“You broke, eh?”
“I been shaking two nickels together for a month, trying to get them to mate.”
I said: “Anybody home, son?”
“How would I know?”
“Go ——— yourself [sic].”
“That’s how people get false teeth.”
“Whoever had done it [killed Geiger] had meant business. Dead men are heavier than broken hearts.”
“When such [Christian] believers are gifted with imagination (and what is imagination but, in part, a mysterious metaphor-making capacity), the “natural” world scarcely exists except as a supernatural manifestation; surfaces are masks through which an underlying, far more significant reality asserts itself in ways that may be startling and original and sometimes grotesque.”Joyce Carol Oates on Flannery O’Connor - from an essay on O’Conner’s “The Artificial Nigger”
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:
Every year, English teachers from across the country can submit their collections of actual analogies and metaphors found in high school essays. These excerpts are published each year to the amusement of teachers across the country.
1. Her face was a perfect oval, like a circle that had its two sides gently compressed by a Thigh Master.
2. His thoughts tumbled in his head, making and breaking alliances like underpants in a dryer without Cling Free.
3. He spoke with the wisdom that can only come from experience, like a guy who went blind because he looked at a solar eclipse without one of those boxes with a pinhole in it and now goes around the country speaking at high schools about the dangers of looking at a solar eclipse without one of those boxes with a pinhole in it.
4. She grew on him like she was a colony of E. Coli, and he was room-temperature Canadian beef.
5. She had a deep, throaty, genuine laugh, like that sound a dog makes just before it throws up.
7. He was as tall as a six-foot, three-inch tree.
8. The revelation that his marriage of 30 years had disintegrated because of his wife’s infidelity came as a rude shock, like a surcharge at a formerly surcharge-free ATM machine.
9. The little boat gently drifted across the pond exactly the way a bowling ball wouldn’t.
10. McBride fell 12 stories, hitting the pavement like a Hefty bag filled with vegetable soup.
11. From the attic came an unearthly howl. The whole scene had an eerie, surreal quality, like when you’re on vacation in another city and Jeopardy comes on at 7:00 p.m. instead of 7:30.
12. Her hair glistened in the rain like a nose hair after a sneeze.
13. The hailstones leaped from the pavement, just like maggots when you fry them in hot grease.
16. John and Mary had never met. They were like two hummingbirds who had also never met.
17. He fell for her like his heart was a mob informant, and she was the East River.
18. Even in his last years, Granddad had a mind like a steel trap, only one that had been left out so long, it had rusted shut.
20. The plan was simple, like my brother-in-law Phil. But unlike Phil, this plan just might work.
21. The young fighter had a hungry look, the kind you get from not eating for a while.
22. He was as lame as a duck. Not the metaphorical lame duck, either, but a real duck that was actually lame, maybe from stepping on a land mine or something.
23. The ballerina rose gracefully en Pointe and extended one slender leg behind her, like a dog at a fire hydrant.
(via:juliemakesupwords:peterwknox:jamiek:17thsuitcase:
audreyhepburncomplex:merricat:tilly-clark:jours)
MOM: Pass the wine, please. I want to become crazy.
DAD: O.K.
GRANDMOTHER: Did you see the politics? It made me angry.
DAD: Me, too. When it was over, I had sex.
UNCLE: I’m having sex right now.
DAD: We all are.
MOM: Let’s talk about which kid I like the best.
DAD: (laughing) You know, but you won’t tell.
MOM: If they ask me again, I might tell.
FRIEND FROM WORK: Hey, guess what! My voice is pretty loud!
DAD: (laughing) There are actual monsters in the world, but when my kids ask I pretend like there aren’t.
MOM: I’m angry! I’m angry all of a sudden!
DAD: I’m angry, too! We’re angry at each other!
MOM: Now everything is fine.
DAD: We just saw the PG-13 movie. It was so good.
MOM: There was a big sex.
FRIEND FROM WORK: I am the loudest! I am the loudest!
(Everybody laughs.)
MOM: I had a lot of wine, and now I’m crazy!
GRANDFATHER: Hey, do you guys know what God looks like?
ALL: Yes.
GRANDFATHER: Don’t tell the kids.
(via bramble: Watch Paul Graham write an essay — literally keystroke by keystroke.)
“As Susan Sontag has observed, a photograph implies “that we know about the world if we accept it as the camera records it.” But, as she further observes, all understanding begins with our not accepting the world as it appears. Language, or course, is the medium we use to challenge, dispute, and cross-examine what comes into view, what is on the surface. The words “true” and “false” come from the universe of language, and no other.”Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death. 1985.
THE FRAME is a commonplace book compiled by Marshall Hogan. Contact me at marshponds[at]gmail.com.
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