Paradoxa is devoted to the study of outsider genres, paraliteratures, forms overlooked by the critical mainstream. This issue takes up one-or maybe it's two-such genres. Metafiction is fiction that doubles as critique. There is no standard name for a form of critique that doubles as fiction, but Helen Flavell, in this volume, offers a term already in use in Australia: fictocriticism. In these two-or is it one?-forms, the line between artist and critic is blurred. "The study of" becomes indistinguishable from "the thing studied." Such violations of boundaries tend to make people very nervous.
Unsettling people can be a worthy goal in itself. Our assumptions need to be shaken up occasionally or they start to fossilize. But it would be nice if the shaking led to some new understanding, rather than letting everything settle back into the same patterns we began with. By paying attention to the ways fiction and criticism intersect, overlap, and transform into one another, we can gain new insight into the way literary texts operate.
Every story is really three stories. There is the story that is actually being told, a series of events that compose the histoire. Then there is the story of the telling: in a different time and place, someone is recounting or writing or maybe just recalling the events of the main story. The story of the storytelling, or discours, can merely be implied or it can be fleshed out into a frame story of its own: Scheherezade telling the Arabian Nights' tales, Marlowe recalling his trip into the heart of darkness.
These two scenes have been well and thoroughly analyzed by literary scholars under such paired headings as story and discourse, narrative and narration, fabula and syuzhet, or diegesis and (because texts, unlike actors on a stage, can only mimic texts) mimesis. Paired categories are orderly, manageable. Third elements are disturbing and destabilizing. Perhaps that is why the third scene, though equally necessary, has received much less attention. It is the scene of someone reading.
There are, of course, a number of very interesting studies of the reception of literary texts. Reader-response theory, growing out of phenomenological psychology and philosophy, focuses on the emotional and cognitive equipment a reader must employ in making sense out of a text. The field of hermeneutics concerns the ways we make and validate interpretive choices. Psychoanalytic studies of literature investigate the way messages can fly beneath the radar of conscious thought. Some feminists have demonstrated the degree to which the greatness of a particular work depends on the circumstances of the reader, while others have pointed out the need to resist becoming the reader implied by, or constructed by, many texts. But none of these approaches has very much to say about the way the process of reading can generate yet another level of story.
Perhaps that's because the story of reading is not usually very well told. The usual genre in which that story is recounted is the critical essay. Most critical essays are, to put it kindly, pedestrian. Peter Barry suggests that the bland homogeneity of most critical writing is a matter of self-protection: having just stumbled through misunderstandings, accidental discoveries, and radical revisions of one's own ideas, one is likely to feel "that utter frankness on these matters would probably not enhance a critical or professional reputation" (250). Drab is protective coloration. Even so, there have been occasional attempts to liven up critical writing. Scholars undertaking a fourth or fifth book often grow restive within the confines of conventional discourse. They feel like stretching their writerly wings and attempting to create something less functional and more ornamental. Why, they begin to wonder, should critical writing efface itself, disappearing in a little puff of smoke after delivering its message like the tapes at the beginning of an episode of Mission Impossible?
And so some writers within the academy, especially those influenced by the more flamboyant French philosopher/critics have experimented with stylistic tricks, poetic devices, personal interpolations, unconventional structures, and nonlinear arguments. A fair sampling of such experiments appears in a volume called A Poetics of Criticism. Of those, a few result in new insights, but far too many simply illustrate that unusual writing can be dull too: Barthes and Derrida and Cixous turn out to be hard acts to follow. Their innovations mutate easily into verbal tics.
Yet the case for reforming the critical article need not depend on a leap into the Postmodern. More traditionally minded scholars, like G. Douglas Atkins, have urged a return to conceiving the critical piece as a form of personal essay, hearkening back to the tradition of Montaigne and E. B. White. Since any writing, critical or otherwise, that attains half the grace and wit of E. B. White is going to be worth reading, this path seems less likely to lead to mere peculiarity than the more experimental model. But it may not lead to critical insights, either; personal essays often substitute geniality for rigor and self-absorption for penetration.
So, aside from calling for just plain better writing from the academy, whether traditional or innovative, is there any way to rethink criticism in generic terms that will result in a more readable and more insightful form? I think there is, based partly on my experience in editing this special issue and partly on the kind of critical writing that I have seen coming from outside the academic world.
It's often claimed, especially in the pages of those literary reviews that have "New York" somewhere in their titles (the worthy exception being The New York Review of Science Fiction), that the non-professorial critic is an extinct species. What has happened to the literate reader from outside the university, or at least outside the English department? Where are the C. P. Snows of yesteryear?
Such readers are not gone, but they can be found only by looking beyond the borders of both New York City and the elite genres. There is a flourishing school of non-university-based critics who double as writers of fantasy and science fiction. The Pilgrim Award, an annual award given by the Science Fiction Research Association for contributions to the understanding of that genre, has often gone to such writers: its recipients include Jack Williamson, Damon Knight, James Gunn, Brian Aldiss, Ursula K. Le Guin, L. Sprague de Camp, Joanna Russ, Samuel R. Delany, and, represented in this issue, John Clute. The ideas of these writers dominate the critical discourse within the community of SF scholars. It is hard to think of any academic critic whose influence compares with theirs except perhaps Darko Suvin and Gary K. Wolfe.
When Russ and Aldiss and Le Guin and Delany write criticism, they draw upon the same resources that make their fiction memorable: engaging personae, carefully crafted sentences, memorable images, humor, pathos, and, above all, narrative movement. They tell stories. In Billion Year Spree, Aldiss convincingly transforms the history of science fiction into a Gothic tale whose heroine is Mary Shelley. In Russ's How to Suppress Women's Writing, she recounts story after story of women whose achievements are denied or obscured by critical maneuvers like "She wrote it but 'she' isn't really an artist and 'it' isn't really serious, of the right genre-i.e., really art" (76). Many of Le Guin's most useful insights come in the form of parables like "The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction" or the story (in "The Woman Without Answers") of Little Bear Woman and the Narratologists. Samuel R. Delany has written a series of "Informal Remarks toward The Modular Calculus," some of which look like scholarly essays and some like exotic tales but all of which advance his ideas on the meaning of fiction (and the fiction of meaning).
Anyone who talks to groups, whether delivering lectures or sermons or the Case for the Defense, knows that audiences respond powerfully to narrative. No matter how sleepy they may have grown by the time the minister gets, as Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote, to "fifthly," they will perk right up at the first sound of a personal anecdote. Heads lift, eyelids reopen, seats creak as people lean forward to hear what happened when the man fell among thieves or when T. W. Higginson first met Emily Dickinson. But the role of storytelling in informative or persuasive writing such as the critical essay is not just a rhetorical trick. Narrative is, according to Louis Mink, a way of knowing. Certain patterns of experience do not lend themselves to arrangement in logical categories or generalizations; they can only be comprehended as parts of a story:
Thus a letter I burn may be understood not only as an oxidizable substance but as a link with an old friend. It may have relieved a misunderstanding, raised a question, or changed my plans at a crucial moment. As a letter, it belongs to a kind of story, a narrative of events which would be unintelligible without reference to it. But to explain this, I would not construct a theory of lettters or of friendships but would, rather, show how it belongs to a particular configuration of events like a part to a jigsaw puzzle. It is in this configurational mode that we see together the complex of imagery in a poem, or the combination of motives, pressures, promises, and principles which explain a senator's vote, or the pattern of words, gestures, and actions which constitute our understanding of the personality of a friend. (Historical Understanding 53)Mink's examples include historical, psychological, and literary configurations. In each case, we reach an understanding of the whole by constructing a narrative about it: the pattern is the story we tell ourselves and is not reducible to some more schematic arrangement (Mink 59-60).
The experience of someone reading a poem or a novel is a configuration of exactly this sort: it takes place over time, involves negotiations with earlier readers and previously read texts, includes sudden shifts and dramatic transfor-mations, and centers on the relationships between the reader and various other characters such as the authorial presence perceived in the text. How better to represent this complicated whole than by telling a story about it?
But telling a story well involves stepping into the realm of fiction. Jane Tompkins tells about the trouble she had when she tried to move from an impersonal to a personal critical style. "I find that when I try to write in my 'other' voice, I am immediately critical of it. It wobbles, vacillates back and forth, is neither this nor that" (Tompkins 175). Part of the difficulty is lack of practice-like most academics, Tompkins has spent years suppressing personal markers in her own writing, so that when she tries to revive that "other" self, she feels both vulnerable and inept. Another source of the difficulty is that creating a personal voice involves fictionalizing. To tell the truth about one's emotional responses, it seems to be necessary to acquire some of the techniques of the fiction writer: constructing convincing scenes, filling in unremembered connections with plausible inventions, and creating a character who can stand in for oneself on the page. As Cathy N. Davidson points out, "the I in personal writing is a highly stylized presence, a character as fleshy as a character in a work of fiction. The personal is strategic and synecdochic, both individualized and, if it works, generalizable" (1070-71).
And so, in order to tell the third story I named above, the critic must leave the bunker and venture out into the no-man's land between academic and creative writing. Yet if we are to believe reports issued from the zone, the writer must carry along a full muster of scholarly armament. Facts must be checked, previous scholarship consulted, theoretical frameworks acknowledged, personal responses interrogated even as they are being drawn upon. None of this is easy even in a conventional piece of writing. Meeting these demands in a text that doubles as fiction poses such formidable challenges that no writer would ever take the task on if it did not also offer the chance for some unique fun.
In my call for contributions for this issue, I suggested that we would consider not only scholarly examinations of metafiction but actual commissions of the act itself. I mentioned, as a model, Scott McCloud's journey through the history and aesthetics of the comic book, Understanding Comics, which is itself a dazzling instance of comic art. We didn't receive any comic books, or even any studies of graphic novels or other partly nonverbal narrative forms, but we did get a variety of submissions dealing with and incorporating a wide range of metafictional and fictocritical techniques. Furthermore, these submissions embodied exactly the sense of fun and adventure that McCloud's work exemplifies and that I hoped to demonstrate further.
The entries that survived our editorial process came from fiction writers and academics (and a few who are both). They focus mostly on relatively recent work, despite my hints in the call for papers about Tristram Shandy and Virginia Woolf. They do vary in subject matter from philosophy to best-sellers, and in their approaches-well, the range can only be appreciated by reading the selections.
The first entry is a brief story co-authored by acclaimed novelists Ellen Kushner and Delia Sherman in which two characters who rather resemble the authors are gradually transformed by their act of imaginative collaboration into two very different sorts of people. The story offers critical insights into the process of creating fiction as well as the ways people use fictions to invent themselves. One of the two writers of this piece, by the way, is an escaped academic herself, but since she seems to be successfully living down her Ph.D. in English, I will not unmask her here.
Helen Flavell, in the second entry, examines the role of fictocriticism in a set of postmodern narratives. She sees the crossing of generic borders not only as a formal experiment but also as a way of criticizing the institutions of literature and the academy. Following her discussion of the form, she offers an example of the way it might work to interrogate the workings of a novel like Wuthering Heights-the reader's feeling for the book depends a lot on what kind of Heathcliff she has met or made.
Bryan Vescio explores one of the major figures used to justify metafiction and fictocriticism: Jacques Derrida. According to Vescio, Derrida's influential critical practice represents an attempt to reconcile paradoxical impulses: to wrestle texts into patterns of meaning and yet refrain from committing interpretive violence upon them. In working through this paradox, Derrida ends up foregrounding his own role as interpreter and thus providing us with one of the most acute examinations of the narrative of reading.
John Clute has written novels, scholarly reference works, and some of the most soaring, savage, and insightful criticism ever to be directed toward the field of science fiction. Here he considers the role of the book reviewer and the nature of critical writing, which he conceives of-how else?-as a choice of stories that the critic can tell.
Rosaleen Love's study of therolinguistics is an act of homage to an earlier metafiction: Ursula K. Le Guin's "The Author of the Acacia Seeds." Le Guin's story affectionately mocked scientific discourse while offering a wild glimpse into the possibilities of communication with nonhuman forms of life. Love borrows Le Guin's premise to create a worthy (and hilarious) companion piece, managing at the same time to critique the original story, the conventions of nature writing, and poststructuralist literary theory.
The next two entries form a natural pairing: one a careful and more or less straightforward investigation of the metafictional elements in Stephen King's Misery; the other a dive into metafictionality in order both to understand and to overturn the implied judgments in King's novel. In these two selections, Michael Arnzen and Sylvia Kelso exchange accustomed roles. Arnzen, author of an award-winning novel, takes the scholarly path, while Kelso, who has mostly published more conventional critical texts, speaks through the character created by King. Their two selections reach similar conclusions via very different paths.
Steve Lehman offers a new perspective on Arthur C. Clarke's fiction: a view from underwater. Blending the forms of personal essay and critical article, Lehman shows how his reinterpretation of Clarke's work grew out of reenacting Clarke's adventures as an avid scuba diver. The experience of the reader transforms the texts, resulting in a convincing explanation of the difference between early and late Clarke.
Eleanor Arnason wrote one of the classic science fictional metafictions: the story "The Warlord of Saturn's Moons," in which the melodramatic adventures of a formulaic hero alternate with scenes from the life of his less adventurous creator. Here she takes a different approach to metafiction. In this selection, which will eventually be part of a collection of linked stories, she introduces us to the fictional techniques of an alien race, the hwarhath (who first appeared in her novel Ring of Swords), and offers one instance of their storytelling. Her scholarly introducer-narrator suggests that hwarhath fiction, a popular but critically deplored form in their society, offers a valuable perspective on hwarhath culture and, from that vantage point, a look back toward our own. Likewise, the statements made by that introducer all perform doubly: as comments on the imaginary body of literature (imaginary at least until Arnason brings it into being) and as a witty commentary on the foibles and the potential of the human variety of science fiction. Are we so different from the hwarhath, among whom "One of the five traditional male virtues is violence"? The sample narrative that follows the introduction will whet appetites for the entire forthcoming collection.
Robin McAllister's reading of Borges' "The Aleph" centers on the idea that any such reading is an attempt to build a frame around the fiction, an attempt that is in some ways foredoomed by the writer's metafictional techniques. What frame is immune to Borges' tricks of perspective? How can we avoid becoming characters in Borges' verbal maze? McAllister's solution is to embrace the dilemma, to take on the role Borges offers as Reader and see how the cloak of language looks on a real human form (no, too late-this reader too has become a linguistic mirage).
Jeanne Larsen explores the role of writer as reader. Larsen writes richly poetic novels about the Chinese past. Because Chinese history is imbued with myth, Larsen is also acclaimed as a writer of fantasy. Looking at ancient China from late twentieth-century America, she is acutely aware of the problems of representation and perspective; because she has chosen to make those problems part of the story, she is also a writer of postmodern metafiction. Here she tells the tale of "Jian Lu-Sen," who is and is not herself, and demonstrates how metafictionality can lead to greater insight into cultural difference along with (or maybe via) some really elaborate puns.
My own entry examines differences between critical and fictional discourse: patterns that look like mere stylistic conventions may mask issues of control over texts and their meanings. My discussion of these issues veers between registers and ends up, inevitably, I suppose, in Wonderland.
This set of meta-ficto-critical writings demonstrates that metafiction is not all one thing. Critical studies like Patricia Waugh's pioneering Metafiction generally look at the genre as a whole, trying to find what it can do and what it means. Metafiction as a genre turns out to mean something like "All texts are fictions and all fictions are metafictions." Such sweeping statements are impossible to test and so nebulous that they have little value as critical tools. If no metafiction meant any more than the whole field means collectively, then we would be justified in relegating the genre to the category of brief and curious literary fads.
But the stories and essays in this issue demonstrate that each metafiction represents an individual response to one or more original texts: each embodies a different story of reading. There are at least as many kinds of metafiction as there are encounters between reader and text-and since every reading of a text transforms the reader, the number of possible interactions is limitless. It is important that at least some of these interactions, these stories, be written out and read by other readers. Otherwise, we remain trapped in someone else's story, some unacknowledged metanarrative about literature and the self.
Works Cited Aldiss, Brian. Billion Year Spree: The True History of Science Fiction. New York: Schocken, 1973.
Atkins, G. Douglas. Estranging the Familiar: Toward a Revitalized Critical Writing. Athens and London: U of Georgia P, 1992.
Barry, Peter. "Criticism as Writing." The Cambridge Quarterly 22 (1993): 249-62.
Davidson, Cathy N. "Critical Fictions." PMLA 111 (1996): 1069-72.
Delany, Samuel R. "Appendix: Some Informal Remarks Toward the Modular Calculus, Part Three." Tales of Neveryon. New York: Bantam, 1979. 247-64.
Le Guin, Ursula K. "The Fisherwoman's Daughter." Dancing at the Edge of the World: Thoughts on Words, Women, Places. New York: Grove, 1989. 212-37.
--. "The Woman Without Answers." Dancing at the Edge of the World. 127-29.
McCloud, Scott. Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art. Northampton, MA: Kitchen Sink, 1993.
Mink, Louis O. Historical Understanding. Ed. Brian Fay, Eugene O. Golob, and Richard T. Vann. Ithaca and London: Cornell UP, 1987.
Russ, Joanna. How to Suppress Women's Writing. Austin: U of Texas P, 1983.
Spahr, Juliana, Mark Wallace, Kristin Prevallet, and Pam Rehm, eds. A Poetics of Criticism. Buffalo, NY: Leave, 1994.
Tompkins, Jane. "Me and My Shadow." New Literary History 19 (1987): 169-78.
Waugh, Patricia. Metafiction: The Theory and Practice of Self-Conscious Fiction. London and New York: Methuen, 1984.
Brian Attebery has written extensively on fantasy and science fiction and is co-editor, with Ursula K. Le Guin, of The Norton Book of Science Fiction.
