Jackpot! Over a dozen analytical essays on The Wire in the latest issue of Darkmatter.
(via: The Millions Blog)
Scott Esposito at the Quarterly Conversation recaps Cormac McCarthy’s career, focusing particularly on how McCarthy has “prob[ed] the fence-posts lining the borders of free will and develop[ed] his own distinctly postmodern view of identity, plot, and country.” The review is enlightening—especially the part on The Road because I have been able to find very little criticism on it.
Here’s a highlight:
Such profound and sincere engagement with his writing bespeaks an author who has very much struck a nerve with all kinds of readers. I think this can be traced to his lifelong obsession with the search for identity: no one thing has been as consistent in McCarthy’s work over his forty-year career as his insistence that we are only offered certain moments to really influence our identity, though we may not know them when we see them and we may be illusioned as to what the choices represent. Furthermore, his most financially successful books and his avowed masterpiece have powerfully stated this idea while also arguing for a distinctly revisionist idea of American identity. Yet what is noteworthy about the latter is that McCarthy has not revised using the typical subversive agents of literature; rather, he has made his revisionists cowboys, the very representatives of the rugged West that first gave birth to the myths McCarthy subverts.
A nice feature of this essay is that it traces this thesis through McCarthy’s ten novels, making a mini-argument for each one. In his section about Blood Meridian, Esposito points to the judge’s “typically convoluted” view on free will that informs the philosophy of many of McCarthy’s other novels:
This is my claim, he said. And yet everywhere upon it are pockets of autonomous life. Autonomous. In order for it to be mine nothing must be permitted to occur upon it save by my dispensation… .
The man who believes that the secrets of this world are forever hidden lives in mystery and fear. Superstition will drag him down. The rain will erode the deeds of his life. But that man who sets himself the task of singling out the thread of order from the tapestry will by the decision alone have taken charge of the world and it is only by such taking charge that he will effect a way to dictate the terms of his own fate.
Esposito explains the paradox of the judge’s logic:
Essentially, the judge argues that knowledge and willful action are only possible once all the facts of a life are known, but the problem is that the only way to make these facts known is to live a life. Thus, as the judge says, life is an already-woven “tapestry”; merely tracing one thread through it, a person will have “taken charge” of his life. But again, the paradox: this is only possible once the tapestry is woven, once a life has been lived and all choices are already made…
Is there a point in which a person can preview the tapestry whole-formed, and thus be in a position to truly choose his course in the world? Or must we always be in the dark as to what form our life will take when all is said and done, and therefore not truly be in a position to make choices that will define our future?
George Fragopoulos reviews Salvador Plascencia’s The People of Paper, and works in ten ‘theses’ of metafiction:
I. Metafiction is the twice-told lie. Much of the novel’s aesthetic power rests in its paradoxical nature. The novel posits itself as a vibrant fiction driven by a convincing verisimilitude; it is in blurring the line between reality and fiction that the novel really takes form. Metafiction is simply the logical extension of the novel’s initial goal: a fiction that would be so convincing it would fool us into accepting it as reality.
II. We fall in love with the fictional construct of the lie before we claim that fictional construct as a truth. This is a fundamental aspect of all metaficiton. Malraux: “An old story goes that Cimabue was struck with admiration when he saw the shepherd boy, Giotto, sketching sheep. But, according to the true biographies, it is never the sheep that inspire a Giotto with the love of painting: but, rather, his first sight of the paintings of such a man as Cimabue.” Metaphysicians, whether they were the guise of artist or theologian, always attach more importance to those things they know to be false than the world those fictions represent.
III. We are never betrayed by reality. We are only betrayed by the lies that we have constructed around that reality. This is another of metafiction’s truths.
IV. Metafiction treats language as the utmost sacred object, but such notions rest on the paradox that there is nothing truly sacred left but fiction. Fiction is the last sacred language act we have. Metafiction seeks to construct sacred books for an age that neither wants nor needs such texts.
V. Metafiction is what Nietzsche may very well have been writing about when he stated that he feared that we still believe in God because we have grammar. God is dead, but only in a sense. We might say, God is no longer the communal gossip whispered from ear to ear in social circles. God is now idle chatter, the nonsense we hear in those most private of moments when we are confronted by something like the Self or the World. For our post-Christian, metafictional world, god has become language, or, better yet, a private syntax rather than a communal grammar. It is still that which structures the world, but on a private scale, atomized.
VI. Joan Didion stated that we tell ourselves stories in order to live. Metaficion posits a slight addendum to such a statement. We tell ourselves lies in order to live. The difference is subtle, but a necessary one, I think. We capture the fiction behind the lie, we may, at first, even be aggravated by such a fact, but we still belong to it, and are grateful it is there.
VII. Metafiction does not posit an arrogant form of human exceptionalism. The Word is flesh not because it has fallen from the heavens but rather because it exists in us. Language possesses a materiality and corporeality not frequently considered.
VIII. Toni Morrison: “We die. That may be the meaning of life. But we do language. That may be the measure of our lives.” These are the only two human realities we truly know, death and life, and when faced with the abyss of either path we only have language.
IX. We are living in a historical moment lifted straight out of a Borges’s essay: “Why does it disturb us that Don Quixote be a reader of the Quixote and Hamlet a spectator of ‘Hamlet’? I believe I have found the reason: these inversions suggest that if the characters of fictional work can be readers or spectators, we, its readers or spectators, can be fictitious.” I would like to amend this a little. Metafiction acts from a center of certainty regarding our own uncertainty as real constructs. We readers and spectators are fictitious, not simply open to such a possibility. Of such notions, there is little doubt of metafiction’s certainty.
X. There is no anxiety in metafiction regarding the fictitious nature of it all. To learn one is a fiction is a liberating truth, perhaps the final one. All the anxiety that exists in metafiction revolves around the construction of a narrative, and what that narrative will contain. A metafiction never ends with the last sentence, but continues long after as the static of our lives. It is all there, simply listen:
THE FRAME is a commonplace book compiled by Marshall Hogan. Contact me at marshponds[at]gmail.com.
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