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A painting of Don Quixote reading by Adolf Schroedter
Cervantes has a habit of interrupting his stories at critical moments. For example, in Chapter VIII, Character-Cervantes (as I discuss in my post Don Quixote: Meta-Masterpiece) interrupts the story of Don Quixote’s battle with the Basque to tell us he doesn’t actually know the ending.
Or, for example, the story of Cardenio, which the unfortunate gentleman relates to Don Quixote and Sancho Panza in Chapter XXIV until Quixote takes offense at Cardenio’s words about Queen Madásima from the novel Amadis of Gaul and sends Cardenio into a mad rage, effectively cutting off the story until later in the book.
Or again, when Quixote and company find themselves at the infamous inn of Sancho’s blanket tossing, where they seek amusement in the story,”The Tale of Ill-Advised Curiosity,” only to have the narrative interrupted by Quixote in the throes of a dream about slaying a giant but really destroying some of the innkeepers wine skins. The moment the story stops, is of course, the moment after we learn that one of the tale’s main characters will die.
This technique not only builds suspense and tension, but says something about readers, too: They are not passive audience members, but participants in the story.
Keep in mind that Quixote himself is a reader-turned-participant in the extremest sense. He has read all the books of chivalry he can find and has decided to take up the sword himself to do great deeds in the name of his Lady Dulcinea del Toboso. And we are, as Cervantes points out on many occasions, reading a book about his exploits. This makes Quixote the ultimate reader participant.
It’s worth noting too, that often, it is Quixote who causes the interruption in the telling of a story, be it on purpose or on accident. In the third example, that of “The Tale of Ill-Advised Curiosity,” the characters reading the tale are Cardenio, Dorotea, the curate and the barber. Cardenio and Dorotea are caught up in a love tangle (not triangle) somewhat similar to that in “The Tale of Ill-Advised Curiosity,” and all four of them have created a story in which Dorotea plays Princess Micomicona, who needs Quixote to slay a giant for her, in order to get Quixote home. They, too, have become participants in Quixote’s story, and it is only fitting that he should interrupt their entertainment to continue the story they’ve created.
Although Cervantes was ultimately parodying Spain’s complete obsession with chivalrous novels, I also read Don Quixote as a parody of the extreme inaction and passivity of those same readers. I doubt Cervantes wants us to put on armor and take up swords and wander around the country slaying wine skins, but interact with the books you read. Think about them critically. Talk about them. Write about them.
I am still technically on hiatus because of grad school, but I’ve just finished my first semester and I have some time while I’m on winter break. I hope to get a few posts up before the spring semester starts in January, but I’m not promising anything!
Over the summer I learned that consuming too much metafiction, as with chocolate, wine, margaritas, cheese, berries of any kind, coffee, tea, cake, cookies, candy or anything else delicious and edible, can lead to headaches, indigestion and temporary loss of taste for that food.
I’m not saying Jack of Fables is a bad series. In fact, it does something completely brilliant by making the writing/illustrating process a kind of character in the books. I’m just saying that it’s a very bad idea to read eight volumes of it right in a row. This comic by Bill Willingham is a spinoff of one of my all-time favorite comics, ever, Fables. The books follow all our favorite fairytale characters in their lives in New York City after they were run out of their homelands by the adversary. And then other stuff happens. Jack of Fables spins off fairly early in the series, and follows a separate timeline.
The best way for me to describe the metafiction contained within is this:
Photo by Celeste Hutchins. Used under Creative Commons.
Many jokes are made about the authors creating the characters (and Jack actually turns fat and ugly and then into a dragon for making fun of the authors–see, the writing/illustrating process has agency in this text! Fracking brilliant!). Literary terms, genres and plot devices like science fiction, fantasy, literary, the fourth wall, the other three walls, deus ex machina, etc. become characters. In every issue (so several times a volume), Babe the Blue Ox gets a page or two to look out at the audience and make jokes.
For the first few volumes the story revolves around the Literals, a family of powerful individuals who created all the Fables. One of them tries to write the Fables and all magic out of existence, and so the Fables must prevent this from happening. The Literals are another way Willingham has characterized the writing process, and made it both hero and villain as certain members of the family fight for the Fables, and others against.
All of it is brilliant, and delicious, and if you read it all at once, thoroughly nauseating. Most of the devices and techniques Willingham uses here are fairly obvious, though the effects of those techniques are varied and as I said earlier, brilliant. My first reaction to this was to roll my eyes and say something to the effect of, “Cervantes was never THIS obvioius,” but I was missing the point.
Jack is a self-absorbed prick. Under normal circumstances, only other self-absorbed pricks would have any interest in reading an entire comic book series about such a douche bag. So by making the writing process itself a character, I could stomach Jack’s self absorption and laugh about it. It was especially funny to me as a writer, because sometimes your characters turn into assholes when you want them to be nice, and you’ve got to do horrible things like turn them into dragons in order to make them nice again.
Willingham obviously has a lot of fun with this series, and it’s a lot of fun to read.
That being said, don’t read it all at once.
…I will start posting regularly again.
Consider June my summer vacation, even though I’ve been doing anything but relaxing.
That’s okay. I’ll get to do lots of that this weekend.
Happy Independence Day! Go read the most awesome web comic ever, The Dreamer, by Lora Innes, to celebrate!!!!
I have been busy spending time with my family, going to baseball games, traveling, and generally enjoying summer, so I’m cheating this week by linking to today’s post from my website, kellylynnthomas.com. I wrote about why parents shouldn’t try to get books booted from libraries or schools because of “objectionable” content in response to Meghan Cox Gurdon’s column on the Wall Street Journal essentially endorsing book banning.
Please read the whole thing here!
Neil Gaiman’s novel-length fairytale Stardust employs an omniscient narrator and occasional authorial interjection–both play a crucial role in not only the telling of the story, but also in the reading of the story.
The omniscient narrator was common in ye olde Literature (think Austen, Bronte, etc.), but is actually kind of frowned upon in modern writing classes.
Instead, fledgling authors are encouraged to use first person or limited third to allow the reader to get close to the character. There’s nothing wrong with getting inside a character’s head, but sometimes it’s nice to not have to deal with someone else’s neuroses (I don’t know about you, but I have enough of my own, thank you).
Authorial interjection, also known as breaking the fourth wall (although that’s more of a stage term, the first three walls being the right, left and back sides of the stage, the fourth being the invisible one between actors and audience), is much more common, but sadly almost always relegated to a comedic special effect in contemporary literature.
Gaiman’s use of these techniques serves to make the story feel more old-timey, more like a fairytale that our grandparents might have told us when we demanded they tell us a story before bedtime.
But more than putting us into the proper frame of mind, the use of the omniscient narrator creates suspense and tension, and is perhaps the most important device in the story (it’s a device because it’s used to present the story in a particular way, and it comes with certain expectations, like the main characters falling in love and living happily ever after).
Without an omniscient narrator, we would know only as much as Tristan, the main character, and half of the suspense would evaporate before it had a chance to even condense in our minds, since the forces wishing Tristan evil often do themselves in before they have a chance to do Tristan any harm.
Since we know more than Tristan, we often get the urge to yell at him for being stupid, or for not following advice or directions. Plus, it makes us feel nice and smart and quite good about ourselves for being so smart.
While the few instances of authorial interjection are used in situations where the characters are not in any grave danger, they don’t fall into the category of comedy for comedy’s sake. These instances serve to pull the reader more fully into the world of the narrator, and by extension, the characters the narrator brings to life for us.
Any emotional distance we may have felt from the characters because of the narrative filter is replaced by a closeness with the narrator. By speaking to us directly, he’s made us a part of the story. And how can you feel distant from a story of which you’re apart?
I’m taking a break from the metafiction this week to once again speak out about a cause I believe in (if I had more time I would have written a metafictional short story about this, since metafiction is so often used for social critique, but alas).
Many of you don’t live in Pennsylvania, but that’s okay. Rather than focusing on jobs and the economy like they said they would, legislators are attacking the LGBTQ community by proposing a marriage amendment that would outlaw any marriage or civil union not between a man and a woman. This is not the first time Pa officials have tried this, hence my post for Blog for Equality Day 2010.
Part of me feels like I should keep politics out of my blog. A bigger part of me feels that any art worth a damn is somewhat political, social or religious in nature, and the “issue” of equal rights for the LGBTQ crowd is a mix of all of those.
So, metafiction fans, please take the time to sign this petition for Equality Pennsylvania, especially if you actually live in Pennsylvania, and tell your own state and federal representatives that you support equal rights for ALL people in this country, regardless of gender, religion or sexual orientation.
Speaking of equal rights, Pa lawmakers are also trying to pass a law that would force many abortion clinics in the state to close. There’s a somewhat complex background behind this law that I won’t bore you with, but suffice it to say that a white man has decided what is best for the medical community to do with abortion clinics against the advice of actual medical professionals… but that’s somewhat of an over-simplification.
My point is this: If you are not gay, lesbian, transgendered, transsexual, bisexual or queer, if you have the full rights that this country affords, how can you possibly justify walking around telling these people they are wrong? If you do not have a uterus and will never, ever have to worry about an unwanted pregnancy, a pregnancy with complications, or needing an abortion, how can you possibly tell women that abortion is wrong and make it almost impossible for low-income women to get the services they need? If you are one of those people, you should be ashamed of yourself.
I suggest the following tactic: Select an organization that either advocates for LGBTQ rights (like Equality Pennsylvania) or the rights of women (like Planned Parenthood), make a donation, even a token donation, in “honor” of the reps who sponsor these bills (Daryl Metcalf and Matt Baker, respectively), and have the notification sent to their Harrisburg offices.
P.S. check out Blog for Equality Day’s sponsor, Pittsburgh Lesbian Correspondents.
Against my better judgment, I’m participating in Story A Day May, in which I will attempt to write 31 stories during the month of May. I just found out about the challenge today, so I’m starting a bit late, but hopefully I can catch up this weekend.
Also against my better judgment, I’m sharing the first story I wrote with you. I hope it’s funny, because there’s more truth in this than I’d like to admit.
“Writing Is A Talent You Surely Have”
Day 1
For the tenth time that day, she checks her email. Her Gmail inbox displays the same three messages it has since she posted what she considers to be her magnum opus, the greatest short story she’s ever written, that anyone’s ever written, on her brand new blog the night before.
The story is about a girl like herself, well it is herself, at least mostly, but prettier and with a nice car, who starts a blog and becomes instantly popular and basically shoves it to those publishing types who think they know everything, but they don’t, do they, or they wouldn’t have all rejected her novel, which is not about herself but about her mother’s childhood in New York City, except in the novel her mother doesn’t get pregnant at sixteen and instead becomes a Broadway actress.
One of the emails is from her mother, one is from the writing forum she joined so she could talk about how much she hates writer clichés and people who THINK they’re writers but are really posers who hang out in coffee shops with laptops, and the third email is from WordPress congratulating her on setting up her very own blog.
She sighs, and thinks that this is the cross she was meant to carry, loneliness, and the purgatory of being an unrecognized genius, because she is a writer and no one, not even her mother who was always very supportive, understands, and she gets up from the computer to make another pot of coffee, even though it is two in the afternoon and she isn’t the least bit sleepy.
A new story will make her feel better, she thinks. And she has quite a few ideas, too many in fact, so she donated a few ideas to her friend Sheri who will probably butcher them, but that’s to be expected since Sheri isn’t a real writer, just one of those posers who became a writer only because she, the Mark Twain of this century, the future most well respected and well known author in America, decided that she must write, it was her true calling, and her career in business, which wasn’t going anywhere anyway, be damned.
She puts her coffee into a travel mug and takes her laptop to the library, where she knows the smell of musty books, the smell of adventures, of fiction, and the people who come and go with the strangest selections, like how to build a transistor radio and 101 things to do with green wire, will inspire her to write another magnum opus she can post on her new blog later that night, by which time her first magnum opus will have already made her famous.
Day 2
When she wakes up in the morning, she yawns, stretches and reaches for her phone on the table beside her. An envelope icon in the upper left corner indicates she has an email. Her heart skips and with a quick intake of breath she checks the message.
Her heart leaps again: It’s from WordPress! She clicks the message, her finger trembling, but immediately she can see it isn’t a comment notification, but a chipper message encouraging her to post more. Well, I certainly will post more, she thinks, and checks to see how many views her second magnum opus, a story about a girl who goes to the library for a book but finds a boyfriend instead, got compared to her first.
The numbers aren’t great. Only five people looked at the second one, and only two looked at the first one. Maybe the second one is better, she thinks, but quickly dismisses the idea, because the first is so clever, and the second simply a study of life and circumstance, and of course a celebration of libraries. That story will be sure to get young girls and boys reading, she thinks, and then it occurs to her that people are suckers for romance, so of course the second story has more views than the first.
She yawns again, puts her phone down and decides to go back to sleep.
Day 3
Midway through a third story, this one about aliens, she has the uncontrollable urge to check her email. She has a Feeling. But this time when she sees the new email from WordPress, she suppresses her excitement until she reads the whole thing.
And when she reads that she has a new comment, no, two! comments, waiting for approval, she tries not to smile too smugly, even though her computer probably can’t register her facial expressions.
Here we go, she thinks, here come the praise and adoration, although she immediately regrets thinking that, because what if it’s actually a negative comment? What if some girl met her boyfriend in a library and he abused her and then dumped her for a more beautiful, blonder, bustier girl and she’s angry because the story made her relive all her horrible memories and now she needs counseling and she’s going to sue…
Her mind cuts itself off when the comment page loads. The first comment is on her first story, the one about the girl who starts a blog in order to become famous, from someone named ubieranki that says, “Nothing really to talk about…” She snorts in indignation and hits the reply button.
“Did you even read the story I wrote, Mr. (or Ms.) ubieranki? What kind of name is that anyway? If you take another look, I’m sure you’ll find plenty to talk about.”
The second comment is from someone with a crazy German-sounding name, hausmittel kopfshmerzen, and it says, “Simply want to say your article is stunning. The lucidity inside your post is merely striking and that i can assume your an expert on this field. Well together with ycur permission let me grab your rss feed to keep up to date with succeeding post. Thanks millions of and please keep up the fabulous work”
She smiles, although wonders why someone would use the word “lucidity” to describe what’s going on inside a short story, but chalks it up to the fact that the reader obviously isn’t a native English speaker, and she’s tickled anyway. “Thanks! I’m glad you liked it. I don’t know if I’d call myself an expert yet, more like an explorer, trying to forge my own path through the publishing world. Of course you have my permission to subscribe to my RSS feed, you’ll be my second subscriber (after my mom, LOL).”
Day 4
The comments pour in. She probably doesn’t need to write anything else, now, right, because so many people are reading what she’s already written and it would be a shame to distract them from her magnum opuses, but she might as will finish the story about the aliens, because after all, she’s already halfway through and she hates leaving things unfinished.
Before she finishes the alien story, though, she reads through all her comments and replies, because she loves the stories about authors who take the time to answer their fan mail, and then wind up changing some little boy’s life because his parents abused him and no one ever loved him and his only friends were books, and then the author.
Comment from hotels in hong kong: “Dude… I am not much into reading, but somehow I got to read lots of articles on your blog. It’s amazing how interesting it is for me to visit you very often.”
Reply: “Thanks! If you ever come to the United States, let me know and you can visit me for real, and we’ll have lots of fun.”
Comment from detoxing your body: “I just want to say thanks for communicating such excellent work. You have opened our outlook to new and exciting topics which not many speak about. It is always great to read about another writer’s ideas.”
Reply: “Expanding horizons is important work for a writer. Thanks.”
Comment from tv through internet: “Nice site you have here… though I have a question I’d like to ask you, preferably through email. How can I contact you?”
Reply: “Thanks! My email address is writerchick857@gmail.com. I look forward to getting in touch with you!”
She wonders if she should send all her comments to the agents who rejected her novel, but decides to wait until she gets multiple pages of comments on all the stories, including the alien one. That’ll show them, she thinks, pages and pages of readers who love my work, and you were dumb enough to reject it. She imagines the looks on their faces, but then feels bad and decides to check her forum for writers to see if anyone else is having the same kind of break away success she is.
Day 5
After agonizing over the ending to the alien story and posting it, wondering when an appropriate time to start selling ad space on her blog will be, and how many ads she should put up, and how selective she should be, and whether or not she’ll let any of the agents who rejected her buy ads, she reads the latest comments on her first two stories. Most of them are similar, so she writes the same response again and again until she gets bored and finally comes to the greatest comment she has ever seen in her five days of blogging.
“Writing is a talent that you surely have,” wrote kinoki foot pad scam. “All your great work is clearly obvious when you state yourself through writing. Your one of a kind writing will always be remembered.”
She smiles smugly and doesn’t even care whether or not her computer can recognize facial expressions. Finally, someone who gets it. Someone who recognizes her genius. She forgets to respond and instead prints out the comment, clips it off of the page and tapes it to her computer monitor, for inspiration, for the times she’s feeling a little down on herself, she can look at what kinoki foot pad scam wrote and remember that her great work is obvious when she states herself through writing.
Suck it, publishing world, she thinks.
A print from Max Pechstein that illustrates the "as we forgive our debtors" section of the Lord's Prayer.
The thing that struck me the most about the German Expressionism exhibit at the New York City Museum of Modern Art was the artists believed their art would change their societies.
I am no art historian, so I recognize I may be missing some of the larger context, but the aftermath of World War I left many Germans in despair. These artists turned to themes of religion, spirituality, sexuality and others in an attempt to raise standards and inspire the German people to change.
It didn’t work. There was no widespread societal or cultural revolution.
The reason these artists’ goal to start a revolution struck me so is that most contemporary artists react to what’s going on in the world around them. For example, an reactionary image that’s stuck with me since high school Spanish class is a painting by Antonio Caro. It’s simply the word “Columbia” painted in white on a red background like the Coca-Cola logo.
It comments on the fact that Columbia has become commercialized and Westernized, with the popularity and spread of Coca-Cola used to symbolize that change.
Caro doesn’t want Columbia to become commercialized, he’s simply reacting to the fact that it has, whereas many of these German Expressionist painters made religious wood block prints in the hopes that the people would see them and become more religious or spiritual.
Metafiction (and literature in general), too, is often used to react to cultural and societal issues, like war, racism and religion.
But should art and literature be relegated to this reactionary position? Or did the German Expressionists have the right idea in trying to enact change through their work?
The strongest argument against artists trying to change the world, so to speak, is that the expressionists failed. Art should also give people a voice to comment on what goes on in the world around them. Indeed, sometimes art can criticize far more effectively than political discourse or mere talk.
As an artist myself (through literature, not visual art), I do believe in art’s transformative power. Perhaps, though, artists should focus on changing individuals rather than entire societies or cultures.
Change does, after all, start with one person.
