoints (Menelaiad), intertextual references, and so on, sentiment above suggests that he is concerned not with the postmoderns sensed loss of objective reality, but rather with the inability to represent, through art, the Real Thing still nonetheless felt to exist. As such, Lost in the Funhouse may be best characterized as an expression of late-modernist selfreflection yet one that is at the same time overwhelmingly confronted with modernism as an intellectual dead end the novel moribund, if not already dead, (LF, p.121) as the writer-character of Life-Story puts it. As Barth states in The Literature of Replenishment (1979), referring to his earlier, much-cited essay
What [] 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.
54

Lost in the Funhouse, published the year after The Literature of Exhaustion (1969), seems, then, to be primarily concerned with the possibility of literatures continuation, in the wake of modernisms subversion of literary conventions and effective deconstruction of artistic representation. The question faced is that of how fiction is to proceed in this dehuman, exhausted, ultimate adjective hour, when every humane value has become untenable (LF, p.107), as one of the narrators of Title puts it. Barths answer, as we have seen, is to make the artifice part of the point, to acknowledge what Im doing while Im doing it (LF, 111), the Barth-like narrator of Title again says. Hence, in The Literature of Exhaustion Barth argues that

54

John Barth, The Literature of Replenishment (1979), in The Friday Book: Essays and Other Non-Fiction, (New York: G.Putnams Sons, 1984) p.206

23

It might be conceivable to rediscover validly the artifices of language and literature such far out notions as grammar, punctuationeven characterization! Even plot! if one goes about it the right way, aware of what ones predecessors have been up to.
55

For Barth, as I suggested above, a nave return to realist conventions is impossible, but so too is the mere continuation of the modernist aesthetic, whose adversary mode of transgression is effectively exhausted (we really dont need more Finnegans Wakes and Pisan Cantos,56 Barth asserts). As such, we see how the stories in Lost in the Funhouse utilizes fictional conventions, but in a way that knowingly acknowledges (through overt theorization) all that modernism, in its unrelenting attack on literary conventions, succeeded in exposing. While such a metafiction may fulfill Umberto Ecos characterization of the postmodern, in which the modern is revisited: but with irony, not innocently,57 it does not fulfill that of McHale or Hutcheon, according to whom postmodern fiction must stem from ontological skepticism, that is, a thoroughgoing sense in which reality is fictional, or constructed through discourse and narrative structures.

55

John Barth, The Literature of Exhaustion (1967), in Metafiction ed. Currie (London, New York: Longman, 1995) p.167 56 John Barth, The Literature of Replenishment, in The Friday Book: Essays and Other NonFiction, (New York: G.Putnams Sons, 1984) p.202 57 Umberto Eco, Reflections on the Name of the Rose in Metafiction ed. Currie (London, New York: Longman, 1995) p.173

24

Donald Barthelmes Snow White (1968) As stated before, Linda Hutcheon makes the distinction between the overt theorization of narrative artifice (as found in Lost in the Funhouse) and covert actualization of narrative artifice. For the reader/critic of metafiction, overt diegetic narcissism, she argues, seems to involve the thematizing within the story of its storytelling concerns parody, narrative conventions, creative process with an eye to teaching him his new, more active role.58 But, she asks,
What if the author decides to assume that his reader already knows the story-making rules? He would still imbed certain instructions in the text, but these would not be in the obvious form of direct address. Therefore, this would be a more covert version of diegetic self-reflectiveness.
59

Hence, in the move from overt to covert narcissism, the stress alters subtly from the teaching of the thematized reader to the actualized act of reading in progress.60 With this distinction in mind, we may begin to look at Barthelmes novel Snow White (1968), establishing some of the ways in which it actualizes narrative artifice through a more covert from of metafictionality than that found in Lost in the Funhouse. Snow White is paradigmatic of the formalist style of metafiction outlined in the previous chapter. As such, it takes leave of the modernist problematics concerning representation, striving to highlight, instead, its ontological status as an art object as fiction as opposed to representation. As Ronald Sukenick states, we have to learn to think about a novel as a concrete structure rather than an allegory, existing in the realm of experience than of discursive meaning.61 Barthelme attempts to thrust the novels own ontological status into the foreground, and through doing so raises several questions regarding how we are to read Snow White. The first of these techniques we encounter, and continue to do so throughout, is the emboldened, upper-case announcements single or short
58 59

Linda Hutcheon, Narcissistic Narrative, (London, New York: Methuen, 1980) p.53 Ibid. p.71 60 Ibid. p.30 61 Ronald Sukenick, The new Tradition in Surfiction ed. Federman (Chicago: Shallow Press, 1975) p.40

25

sequences of sentences that appear in the centre of otherwise blank pages. For example, the novel ends with: THE FAILURE OF SNOW WHITES ARSE REVIRGINIZATION OF SNOW WHITE APOTHEOSIS OF SNOW WHITE SNOW WHITE RISES INTO THE SKY THE HEROES DEPART IN SEARCH OF A NEW PRINCIPLE HEIGH-HO62 Not only is the novels ontological status foregrounded the reader being forced to focus on the act of reading, and the spatial arrangement of words on the page - but, as these form the closing words of the novel, we also notice the refusal of a closed ending, and with it closed meaning. Our desire to impose a coherent teleology or narrative structure upon the disparate fragments found in the novel is denied. Brian McHale points to this forking of paths as a recurrent stylistic feature of postmodern fiction, in which the visible bifurcation of the plot highlights authorial decisions concerning construction; mutually exclusive possibilities are jointly realized, juxtaposed.63 Elsewhere in the Snow White we see Burroughs-style cut ups, with irregular spacing, for example, Firmness mirror model custody of the blow adequate scale I concede that it is to a degree instruments distances

parched. (SW, p.37) Instances of this cut-up or assemblage technique inevitably raise questions concerning the reading process. Snow White forces the reader to ask how literary texts are written and how they are read. How, in other words, we fix, determine, and delimit language as literature?64 The answer is essentially that which poststructural criticism promotes; the reader is heralded as the essential meaning-maker. As Jerome Klinkowitz argues,

62

Donald Barthelme, Snow White (1968), (New York: Scribner, 1996) p.187 Further references within text SW. 63 Brian McHale, Postmodernist Fiction, (London, New York: Routledge, 1987) p.107 64 John Leland, Remarks Re-Marked: Barthelme, What Curios of Signs! Boundary 2, Vol. 5, No.3, (Spring, 1977) p.808

26

Fiction itself is an autonomous reality. The new conventions follow in kind: reading must become a more energetic act, a participation in the process of fictional creation; no bogus order may be imposed on its events-things transpire by digression []; meaning itself will not preexist the fiction but be created in it.
65

Snow White does, to an extent, embed reading instructions of this sort within the text itself. Several of the dwarves take part in reading of a novel by Dampfboot (including the outer part where the author is praised and the price quoted - thus the object as a whole) and describe their experience: It was hard to read, dry, breadlike pages that turned, and then fellfragments kept flying off the screen into the audience, fragments of rain and ethics. (SW, p.111) One dwarf goes on to state:
We like books that have a lot of dreck in them, matter which presents itself as not wholly relevant (or indeed, at all relevant) but which, carefully attended to, can supply a kind of sense of what is going on. This sense is not to be obtained by reading between the lines (for there is nothing there but white space) but by reading the lines themselves looking at them and so arriving at a feeling not of satisfaction exactly, but of having read them, of having completed them. (SW, p.112)

The dwarfs words echo closely those of Ronald Sukenick, calling for the novels operation within the realm of experience as opposed that of discursive meaning. Hence, the Dampfboot novel represents the novel, Snow White, itself, in nuce (as a smaller version of itself) or as a novel-within-a-novel, through mise en abyme. This is a common metafictive device, one that is by no means exclusive to contemporary metafiction, but especially effective in the foregrounding of fictional ontology, with which many writers of contemporary formalist metafiction (including Barthelme) are particularly concerned. (As I stated in the first chapter, one cannot argue that it is postmodern thought that originally gave rise to metafictional awareness itself at least within realm of literature. One can, however argue that postmodern thought provides metafictive techniques with renewed impetus for the formalist writer, providing fiction with a means of highlighting its ontological status as an autonomous reality as opposed to the type of representation of reality). In another instance of covert metafictive instruction, Jane and her mother
65

Jerome Klinkowitz, Avant-Garde and After, SubStance, Vol. 9, No. 2, Issue 27: Current Trends in American Fiction (1980), p.132

27

discus the meaning of an apelike hand found in their mailbox. While Jane tells her mother to Think nothing of it, her mother replies I think you dismiss these things too easily Jane. Im sure it means something, to which Jane again replies, Dont go reading things mother. Leave things alone. It means what it means. Content yourself with that mother (SW, p.113). Clearly, Jane here is situated as the poststructuralist, or postmodern reader and her mother as the traditional, realist reader. Barthelmes clever use of pun on the word content reminds us that much of the novels thematic content focuses on the act of reading itself, which, in Barthelmes understanding, is more one of creating meaning than it is of finding preexistent meaning. The clearest example of Barthelmes thematization of the readers role comes in the form of a parodic questionnaire which features at the end of Part I of the novel. A distinctly authorial voice presents us with fifteen QUESTIONS:
9. Has the work, for you, a metaphysical dimension? Yes ( ) No ( ) 10. What is it (twenty-five words or less)? _______________________ ____________________________________________________________ ____________________________________________________________ 12. Do you feel that the Authors Guild has been sufficiently vigorous in representing writers before the Congress in matters pertaining to copyright legislation? Yes ( ) No ( ) 14. Do you stand up when you read? ( ) Lie down? ( ) Sit? ( )

This direct address makes it impossible for the reader to remain passive: question two highlights the extent to which we, as readers, find meaning in the text; question ten forces us to articulate our reading of it; question twelve crosses ontological realms between that of the fictive world and the real world in another foregrounding of the autonomous world fictive referents construct; and question fourteen, too, forces us to consider the reading act, and the way we approach the novel as an object within our experience. This questionnaire is, in a sense, parodic or ironic in that it temporarily reasserts an authorial voice (elsewhere effaced, or implicitly construed as dead) only to have that voice succumb to the readers whims, for example question five asks, In the further development of the story, would you like more emotion ( ) or less emotion ( )? as if the empowered reader really did control 28

or write the text. In our reading, we have thus begun to establish the new role, which (as Hutcheon states) the reader of overt metafiction is taught and which covert metafiction already assumes:
As the novelist actualizes the world of his imagination through words, so the reader from those same words manufactures in reverse a literary universe that is as much his creation as it is the novelists. This near equation of the acts of reading and writing is one of the concerns that sets modern metafiction apart form previous novelistic self-consciousness.
66

Perhaps

it

is,

to

an

extent,

this

new

poststructurally-informed

characterization of the reader which sets not modern (as Hutcheon has it in this, a quotation her earlier study of self-conscious fiction) but postmodern fiction apart from previous forms of metafictive self-reflection. Despite its ties to the modernist aesthetic, what we find in the postmodern brand of textual and formal self-consciousness seems to be an attitude of celebration due to a sensed liberation (as opposed to structuralist prisonhouse captivity). As Andreas Huyssen suggests:
It is no longer the modernism of "the age of anxiety," the ascetic and tortured modernism of a Kafka, a modernism of negativity and alienation, ambiguity and abstraction [] Rather, it is a modernism of playful transgression, of an unlimited weaving of textuality, a modernism all confident in its rejection of representation and reality, in its denial of the subject, of history, and of the subject of history.
67

Huyssen goes on to describe how Barthes and his American fans, amongst whom Barthelme and other Surfiction writers may well feature, ostensibly reject the modernist notion of negativity replacing it with play, bliss, jouissance, i.e., with a critical form of affirmation,68 an affirmation that is strongly sensed in Snow White. At this point, it would serve us well to look at an instance of what Hutcheon would call historiographic metafiction primarily as a point of contrast, enabling us to better place Barth and Barthelmes work.
66 67

Linda Hutcheon, Narcissistic Narrative (London, New York: Methuen, 1980) p.27 Andreas Huyssen, Mapping the Postmodern, New German Critique, No.33, Modernity and Postmodernity, (Autumn, 1984), p.39 68 Ibid p.42

29

Kurt Vonneguts Slaughterhouse Five (1969) Listing Vonneguts Slaughterhouse Five, along side Rushdies Midnights Children, as an example, Patricia Waugh describes how
Metafiction suggests not only that writing history is a fictional act, ranging events conceptually through language to form a world-model, but that history itself is invested, like fiction, with interrelating plots which appear to interact independently from human design.
69

Though Waugh fails to make the distinction, it is clear that the metafiction to which she here refers is specifically that that of the visionary/historiographic variety. We may look to Slaughterhouse Five as a prime example of visionary or historiographic metafiction described in the previous chapter depicting a historical event or passage of time, yet baring the manner in which its narrative is constructed, in an attempt to reveal the fictionality or unreality of that which is often naturalized, or taken to be real. As Hutcheon states, historiographic metafiction uses parody to put into question the authority of any act of writing, locating the discourses of both history and fiction within an ever-expanding intertextual network that mocks any notion of either a single origin or simple causality.70 Jerome Klinkowitz argues that this kind of fiction (which he labels disruptivist) is concerned with not just the reporting of the world, but the imaginative transformation of it.71 In Slaughterhouse Five, this achieved through both thematic content, and the self-reflexivity of the novels narrators. Firstly, on a thematic level, the novel focuses on history (as a form of meta-narrative or story, imposed upon events in order to render them meaningful to a civilization) and the human concept of time itself. In the second chapter, we learn how Billy Pilgrim, the novels protagonist, has come unstuck in time,72 experiencing the events of his life in a distinctly non-linear fashion, akin to time-travel. In his encounter with the an alien race, the Tralfamadorians,
69 70

Patricia Waugh, Metafiction, (London, New York: Routledge, 1984) p.48-49 Linda Hutcheon, Telling Stories: Fiction and History, in Modernism /Postmodernism, ed. Peter Brooker (London, New York: Longman, 1992) p.129 71 Jerome Klinkowitz, The Life of Fiction (Chicago, Lon.: Uni. Illinois Press, 1977) p.32 72 Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse Five (1968), (Vintage, 2000) p.17 Further references in the text SH.

30

he learns how they can look at all the different moments [past, present and future] just the way we can look at a stretch of Rocky Mountains, and how it is just an illusion we have here on Earth that one moment follows another one, like beads on a string (SH, p.19-20). Later in the novel, a Tralfamadorian describes earthlings as the great explainers, explaining why this event is structured as it is, going on to explain how All time is all timeIt does not lend itself to warnings or explanations. It simply is (SH, p.62). Clearly, then, the novel thematizes the human tendency to impose linearity and causality upon events, and in turn attempts to reveal the contingency/constructedness of these narrative structures. In the first chapter of the novel, the narrator (a minimally fictionalized version of Vonnegut himself) describes how he thought it would be easy for [him] to write about the destruction of Dresden, since all [he] would have to do would be to report what [he] had seen, but how in reality, not many words about Dresden came from [his] mind (SH, p.2). He too has difficulty planning the novel in a linear fashion (using coloured, crayon lines on a long stretch of wallpaper). Hence what we are offered, in the absence of a traditional realist or historical account, is predominantly fabulation. As Klinkowitz states, an attitude often found in American fiction of the late sixties is that if the world is absurdif what passes for reality is distressingly unreal, why spend time representing it?73 This is a sentiment strongly conveyed through the fabulation and metafictionality of Slaughterhouse Five. Interestingly, the Tralfamadorians offer Billy some of their literature, which they explain to him as follows:
Each clump of symbols is a brief urgent message describing a situation, a scene. Weread them all at once, not one after the other. There isnt any particular relationship between the messages, except that the author has chosen them carefully, so that, when seen all at once, they produce an image of life that is beautiful and surprising and deep. There is no beginning, no middle, no end, no suspense, no moral, no causes, no effects. (SH, p.64)

One cant help but hear echoes of Raymond Federmans propositions concerning surfiction here, for example in the call for work to be judged not on the basis of its social or moral value, but on the basis of what it is and what it
73

Jerome Klinkowitz, The Life of Fiction (Chicago, Lon.: Uni. Illinois Press, 1977) p.4

31

does as an autonomous art form in its own right totalizing, linear narrative explanations consciously avoided.74 The Tralfamadorians also state: What we love in our books are the depths of many marvelous moments seen all at one time (SH, p.64). This time the statement echoes Barthelmes dwarf when he states We like books that have a lot of dreck in them, in which one reads the lines themselves looking at them and so arriving at a feeling not of satisfaction exactly, but of having read them, of having completed them. (SW, p.112) What we find in Tralfamadorian literature, then, is essentially a model of surfiction, or formalist metafiction, which withdraws from the act of representation, foregrounding its construction, and thus its ontological status. While Slaughterhouse Five does contain this model, it is not, itself, a fiction of this kind (despite holding certain sympathies towards it, in its deliberately jumbled plot or disrupted chronology). The novel does not simply leave representation alone (as did Barths Lost in the Funhouse and Barthelmes Snow White) but situates itself as a historical representation, in order to problematize the notion of narration and highlight the unrealities present in the world. As we shall see in the concluding discussion that is to follow, this is an attribute which Hutcheon believes forms the crucial difference between metafiction that is to be labeled postmodern and that which is not.

74

Raymond Federman, Introduction, Surfiction ed. Federman, (Chicago: Shallow Press, 1975) p.8

32

CONCLUSION As we have seen, Hutcheon argues that the anti-representational surfiction (here formalist metafiction), which Barth and Barthelme can be said to produce, might best be labeled an instance of late or extreme modernism rather than postmodernism. In [postmodern] novels, she states, there is no dissolution or repudiation of representation; but there is a problematizing of it.75 For Hutcheon, then, it is not simply a case of novels metafictionally reveling in their own narrativity or fabulation. Narrative representation story-telling is a historical and political act, and, as such, postmodern metafiction must partake in a denaturalising of the conventions of representing the past in narrative historical and fictional [] in such a way that the politics of the act of representing are made manifest.76 The reason Hutcheon excludes American Surfiction (or formalist metafiction) from the postmodern is that where historiographic metafiction constitutes a discussion about the artificial (or contingent, or constructed) nature of historical narratives (or metanarratives in general), surfiction/formalist metafiction, she argues, does not. As we have seen, however, surfiction or formalist metafiction may nonetheless stem from the same postmodern theoretical concerns as historiographic or visionary metafiction, namely the perceived artificiality of social narratives and the contingency or unreality of reality in general, yet its chosen reaction (a repudiation of representation) is not one that makes those concerns manifest. The problem faced (outlined by Graff earlier in the debate) is that of distinguishing between texts that understand the postmodern, and those that are merely symptomatic of it. McHale shares this concern, and points out the difficulty of distinguishing the diagnostic from the symptomatic in postmodern culture: Almost anything that can be construed as a diagnosis of the postmodern condition can also, it appears, be construed as a symptom of it.77 If what we are given in the Barths Lost in the Funhouse and Barthelmes Snow White is formal metafictionality or poststructural jouissance, it seems impossible to establish from the text alone the authorial motivations postmodern or otherwise from which these features arise. In Vonneguts Slaughterhouse
75

Linda Hutcheon, Telling Stories: Fiction and History, in Modernism /Postmodernism, ed. Peter Brooker (London, New York: Longman, 1992) p.232 76 Ibid. p.240. My italics. 77 Ibid. p.30

33

Five, on the other hand, we see the fundamental contentions of the postmodernist made manifest. Through visionary/historiographic metafictionality the postmodern is (in a somewhat paradoxical sense) represented. Hence, for a text to be discernibly postmodern, it must, it seems, be about the postmodern, not just stem from postmodern thought. This, I believe, constitutes the crucial difference between the visionary and formalist varieties of contemporary metafiction discussed in this dissertation. In all three of the texts studied, life, reality and history are, to greater or lesser extent, purged from the work of art. What we instead see in Barth and Barthelmes fiction is the construction of new autonomies, based, as Huyssen argues, on a pristine notion of textuality, a new art for art's sake which is presumably the only kind possible after the failure of all and any commitment.78 Metafictionality, then, provides literature with a means of achieving autonomy an autonomy which appears particularly attractive to the postmodern artist, given the perceived unreality of contemporary reality.

78

Andreas Huyssen, Mapping the Postmodern, New German Critique, No.33, Modernity and Postmodernity, (Autumn, 1984), p.38

34

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Barth, John Lost in the Funhouse (1968) (London, New York: Anchor Books Edition, 1988) Barth, John The Literature of Exhaustion (1967) in Metafiction ed. Currie (London, New York: Longman, 1995) pp.51-62 Barth, John The Literature of Replenishment (1979) in The Friday Book: Essays and Other Non-Fiction (New York: G.Putnams Sons, 1984) Barthelme, Donald After Joyce, Location 1, No. 1 (Summer, 1964) pp.13-16 Barthelme, Donald Snow White (1968) (New York: Scribner, 1996) Bertens, Hans The Idea of the Postmodern: A History, (London: Routledge, 1995) Currie, Mark Metafiction ed. Currie (London, New York: Longman, 1995) Federman, Raymond Surfiction ed. Federman (Chicago: Shallow Press, 1975) Goldmann, Lucien Towards a Sociology of the Novel, trans. Alan Sheridan (London: Travistock Publications, 1975) Graff, Gerald Literature Against Itself (London, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1979) Hutcheon, Linda Narcissistic Narrative (London, New York: Methuen, 1980) Hutcheon, Linda Telling Stories: Fiction and History, in Modernism/Postmodernism ed. Peter Brooker (London, New York: Longman, 1992) pp.229-242

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Hutcheon, Linda A Poetics of Postmodernism (London, New York: Routledge, 1988) Huyssen, Andreas Mapping the Postmodern, New German Critique, No.33, Modernity and Postmodernity, (Autumn, 1984), pp.5-52 Klinkowitz, Jerome Avant-Garde and After, SubStance, Vol. 9, No. 2, Issue 27: Current Trends in American Fiction (1980) pp.125-138 Klinkowitz, Jerome The Life of Fiction (Chicago, London: Univ. Illinois Press, 1977) Leland, John Remarks Re-Marked: Barthelme, What Curios of Signs! Boundary 2, Vol. 5, No.3 (Spring, 1977) pp.795-812 Lodge, David The Novel Now (1990) in Metafcition ed. Currie (London, New York: Longman, 1995) pp.39-50 Lyotard, Jean-Franois The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press 1984) McCaffrey, Larry Meaning and Non-Meaning in Barthelmes Fictions, Journal of Aesthetic Education, Vol. 13, No.1 (Jan, 1979) pp.69-79 McHale, Brian Postmodernist Fiction (London, New York: Routledge, 1987) McHale, Brian Telling Postmodernist Stories, Poetics Today, Vol.9, No.3, Aspects of Literary Theory (1988) pp.545-571 Norris, Christopher The Contest of Faculties: Philosophy and Theory after Deconstruction (London, New York: Methuen, 1985) Strehle, Susan Actualism: Pynchons Debt to Nabakov, Contemporary Literature, Vol. 24, No.1 (Spring, 1983) pp.30-50

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Sukenick, Ronald The New Tradition in Fiction in Surfiction ed. Federman (Chicago: Shallow Press, 1975) pp.291-310 Tatham, Campbell John Barth and the Aesthetics of Artifice, Contemporary Literature, Vol. 12, No. 1 (Winter, 1971) pp.60-73 Vonnegut, Kurt Slaughterhouse Five (1968), (Vintage, 2000) Waugh, Patricia Metafiction (London, New York: Routledge, 1984) Woolley, Deborah A. Empty Text, Fecund Voice: Self-Reflexivity in Barths Lost in the Funhouse, Contemporary Literature, Vol.26, No.4 (Winter, 1985), pp.460-481

37