The Frame

Patrick Galloway’s take on Flannery O’Connor’s use of mystery:

“The Catholic mindset accepts mystery as a fact of life, that there are certain things we are simply not meant to know, certain workings of the cosmic machine that only God understands. O’Connor utilizes this as a plot option, this mysterious, unexpected turn. She is not satisfied with the limitations of purely realistic prose, being rather of the opinion that her kind of fiction ‘will always be pushing its own limits outward toward the limits of mystery.’”

This sounds right to me—and it takes a little pressure off of me as I reader her Complete Stories. Writing about O’Connor is a little intimidating because so much has been written about her, and I have never read her before. I am reading her without a clue as to how I am ‘supposed’ to read her, if there is such a thing.

At first, I found her style a little jarring. I found myself unprepared to handle her sudden plot twists and unresolved endings. As I continue to read, I appreciate the mystery at the heart of her stories. She respects the limits of fiction and does not ‘tell’ her readers how to read her stories.

In a weird way, when reading O’Connor’s stories, I feel like my ability to read is under examination, judged in the same way that God will judge her characters. My struggle to follow her narratives reflect the struggle of her characters to know the will of God. At the heart of her narratives is a mystery that I am shut out of, just because.

More and more, I am finding this mystery one of the most compelling things about her stories.

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: