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Fiction About Fiction
SO WHO’S THE FIRST postmodern genius? You’re thinking Beckett, maybe, or Alain Robbe-Grillet?
Think what you want, but I’m going with Chuck Jones. Yup. That one. Animator extraordinaire for the
Brothers Warner. In one famous episode, “Duck Amuck,” Daffy Duck undergoes a series of baffling and
ridiculous transformations, acquiring a tutu, a head like a flower, the body of a lion, and so on. At the end,
we’re amused but hardly surprised to learn that the impish wielder of the cartoonist’s pencil is, indeed, Bugs
Bunny. Warner Bros. took this self-reflexivity even further in the television series Animaniacs, which plays
like an extended dialogue with the history of cartooning. In fact, cartoons seem uniquely well suited to this
whole self-referential thing, whether made for television (The Simpsons, Family Guy, South Park) or feature
films (Who Framed Roger Rabbit?). But even live-action shows get in on the game. The television series
Moonlighting (admittedly not representative of anything in Hollywood) ended one season in midchase to
collect the costumes and props because the season had ended before the episode had. Somehow, though,
when serious writers do it, some readers may suspect they’ve been cheated. Yet cheated is the last thing we
are; rather than closing down possibilities, the strategies we’ve come to know and love as metafiction opens
them up.
It’s just that readers, and student readers especially, get a little impatient with
funny business in their reading.
How impatient? Read on.
Sometimes we speak of a novel soaring, of narrative flights. Sounds nice,
doesn’t it? Impressive. One envisions the passion of Morrison, the wit of
Wodehouse, the scope and scale of Tolkien, the invention of García Márquez. No
question about it, there are some wonderful novels in the world. Some of them
seem to have wings. But that’s not what I mean. I’ll give you a soaring book:
The French Lieutenant’s Woman.
The most thrown book in American colleges.
I know when, and when will get you why. What, you want the exact
paragraph? We have two options, so take your pick. Sometimes it flies in
Chapter 13, when the narrator, having just asked at the end of Chapter 12 who
Sarah is and “Out of what shadows does she come,” answers with this little gem:
“I do not know.” Not the answer we typically expect. Here’s the rule: when a
narrator asks a question, he is obliged to answer. Fowles’s narrator does answer,
only not to our satisfaction. But wait, it gets worse. Not satisfied confessing
ignorance, he actively breaks the illusion he has maintained for a dozen chapters:
This story I am telling is all imagination. These characters I create
never existed outside my own mind. If I have pretended until now to
know my characters’minds and innermost thoughts, it is because I am
writing in (just as I have assumed some of the vocabulary and “voice”
of) a convention universally accepted at the time of my story: that the
novelist stands next to God. He may not know all, yet he tries to pretend
that he does. But I live in the age of Alain Robbe-Grillet and Roland
Barthes; if this is a novel, it cannot be a novel in the modern sense of the
word.
At which point, wham! Against the wall, shaking the Sports Illustrated
swimsuit calendar and rattling the South Padre Island souvenir beer mug nearly
off the shelf.
The second place is perhaps less definite, but here’s where it begins: “No. It
is as I say. You have not only planted the dagger in my breast, you have
delighted in twisting it.” Nothing in there, in itself, to create flying paperbacks.
Except that we’ve read it before. Exactly. And quite recently. This particular
passage comes early in a final chapter, which had, a moment before, seemed
superfluous. Chapter 60 ends with the finality of a novel’s ending, complete with
a small child, a forever-after embrace, and (I’m not making this up) a thousand
violins. So who needs another chapter? Well, Fowles does, for one. Chapter 61
offers us a different ending—no evermore, no string section. He uses the device
of an author-surrogate setting his watch back fifteen minutes as the pretext for
creating an alternative ending, one considerably less happy, if perhaps more in
tune with modern sensibilities. And when some students find out that THE
conclusion is merely A conclusion, and there is also a B, then Air Fowles flies
again. To be sure, some readers see the extra chapter—and the extra alternative
—as a gift.
There’s something maddening, at least for those reading under a deadline,
about the revelation that novels are illusions. At some level we know, don’t we?
Novels are made-up things? But they’re more than that. Novels are in a sense
learned activities—learned by cultures and learned by individual readers and
writers. A novel is, as Fowles suggests, a compilation of conventions, a series of
if-then propositions: if the main character is a child at the beginning, then the
goal of the novel is to deposit him at some state of adulthood by the end; if the
narrator is limited to only knowing one character’s mind in Chapters 1 through
5, she can’t suddenly pretend to know everyone’s mind when the crunch comes
in Chapter 23. Or this: if a narrator pretends to omniscience throughout the first
twelve chapters and then poses a major question about a character, he damned
well better have an answer when we turn the page. None of this suddenly
becoming helpless as a babe; there is no off position on the omniscient switch.