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Small wonder, then, that when we come to the “first” novels, they’re already
highly self-aware, reflexive. One might almost say postmodern. If one wanted to
get hit. One doesn’t. The point is, we tend to think of self-referential writing as
something that comes along late in the day, but in the case of the novel, that
would be an error. The first metafictional novel? Don Quixote (1605). Also, as it
happens, pretty much the first novel. In English, metafiction makes an
appearance at least as early as Tristram Shandy (1759–1769). Both works are
shot through with jokey, irreverent textual play—puns, reversals of expectation,
print-based gambits like full blank pages, anything that Cervantes or Sterne
could think of to do with this new form that they obviously weren’t taking too
seriously. And the ink was barely dry on Samuel Richardson’s Pamela before
Henry Fielding—he of Tom Jones—offered up his parody, Shamela. In some
ways, the early days of the novel were like the Wild West: very few rules and a
lot of outrageous activity. Part of that was not having any model of how the
novelist must behave toward his novel. There’s no reverence toward tradition
before there is a tradition. Those early novelists could do anything, and they did.
Only later did novelistic conduct get codified. I’ve talked elsewhere about
the specifics of Victorian publishing practices. What we’re interested in here is
the way those practices—serial publication, mass audiences, linear narratives,
sprawling canvases—tell us about the narratives themselves. Chiefly, they
suggest a regularization of the novel: more and more, novels resembled each
other in structure, and for reasons philosophical as well as commercial, tended to
be less experimental than in other eras. The later Victorians pursued realism, by
which we mean not merely accuracy in portraying the world but a systematic
effort to create the illusion of reality, with a zeal that was near-religious. Or
maybe not merely “near.” The idea was for readers to snuggle right into a novel
as if into the story of their friends’ lives (and readers often did think of these
characters, with whom they lived for many months, as bosom friends or mortal
enemies). In any case, if your worldview, economic principles, and publishing
practices conspire to make the realistic novel the highest form imaginable,
you’re probably not going to spend a lot of time calling attention to the artifice
of the form. This is not a failing. As a reader, would you want to be reminded,
with Tess D’Urberville lying on a slab at Stonehenge waiting to be taken by the
police, that we’re just playing with form here? I think not.
Does that mean that Hardy doesn’t notice that he’s sitting for months,
building up five hundred or so manuscript pages, that he’s making an artistic
creation? Of course not. But it does mean that he chooses not to emphasize the
made-ness of the book. That emphasis is called “foregrounding” in the criticism
trade, meaning that an aspect of the work is moved to the front in order to call
special attention to it. Literary realists, for the most part, tend to foreground story
and relegate the messy business of artistic self-awareness to the background.
Very deep background.
There’s a tendency to see all this metafiction business as “postmodernism”
(a term so amorphous as to be almost entirely bankrupt), as merely a function of
a certain historical moment when, presumably, writers had run out of ideas. And
in truth, there did seem to be some danger of that. Right around the time of
Gass’s book there was a lot of death-of-the-novel talk going round. In 1967,
John Barth published his celebrated Atlantic Monthly essay, “The Literature of
Exhaustion,” in which he argued that the novel had exhausted its possibilities,
that perhaps everything that could be done with the form had been done. Yet a
mere fourteen years later, he published a companion essay, “The Literature of
Replenishment,” announcing a miraculous recovery by the patient, whose
narrative pneumonia had turned out to be a mere case of the sniffles. What a
relief!
Yet that tendency of fiction to examine its own bases and practices, to doubt
its veracity even as it insists on it, has been there from the first and sometimes
shows up in very realistic novels. You remember the soaring Fowles? Chapter
13, right? Well, he wasn’t the first. There’s another novel, also Victorian in form,
where right in the middle of the narrative the author pauses, in a chapter called
“In Which the Story Pauses a Little,” to lay out her theory of novel writing and
to talk about the limitations on what she, as novelist, can know. Hers is Chapter
17, not Fowles’s “unlucky” 13. So who is this innovator? Angela Carter? Jane
Smiley? Nope. She’s that great postmodernist, George Eliot, in Adam Bede
(1859). Now if Eliot, the realist of realists, displays this self-referential element,
even a little, it has to be a strong impulse. Well, of course it is. And why?
Because novels don’t grow in gardens. They are made things, and their
makers get their know-how by reading lots and lots of other novels. And you
can’t read all of those novels, pick up the old quill, and suddenly forget that
you’ve ever read a novel. So here it is (you knew it was coming), the Law of
Crowded Desks: When a novelist sits down to begin a novel, there are a
thousand other writers in the room. Minimum. There are even writers present
whom she’s never read. But that way madness lies, or at least a serious
headache.
So what does that mean? Yeah, yeah, one room, lots of buddies. But in
practical terms, what does it mean for the writer? It means that nobody’s
innocent. You simply can’t sit down to write a novel as if the world isn’t already
full of novels. It is already full of novels, and so is your head. That’s just how it
is. One response I hear in class to any self-conscious novel is that it’s a stunt, an
artificial posturing. My students are right. It is a stunt. Well, guess what? So is
the novel that ignores all those other writers in the room. To pretend innocence
or lack of self-awareness is exactly that: pretense.