A piece on mutations in metafiction and the didacticism therei

Eve, Martin Paul

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Martin Paul Eve

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Alluvium 21st-Century Writing 21st-Century Approaches

Still Here: Post-Millennial Metafiction and Crypto-Didacticism

A piece on mutations in metafiction and the didacticism therein

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Still here: post-millennial metafiction and crypto-didacticism

University of Lincoln Institutional Repository

In 1993, David Foster Wallace published an essay piece entitled  “E Unibus Pluram” in which he outlined hisbelief  that  fiction  should  move  away  from  the  'critical  and  destructive'  postmodern  irony  that  he  saw  asdominating the field (Wallace 183). With the rise of this “New Sincerity” since the early 1990s, we should surelyexpect that the metafictive vanity and ludic mode of the the postmodern literary movement would by now beextinct. This has not been wholly the case, as I will outline in this piece. The reasons for this stasis are diverse anddifficult to trace, but by briefly surveying the post-millenial trends of  Don DeLillo,  Thomas Pynchon,  DavidFoster Wallace  and finally resting on Roberto Bolaño's  2666, it can be seen that an emerging trend of cloaked,“crypto-didactic” metafiction is one of the the new standards by which this literature measures itself.In the initial survey of the triad of American postmodernists I've picked upon, DeLillo is perhaps the easiest toassess. Although never as playful as Pynchon, Ratner's Star (1976), Running Dog (1978) and White Noise (1985)are  easy  to  place;  they  are  very  much  of  their  time  and  are  saturated  with  issues  of  (self-)representation,simulacrum and simulation in the late-capitalist phase. Likewise, DeLillo also has an easily locatable series ofhistoriographic metafictive work – those concerned with issues of history and its relation to fictional narrative.Indeed, Libra (1988), and Underworld (1997) are perhaps most exemplary of this trend, the former obsessing overthe  Kennedy  assassination,  its  cultural  significance  and  the  role  of  the  Zapruder  film –  another  mode  ofrepresentation – in the retrospective reconstruction of the event. Late 20th-century historiographic metafiction: reconstructing events like the Kennedy assassination[Image by Alex Sandifer under a CC-BY-NC-SA license] DeLillo is a fantastic candidate for appraising shifts post-2000 because his work changes at almost precisely thatpoint.  Moving  away  from  his  standard  novel  form,  with  the  exception  of  2003's  Cosmopolis,  DeLillo  haspublished three pieces that exemplify a change in style:  The Body Artist (2001),  Falling Man (2007) and PointOmega (2010). These three texts are notably more compact than DeLillo's previous work. They seem, as with thedissection of Douglas Gordon's 24 Hour Psycho in Point Omega, to zoom in, to slow down, to contemplate at apace that  resists  the ever-speeding commodity-exchange process;  a  mode of  resistance to  capitalist  time thatresonates with Pynchon's essay on Sloth (Pynchon, 1993). Interestingly, though, despite the change of pace andform, DeLillo's texts are still saturated with issues of representation: film in Point Omega and performance art inThe Body Artist and Falling Man, the latter of which has drawn sharp criticism for its juxtaposition of 9/11 withartistic  practice.  So,  despite  their  contractions and their  focus upon the unique and the specific  that  is  oftenoverlooked or consumed under an over-limited generalisation, DeLillo's novels still cannot let go of the ironictwist and self-focus.One of  the  key  factors  that  renders  DeLillo's  continued  metafictive  writing  unsurprising,  though,  lies  in  theposthumous publication of Wallace's  The Pale King (2011), a document reconstructed by Wallace's long-timeeditor, Michael Pietsch. This novel, which primarily aims to represent the mundane and the everyday in such away that can still hold the reader's attention – a problematic aesthetic – hardly shows Wallace eating his owndog-food as set out in “E Unibus Pluram”. In fact,  the novel features a character called David Wallace whocontinually asks the reader to look back at the copyright page and to believe his sincere statements on authorialveracity. If this is a turn away from metafictive practices, it is done through a double irony, for we would have toread the presence of Wallace in his own novel as an ironic depiction of an ironic situation. Unless we believe thatWallace thought that two wrongs made a right,  The Pale King is no more successful at turning away from itsliterary roots than was his pre-millennial Infinite Jest (1996), which also features many artefacts (mostly futuristicentertainment “cartridges”, particularly “Accomplice!”) that mirror the novel's own preoccupations. Adam Kelly,in his essay on Wallace and the New Sincerity, claims that Wallace's practice resembles metafiction, but actuallyforces a re-negotiation of the author-reader contract. With the publication of The Pale King, I'm not sure that thisstill holds true. The postmodern city of surfaces and simulacra: have 21st-century narratives moved beyondmetafiction?  [Image by Randy Lemoine under a CC-BY license] Similarly,  one  might  also  believe  that  Thomas  Pynchon's  2009  Inherent  Vice,  with  its  slimmed  appearance,relatively  small  ensemble  and  (gasp!)  discernible  plotline  represents  a  move  to  new  modes.  This  is  notstraightforwardly true, though. Although  Mason & Dixon (1997) presented Pynchon's most “human” novel yet,with  its  affective  protagonists  and  sentimental  conclusion,  Against  the  Day (2006)  comes  across  as  a  lessstructured version of Gravity's Rainbow (1973) and features many of the the hallmarks of his novels: a massiveensemble of characters, pre-occupations with spatial and temporal distortion, the Sanjak of Novi Pazar, a kazoo(restrainedly limited to a single mention), bizarre sexual couplings and triplings and songs. Pynchon does seem tohave softened his metafiction a degree – we are, after all, told, with a joking reference to Freud, that “sometimes aTatzelwurm is  only a Tatzelwurm” (Pynchon 2006: 655) – but  to all  intents and purposes,  Pynchon's  fictionremains similar, if not completely unaltered from his twentieth-century writing. Indeed, Inherent Vice now givesus the California trilogy taking its place alongside The Crying of Lot 49 (1966) and Vineland (1990).Of course, one could argue, as does Patricia Waugh, that to some extent, all fictions are metafictions. However, asshe acknowledges, these lie on a spectrum (Waugh 18-19). These shifts in the prevalence of metafiction in thewritings of the past masters have not, I would argue, borne out the promise of a sincere, post-post-modernistfictional practice that moves back along this spectrum. For a final consideration, let me turn to Bolaño's  2666.Bolaño was never in this clique of writers and so is a better figure through which to read the shifts in metafictivewriting. He is also from a different extra-US national setting. However, in various ways, 2666 acknowledges theheritage of American postmodernism within which it frames itself and thus it acts as a crucial keystone for anappraisal of early-twenty-first-century changes to fiction.2666 has been heralded as phenomenal.  Impossible  to  do justice  to  its  size  and scope,  by way of synopsis,Bolaño's novel interweaves five narratives concerning a set of self-obsessed literary critics, Oscar Amalfitano,Oscar Fate, Bolaño's fictional reclusive author Archimbaldi and a central section on “the crimes” across a 900page epic. These “crimes” form the dystopian, or form of utopian, centrepiece with which the novel batters itsreader: the sequential, gruelling description of the bodies of the female sexual homicides around the fictional townof Santa Teresa, a thinly veiled rendition of the ongoing, horrendous reality in Ciudad Juárez. Has Pynchon softened his metafiction in the 21st Century? Fans take part in the international"Pynchon in Public Day" [Image by Creg Thrmas for Pynchon in Public Day, a CC-BY-SA licensedproject] Interestingly,  however,  Bolaño's  novel  explicitly  encourages  comparisons  to  Thomas Pynchon,  as  one  of  itscentral  figures  is  a  much-lauded  reclusive  novelist,  amid  a  1000-odd  page  book  populated  with  interlacednarratives. Bolaño's metafiction seems to work very differently, though, to the aforementioned writers. Instead, itseems to recognise the ethical core of its work lies in a form of moralising that teaches; it rests in a form that I call“crypto-didacticism”.  This  mode relies  upon a  complex,  often-lengthy  fictional  format  with  diverse  casts  ofcharacters;  in  short,  an  encyclopaedic  narrative.  However,  a  crypto-didactic  text  is  one  that  can  be  reducedthrough interpretation to an ethical formulation. This is, therefore, the “new” mode by which works of fiction canmoralise in a way that doesn't seem to patronise a reader's intelligence in an age of relativism. In the world of2666, a world that maps the necropolis of our own reality, this is clear. Four hundred women have been tortured,raped and murdered, the police do nothing about it because the victims are working class women and, to quoteBolaño directly, “nobody noticed” (Bolaño 372). In other words, amid rampant gynophobia and misogyny: “thewomen here aren't worth shit” (Bolaño 318). Bolaño's practice is metafictive, though, through the flares it sendsup to  show its  transformative desire:  “teaching  children might  be the  best  job  in  the world,  gently openingchildren's eyes, even the tiniest bit” (Bolaño 456). Or consider another example, in the dialogue between two ofBolaño's characters:       “'That's  a  pretty  story.  […]  A  pity  I'm  too  old  and  have  seen  too  much  to  believe  it'        'It has nothing to do with belief […] it has to do with understanding, and then changing'” (Bolaño 716)If this is the new, truly ethical direction in which metafiction is moving, then perhaps it's time to break out thechampagne? I remain less convinced by this and still undecided that the New Sincerity actually ever representedany kind of break from postmodernism's project. To illustrate this point and to round off this discussion, I'll leaveyou  with  a  summary  of  Gravity's  Rainbow that  I  feel  is  fairly  accurate:  contemporary  America's  power  ispredicated upon instruments of death, developed by the Nazis, built by slave labour and exemplified by the V-2rocket. We, in Europe and America, are all complicit in building this.You can decide for yourself whether this project already sounds, in 1973, for all its metafiction and irony, asthough it has an ethical core and, beneath all its cryptic cloakings, as though it has something to teach us.

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Still here: post-millennial metafiction and crypto-didacticism

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