Mourning and Metafiction: Carole Maso's The Art Lover.

Publication: Contemporary Literature

Publication Date: 22-DEC-98

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COPYRIGHT 1998 University of Wisconsin Press

They keep me near and at the same time bid me farewell. That is what real love is.

Carole Maso, The Art Lover

If we are trapped within Fredric Jameson's much-celebrated prison house of language, then the bars of that prison house can be broadly construed in terms of aestheticization--a process of discursive rendering that shapes our worlds through the ineluctable mediums of perception and articulation. This process of discursive rendering is, of course, at play in every literary work, though individual works may seek to varying degrees either to display or to hide the processes through which language is shaped and patterned into the literary work itself. At an extreme end of this spectrum, metafictional works relentlessly foreground, through their patent self-reflexivity, the aesthetic boundaries of their linguistic prison. By drawing attention, in a sustained and systematic fashion, to the literary conventions and linguistic medium that constitute a fictional work, metafiction exposes and examines the aesthetic conditions of the literary prison house.

Although the element of self-reflexivity that defines metafiction has long been recognized, the implications of this self-reflexivity have also been extended beyond the domain of metafictional works. For Patricia Waugh, the tendency of metafiction to scrutinize the conditions and limits of its own aesthetic construction can provide "extremely accurate models for understanding the contemporary experience of the world as a construction, an artifice, a web of interdependent semiotic systems" (9). In the same moment that metafiction illuminates and exposes its own aesthetic construction, readers are invited to contemplate and perhaps to demystify, in quasi-Marxist terms, the conditions and limits of their own discursively constructed worlds. Linda Hutcheon echoes this point when she isolates the metafictional paradox: in the moment that the reader of metafiction is estranged from the metafictional text by its refusal to allow any suspension of disbelief, the reader is simultaneously co-opted by the creative process of imaginatively constituting the text through the act of reading (Narcissistic Narrative 5). For Hutcheon, this paradoxical position forces, or at least invites, readers to become aware of how realities outside of metafictional texts are similarly constructed, because "[r]eading and writing belong to the processes of `life' as much as they do to `art'" (5). In essence, Waugh and Hutcheon argue that the self-reflexive scrutiny of aestheticization in metafiction embodies significant implications beyond the domain of literature because the process of aestheticization is itself ubiquitous. In this view, metafiction becomes a didactic genre.

The didactic potential of metafiction rests upon the genre's fundamental ambivalence toward the aesthetic constitution of its own textual body. The performance of literary conventions--patterns of emplotment, rhetorical tropes, modes of characterization, among others--bestows upon a text its form, while the exposure of those literary conventions tends to evacuate them of their habitual aesthetic effect. This is, of course, part of the process of demystification by means of estrangement that is valorized by Waugh and Hutcheon. When John Barth turns the structure of linear narrative back upon itself with an ironic twist of the page, in "Frame-Tale," he thereby alerts readers to the artificial construction of narrative plot that will explode even more exuberantly in the narrative gymnastics of "Menelaiad." When Art Spiegelman questions the ability of comics to represent adequately the events of the Holocaust (fig. 1), he effectively indicts the veracity of Maus as a whole in the same moment that Maus continues to portray Vladek's experiences during World War II. When Richard Brautigan employs fanciful figural language that stretches a reader's imagination by the incongruity of the image--"The trouts would wait there like airplane tickets for us to come" (56); "I waded about seventy-three telephone booths in" (56)--he implicitly foregrounds the artifice that inhabits language while still using that language throughout Trout Fishing in America. These examples all illustrate how metafictional self-reflexivity can expose the aesthetic components of a literary text with tremendously subversive effect. But at the same time, these examples also illustrate how those aesthetic conventions are the only means by which metafiction can make those subversive observations. In effect, Jameson's prison house is a prison only because there is no other house in town.

In the late sixties, early works of metafiction such as Barth's Lost in the Funhouse, Donald Barthelme's Snow White, or William Gass's Willie Masters' Lonesome Wife seemed to note with a kind of exuberant despair their imprisonment within a narrow aesthetic domain--a domain most notably associated with the oppressive legacy that modernism had bestowed upon these writers. The extremely disruptive narrative strategies and linguistic innovations of these early metafictions led Robert Alter to remark in 1975 that "one can admire the virtuosity with which narrative materials are ingeniously shuffled and reshuffled yet we feel a certain aridness; for the partial magic of a novelist's art, however self-conscious, is considerably more than a set of card tricks" (222). The "aridness" that Alter felt as a result of the relentless self-reflexivity and impulse to innovation in these early metafictions captured the spirit of Barth's literature of exhaustion. The fundamental ambivalence that inhabits metafictional self-reflexivity--the impulse to expose, with subversive effect, the nature of aesthetic conventions while simultaneously invoking, and thereby endorsing, those conventions--was apparently overshadowed, in the late sixties, by the tendency of these works to self-reflexively relate themselves back to the oppressive mantle of modernism, and consequently to despair over the apparent lack of a viable future aesthetic option. These metafictions hardly celebrate the possibilities of prose, and by the close of the sixties, the much-touted death of the novel had become less an object of debate than a commonly accepted sentiment. Critics and novelists alike were confidently declaring, in light of "the extreme desiccation of recent literary culture" (Koch 6), that "the age of the novel, like the ages of opera and reform, is past" (Newman 41). "It has passed on into history with the Epic Poem and the Volstead Amendment. The Great Age of Prose Fiction which began with Fielding and Richardson and reached its flowering in the first several decades of the twentieth century is drawing to a tawdry close" (Rubin 4). The few ignorant souls continuing to write modernist or, worse yet, conventional realist prose in the face of this perceived fact were only degrading American literature, so that the period of American prose from 1950 to the late sixties would "eventually be regarded as the lowest and most impoverished point in its history since 1870" (Koch 5).

Three decades after this "impoverished point" in American literary history, it seems clear that neither has the novel died nor are the works of that period especially deficient in relation to what was written before or after. Even more curious is the possibility that metafiction may well have played some part in sustaining the viability of the novel genre. In recent years, metafiction has moved away from its incarnation in the sixties as a rebellious literary reaction against the weight of modernism; instead, the metafictional impulse has become an integral element within the wider cultural moment of postmodernism.(1) Metafictional self-reflexivity lends itself well to "complicit critique"-- the kind of subversive inhabiting of cultural forms and institutions that has been identified as a privileged trope of postmodernism (Hutcheon, Poetics 3). While it seems obvious that the metafictional impulse has been co-opted by the rapacious forces of consumerism that define late capitalism, this fact does not necessarily evacuate metafiction of its subversive or disruptive potential. On the contrary, one need only look to works such as Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior or Bharati Mukherjee's The Holder of the World in order to see how the metafictional impulse within literature has become one powerful strategy, among others, that contributes to the means of cultural critique and self-definition within postmodernism.(2)

Since the late sixties, metafiction has moved away from its status as the tombstone of the novel to its present status as one element among many that contributes to the dynamic matrix of postmodernism. But the taint of despair that initially inhabited metafiction has not entirely quit the genre; after all, in the same moment that metafiction illuminates the nature of the aesthetic prison that entraps us all, metafictional works build that prison anew. This ambivalence is, in my view, a fundamental and defining element of metafiction. Furthermore, this ambivalence clearly informs the metafictions of Carole Maso, who has emerged as a significant voice in contemporary American writing partly because of the willingness of her works to explore and to extend the fundamental ambivalence within the metafictional impulse.

Maso, who has published six novels between 1986 and 1998 and who presently directs the creative writing program at Brown University, has written recently, "I do believe that there might be ways in language to express the extreme, the fleeting, the fugitive states that hover at the outermost boundaries of speech" (Aureole ix). This dictum may also inform her previous works, which stand as a sustained meditation on the nature and adequacy of fiction, in terms of both the evocative capabilities of language and the structure of novelistic plot. Within the finely woven tapestries of her works, Maso explores issues of mourning and loss, identification and sexuality, while simultaneously interrogating how successfully the novel and its prose can render these aspects of her protagonists' struggles in life. In this way, Maso's novels attempt to address problematic issues that stand at the edge of the representational capabilities of fiction, while simultaneously interrogating how successfully fiction itself can address these issues. Maso's works are therefore metafictional insofar as they...

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