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

BY THOMAS HEGINBOTHAM

(Robert Rauschenberg - Canyon, 1959)

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The Art of Artifice: Barth, Barthelme

and the Metafictional Tradition. BY

THOMAS HEGINBOTHAM

WORD COUNT: 9,427

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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 Barth’s Lost in the Funhouse (1968)

ii. Donald Barthelme’s Snow White (1968)

iii. Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five (1969)

Conclusion Bibliography

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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 Hutcheon’s notion of ‘historiogaphic metafiction’ and Gerald Graff’s

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

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

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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 metafiction’s 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: “Chaucer’s elaborate framings of The Cantebury

Tales; Shakespeare’s 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 Sterne’s 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 Patricia Waugh, Metafiction (London, New York: Routledge, 1984) p.5 3 Mark Currie, ‘Introduction’, Metafiction, ed. Currie (London, New York: Longman, 1995) p.5 4 Ibid.

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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 self-

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

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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 novel’s 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

9 Ibid. 10 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)

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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 post-

structural 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

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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 re-

ordering 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

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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

language’s 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-François 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

metanarratives”20 – 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-François 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 fiction’s 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 de-

realizing itself…In a paradoxical and fugitive way, mimetic theory remains alive.

Literature holds the mirror up to unreality…its conventions of reflexivity and anti-

realism 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 Patricia Waugh, Metafiction (London, New York: Routledge, 1984) p.44 24 Gerald Graff, Literature Against Itself (London, New York: Routledge, 1988) pp.179-180

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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, Hutcheon’s 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 Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, Robert Coover’s The

Public Burning and E.L. Doctorow’s Ragtime, as well as Kurt Vonnegut’s

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 Waugh’s claim that while

metafiction explicitly lays bare the conventions of realism, it does not ignore or

25 Ibid. pp.14-15 26 Linda Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism (London, New York: Routledge, 1988) pp.109-110 27 Susan Strehle, ‘Actualism: Pynchon’s 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 ‘naïve’ 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 Patricia Waugh, Metafiction (London, New York: Routledge, 1984) p.18 29 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,

moral…value…but on the basis of what it is and what it does as an autonomous art

form in its own right.35

32 Linda Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism (London, New York: Routledge, 1988) p.40 33 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 Barthelme’s 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 self-

consciousness, 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 Federman’s

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 Barthelme’s Fictions’, Journal of Aesthetic Education, Vol. 13, No.1, (Jan, 1979), p.74 39 Ibid. p.75

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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 Donald Barthelme, ‘After Joyce,’ Location 1, no.1 (Summer 1964), p.14 41 Larry McCaffrey, ‘Meaning and Non-Meaning in Barthelme’s 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 Goldmann’s reading of Allain Robbe-

Grillet’s 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 Graff’s

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 it”47; 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 Hutcheon’s 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 Barth’s Lost in the Funhouse (1968)

Of my selected readings, John Barth’s 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 Author’s 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

fiction’s 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 collection’s title piece, “Lost in the Funhouse,” Barth repeatedly

directs the reader’s attention to the conventions of traditional realism. For

instance, verisimilitude or fiction’s connection to the real world is theorized:

“Initials, blanks, or both were often substituted for proper names in nineteenth-

century to enhance the illusion of reality” (LF, p.73); “Is there really such a

person as Ambrose, or is he a figment of the author’s imagination?” (LF, p.88).

We see, too, traditional narrative form discussed: “The action of conventional

dramatic narrative may be represented by a diagram called Freitag’s 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 Author’s Notes,” Lost in the Funhouse, (Anchor Books Edition, 1988) p.203 – Further references within text LF.

21

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 artist’s

mode or form into a metaphor for his concerns…not 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

that’s not supposed to be used” (LF, p.83); Barth’s fiction foregrounds that

which, conventionally, remains implicit. As with many instances of metafiction, it

is the ‘process’ (the story-telling) which forms Barth’s 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 he’d really felt…was an odd sense of detatchment…he 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 he’d meet a beautiful girl in

the funhouse; they’d have hairs-breadth escapes from real dangers; he’d 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

text’s self-consciousness) prevents his being ‘real’.

In “Life-Story,” also contained within the collection, we encounter a writer-

character 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

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“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-character’s 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, Barth’s 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

doesn’t prefer art that at least overtly imitates something or other than its own

process? That doesn’t continually proclaim ‘Don’t forget that I am artifice?’” (LF,

p.117). The answer, it seems, is John Barth. But the crucial difference between

the writer-character’s story and Barth’s “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. Barth’s 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

doesn’t matter how naively linear the anecdote is; never mind modernity!” (LF,

119). For Barth, while such a naïve 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 Barth’s “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

23

to…turn ultimacy against itself to make something new and valid, the essence

whereof would be the impossibility of making something new” (LF, p.109).

While Barth’s 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 postmodern’s

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 self-

reflection – 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 literature’s

continuation, in the wake of modernism’s 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.

Barth’s answer, as we have seen, is to make the artifice part of the point,

“to acknowledge what I’m doing while I’m 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.Putnam’s Sons, 1984) p.206

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It might be conceivable to rediscover validly the artifices of language and literature –

such far out notions as grammar, punctuation…even characterization! Even plot! – if

one goes about it the right way, aware of what one’s predecessors have been up

to.55

For Barth, as I suggested above, a naïve 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

don’t 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 Eco’s 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 Non-Fiction, (New York: G.Putnam’s 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

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Donald Barthelme’s 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

Barthelme’s 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 novel’s 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 Linda Hutcheon, Narcissistic Narrative, (London, New York: Methuen, 1980) p.53 59 Ibid. p.71 60 Ibid. p.30 61Ronald Sukenick, ‘The new Tradition’ in Surfiction ed. Federman (Chicago: Shallow Press, 1975) p.40

26

sequences of sentences – that appear in the centre of otherwise blank pages.

For example, the novel ends with:

THE FAILURE OF SNOW WHITE’S 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 novel’s 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 custody of the blow scale

model I concede that it is to a degree instruments adequate 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

27

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 fell…fragments 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 dwarf’s words echo closely those of Ronald Sukenick, calling for the novel’s

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

28

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. I’m sure it means something,” to which Jane again

replies, “Don’t 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. Barthelme’s clever use of pun on the word ‘content’

reminds us that much of the novel’s thematic ‘content’ focuses on the act of

reading itself, which, in Barthelme’s understanding, is more one of creating

meaning than it is of finding preexistent meaning.

The clearest example of Barthelme’s thematization of the reader’s 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 reader’s 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

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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 novelist’s. 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 Barthelme’s work. 66 Linda Hutcheon, Narcissistic Narrative (London, New York: Methuen, 1980) p.27 67 Andreas Huyssen, ‘Mapping the Postmodern’, New German Critique, No.33, Modernity and Postmodernity, (Autumn, 1984), p.39 68 Ibid p.42

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Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five (1969)

Listing Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five, along side Rushdie’s Midnight’s

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 novel’s 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 novel’s 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 Patricia Waugh, Metafiction, (London, New York: Routledge, 1984) p.48-49 70 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.

31

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 time…It 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 absurd…if

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.

We…read them all at once, not one after the other. There isn’t 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 can’t help but hear echoes of Raymond Federman’s ‘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

32

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 Barthelme’s 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 Barth’s Lost in the Funhouse and Barthelme’s

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

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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 “de-

naturalising 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 Barth’s Lost in the Funhouse and Barthelme’s

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 Vonnegut’s 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

34

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 Barthelme’s

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

35

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